It can be said that, in its fragility, the last in the sense of the last flash of something remains for us as a claim even after it passes. Such is its power.
Entitled “The Last God” (»Der letze Gott«), the penultimate chapter of Heidegger’s posthumously-published Contributions to Philosophy opens with a reflection similar to this one.(⦿) For thinking of a “last god,” as Heidegger suggests we ought to think about it, not only forces us to wonder what “last” means: it also obliges us not to lose sight of the fact that the “gods” are for Heidegger – like for the Greeks – a matter of brilliance.
Now, whoever says “gods” in this context says not only the gleaming – almost imperceptible for us today, inasmuch as most of what surrounds us is produced by ourselves – that makes this orchid appear in the realm of the visible as an orchid, thus coming to the presence at the same time as it comes to be.
Whoever says “gods” also says such and such ways of caring for what shines forth.
Therefore, the “gods” are not beings, much less people, but the shining forth of the living; or, better still, the many ways that we have of protecting its brilliance – we, who know ourselves, or should know ourselves, sustained by the brief flash that we are.(Δ)
And yet if we are unable to perceive the “last flash” of the old gods that – as Schiller and Hölderlin perfectly understood – withdrew from the earth when a more remote god projected its own shadow upon it – a shadow that still covers the earth even now that such god is gone – how, then, will we be able to care again for the gleaming in which being consists?
Maybe this can help to understand a little better what Heidegger wanted to say in his famous Der Spiegel interview when, somewhat enigmatically, he affirmed that “only a god can save us.”
***
Severino – another of the major philosophers of the 20th century of whom, so far, only The Essence of Nihilism has been translated into English(⊗) – also speaks of a “last god.” But it is a radically different god.
Severino evokes Hesiod’s depiction of the union of Gaia (the earth) and Uranus (the sky). So close and tight was their union, that they allowed no space between them. As a result, human life was not yet possible; for, however we may like to represent it, human will consists in making room for itself against necessity – that is to say, human life occurs through, and displays in various forms, a dialectic combination: of the giving vs the given.
Once the barrier formed by Gaia and Uranus dissolved, human life managed to appear. But fragments of that barrier remained in place, namely, all those things we interpret to be necessary and vis-à-vis which – sometimes peacefully, violently other times – we build our lives: a river whose seasonal growth men would learn to predict, a volcano whose proximity they would avoid, a thick forest in which they would choose to open a clearing so as to settle while feeling sheltered by the surrounding vegetation, preys they would seek for to eat and dangerous predators from which, in turn, they would learn to defend themselves, etc.
Initially, men viewed necessity, i.e. they viewed that which stood beyond their reach, as sacred. Just like sacred were for them life’s forces (fertility, growth, victory, etc.), which stood, too, beyond their reach. Yet a profound shift in the meaning of the sacred has taken place over the past centuries, first in the West and perforce everywhere else as a consequence of the West’s expansion: we have come to view our own making room for ourselves against necessity not only as sacred, but as the sacred par excellence. As a result, technology has become a new and all-powerful god in detriment of all others: it has become the “last god,” the modern god.
Severino talks on this in a two-minute video-recording in Italian titled “Dio e tecnica.” It is worth watching, as it is also one of his latest video-recordings, from 2019 (he was 90 then!).
Needless to say, the danger implied by this semantic shift is superb. It may well be the biggest danger we have ever faced – for we, ourselves, are now the danger, to ourselves and to everything else.
***
These “last gods” oppose one another. Overtly. Yet pretending we must choose among them would be naive. For which of the two will end up colouring the future does not exactly depend on choice. It rather depends of our aptitude to distinguish between what the Greeks called “excess” (ὕβρις, hybris) οver, and “respectful awe” (αἰδώς, aidos) before, “that which is” (τὸ ὄν, to on) – or of our failure to do so.
(⦿) Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 321.
(Δ) On what the Greek gods are, and on what they are not, see our entry “Endemic Pandemic Pandemonium,” where – drawing on the twofold, both phonetic and semantic, correlation that exists between the Greek verbs to “appear” (φαίνω, phaino) and to “say” or “speak” (φάναι, phanai) – we define them as the names given by the ancient Greeks to the “appearing” (φαίνεσθαι, phainesthai) of world’s ever-living forces; forces which, of course, are not only physical, but include too, for example, the “clear vision” necessary to act wisely (like in the case of Achilles’s renouncement to kill Agamemnon), to achieve with success the purpose of an action (like in the case of Achilles’s defeat of Hector), or to bring things back to order after the confusion caused by a plague (like in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex): “Athena,” then, is the name given by the ancient Greeks to that variously thematisable “clear vision.” On what drove them to “personalise” such forces, as it is commonly assumed – actually they did not, since the gods were for them anything but persons: their depicting them as persons was merely a literary recourse to embellish and enrich, imaginatively speaking, the possibilities of the discourses that tell about them – see our entry “Is the Earth Round?” We have additionally written on the Greek gods in other entries like “Of Poetry, Gods, Heroes, and Mortal Things,” “Chaosmosis and the Feminine Cosmos,” and “Dionysos and Apollo.”
(⦼) That is to say, when the earth, after being transformed into the lower creation of an extra-terrestrial god and put by him at our disposal, was – once that god was removed from the picture – turned into a standing reserve of resources from which to take advantage and profit.
(⊕) Namely, the shining forth of all things into unconcealment.
(⊗) Emanuele Severino, The Essence of Nihilism (London and New York: Verso, 2016).
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