Heidegger and Kearney

Steiner interprets Heidegger as regarding poets as being closest to the meaning of being. But only some poets. ‘The poet names what is holy.’ An analogy with religion suggests itself: only a few individuals have the heightened feel of and for the divine and the ability to express it. The rest of us follow along as best we can, but can’t be expected to be such first order witnesses, just as we cannot all be poets. Heidegger’s question of ontotheology raises many questions but one of them is, since God is what I like to call a ‘weird entity’ in that s/he does not behave predictably, how is it that we can know reliably what God is like? Must God inevitably appear as capricious? The record of divine acts in history is meant to guard against this by showing God as loving and helping, but there are multiple times when God does not. Can this be explained by Richard Kearney’s idea of the God of the possible who needs us just as we need God. Kearney cites Ettie Hillesum who told God we would help him, take responsibility for God where he couldn’t take responsibility for himself. Perhaps God is only able to act when we make what the Celtic tradition called ‘thin places’, where humans are so attuned to the divine as to allow it to unconceal itself in us (to put it in Heideggerese). This is not to say God is limited to what humanity can do but that God, on the whole, does not act without our consent and help. This in turn may help explain why it is more difficult to establish divine justice as the scale on which we act increases: too many constraints come into play, against which we cannot assert our will. Only over a very long time may we climb out of such a situation.