Page 18 - Eclipse of God

Introduction to the 2016 Edition xvii

ception of religion denies the possibility of God’s reality by
positing the identification of God and the human as the final
moment in the psychic development of the individual. Whereas
Sartre took Nietzsche too literally, Jung, Buber claims, answers
Nietzsche by saying, “All the gods are dead, now we desire that
the superman live!” (78). Buber is perhaps most sympathetic
to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. Like Buber, Heidegger
understands Nietzsche’s pronouncement on God’s death in
light of the sentence that follows this claim: “for we have killed
11
him.” For Heidegger, Buber explains, this means “God can
rise from the dead. . . . [T]he unfolding of the new ontological
thought can prepare for a turning- point in which the divine, or
as Heidegger, in agreement with the poet Hölderlin, prefers to
say, the holy, will appear in new and still unanticipated forms”
(59). Where Buber disagrees with Heidegger is in Heidegger’s
insistence that human beings cannot affect the reappearance
of God (or gods in Heidegger’s case). For Heidegger, only the
fate of being, and not human freedom, determines whether
and how a God might appear. For Buber, in contrast, “God
needs man independent . . . as partner in dialogue, as comrade
in work, as one who loves Him; God needs His creature thus
or wills to need him thus” (63).
While Buber’s philosophy, like Heidegger’s, is complex, his
worry about Heidegger is ultimately very straightforward. By
refusing the possibilities of a transcendent God and human
freedom, Heidegger, Buber contends, surrenders the possibil-
ity of moral judgment and affirms the “most inhuman mani-
festation” of his historical hour. Buber’s point is not just that
Heidegger joined the Nazi party and gave his infamous Rectoral

11 Friederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine
Nauckhoff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120.