Lost ground: Jim Hanson’s “neo-ontotheology” in dialogue with Merold Westphal

What is onto-theology?

The philosophical origins of onto-theology can be traced back to Aristotle but, as a philosophical term, it was first mentioned by Kant to describe different types of theological conceptions of God which was later picked up and used by Martin Heidegger in his critique of metaphysics. ² What separates Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology from Kant’s use of the term is that, while Kant was describing the differences between “cosmo-theology”—theologies that conceptualize God based upon existence—and “onto-theology”—theologies that conceptualize God based upon being—Heidegger was critiquing our metaphysical tendency(s) to create a ground for existence in service of ourselves. His critique, from a religious point of view, was that we often utilize God as ground for our thought and, in doing so, we only allow God into our thought on our terms. Furthermore, in doing so, a God-as-ground becomes removed from our own lives, and is so distant because its primary function is to ground other functions; this God ceases to be a God that we can lovingly worship. Hanson’s article echoes this when he quotes the famous section of Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, in which Heidegger claimed 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.” ³ However, what Hanson misses here is that Heidegger was not just critiquing theology for, as Hanson puts it, “rationalizing faith-based experience[s] of the deity,” but he was critiquing the grounding of metaphysics itself, particularly with a God that has been surrendered unto the principles of sufficient reason. ⁴ The essential critique, here, is that when we base our metaphysics on God and God becomes the grounding of all our thought, we subjugate God to our thought, essentially preventing God from being more than we can conceive.

Derrida echoed this in his critique of language, as Jim Hanson argues, but again, it is important to look at what Derrida was critiquing through language. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida centered his critique against Husserl’s “reduction” of the importance of language; arguing that when the voice speaks out beyond what he calls “auto-affection,” or beyond one’s own interior monologue, that voice loses the mastery of its own speech. Furthermore, when the possibility of repetition is introduced (either through the text, voice recordings or even oral performances; to Derrida these are all forms of inscribing words and thus are texts) the original thought is diminished in some way and becomes a new interpretation of said thought:

By means of this written inscription, one can always repeat the original sense, that is, the act of pure thought which created the ideality of sense. With the possibility of progress that such an incarnation allows, there goes the ever growing risk of ‘forgetting’ and loss of sense. It becomes more and more difficult to reconstitute the presence of the act buried under historical sedimentations. The moment of crisis is always a moment of signs. ⁵

In summary, onto-theology is not primarily an issue regarding theology, but of grounding our metaphysics (or, in Derridean terms, our metaphysics of presence). This is why some scholars write the term as onto-theo-logy to differentiate each aspect of the critique (onto—being; theo—highest; logy—thought; or the highest ground/thought of being). A non-religious example of onto-theology would be Scientism, which is a worldview that again bases its metaphysics upon the principle of sufficient reason in which humanity, through the sciences, can come to know and master all things. In this non-religious example, there is still a desire for ground and the world is again shaped upon a worldview that best suits its adherents. This scientific-calculative reasoning, as the highest form of thought, empowers humanity with the ground to master the universe. Just like with a God-based form of onto-theology, the primary problem is still one of the mastery of the subject and the ways in which we manipulate that ground through our own reasoning or speech to serve ourselves (e.g., “God wills it!” or “… it is scientifically proven!”). There is an inherent violence latent within this metaphysical scheme, which is why philosophers and theologians are so keen on overcoming this problem.

Overcoming onto-theology: A case study with Merold Westphal

Now that we have covered the concept itself, let us move on to a particular form of overcoming onto-theology. In the following section I explore how Merold Westphal treats onto-theology and how he attempts to overcome it primarily because he is a key scholar within Jim Hanson’s critique and because, in his critique of Westphal, Hanson overlooks important aspects of Westphal’s argument. After this exploration, I will then provide a stronger critique of Westphal, this time made by John Caputo, which will then lead us to the next section in which we look toward the future of metaphysics and onto-theology within a theological context.

In his work Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, Merold Westphal sets up his phenomenology by starting from what he sees as the primary religious problem of our times: onto-theology. ⁹ From there he builds a philosophical-theological system that, in the process of overcoming onto-theology, can be sustained beyond the initial problem and can be used as a foundation for future theology and philosophy within a religious context. I organize his argument through three main questions and three corresponding themes:

How can I know of God?—the problem of onto-theology

On the initial question Westphal echoes our critique above by designating it as the product of rationalism, born out of the Enlightenment where philosophers and theologians alike tried to conceive of God as the ground of all existence (Hegel) and within the limits of reason (Kant). Therefore, this God is only allowed to enter into philosophical discourse on philosophy’s terms and becomes a God whose primary function is as a conceptual device to make the world intelligible to humanity. ¹⁰ The consequence of this is that philosophy makes God less personable and increasingly distant to humanity; which is an argument he accepts from Heidegger and is in line with what we have seen in the first section of this article. The result of this way of thinking is that scientific-calculative reasoning ¹¹ becomes the only path to knowledge or understanding and where once-transcendent concepts, like nature and knowledge, are only understood by their worth as utilities or resources. ¹²

Faith, as the foundation of belief, is increasingly considered invalid within contemporary culture because it does not meet the threshold of proof set forth by scientific-calculative reasoning, according to Westphal’s understanding of onto-theology. Moreover, concepts of God, as well as of the other transcendental ideas mentioned above, have either become more reliant upon onto-theology (such as Jim Hanson’s argument for a neo-onto-theology) in an attempt to justify belief in God or have been reformatted into a “somethingism” or a belief in “somethingness,” which is a belief in some form of high spirituality that is vaguely understood and ultimately unreachable.

Keeping in mind this critique of onto-theology, Westphal then moves onto the second question: Westphal begins to answer this question with the Augustinian foundation that God is incomprehensible and yet humanity still has access to God through worship and prayer. To explain this foundation, Westphal compares Augustine to Wittgenstein, arguing that the “unknowability” of God happens through the prism of language, whereas Augustine’s theory of language “affirms a hiddenness over sheer presence in our knowledge of God” which even extends to how consciousness understands the world, allowing for a certain concealment—an ignorance toward the complete comprehensibility of things—to the world and to God. ¹³ From this ignorance, Augustine argues that “knowing” God is to seek God through prayer and worship, continually asking “what then, is the God I worship?” ¹⁴ and “what do I love when I love my God?”. ¹⁵

Using the Augustinian notion that God is incomprehensible and that the path to seeking or knowing God is a path of praise and prayer, Westphal then pivots to Pseudo-Dionysius’ apophatic theology as well as Thomas Aquinas’ via analogia to show how something can be said of God, albeit tangentially. Westphal emphasizes Pseudo-Dionysius’ via negativa and Aquinas’ analogia entis to illustrate that saying something about God without slipping into onto-theology is a process of concealment and “unconcealment,” where it is acceptable to make a statement about God, such as “God is Love,” but only if it is analogously understood as love. In this sense, God can be understood as love qua love, but to say that “God is Love” and that “I love my wife” is not partaking in the same, univocal discourse. In short, our God talk should always be understood as uncovering a truth about God while never becoming the sole truth about God. Therefore, you can say, in the vein of Aristotle, that God is the Prime Mover as long as it is understood that God is more than just the Prime Mover.

It is important to recognize that this technique of understanding God is rooted in praxis for Westphal. He adroitly notes that Augustine’s notion of seeking out an incomprehensible God—asking what do I love when I love my God?—is pursued through prayer and worship and, furthermore, the God talk of via negativa and analogia entis removes the believing self from the center of reality, allowing a self-transcendence to occur which, rooted in the praxis of worship or what some might call discipleship, reveals the transcendence of God. Therefore, he argues, overcoming onto-theology is a process, an act of self-transcendence that opens the believer up to God. ¹⁶ This process, for Westphal, has its roots in Scripture and also within religious traditions. He states that we can see this overcoming of onto-theology and desire to master the subject within religion through the Christian Scriptures as well as through the hermeneutical tradition that flows out of the Bible. ¹⁷

On this last note concerning hermeneutics, Westphal connects the teachings of Christ and the prophets of the Old Testament, especially the prophet Amos, to the hermeneutics of suspicion found within the writings of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others. These secular “Masters of Suspicion,” to borrow a phrase from Paul Ricoeur, often critique religious praxis and religious belief in ways that mirror the religious critiques within the Bible. ¹⁸ Westphal argues that a hermeneutics of suspicion can be an access point for theology to dialogue with philosophy, in the process of correcting instances when, as he argues, “theology becomes ideology in service of idolatry.” ¹⁹ What is interesting here is that Westphal develops a Barthian standpoint on Scripture, in that revelation holds a highest authority for knowing about God, for him, but through his hermeneutical understanding of Scripture, he opens up a dialogue between faith and reason as a way not to slip into onto-theology. While he still founds his phenomenology on the primacy of faith in the existence of God—no “proof” of God’s existence can adequately overcome onto-theology—he does not close shut his hermeneutics at the church doors. However, this does not completely help him evade the critique of falling back into onto-theology, which I will return to later.

But what of this faith and this hermeneutics of suspicion? Our third question, strikes at this issue in that Westphal, having established that understanding God involves a praxis-based faith plus a hermeneutics of suspicion, now looks toward a dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas in order to flesh out how that faith is lived and to better explain how this faith opens the believer up to a greater transcendence that may be called God while avoiding onto-theology.

Westphal engages Kierkegaard in order to accomplish two things, the first being that he wants to show how the paradox of faith, as seen through the eyes of Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, cannot be explained through reason, and the second being that he wants to show how such a faith puts the self into a heteronomous relationship between God, the self, and the other. From this latter perspective, Westphal then engages Levinas to further cement the idea that praxis is the foundation of religious faith, therefore returning back to his argument that a self-transcendence, a decentering of the self, opens the self to a transcendental relationship with God through the other. This fusing between the paradox of faith and the ethical obligation of that faith is the Archimedean point for Westphal: in order to say something about God we must enter into fellowship with God’s creation, i.e. the other, and through that fellowship we are opened up to the ultimate other, God.

This ethical relationship compels Westphal to proclaim that “the theological task rooted in the agreements between Levinas and Kierkegaard [is that] all theology should be liberation theology, a guide to the practice of overcoming oppression in all its forms.” ²⁰ By staking the claim that theology should always be oriented toward overcoming oppression through loving the other, Westphal reintroduces his hermeneutics of suspicion, which emphasizes a critical consciousness within the religious tradition while also stressing a critical consciousness outside of religion, where those who are aligned with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx rightly critique religious praxis when it goes awry or becomes in service of the self rather than the other (which he believes is an aspect of onto-theology). This philosophical–theological dialogue becomes the bridge between faith and reason for Westphal, a bridge in service not for the Church or the Temple or Reason, but for those suffering at the steps of both houses.

Critique of Westphal and the future of onto-theology

Westphal, however, is not without critique, and his longtime friend John Caputo levies a strong one against him. In this concluding section I briefly lay out this critique in order to show that, while a neo-onto-theology (as Jim Hanson describes it) may not be tenable as he describes it, he is onto something when he highlights the difficulty of talking about God without some form of onto-theological structure. My concluding claim will be that onto-theology is a problematic point in our metaphysics that can lead to violence, but it is also inescapable to a certain degree; yet while it is inescapable this does not mean that it should be embraced. Rather, it should be mitigated with what Westphal calls “the prophetic voice.”

In his essay “What is Merold Westphal’s Critique of Onto-theology Criticizing?” John Caputo dissects Westphal’s phenomenology of faith, showing that while it does allow for some form of self-transcendence and decentering of the self—thereby ensuring that the self is not the center of all things—it still holds a center and therefore does not actually overcome the problem of onto-theology. ²¹ Caputo bases this critique on the Derridean line of thought where Derrida argued that, although removing the self as the center of thought is good, the fact that there is still a center grounding the self means that onto-theology is still in play; along with the scientific-calculative thinking that makes it so problematic. Caputo even suggests that the critique of onto-theology might even be called a critique of “onto-theo-logico-centrism,” arguing that Westphal falls into a familiar trap of basing his idea around a center that grounds thought. In doing so, Westphal’s de-centering switches one center for another and never actually solves the problem. Addressing both the Derridean critique of centrism and Westphal, Caputo states that:

What is being criticized [by Derrida] is confidence in the Center itself and the protection it affords, the confidence that there is a Center that holds firm and encompasses all. [Derrida] describes a situation in which we are more radically de-centered, de-centered not because we are merely fallen and finite while the Center itself is infinite, holy and incomprehensible to our finite minds and wills, but because the Center itself is in question. ²²

Westphal is not alone, however, in being wrong in his critique. Joeri Schrijvers shows us in his work, Onto-Theological Turnings? that Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Yves Lacoste’s attempts to overcome onto-theology ultimately all fail. After exploring their arguments thoroughly, he comes to the conclusion that perhaps onto-theology is inevitable and we can only hope to overturn it within our theology. ²³ Even though both have diverging takes on onto-theology, Joeri Schrijvers’ point aligns well with Merold Westphal’s sense of the prophetic voice: Westphal’s hermeneutics proclaim that the prophetic voice which comes from the other—and at times that other can come in the form of Scripture or the Church’s staunchest critiques ²⁴ —can break open one’s sense of self, de-centering the self which allows for a transcendence from which we may experience God’s love. And while there is still a center, we are for a moment aware of its presence and are able to move beyond it. In this way, onto-theology is not “overcome” and removed from our lives, but we enter into the process of overcoming, a never-completed attempt of renewing and strengthening our relationship with the wholly other—God.

Jim Hanson is attempting a similar movement with neo-onto-theology but, by affirming the importance of onto-theology in his attempt to show its inevitability, he does not assuage or otherwise address any of the critiques of onto-theology and what makes it dangerous (and potentially violent). ²⁵ Furthermore, it should never be the central aspect of one’s theology or metaphysics since it is, in itself, a form of idolatry that places our own image of God as the highest concept of God; thus disallowing God to speak for God’s self. By holding onto the notion of onto-theology and, furthermore, fashioning it as the core of one’s theology (“neo-ontotheologians?” ²⁶ ), he fails to achieve a theology beyond a logo-centric essence without creating another layer because neo-onto-theology still mistakes God as a ground for our own thought, implicitly holding God responsible for our finite, and often violent, ontologies while never letting God out of the grasp of the principle of sufficient reason. ²⁷ When he proclaims that the neo-onto-theologian prays with Meister Eckhart, proclaiming “I pray God to rid me of God”; postmodern theologians and philosophers pray with him. ²⁸ The difference is in accepting that the latter God in that prayer is the ground in which we’ve fashioned the former God. Knowing the difference and living the difference, however difficult, is what matters.