Congratulations to Taylor Abels, who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation with distinction on December 3rd! His topic was "Heidegger on the God and the Liturgy of Being", and his director was Michele Averchi, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.
Mr. Abels was born and raised in central Texas. He received his bachelor's degree, with majors in Philosophy and Theology, from the University of Dallas in 2015. He received a master's degree in Philosophy from the Catholic University of America in 2019. He currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife Marissa, and hopes one day to return to the state from which he first exited.
Dissertation Abstract:
One of the great 'lures' of Heidegger's thought, especially his middle and later works, is the theologically-charged language that saturates his texts. Heidegger rejects the claim that God could play any constitutive role in being, in the manner of a first cause or principle, but refuses to disentangle the topic of the divine from his phenomenological project. In fact, Heidegger claims that a central goal of his project is to restore and free the natural, religious experience of God via a recovery of the genuine phenomenological sense of being. This raises a two-part question: how does Heidegger conceive of the relation between God and being in his later works, and is he successful at restoring the experience of the former through the latter?
In my dissertation, I respond to the first part of the question by arguing that Heidegger presents the god-being relation according to the overarching image of a 'liturgy.' For Heidegger, being—or the transcendental horizon of all appearance—is like a great cosmic event in which human beings meet the divine 'in the middle' of the earth and the heavens in an act of celebratory worship of the divine.
What Heidegger means to convey with his liturgical image of being, I argue, is a 'phenomenology of measure' in which God is the 'measure' of being. According to Heidegger, the transcendental horizon of all appearance can only be measured out, that is, reveal its own essence, in the appearance of God. There is a surprising phenomenological reciprocity between God and being, even though God cannot be included as one of being' principles or causes in the normal sense of these terms.
While the answer to the first part of the question reveals a type of complementarity between God and being, I argue, the answer to the second part of the question is nevertheless a resounding ‘no.’ In his choice of liturgical images, and his account of the phenomenology of measure, Heidegger reveals that he has a unique conception of the liturgy itself, which is alien to natural religious experience. For Heidegger, a liturgy has the divine as its center, but is not intrinsically a 'divine' event, since it is the 'between' point of divine and non-divine realities. Heidegger's vision of the liturgy, I conclude, actually presents the liturgy as a 'godless' act of self-glorification, and his account of being correlatedly renders God an instrument of being's own self-revelation, not the ultimate object of worship. This means, ironically enough, that it is precisely Heidegger's liturgical approach that frustrates his goal of restoring the religious experience of God.