Ontotheology: Heidegger’s Charge and the Classical God

Ontotheology is the name for a metaphysics that explains everything that exists by appeal to one highest being, the first cause at the top of the order of beings. Immanuel Kant coined the word, and Martin Heidegger turned it into a charge against the whole of Western philosophy, arguing that its God is a principle no one could pray to. Theologians cannot ignore the ontotheology charge, because if it holds, the God of the classical creeds is an idol of the philosophers. It holds against some accounts of God and misses others, and what separates them is whether God is described as one more being inside our own frame of reference.

Key takeaways

• Ontotheology joins two questions. It answers "what is it for anything to be?" by pointing to a highest being; Kant named it, Heidegger generalized it.
• Heidegger's charge is religious as well as philosophical. Before the causa sui, the god of philosophy that causes itself, no one can "fall to his knees in awe."
• Aquinas is the hard case. His God is in no genus, no class of things sharing one nature, and being is no genus, so Merold Westphal and, later, Jean-Luc Marion acquit him.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) grants the negative point. Against Heidegger's god-less thinking and univocalist theism, it holds that God differs from us in kind and that our words about Him stay true when each carries its frame.

What is ontotheology?

Ontotheology is an account of reality that welds two inquiries into one. The first is ontology, the study of what it is for anything to be at all. The second is theology, here meaning the study of a highest being who grounds and explains everything else. Ontotheology answers the first question with the second: to understand being, find the supreme being and trace everything back to it. Its two main users, as the Wikipedia entry notes, meant different things by it.

Kant coined the word in the Critique of Pure Reason. "Transcendental theology aims either at inferring the existence of a Supreme Being from a general experience, without any closer reference to the world to which this experience belongs, and in this case it is called cosmotheology; or it endeavours to cognize the existence of such a being, through mere conceptions, without the aid of experience, and is then termed ontotheology." In plain terms, cosmotheology argues from the world up to God, and ontotheology from the bare concept of God, as the ontological argument does. Iain Thomson, in Heidegger on Ontotheology, calls the term a "distasteful neologism," one "for which we have Kant to thank." Anselm's argument is older than the word, and Volume One of the Many Beings series takes up Anselm in its own place.

Heidegger borrowed Kant's word and widened it. Behind his use stands what he called the ontological difference, the difference between being, what it is for anything to be, and beings, the things that are. A tree, a number and a person are beings. Their being is not one more thing beside them. Heidegger's claim was that Western metaphysics, from Plato onward, kept answering the question of being by pointing at a being, and the highest being in particular, and so never asked the question it set out to ask.

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What did Heidegger mean by the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics?

By the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, Heidegger meant that metaphysics does two jobs at once, asking what beings have in common and naming the highest being that accounts for them, and does the first by way of the second. Its fullest statement is a 1957 lecture, "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics," the second essay in Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh in 1969. It asks: "How does the deity enter into philosophy, not just modern philosophy, but philosophy as such?" (p. 55). His answer, as Merold Westphal quotes it, is that "the deity can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the deity enters into it" (pp. 55-56). God is admitted on philosophy's terms.

What philosophy requires, on Heidegger's account, is a ground. "More rigorously and clearly thought out," he writes, "metaphysics is: onto-theo-logic" (p. 59). Westphal, in "Participation and Kenosis" (2005), traces the pattern to Aristotle, whose study of being as being needed the Unmoved Mover to complete it, "so that first philosophy becomes theology, or rather, since the two elements work in tandem, onto-theology." He defines the result as "the affirmation and articulation of a Highest Being who is the key to the meaning of the whole of being."

For Heidegger being is not a genus, a class of things sharing one nature, to which beings belong. Discourse about being, he says, never understands the name "in the sense of a genus, an empty generality" (p. 51). A man who asks for fruit and refuses every apple and pear goes home with nothing, and "it is still infinitely more impossible to represent 'Being' as the general characteristic of particular beings" (p. 66).

The lecture's most quoted passage names this god. The ground of all beings must itself be grounded, and so the supreme being becomes "the cause as causa sui," the cause of itself:

"This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god." (Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Stambaugh, p. 72)

The sting is religious. A god defined by the work he does in an explanation is a piece of the explanation, and no one worships a premise. Heidegger then adds: "The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God." The onto-theological character of metaphysics had become questionable, he said, "not because of any kind of atheism" (p. 55). His target was the god of the system.

Why do theologians take the ontotheology charge seriously?

Heidegger's ontotheology found sympathetic readers among Christian philosophers, because it named a danger they already feared. Merold Westphal, author of Overcoming Onto-Theology (2001), sets out Heidegger's 1957 critique in three points. Metaphysics, "in its quest for total transparency," employs "abstract, impersonal concepts such as causa sui in conjunction with the principle of sufficient reason." Its aim is "to eliminate mystery from human experience by rendering being fully transparent to our understanding." And in doing so "it sets up norms for our God-talk that are religiously useless."

His verdict: "I think this critique has real bite."

Jean-Luc Marion pressed the critique further. His God Without Being, first published in English in 1991, opens with a chapter on "The Idol and the Icon," and its point is that a concept of God can become an idol as surely as a statue can. As his publisher summarizes the book, Marion "challenges a fundamental premise of traditional philosophy, theology, and metaphysics: that God, before all else, must be." He places God instead in agape, Christian love. "If God is love, Marion contends, then God loves before he actually is." In an essay of 1985, by Manuel Porcel Moreno's account, Marion held that Aquinas had shut the question of God inside the metaphysics of being, which placed Aquinas under the charge.

The Wikipedia entry adds Brian Ingraffia and Bruce Ellis Benson to the Christian thinkers who argue that biblical revelation escapes ontotheology. What draws them is Heidegger's own test. Moses did not meet a first principle at the burning bush:

"Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God. (Exodus 3:5-6, NIV)

Any doctrine of God that cannot account for that scene has failed, which is why the question whether God is a person runs through this whole debate.

If you want the case argued straight through rather than in fragments, Volume One is free to download.

Is Aquinas an ontotheologian?

On the most careful reading, Thomas Aquinas is not an ontotheologian, because he denies the premise the charge needs. An ontotheology needs God to be the highest member of the order of beings, the top case of a kind. Aquinas denies that God belongs to any kind. In the Summa Theologiae, Question 3, he asks whether God is contained in a genus, and answers with a point Heidegger would also make: "the Philosopher has shown (Metaph. iii) that being cannot be a genus." Since God's existence is His essence, God would have to be the genus "being" if He were in any genus, and there is no such genus. "Therefore it is plain that God is not in a genus as if He were a species."

God "has no genus nor difference, nor can there be any definition of Him," and He is not the first principle of one class of things, because "God is the principle of all being." The article before it states the ground: "God is His own existence, and not merely His own essence." This is the doctrine of divine simplicity, that God has no parts, together with aseity, His existence from Himself, and it is the reason Thomism does not describe God as a very large item at the top of a list.

The tradition heard the same truth in the divine name:

God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'" (Exodus 3:14, NIV)

The Many Beings series reads the verse with the classical tradition: "This is not the name of a being who happens to exist; it is the name of a being whose very nature is existence."

Westphal acquits Aquinas of ontotheology for two reasons. First, "his doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God and the corresponding doctrine of analogy, if taken seriously, preserve the element of mystery." Second, Aquinas treats philosophy as the handmaid of theology, so his abstract categories serve a discourse about grace, incarnation and sacraments rather than ruling it. Marion came to a similar conclusion. His essay "Thomas Aquinas and Onto-theo-logy" (2003) is included in the second edition of God Without Being, and Porcel Moreno reads it as a retraction that releases Thomist thought about God from the charge of ontotheology. Whether Marion fully withdrew his earlier criticism is still argued, so we report his conclusion, not a consensus.

Who does the charge of ontotheology hit?

The charge hits any account in which God is the top entry in one order of beings that also contains us. Westphal names Aristotle's Unmoved Mover first, and Hegel "will soon be a second major paradigm." The 1957 lecture itself grew from a seminar on Hegel. The Wikipedia entry adds Leibniz, whose God is the ultimate reason of things. In each case, God's role is to close the system, and the system decides what God must be.

Duns Scotus is the disputed case. Scotus held that "being" is one concept said of God and creatures, though in two modes, infinite and finite. The thesis is called univocity: a word such as "being" keeps one meaning whether said of God or of a creature. The Wikipedia entry notes that Scotus is often cited as the first ontotheologian. Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank's school, presses the case hardest. In Milbank's words, as Richard Cross reports them, the story finds "ontotheological idolatry regarding God, and the placing of God within a predefined arena of being." Cross answers that "Scotus's defense of the univocity of the concept being in fact has no such metaphysical consequence." Thomas Williams agrees, insisting that "the doctrine of univocity is a semantic doctrine," a thesis about concepts that "does not imply that there is any feature at all in extramental reality that is a common component of both God and creatures." The longer quarrel belongs to univocity itself.

Some analytic philosophers defend univocity outright: William Alston argued that God's otherness is "compatible with a degree of univocity." Held as Williams holds it, as a thesis about meaning, such univocity can stay clear of the charge. Cashed out as ontology, it becomes ontotheology. A God who has the same knowledge, power and being we have, only more of each, differs from us in degree, and a God who differs in degree is the highest being in a shared order. That is the God Heidegger described, and the modern view that Brian Davies named theistic personalism has to show, at each step, that it is not that God.

Each volume of the Many Beings series puts this sorting rule to work on a different dilemma, and the books show where.

Where each side is strong, and where the difficulty lies

Heidegger is strong where the god of a system is at stake. A God whose attributes are fixed by what an explanation needs has been built to order, and Heidegger is right that a God of that kind cannot be prayed to. Westphal's three points hold against every philosophy that wants the whole of reality to be transparent to us.

The defenders are strong where the classical God is at stake. Aquinas said centuries before Heidegger that God is in no genus and being is no genus, and Heidegger's history of metaphysics moves past that claim too quickly. Marion's own reversal is evidence that the charge of ontotheology, pressed carefully, does not reach the doctrine it was most often aimed at.

The difficulty lies in what each side offers in place of the error. Heidegger's cure is a god-less thinking that waits, and it assumes that the only words we have for God are words that place Him inside our frame, so that speaking of Him at all makes Him one more being. The defenders' cure is analogy and mystery, and Westphal leans on both. Analogy here means that our words apply to God in a sense related to, but not the same as, their creaturely sense. The Many Beings series names the weakness of that cure: analogy with no rule governing it "can absorb any objection whatever, and an answer that cannot fail is not an answer." Neither side says in advance which of our words keep one sense when said of God, which cannot, and why.

Volume One derives that rule before it touches a single dilemma, and your copy is free.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer ontotheology?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that dissolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. Its answer to ontotheology is to grant Heidegger's negative point and refuse his conclusion: against Heidegger's god-less thinking it holds that we can speak truly of God, and against univocalist theism it holds that God is not the highest instance of what we are. With Thomist analogy it keeps both, and adds the rule analogy has lacked. It is the position argued across the Many Beings series.

The position begins from two axioms: every being has an essential nature, and a conscious being's way of apprehending reality is inseparable from that nature. From these the series proves that God and creatures differ in kind, not in degree: aseity contradicts contingency, the dependence on something else for existence that marks every creature. The series states what a mere difference of degree would mean: "God would simply be a larger, more powerful, more intelligent version of Man. He would be at the far end of the same spectrum of being." That sentence describes the God of ontotheology, and FICT denies it at the foundation. Heidegger's negative point is granted in full: God is not one more item among beings.

Heidegger's conclusion does not follow from that point. Because natures differ in kind, the frames in which God and creatures apprehend reality differ in kind, God's own frame and our finite, human frame. A term whose content involves possibility, time, agency or value carries the frame it is said from. Carrying such a term across the divide as though it kept one sense is the error the series names the Many Beings Fallacy, and the highest-being picture is built by committing it: take "being," "cause" or "power" as we know them, raise them to the maximum, and call the result God. Logical terms keep one sense in both frames, and both indexed senses refer to the one reality God's frame grounds, so our words are true of Him without placing Him in our order of beings.

The causal vocabulary follows the same rule. The series calls God the Uncaused Cause, but "cause" in our frame names one link in a chain of beings, and God is not the first link. He is what the whole chain receives its being from, which is why the argument from contingency concludes to a necessary being rather than a large one, and why the tradition speaks of the ground of being. The ontotheological causa sui fails for the reason Heidegger felt: it takes a creaturely notion of cause and turns it back on itself.

The negation belongs where apophatic theology, the way of speaking of God by saying what He is not, has long located it, on comprehension and on genus, not on true affirmation. Volume Five finds the same pattern in mathematics and calls it "apophatic theology arrived at by formal necessity." Isaiah gives the measure:

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9, NIV)

The God who is in no genus is the God before whom Moses hid his face. The statement of FICT sets out the axioms and the rule in one place.

If you want the derivation step by step, Volume One is yours free.

How the positions compare

Each position sees something true and leaves something open.

Frequently asked questions

What does onto-theology mean in simple terms?

Onto-theology means explaining what it is for anything to exist by pointing to one supreme being who grounds everything else. The word joins ontology, the study of being, to theology, the study of God. Heidegger's complaint was that this answers a question about being with a being, and makes God part of the explanation.

Who coined the term ontotheology?

Immanuel Kant coined it in the Critique of Pure Reason for a theology that knows God's existence "through mere conceptions, without the aid of experience," as against cosmotheology, which reasons from experience. Heidegger later took the word over and widened it into a charge against all Western metaphysics.

What did Heidegger mean by causa sui?

Causa sui means "cause of itself." Heidegger used it as the name for the god of philosophy, the ground that must account for itself because it accounts for everything else. His point was religious: "Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god."

Is classical theism ontotheology?

Classical theism as Aquinas held it is the hardest case for the ontotheology charge. Aquinas taught that God is in no genus, that "being cannot be a genus," and that God is His own existence, so God is not the highest member of any kind. Westphal acquits Aquinas, and Marion's 2003 essay reached the same verdict. The charge lands more easily on accounts that place God and creatures in one order and separate them only by degree.

Does ontotheology make natural theology impossible?

It does not, though it changes what natural theology, reasoning toward God from the world rather than from revelation, may claim. Westphal recalls Brian Leftow's distinction: an argument for God shows that there is an explanation of the world, without giving that explanation. Paul at the Areopagus in Athens spoke of the God who made the world and needs nothing from human hands, then borrowed the idiom of his hearers: "'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'" (Acts 17:28, NIV). He reasoned toward God without making God a premise.

Where to go from here

Heidegger was right that the God of ontotheology, fitted to the needs of a system, is an idol, and the defenders were right that the God of Aquinas was never that God. What the debate has lacked is a rule that says, before any argument starts, which of our words can be carried into God's frame and which cannot.

Volume One sets out the axioms and names the Many Beings Fallacy, and it is free to download. Volume Four carries the rule into divine simplicity and immutability. For the attributes one at a time, start with the attributes of God, and for the whole field, see the doctrine of God. In his first letter to Timothy, Paul praises the God "who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen." (1 Timothy 6:16, NIV). That God is no highest being, and He can be worshipped.