Conclusiones y Recomendaciones

Before concluding, it may be interesting to point out that the present discussion about

BeingMET(with its entailed foundationalism) and BeyngMET (with its entailed para- foudationalism) can help us to have some new insights into one of the most enigmatic figures of Heidegger’s philosophy, that is the last God.

Very often, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, the ground of all entities (or the reason why human beings, trees, sun sets, stars, planets and everything else

are) goes under the name of God. For instance, according to Aquinas, “God wills the

existence of all things” (cf. Lovejoy, 2001, p.319) while, according to Leibniz, God is the Perfection Prior, which generates the world as a necessary logical consequence of his essential nature (cf. Lovejoy, 2001, p.319). Schelling believes that God is that eternal realization [Realwerden] orGenesis of the world (cf. Lovejoy, 2001, p.320) while Meister

Eckhart (who highly influenced Heidegger) thinks that God is the ground [Grund∗] of

everything. Even though, in all these cases, God is thought of as the universal ground, Heidegger has never borrowed any term from theology. His conception of the universal ground always goes under the name of ‘BeingMET’ or ‘BeyngMET’. The reason for his divorce from the theological tradition is clearly explained inPhenomenology and Theology

(1967). Since Heidegger holds the idea that the ground of every entity is not an entity itself, he thinks that God cannot be such a universal ground because, in the theological framework, God is treated as an entity, namely as something thatis. Godis what wills,

generates or realizes every thing; god is the ground of all entities. Of course, God is

not a normal entity among entities. For instance, God is eternal and normal entities are not. Even more simply, God is the ground of all entities while a normal entity (such as a table) is not. So, even though God is often conceptualized as a super-ens, God is

still thought of as an ens. Since we refer to God, God is an entity, and this is why we

can pray to Yahweh, we can make war in the name of Christ, and we can distinguish

God because, in the first place, God is treated as an entity. Such an account of God is incompatible with the Heideggerian assumption that the ground of everything is not an entity and, from this, also follows the necessity of separating God (the super-ens)

from BeingMET (or BeyngMET), which is not an ens. Therefore, “BeingMET [or

BeyngMET] is not God” (Heidegger, 1989a, p.303). In Heidegger’s jargon, we could say

that theology is ultimately an onto-theology, namely the study of the divine element as

an entity. “Both ontology [the study of entities] and theology are ‘-logy’ [or sciences]

because they are concerned with the attempt at explaining entities” (Heidegger, 1967,

p.225). This is also the reason why Heidegger claims that theology is just like any other kind of science: it deals with God as an ‘object of study’ while the ground of all entities is not an object at all. Therefore, God is inappropriate as a characterization ofBeingMET (orBeyngMET).

Having said that, the approach proposed by Heidegger inPhenomenology and The- ology (1967) does not seem to hold for the whole trajectory of his philosophy. Indeed,

inContributions to Philosophy (1989a), Heidegger himself returns to theology accepting

what he calls the last God. Unfortunately, he does not give any clear account of what

thelast God really is. On the one hand, we know that it is not simply “another God [der Letzte Gott]” because it is “different from both the old traditional Gods and the Chris-

tian God” (Heidegger, 1989a, p.394). The last God is characterized, using Hölderlin’s

expression, as the “closest one” but, at the same time, “the most difficult to understand” (Heidegger, 1989a, p.396). On the other hand, we also know that the last God is tightly

connected with the idea ofBeyngMETbecause “the truth of beyng [BeyngMET] is the truth of thelast God” (Heidegger, 1989a, p.396). Since Heidegger never rejected his con-

demnation of theology, at this point, some questions look inevitable: how can Heidegger hold the position that ‘God’ cannot be another name to refer toBeyngMET, believing,

at the same time, that the last God is actually a synonym of BeyngMET? And, if so,

what is the difference between the traditional account of God and the last God? These

questions remain unanswered.

One possible way of making sense of the thoughts expressed inContributions to Phi- losophy (1989a) is to appeal to para-foundationalism. Thelast God may be interpreted

as the dialetheic foundational element that we have called BeyngMET. If this is the

case, since BeyngMET (or the last God) is not an entity, Heidegger can still maintain his previous critique against theology. On the other hand, since BeyngMET is also an

entity, it is actually possible to refer to it as God because, consistently with the theo- logical tradition, God is that entity in virtue of which everything is. From this point of view, thelast God is the “closest one” (Heidegger, 1989a, 396) because it is an entity

and the world of human beings is constituted by entities. Entities are the things we are most familiar with. Nonetheless, the last God is also “the most difficult to understand”

(Heidegger, 1989a, p.396) because it is not an entity as well and, as we have seen, what is not an entity leads to an aporia, which is accepted as true in the para-foundationalist view. So, “the closest proximity to the last God is the event of (. . . ) its rejection”

(Heidegger, 1989a, p.402). The last God is phenomenologically present when it is not

or, more precisely, it is present when it is absent. It is present and it is not. On the

one hand, it is present as all the other entities are: the last God is present to the mind

of the people thinking or speculating about it and, thus, referring to it. On the other hand, thelast God is not present as well: since it is not an entity and everything that

is phenomenologically present is an entity, the last God cannot be phenomenologically

present. So, if it is true that ‘only a God can save us’ (cf. Safranski, 1998), given Hei- degger’s metaphysics, this God has to be thelast one. It has to be the God that grounds

everything including itself without being grounded at all.