new poiesis and the messianic: reflections on faith without religion · today · 58 } poiesis and...

BIKOLNON: Journal of Ateneo de Naga Graduate School

Poiesis and the Messianic: Reflections on Faith

without Religion

Michael Roland F. Hernandez Ateneo de Naga University

Abstract

This paper elaborates a discussion of poiesis as a context for understanding the human experience of faith and the “religious.” It aims to prove that the poetic understanding of religion as a human response to the divine can only make sense as a response to a future to-come that shuns away any solidification of faith within established or institutional religions.

I contend that the experience of poiesis, understood as an occasion for understanding religious experience, leads us to a post-metaphysical understanding of religion. This post-metaphysical thinking considers religion as a search for the “holy” that is no longer limited to the confines of institutionalized faiths or religions. For faith to be an authentic experience of man, it must necessarily overcome any petrification of the “holy” in terms of any theology or “god-idea.

Keywords: poiesis, messianic, Heidegger, Derrida, religion

58 } Poiesis and the Messianic: Reflections on Faith Without Religion

Introduction

The crisis of religion signaled by Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God” (2001, pp. 109; 119-20; 199)1 has given rise not only to the problematization of faith but also to the “death” of man. Religion, as man’s instrument towards salvation, has its fragile foundations questioned and its justification for man’s need for any sort of transcendence already looked upon with suspicion. This crisis of religion is defined and finds itself situated between finding avenues for the rational justification for the experience of faith and the position that disregards any need for such rational proofs in favor of a faith independent and immune from any secularizing and modernist critique of religion.

The former view is one face of a crisis that gives space for religious discourse only insofar as faith can be rationally justified by the argumentative rigor of modern science. Such scientific emphasis on proofs has tended to marginalize most religious discourse as “irrational” and “unscientific.”2 Mention of any “god-talk” must be regarded with suspicion as simply “mythical” and hence unphilosophical. This maddening demand for logical proofs and the rational justification of religious belief closes man to that deep experience of transcendence possible within religious experience itself.

On the other hand, there is also the experience of religious fundamentalism that threatens to exclude all forms of rationalization of belief. Often, this tendency towards religious absolutism results to a subjectivist conception of truth that may give fruit to horror and violence. 3 The New York event of 9/11 perpetuated by Islamic fundamentalists is a reminder of the concrete dangers that may result when one sets himself off from the demands of the rational (Borradori, 2003, pp. ix-xiv).

It is in the face of these two extremes that we can find Martin Heidegger’s thinking of the religious as relevant for thinking a solution to such crisis. While not explicitly considered as religious, Heidegger’s thinking became a fecund space for the “question of God” after what most scholars would call as the Turn [die Kehre]. This religious concern or “return” would come to be considered as an essential aspect of his

Michael Roland F. Hernandez { 59

thinking of “being” [Sein or Seyn] 4 as evidenced in his later, more “poetical” writings.5 In these writings, the themes of technology and the religious became closely intertwined with the central ontological concern of his earlier writings (specifically Being and Time). However, this is not to say that these concerns were absent in his early works. Rather, they were merely relegated to the background because of Heidegger’s more explicit concern with the explication of Dasein and temporality. Heidegger insists that the understanding of these later concerns can only be properly understood if they are contextualized as already contained and implicit in his early works (Richardson, 1967).6

This paper thus elaborates a discussion of poiesis as a context for understanding the human experience of faith and the “religious.”7 It aims to prove that the poetic understanding of religion as a human response to the divine can only make sense as a response to a future to-come that shuns away any solidification of faith within established or institutional religions. In order to demonstrate this, the study will: 1) commence with the discussion of Martin Heidegger’s appropriation of the Greek term poiesis as the basis of human dwelling; 2) and proceed to the characterization of dwelling as essentially religious. From this fundamental perspective about human existence, will ultimately consider 3) the implications of the idea of “faith without religion.” Here, I contend that the experience of poiesis, understood as an occasion for understanding religious experience, leads us to a post-metaphysical understanding of religion.8 This post-metaphysical thinking considers religion as a search for the “holy” that is no longer limited to the confines of institutionalized faiths or religions. For faith to be an authentic experience of man, it must necessarily overcome any petrification of the “holy” in terms of any theology or “god-idea.”9 In this way, Heidegger’s idea of poiesis can thus be understood as a form of a deconstruction of religion that leads us to the idea of a faith without religion (i.e., institutional religion) (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 164). To unpack the potency of this concept, I will utilize in the end Jacques Derrida’s ruminations to drive home the implications of the idea of a faith or “religion without religion” to the contemporary search for “religious authenticity.” This way, we aim to go beyond the “death of man” occasioned either by the narrow-mindedness of theological rationalism or by the violence of religious fundamentalism towards the “salvific redemption” of man in the coming of what is authentically “holy,” the truly religious, or the “messianic” absolute.


Heidegger’s Thinking on Poiesis

In his essay “Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger takes his cue from both Plato and Aristotle about a sentence taken from Plato’s Symposium (205b): “Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen]” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 293). Poiesis, understood thus, is a bringing-forth that takes into account not only the “artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery” in handicraft manufacture (e.g., chairs, vases, etc.) and intellectual craft (e.g., poems and other intellectual stuff), but also the “arising of something from out of itself” in phusis or nature. In fact, for Heidegger, phusis is poiesis in the highest sense since it “has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth . . . in itself (en heautoi)” in contrast to “the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or the artist” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 293).

Within this bringing-forth, the four modes of occasioning—the four kinds of causes in the Aristotelian sense (formal, material, efficient, and final)—are at play. Since these four modes of “[occasioning] has to do with the presencing [Anwesen] of that which at any given time comes to appearance,” bringing-forth [poiesis] has to do then, with the bringing out of something from concealment into unconcealment; it “comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 293). Bringing-forth comes to pass, resting and moving freely within the moment of revealing, as the bringing of something “hither out of concealment, forth into unconcealment”—this is what the Greeks call truth, or aletheia” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 294). Thus, the revealing made possible by poiesis is possible only as a revelation of the truth of the thing. In this revealing is where “the possibility of all productive manufacturing lies” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 294). Poiesis as a mode of revealing is thus the realm of truth.

On this account, any mode of creation or bringing-forth has to do with the production of the truth of something and hence, with knowledge (epistinio). However, poiesis is not mere making. In another essay, Heidegger explains that there is a difference between bringing-forth as creation and bringing-forth as making (Heidegger, 1993, p. 179). The bringing-forth in making requires the painstaking cultivation of complete mastery leading to craftsmanship that does not lead to the


unconcealment of what is concealed. In contrast to this, a closer examination of techne reveals to us that “it never means some kind of practical performance.” Rather, it “denotes a mode of knowing” that apprehends “what is present, as such.” Since the essence of knowing consists in aletheia, techne is more properly understood as “. . . a bringing-forth of beings . . . that . . . brings forth what is present as such out of concealedness and specifically into the unconcealedness of their appearance;” and never simply signifying “the action of making . . . .” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 180). Thus, poiesis has its essential character as bringing-forth in creation. In this vein, to create means “to let something emerge as a thing that has been brought forth.” But the emergence of the work through creation is precisely the “way in which truth becomes and happens” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 180). Poiesis is thus the way for truth, as aletheia, can happen. In itself, poiesis is the happening of truth.

Elsewhere, Heidegger further draws from Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, chaps. 3 and 4) in clarifying that poiesis, in the mode of techne, is an activity “which aims at an end distinct from itself” (Kearney, 1999, p. xii).11 Techne “. . . reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie before us, whatever can look and turn out now in one way or another. . . This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 295). This “view of the finished thing” is what guides the creator (producer or maker) in “the production . . . of the product which the producer has in advance” (Kearney, 1999, p. xii). In this way, we can see that poiesis can refer to any activity that aims at the production of something or an end which is outside the producer and lasts even when the creative action is over. Thus, we have “the art work produced by the artist, the text produced by the philosopher, etc.” (Kearney, 1999, p. xii). What is decisive in techne, and hence in poiesis, however, “does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of the means.” Rather, “it is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 297). The Italian commentator Giorgio Agamben clarifies this point succinctly:

The essential character of poiesis was not its aspect as a practical and voluntary process buts its being a mode of truth understood as unveiling, a-lhqeia (Agamben, 1999, p. 69).12


. . . the essence of poiesis has nothing to do with the expression of the will (with respect to which art is in no way necessary): this essence is found instead in the production of truth and in the subsequent opening of a world for man’s existence and action (Agamben, 1999, p. 72).

Poiesis, then, is essentially the setting-into-work of truth or the happening of aletheia. How is the production of this truth possible? In the production of the work or the thing, the act of creating itself does not only bring-forth the being of the work; rather it also at the same time, in the same act of bringing-forth, “places this being in the open region in such a way that what is to be brought forth first lights the openness of the open region into which it comes forth” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 181). What is brought-forth is the work and its being placed in the open region of beings is the happening of truth. Creation then is a bringing-forth of the truth that brings the openness of beings. Agamben explains that this intimate relation of poiesis to aletheia is of crucial significance in determining what poiesis really is according to the Greeks. He writes:

The Greeks, to whom we owe all the categories through which we judge ourselves and the reality around us, made a clear distinction between poiesis (poiein, to pro-duce” in the sense of bringing into being) and praxis (prattein, “to do” in the sense of acting. . . . [Central] to praxis was the idea of the will that finds its immediate expression in an act, while, by contrast, central to poiesis was the experience of pro-duction into presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing into being, from concealment into the full light of the work (Agamben, 1999, pp. 68-69).

In this vein, Agamben continues to explain that poiesis “constructs the space where man finds his certitude and where he ensures the freedom and duration of his action” (Agamben, 1999, p. 99). As such, for the Greeks, poiesis, expressed in ergon and energeia, “had nothing to do with action but rather designated the essential character of a status in presence” (Agamben, 1999, p. 80). Poiesis, as pro-duction into presence, thus means the passing of something “from nonbeing to being, thus opening the space of truth (a-lhqeia) and building a world for man’s dwelling on earth” (Agamben, 1999, p. 80).


From such correlation of poiesis as production-into-presence with the happening of truth, we can then conceive of poiesis as man’s fundamental mode of presencing which determines all other humanly possible modes of production. But man’s creative activity in poiesis does not merely refer to production as agere or doing, but more importantly to production as gnosis or knowing which is ultimately related to the truth of being. As such, poetic pro-duction where aletheia happens is ultimately constitutive of man’s dwelling. Man, as man, is fundamentally enjoined by being “to dwell in the truth of [b]eing.” For Heidegger, “[this] dwelling is the essence of [man’s] being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 236).

Poetic Dwelling as Religious Dwelling

It is at this point where poiesis can be seen as the basis of human dwelling. Poiesis, as we have seen, is a pro-duction into presence, a creation that brings-forth something from concealment to unconcealment. Now, as being-in-the-world, man is first brought to into this world through poiesis. Heidegger writes: “Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 218).

Poetry, thus, is what really lets man dwell. We only attain to dwelling through an act of poetic creation, which for Heidegger is a kind of building. Dwelling, understood by Hölderlin as “the basic character of human existence,” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 215) is man’s essential feature as a being-in-the-world. Now, since human dwelling is only possible through poiesis, man’s dwelling is essentially a poetic dwelling. What does it mean to dwell poetically? To dwell poetically means that man has acknowledged in truth the fundamental character of his being-in-the-world. “The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we human are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 325).

Now, the essence of this dwelling lies in that experience of remaining or staying in a place where one is brought to and remains in peace. Being at peace, one is then preserved from harm and danger. Preserved from harm and danger, one is then free. Being free, one is then spared from harm. Now, this sparing is not only a delivery from harm but a letting-


be of something so that it can realize its own essence, “when we return it specifically to its essential being.” “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its own essence” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 327).

In poetic dwelling, then, one lets things to be in their being so that they can attain their own full essence or nature. To dwell fundamentally means that one spares things so that they can attain their own being. With regard to man, we can say that he dwells only insofar as he is able to dwell “in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 327). It is this acknowledgment of man’ s being a mortal that characterizes man’s dwelling as a poetic one. How is this possible? For man, this means that one must acknowledge one’s being a mortal as the utmost possibility of his being a Dasein. Heidegger writes:

Man exists as a mortal. He is called a mortal because he can die. To be able to die means: to be capable of death as death. Only man dies—and indeed continually, so long as he stays on earth, so long as he dwells (Heidegger, 1971, p. 222).

By accepting his own mortality in the face of his inevitable death, man dwells in such in a way that he lets the natural course of events happen without technological intervention. By being a mortal, one includes oneself as “belonging to men’s being with one another” and brings himself before the mercy of the “gods” or the “divinities” while spanning at the same time, that distance between the earth and the sky. Through this acknowledgment, man brings himself into the primal oneness of the fourfold (Heidegger, 1993, p. 327) and as such, opens himself up to the fourfold play of being as “a vigilance toward the god that is not yet there” (Kearney, 1999, p. 57). Poetic dwelling means that man’s “stay on the earth beneath the sky” is a dwelling which he measures against the godhead, i.e., the divine, the sacred or the holy. It is only in this measuring that man’s dwelling becomes a real poetic dwelling. Man’s dwelling is only such dwelling when it is in itself “opens” or is already “open” to that experience of the godhead or the “religious.” Man’s dwelling is an essential openness to the experience of the divine.

Only insofar as man takes the measure of his dwelling in this way is he able to be commensurately with his nature. Man’s dwelling depends on an upward-looking measure-taking of the dimension,


in which the sky belongs just as much as the earth (Heidegger, 1971, p. 221).

Man therefore becomes really authentic only if he is able to acknowledge the essential religious dimension of his dwelling. It is only when takes an upward look towards the sky and the divinities that his existence acquires a “depth dimension.” When man looks up towards the sky he still remains on the earth and this looking-up is what measures out the span or the distance between the earth and sky as the authentic dimension of man’s dwelling. However, this span or dimension is itself what metes out or makes possible the between: “the upward to the sky as well as the downward towards the earth” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 220). For Heidegger, this dimension is “without a name” and for this reason does not admit of any measure except that measure which is “its own metron, and thus its own metric” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 221). This measure is taken by man himself in so far as he “gauges the between, which brings the two, heaven and earth, to one another” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 221). But inasmuch as man is the one who is taking this measure, man is also able to measure himself against the godhead and hence, to be able to become what he is according to his own nature.

. . . man spans the dimension by measuring himself against the heavenly. Man does not undertake this spanning just now and then; rather, man is man at all only in such spanning (Heidegger, 1971, pp. 220-221).

This measuring against the heavenly is what we aptly call as man’s essential religious dimension. Without this dimension, in which man measures himself against the godhead or what is heavenly, it would not possible for man to achieve authentic dwelling. It is this religious dimension which puts to man the inescapable pressure to be himself as this dimension is something which he can never escape.

This is why he can indeed block this spanning, trim it, and disfigure it, but he can never evade it. Man, as man, has always measured himself with and against something heavenly (Heidegger, 1971, p. 221).

It is in man’s taking measure of this religious dimension which Heidegger calls as the “poetic” or “creative” element in human dwelling.


This is because the measuring of this religious dimension is “the element within which human dwelling has its security, by which it securely endures” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 221). If the poetic is what really causes dwelling and the poetic is essentially the “religious” since it is where man measures himself against the divine, then human dwelling has, always and already, the “religious” as its secure foundation; human dwelling is essentially religious dwelling. It is in then in the poetry of the religious where we can find the “origin” of human dwelling.

This poetry of the religious takes man’s measuring himself against the divine as the basis of what is poetic in human dwelling. Man’s openness to the divine is what is creative of human existence. If we are to follow this conclusion along strictly Heideggerian lines, this means that it is man’s measuring against the godhead, i.e., man’s relationship with the divine, which is creative in all spheres of human activity. At the roots of human dwelling is the religious which determines all humanly possible modes of production. All bringing-forth then is a poetic comportment that takes its basis from man’s essential relationship with the divine.13

In poetry there takes place what all measuring is in the ground of its being. ( . . . ) That consists in man’s first of all taking the measure which is then applied in every measuring act. In poetry the taking of measure occurs. To write poetry is measure-taking, understood in the strict sense of the word, by which man first receives the measure for the breadth of his being (Heidegger, 1971, pp. 221-222).

Religion as Man’s Poetic Dwelling

To understand religion in terms of poiesis, one must start from the recognition that man’s dwelling is essentially religious and it is essentially religious because of the poetic character of man’s dwelling that brings him into necessary measuring against what is divine. This means that at the very basis of man’s dwelling lies that basic openness towards the essence of the holy, an orientation to the divine which invites us to the experience of transcendence.

In poiesis, religion can be understood as a space for the production of the truth of man insofar as he is necessarily connected with the divine. This truth however is not to be understood propositionally in terms of our


usual rational categories that work according to the logic of proof or evidence. Poiesis, as the happening of aletheia, has its own domain of rationality that tries to move beyond the cognitive “understood as the domination of the object by means of knowledge” (Cited in Kearney, 1999, p. xiv). However, this does not mean that poiesis refuses all forms of rational understanding. To do this would mean relapsing back into that potentially violent fundamentalism which we are so wont to avoid. Rather, to move beyond the cognitive means to recognize, as Aristotle did, that there are “forms of understanding proper to ethical action (praxis) and poetical production (poiesis) are quite different from the exact modes of cognition proper to theoria.” Richard Kearney explains that these modes of knowing are “more approximative, provisional, tentative, more informed by the hit-and-miss, trial-and-error contexts of lived experience and example” (Kearney, 1999, p. xiv). Poiesis as a mode of cognition tends to surpass the limits of theoretical reason towards a production of truth that is no longer limited to its formulation as adequatio rei et intellectus, i.e., as correspondence between the thing and the mind (Heidegger, 1993, p. 120). Instead, poiesis shows and brings-forth the idea of a truth that reveals itself, as unconcealment of what is meaningful in its letting something be present. Letting something be present does not mean that all teleology is lost in poiesis. Rather, it means that poiesis “remains answerable to action as its ultimate goal” (Kearney, 1999, p. xv). Poiesis always takes into account that there is some other end or goal in view; it is always production for the sake of something, which in this case is praxis (Kearney, 1999, p. xv). Poiesis is not a passive or a mere subjective letting be of something to render it present; rather, it remains beholden to an end that determines it as an ethically responsible bringing-forth. It is on this account that Aristotle relates poiesis to phronesis, i.e., that “practical wisdom which deliberates about actions and ends in a context where human selves discover an ethos binding them to others in a community, tradition, or polis” (Kearney, 1999, p. xii). Poiesis in this case becomes a function that ties itself to imagination so as to enable the human being to deliberate on the ethical aspects of human conduct.

To understand religion through poiesis then means to consider religion within a different domain of rationality that does not operate according to the usual logic of cause and effect, proof and evidence. As such, religion can be understood as a mode of revealing in which man finds himself “pro-duced” as a being related to the divine. Religion becomes


an event within which man is given the possibi (Kearney, 1999)lity to realize or actualize himself according to the nature that is authentically or properly his. In this case, the emphasis is no longer in the justification and rationalization of one’s belief; it is no longer the endless and pointless questioning of whether one’s faith in God is illusory or not. Rather, the emphasis is on the understanding of religion as man’s basic dwelling place in which he strives to create or produce himself according to the modes possible to him precisely as a being-in-the-world. As such, religion becomes a happening which shapes man according to his relationship with the divine. Poiesis guarantees us that this relationship with the divine is not mere human imagination, whose reality is subjectively imagined and indifferent against others. Rather, poiesis guarantees us that religion becomes an experience that takes into account an ethically responsible belonging with-others.

In this vein, we can see the sense in which religion as poiesis becomes a “measure-taking.” Poiesis as taking of a measure means that in religion, man must measure himself against the godhead who, while revealing himself remains to be unknown. This unknown god is the measure for man, the poet. How is this possible? Heidegger himself explains this perplexing question.

[H]ow can that which by its very nature remains unknown ever become a measure? For something that man measures himself by must after all impart itself, must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is unknown, and he is the measure nonetheless. Not only this, but the god who remains unknown, must by showing himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown. God’s manifestness—not only he himself—is mysterious (Heidegger, 1971, p. 222).

On this account, religion for man becomes an encounter with god as the mysterious unknown. This implies that the recognition of the measure by which man measures himself is a measure which he cannot and does not control. Religion thus understood means that it is a space where man is always on a continuous seeking for what is infinitely other, for that which will give ultimate meaning to his life or to his being as a dweller-on-earth. Religion understood through poiesis reveals to us the impossibility of exhausting the “reality” of god and our ever-moving towards a fuller relationship with the coming of the impossible god. This


god is impossible not because he does not exist metaphysically but because his being a measure of man puts man in the position of absolute surrender to the mystery, to that which man does not and can never control, to that which escapes all categorization.

The measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown is revealed as such by the sky. God’s appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment. Thus the unknown god appears as the unknown by way of the sky’s manifestness. This appearance is the measure against which man measures himself (Heidegger, 1971, p. 223).

Religion, understood thus, becomes a search for the “holy” which is to come yet never fully comes because it never really fully reveals itself. As such, we can say that religion, as man’s production of his own truth in relation to the divine, is a continuous reaching out towards that god who appears yet conceals himself in his very own manifestness. Religion then, as man’s poetic dwelling, brings us forth to an experience of god that is not achieved by ordinary human effort. To understand religion through poiesis means that we abandon all attempt to categorize god and to define our salvation using our own means. Religion as man’s poetic dwelling is a letting-be of things in a manner that releases our dwelling to the endless waiting for God. As Heidegger says: “I do not deny God. I state his absence. My philosophy is a waiting for God” (Cited in Kearney, 1999, p. 58).

As such waiting, religion as poiesis reveals to us that man’s dwelling must be always be a continuous preparation for the coming of god. Man’s salvation can never be his own achievement; man cannot “pro-duce” or “bring-forth” his own salvation. He can only prepare for it and this preparation is possible “only to the degree to which his being is appropriate to that which itself has a liking for man and therefore needs his presence” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 228). This is the reason why “[only] a God can save us” (Heidegger, 1981, p. 57). Man might do everything in his power to think his salvation from his own perspective but it is only god himself who can grant him the freedom towards authentic dwelling. Preparation is not something that can be willed by man himself; it is a


preparation that is given to us insofar as be-ing en-owns us (Heidegger, 1999, pp. 5-6). In the face of such helplessness, man’s only possible response is to make his dwelling as an open-readiness to the arrival or absence of god. This readiness consists only in a hope that keeps oneself open to receive the truth of be-ing as something freely given through a giving that comes from be-ing-enowning itself [Ereignis] (Emad, 2007, p. 189). Poiesis is itself the way by which man readies himself for the coming of this gift of salvation. This is only possible when man enters into a kind of thinking that befits his being-in-the-world as a mortal who dwells on earth. As Heidegger again explains:

The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline (Heidegger, 1981, p. 57).

Such understanding of religion in terms of poiesis leads us to the consideration of our dwelling as a preparation for that salvation freely given to us by the coming of god or the truth of be-ing. It is a preparation possible only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be carried over into the truth of be-ing [Sein or Seyn] through the cultivation of poetic thinking.

Faith without Religion

The poetic experience of the divine allows us a mode of understanding religious experience applicable to all faiths or religion. This poetic mode of understanding is not concerned with the justification of faith or with the presentation of proofs. Rather, it is concerned with the establishment of a way of being or a manner of dwelling which enables man to be man commensurately with his nature as a mortal who dwells on the earth (Heidegger, 1971, p. 221). Man only achieves this authentic dwelling when he measures himself against the godhead or the heavenly, which while manifesting itself, conceals itself as that which is unknown. It is only through such measuring against the godhead that man achieves that religious comportment vigilant to the coming of the god who is not yet there. Poiesis is what opens us to the clearing of the holy and readies us to the reception of the mysterious, nameless, and unknown god or to a more open experience of the unforeseen (Heidegger, 1971, p. 216). This poetic understanding, however, contrasts itself with the conventional


understanding of religion as something institutional—i.e., faith as seen in terms of dogmas, creeds, or theological doctrines. These articles of faith often limit the definition of what is religious and more often than not, hinder the believer from achieving a more authentic experience of the holy.

On this account, Heidegger’s thinking of poiesis allows us an appreciation of the holy as not limited to the confines of institutionalized religions and institutions. Such understanding is freed from any “determinate, sectarian dogmas and beliefs” and is more properly understood as an experience of “faith without religion” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 167). In this vein, poiesis is a thinking that carves a path towards the understanding of “religion beyond (or without) religion” or a “faith without religion.” For Jacques Derrida, such conception of faith is the more authentic experience of the holy because it partakes of the “universal structure” essential to the nature of human dwelling. This universal structure is what opens man to the reception of a salvation in terms of the god who is to come in an “unforeseeable future.”

Insightfully, Derrida calls this universal structure as the “messianic” and distinguishes it from “messianisms.” For him, “messianisms” refer to institutionalized religions, i.e., those characterized by “specific religious beliefs, the historical doctrines and dogmas, [and] of the “religions of the Book” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 160) such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and even those philosophical doctrines that petrify the figure of the Messiah. These various messianisms identify religious truth as a privileged moment in their formation and appropriate it as a fundamental principle exclusive only to them as a select cult. Historically, the absolutisms inherent in these institutional religions have often led to the countless religious wars that have often defined their shared narrative. Thus, we see the “killing of the children of God in the name of God, which too often really are children, killing the innocent in the name of peace and justice” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 161).

In contrast to this sclerotic understanding, Derrida articulates his conception of the “messianic” as a universal structure in our present experience which prevents the same from being self-contained in the present. Drawing from a deconstructive conception of history, the


messianic is articulated at that moment whereby the present passes over into the next instant as a fuller dimension and fulfillment of an ontological dimension which is entirely freed from the masterful control over presence by the sovereign human subject. For Derrida, this universal structure has to do with the absolutely indeterminable future that allows us to encounter the other, as “something that we could not anticipate, expect, fore-have, or fore-see, something that knocks our socks off, that brings us up short and takes our breath away” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 162). Derrida explains that this “messianic future is an absolute future, the very structure of the to-come that cannot in principle come about, the very open-endedness of the present that makes it impossible for the present to draw itself into a circle, to close in and gather around itself” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 162).

Characterized by the openness and unexpectedness to what is to-come, the messianic is a structure itself of “the to-come that exposes the contingency and deconstructibility of the present” and thereby exposes “the alterability of . . . the “powers that be,” which claim mastery over any system grounded on presence. It is what enables us to always pray, plead, and desire the coming of the Messiah and opens us to the possibility of addressing “god” and the “other” with the word: “Come” [Viens]. The messianic is different from messianisms in that it remains itself open to the coming of the “holy” or of “god” who remains as an absolute other. It is what always keeps us on the move towards a “hope, desire, expectation, [and] promise . . . of the future” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 163). It is what makes us keep the faith freed from the limitations of our many theological and philosophical messianisms. This free faith testifies to the messianic as a paradoxical movement that cannot be simply mastered or domesticated or taught or logically understood (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 22). For Derrida, such faith is pure and absolutely universal—albeit a universality not opposed to the singularity that deconstruction have been all the while emphasizing. Thus, it is neither Christian nor Jew nor Islamic nor Buddhist—it is a faith “without religion,”

It is on this account that Derrida vehemently criticizes the violence of terrorism underlined by religious fundamentalism. Reacting to the Event of 9/11, he says:


What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the “bin Laden effect” is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such action and such discourse open onto no future, and in my view, have no future . . . (Borradori, 2003, p. 113).

The messianic reference of faith to a future to come is what makes the experience of the holy or the religious as an impossible experience. It is impossible because the holy comes as something that is totally other, the tout autre in the Levinasian sense that comes in a manner beyond our comprehension, i.e., beyond the language of being and presence. The holy is impossible because it comes in the language of “absence;” an impossibility that makes deconstruction a desire or a passion for the impossible, that makes it a search, a dream, a sigh for “something to come but does not come” (Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, 1997, p. 22).

This understanding of a faith that is “without” religion however should not lead us to a passive and non-committal quietism. For Derrida, “[the] responsibilities that are assigned to us by this messianic structure are responsibilities for here and now. The Messiah is not some future present; it is imminent and it is this imminence that I am describing under the name of the messianic structure” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 1997, p. 24). This faith therefore invites us towards a responsibility that actively engages itself with the plight of the other in the here and now. Here is where poiesis bridges the relation between the realm of the religious with that of ethics. Poiesis concerns itself with finding ways to reconcile the experience of waiting for the unforeseeable and impossible “holy” with the demands for ethical relation by the totally other. Through poiesis, we can claim that it is possible to reconcile religion and ethics if we take religion, as man’s poetic dwelling, as the fundamental experience of being-with others towards whom we must act ethically, not in the sense of any established morality but in the sense of our essential or fundamental responsibility for the other (Kearney, 1999, p. xii). Within religion as man’s poetic dwelling lies the inclusion of the other, whether as god or the human other, to whom we must act


responsibly. Religion, ultimately, cannot and must not separate itself from the question of responsibility towards the other.

Poiesis and Faith

The possibility of understanding faith and religion from the perspective of poiesis constitutes a radical de-construction of the concept of religion. No longer limited to institutionalized religions, a poetic faith transforms religion into one that endlessly waits for the coming of the god who unconceals yet conceals himself in its very unconcealment. Faith then becomes a waiting for a god who announces his presence through his absence—a god who is always “there . . . but not yet. . . .” This is the faith that lets beings be in order to achieve their own essence and waits for god to freely reveal himself in an indeterminate future. This faith, which demands salvation from the future, is thus never fully present. As such, it is a faith that has become impossible. To be impossible however does not mean that it is a meaningless faith. On the contrary, this faith which has a passion for the impossible is most authentic since it recognizes that the real object of religious experience is that which cannot be completely grasped or understood, hence mysterious.

Such deconstructed faith is what rightly passes as a kind of atheism in terms of the established religions. As such, it is a faith that breaks from the traditional, excessively ontological way of thinking about God. This is a faith that renounces the cognitivism that continuously asks “what is this?” or “what is that?” This is the faith that asks, a la Meister Eckhart, to rid ourselves of God, of those linguistic difficulties that obscure our knowledge of God, the God beyond God, the God apart from our philosophical, theological and linguistic constructions, the God who is otherwise than Being.

In this regard, poiesis ultimately tells us that faith is essential for man to be man. Faith is essential to man’s dwelling if he is to realize his own essence as a mortal here on earth. Man can only be man through faith if he recognizes his being a mortal who must necessarily measure himself against the gods or divinities and bridge the connection between sky and earth. Faith is what brings man “not unhappily” to a necessary relation with the divine. Through this faith, man is able to welcome the “claim and appeal” of god (as the measure of man) “with his heart” and to respond in such a way that involves his whole being as a man. Only in


such poetic measuring against the divine, can man acquire the contentment due his nature as a being-in-the-world. In such “faithful” poetic dwelling, the freedom to be according to his own essence is where man is preserved from harm and danger and thus, ultimately remain in peace. Messianic salvation consists precisely in this: that freedom leads to peace and makes the heart of man respond with joy to the coming of a god who will always leave us wanting for more.

References

Agamben, G. (1999). Poiesis and Praxis. In The Man Without Content (G. Albert, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Barbaza, R. (2003). Heidegger and a New Possibility of Dwelling. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Borradori, G. (2003). Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Caputo, J. (1997). Deconstruction in a Nutshell. New York: Fordham University Press.

Caputo, J. (1997). The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,

Haught, J. (2008). God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press.

Heidegger, M. (1966). Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie, & E. Robinson, Trans.) New York: Harper and Row.

Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought. (A. Hofstadter, Trans.) New York: Harper and Row Publishers.

Heidegger, M. (1973). The End of Philosophy. (J. Stambaugh, Trans.) New York: Harper and Row.

Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic Writings. (D. F. Krell, Ed.) New York: Harper Collins.

Heidegger, M. (1999). Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). (P. Emad, & K. Maly, Trans.) Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, M. (Mai, 1976). Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten. In T. Sheehan (Ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (W. Richardson, Trans., Vol. 30, pp. 45-67). Der Spiegel

Juergensmeyer, M. (2000). Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.


Kearney, R. (1999). Poetics of Modernity: Towards a Hermeneutic Imagination. New York: Humanity Books.

Lagdameo, F. J. (2008). The Holy and Heidegger's Godless Thinking. Budhi. Leithart, P. (2000). Making and Mis-making: Poiesis in Exodus 25-40.

International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2(3), 307-318. Nietzsche, F. (2001). The Gay Science. (W. Bernard, Ed., & J. Nauckhoff, Trans.)

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Richardson, W. (1967). Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff. Whitehead, D. (2003). Poiesis and Art-Making; A Way of Letting Be.

Contemporary Aesthetics, 1.

Endnotes 1 See aphorisms 108, 124, 343.

2 For a sustained critique of this thesis, see Haught (2008).

3 For an exhaustive discussion of religious terrorism and violence, see Juergensmeyer (2000).

4 We are here referring to the Das Sein des Seiendes or the Being of beings which he first expounded in Being and Time (see infra.) and claimed to be the center of his philosophical thought. The word Seyn refers to Sein that is no longer thought metaphysically. See Heidegger (1999).

5 The more poetical writings would include the writings published around the 1950s onwards that “are dominated less by scholarly, technical philosophical language than by figures of myth and poetry.” These writings unravel “new though not wholly unfamiliar strands of the question of Being.” See Krell, “Introduction” to “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Heidegger (1993), p. 320.)

6 Heidegger himself agrees with the William Richardson’s Heidegger I and Heidegger II distinction provided that the thought of Heidegger II is understood as a deepening of and not a deviation for the thought of Heidegger I. Both say the same thing from different perspectives. See Richardson (1967).

7 By underlining the creative role of the faculty of imagination, we understand faith no longer merely as an intellectual assent but as a fundamental response to whatever it is that can be considered as an object of belief, be it a personal God (e.g., in the Judeo-Christian Muslim tradition), supernatural beings or


spirits, deified ancestors, an idea, a norm, a thing, or a principle of conduct that one follows in his life.

8 By “post-metaphysical,” we mean an understanding of religion no longer in terms of the metaphysical categories of “being,” causality and presence. This is a term brought about by Heidegger’s project of “overcoming metaphysics.” To understand this simply, the usual categories of metaphysics are, for Heidegger, no longer sufficient or capable to reveal the coming of the truth or aletheia of being. To overcome metaphysics means to understand being no longer as ground of beings (causa prima, causa sui) or as the highest being (summum ens). Rather, it is to think being from the point of view of the “history of being” or “Enowning” [Ereignis]. See Heidegger (1973), 91. Ereignis is also translated as “Appropriation” or “Event of Appropriation.” We opted to use the term “Enowning” following Emad and Maly’s translation of Contributions to Philosophy. See Kearney (1999), pp. xix-xxii.

9 An excellent guide for this discussion is Lagdameo (2008).

11 In contrast to poiesis is praxis, which is “an act which contains its end within itself.”

12 See also Whitehead (2003).

13 Our claim here echoes what Peter Leithart construes to be John Milbanks’ conception of the relationship between human making and divine creation. “Since human making reflects the eternal Trinitarian nature and the continually creative work of God, however, it is not ‘secular’ or ‘neutral’ but a reaching for transcendence, and an imitation of and participation in the ongoing creative action of God. Reflecting the divine making, human art even partakes of the ex nihilo of the original divine creation” (Leithart, 2000, p. 309).

Michael Roland F. Hernandez holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) with a dissertation on the genealogical deconstruction of Filipinization. He is presently an International Associate of the American Philosophical Association (APA) for the A/Y 2020-21 and currently teaches at the Philosophy Department of the Ateneo de Naga University (ADNU).

new poiesis and the messianic: reflections on faith without religion · today · 58 } poiesis and...

Documents