Blaise Pascal famously distinguished between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (and of Christians) and the God of the philosophers. The first is the God of the religious beUever, the "personal," loving God (of whatever reUgious tradition) that offers hope of salvation to the beUever and fear of punishment and damnation to the nonbeliever. The second refers to all those abstract "ultimate realities" that have accumulated throughout the history of Western philosophy that complete some comprehensive, inteUectual view of all that is (and has been or will be). To this distinction we also might add another sort of God, what Richard Rorty caUed the God of the theologians, the sort of God that results from "running together the needs of religious beüevers with the needs of the philosophers" by changing the label of the latest philosophical costume.1 Rorty specifically had in mind Paul TilUch's theological "knockoff" of Heidegger's Sein and Mark Taylor's appropriation of Derrida's différance, but his label would include everything from Philo's use of Plotinus and Aquinas's use of Aristotle to process theology's reinterpretation of Whitehead, to recent efforts by philosophers working in the Continental tradition to reconcile postmodernism with Biblical themes.2
These distinctions, however, overlook a more original, more primordial sense of what is divine: the god of the thinker. The early Greeks named this understanding of divinity daimon (...), a naming which is heard at the crossroads between philosophy and religion, between eariier and later Greek thinking, in Socrates' talk of what inspires and drives him. Interestingly, the twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger wrestles with the meaning of daimon in his interpretations of Plato, Aristotle, and early Greek thinkers, hinting at his own understanding of what is divine named in "the last god" (der letzte Gott). This is the field I want to survey in this paper: what are the meanings of daimön and the "last" god, and how do they name the god of the thinker.
We begin with Socrates, the paradigmatic thinker of Western philosophy. In the course of his trial, Socrates notes that:
I am subject to something divine (daimonion; ...), which Meletus saw fit to travesty in his indictment. It began in my early childhood - a sort of voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on. (Plato, Apology, 31c-d)3
Socrates' daimonion apparently was well known; both Plato and Xenophon note or have Socrates refer to his daimonion a number of times. In addition, as Socrates observes here, his daimonion is part of what is at issue in his indictment; aU the sources note that Socrates was charged with introducing or bringing in "strange daimonia" (...).4 Socrates' daimonion was clearly important to who he was and to what he was charged with being.
As a first reading, the noncommital translation of daimonion as "something divine" seems most appropriate. On the one hand, many of the earliest Greek writers (e.g., Homer, Pindar, the Greek tragedians) use the term daimon in conjunction with theos (...), such as in the stock ending for Euripides' plays:
Many forms are there of the divine (daimonion; ...). Many things the gods (theoi; ...) accomplish unexpectedly. What we waited for does not come to pass, while for what remained undreamed the god (theos; ...) finds ways. Just such doing was this doing.5
The two terms - daimoni and theos - are and are not exactly interchangeable. Lacking an image or a cult, ... often indicates a strange sort of activity or power rather than a class of beings. In that sense, daimön is similar to o theos (...), which means "god" or "the god" in a generic sense, not the particular and individual gods of the Greek pantheon. Naming "a force that drives man forward where no agent can be named," one way to understand daimon then is as "the veiled countenance of divine activity" that is invoked when the event or action eludes characterization and naming.6 This seems to be exactly the way to describe what is going on with Socrates. As James Beckman has put it, "Socrates' description of the ... reveals nothing about any god or ... precisely because no such thing is revealed to him.... The ambiguity of the reference to the ... is the measure of its preciseness as a description" (Beckman 77). By citing the daimonion, Socrates acknowledges mat some force or power is at work in and through him but about which he can say little more.
This initial reading of daimôn is deepened and complicated when we recall the famous fragment from Heraclitus (DK 119): hthos anthropoi daimon (...)-"One's character is one's daimon" or "one's daimon is one's character." Here daimon" is sometimes translated as "fate" or "destiny" in keeping with the apparent root meaning and the way the ancient Greeks spoke of a Ufe of good or bad fortune.7 Though Charles Kahn says in his commentary on this fragment that "it is a man's own character, not some external power, that assigns to him the quality of his life" (261), it is not that simple. It is important that we hear the double sense of the Heraclitus fragment: one's character is one's daimon/ one's daimon is one's character. For the ancient Greeks your character is "given" to you in some sense; who you are is not completely within your control. "Your" actions reveal "your" character but are also something given to you, something sent by "something divine." Prime examples of this can be found in Greek tragedy, in which key characters continually are "identified" wim a god or divine force. A character's emotions are attributed to something divine, some god, some daimon, especially in cases where the character suffers some dislocation, some "blindness" (ate; ...) or "raving (madness)" (lussa; ...).8 Perhaps the best example of this human/inhuman coupling is Oedipus in Oedipus Tyrranos. There, in the final choral ode, noting and lamenting the paradigmatic character of Oedipus, the chorus points out how his life is fused with the daimona (11 94).9 Later, after he has gouged out his eyes, the chorus asks him what daimonon (...) urged him, to which he gives the equivocal reply: "It was Apollo, friends, Apollo,/ that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion./But the hand mat struck me/was none but my own" (1 327-33). 10 Oedipus doubles for the god, as do so many of the tragic heroes, in the ambiguous way indicated by Heraclitus' fragment. This likewise seems to be the point of Socrates' acknowledgment of his daimonion. "It" marks a puzzling site in his experience that is both "inside" and "outside" of who he is and what he does. What we today would reduce to some sort of natural psychological process (a "hunch" or "intuition," i.e., "something" tells me such and such), "it" is nonetheless something more to Socrates; he treats "it" in a downto-earth, matter-of-fact manner but at the same time acknowledges "it" to be something beyond himself and his ordinary consciousness of and thought about the world.
The characterization of the divine as daimon is given further depth through Martin Heidegger's treatment of the saying from Heraclitus. Finding the usual translation more modern than Greek, he offers an alternative translation in his "Letteron Humanism": "man dwells, insofar as he is man, in the nearness of the god."11 He finds this translation confirmed in a story about Heraclitus told by Aristotle in which Heraclitus assures some visitors that the gods show themselves in his kitchen.12 Heidegger's point is that, according to Heraclitus, what is divine shows itself even in an ordinary, familiar [geheuer] place such as that kitchen. Thus he follows with a second translation: "The (familiar [geheure]) abode is for human beings the open region for the presencing of the god (the un-familiar one [des Ungeheuren])" (GA 9, 187; Path, 270). Now Heidegger translates daimon as "the un-familiar one" or "the uncanny," recalling a discussion Heidegger had of daimon in his Parmenides course a few years earlier. There Heidegger's clarification of daimon starts by way Aristotle's use of daimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics as an all-encompassing word for what is excessive, astounding, and difficult.13 Thus, Heidegger chooses to translate to daimonion as das Un-geheur. It is a somewhat old-fashioned term he borrows from Hölderlin's translation of a choral ode in Antigone (332-75) that calls human beings to deinon (...), "the strangest."14 Suggesting "monster" or "the monstrous" (das Ungeheuere), Heidegger makes it clear in those lectures that Un-geheur means "the uncanny," "the unfamiliar," or "the extraordinary." Daimon is the uncanny because it presents itself in everything ordinary - and is hence the most natural - without being the ordinary. With the ancient Greeks, the daemonic appears not only through elements "inside" the self (the passions, the blood) as noted above, but also "outside" the self - through wind, rain, fire, animals. Socrates himself makes a point of this in Xenophon's Apology (12-13), noting that people take the sounds of birds to be omens from the gods. Continuing to elaborate on daimon, Heidegger notes its relation to daio (...), which Heidegger translates as "to present oneself in the sense of pointing and showing" (GA 54, 151; P, 102). This sense of pointing or showing relates to a significant characteristic of the Greek gods: they give signs and point (GA 54, 59; P, 40). HeracUtus noted this as weU (DK 93): "The Lord whose oracle is in Delphi [the god Apollo] neither speaks nor conceals but hints [winkt]" (...).15 Socrates knew this, which is why he was wise to question the oracle at Delphi (Apology 21b) rather than simply accept the answer of the oracle. In this way, recognizing and acknowledging what is divine, Ustening to "something divine," he acknowledged something strange and uncanny, what is questionable and question worthy - what caUs for thinking. The astonishing being of the ordinary - what is strange and uncanny - takes name and figure and place in the work, as the god. The god is an indication, a sign, a hint, of how things are and who we are. As a result, daimonion points to being; daimon (and its cognates that acknowledge "the gods" or "divinity") indicates invisible and ungraspable being itself, whereby what is divine is manifest in the abyssal space of being itself. Such, according to Heidegger, is the fundamental Greek experience of what is divine.16
What Heidegger's interpretations of daimon show is that the word is a recognition of something divine, overwhelming, unsurpassable, which emerges in, through, and from our actions and refuses our control. In that way the ancient Greeks came to know and find themselves dwelling in the neighborhood of the uncanny and strange. What was meaningful and significant was not seen beyond this world, beyond the things in the world and the things that take place in the world, but in themselves and things themselves. The gods then are not objects of speculation or a theology but indications of the awesome forces and powers active in the world in and around us that reveal the significance of things. What is divine is incomprehensible not because it so utterly transcends us or is so esoteric by nature that we cannot understand it, but because it is so close, so near, so simple, so "ordinary," and so specific to particular events and activities.
These senses of daimön that we have been discussing - as something that is given, a destiny that is bound up with who one is and how one acts, as the uncanny that caUs into question, showing us as we are and what is significant - are connected to Socrates' other significant mention of divinity in the Apology, namely, his explanation of his "mission" to philosophize (Apology 20e ff.). The story is weU known: Socrates reports that his friend Chaerephon went to Delphi and asked "the god" (o theos) whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, to which the priestess simply answered "no."17 Note here that Socrates (and throughout much of the Apology) uses the generic "the god" and never refers to any particular god in which the city beUeves (though he slyly leaves the jury to assume that he is talking about Apollo by talking about "the god at Delphi" Apology 2Oe]). "The god" did not give him any directions, just as Socrates' daimonion never urges him on. Instead, the oracle's answer strikes Socrates as strange, uncanny, extraordinary, since he claims no special knowledge for himself. Thus he questions the meaning of the answer given Chaerephon. What results is his interpretation of the ocular saying: that his questioning of others is done at "the god's command" and that he acts in service to "the god" such that "the god" has appointed him or given him a mission to act as he does-to question. "The god" leads him to questioning, even to questioning "the god" (Apology 21c). Thus he refuses to give up his destiny, saying that "this duty I have accepted, as I said, in obethence to the god's commands given in oracles and dreams and in every other way mat any divine dispensation has ever impressed a duty upon man."18 Socrates is not willing to stop his questioning, his inquiries, because that would be impious; it would go against who he has been given to be - by "the god," by his daimonion. His daimonion defines who he is by pointing to what is strange, what is uncanny, what is worthy of thought.
To the philosopher and the religious believer, Socrates'justification of himself and his daimonion make little sense. As James S. Hans puts it, not only does it seem implausible, "his justification contradicts itself: he is paying great fealty to the gods throughout his life by trying to cast doubt on their oracles."19 By the standards of philosophical and religious thought - which seek justified beliefs - Socrates is impious because he asks questions. Yet mis is only impious and contradictory if we take Socrates to be expressing beliefs that do or do not conform to some sort of philosophical or theological orthodoxy. But Socrates does not express belief in me gods (of the city) anywhere in the Apology. He does proclaim his piety, though, because piety for him comes from acknowledging that "the god" "wants everybody every day to be questioning: examining and re-examining the values by which their life is led."20
While daimon and the Greek gods are no more, it is within the context of such an understanding of divinity that we should hear Heidegger's own talk of what is divine - talk that shifts in ways that seem, like the term daimon, designed to avoid assertions about what is divine while at the same time acknowledging "something divine." On the one hand, he notes the daemonic references to divinity in predecessors such as Hölderlin and Nietzsche, then appropriates them in his own thinking. For instance, Hölderlin's remembrance of the ancient Greeks and their gods inspires Heidegger's talk of "gods" or "divinities" (in keeping with there being many forms of daimonion, as Euripides said), the "beckoning (winkenden) messengers" of what is divine that are revealed (though in some sense "hidden") in and through things. Likewise, in the essay ". . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ," Heidegger elaborates on Hölderlin's "unknown god," which is revealed by the sky and pervades what is intimate to human beings. It thereby serves as a measure by which human beings dwell on the earth, though it remains a stranger (Fremde) even as it emerges in and mrough things and events.21 Such references have and continue to provoke thought, puzzling philosophers and theologians alike who are accustomed to the Western tradition and its (philosophical or religious) monotheism.
Nietzsche too echoes the daemonic with his word "God is dead." When me madman - one without the sense of others - proclaims this in The Gay Science (section 125), it elicits questioning - first, the sarcastic questioning of atheists but then the more original questioning of the madman himself:
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murders. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? . . . How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"22
There are no answers from the listeners, who stare at the madman in astonishment. We are left with the questions. Later, echoing the mourning that Heidegger has noted in Hölderlin, the madman strikes up his requiem aeternam deo in several churches, acknowledging them as the tombs and sepulchers of God. God has passed away, leaving us - if we think - with questions about ourselves and seeking what is divine.23
This especially is the case where Heidegger speaks elusively of the "last" god (der letzte Gott) - more specifically, the passing by (Vorbeigang) of the "last" god.24 This perhaps is Heidegger's most riddUng naming of what is divine. On the one hand, it means "the ultimate God" and thereby echoes Hölderlin and Nietzsche: the passing by of the ultimate God marks the transition in which we find ourselves, in which all the philosophical and reUgious ultimates (including the Christian God), all the gods that have been, have passed by, with no new god or gods yet reveaUng themselves. On the other hand, echoing both Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols and Hegel's observation that "the owl of Minerva flies at dusk," Heidegger's reference to the passing by of the "last" god seems to indicate that only in the transition from the last god - whichever god has been-to an unknown future god, gods or lack of gods do we catch a gUmpse of the essence of divinity (Gottwesen). Only now do we have a sense of "something divine." Thus Heidegger says in the Der Spiegel interview that:
Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and composing (dichten) we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in our going-down, for in the face of the god who is absent, we go-down.25
The "going-down" here is a coming back down to earth from the speculative heights of traditional philosophy to abide in who we are. The "salvation" of which Heidegger speaks, then, is a matter of becoming who we are.26 To become who we are we need a measure, a god, something divine - which can even be an absence of god. This then is another meaning of the "last" god: "last" as end, as goal, as an essential indicator (a hint or sign) of human being. That is Da-sein, "being t/here," the being for whom its being is an issue, the being that asL· the meaning of being (GA 65, 407-08, 409, 413; CP 286-87, 288, 291).
Here, now, is the heart of the matter. Poetically naming daimön in conjunction with its heroes, Greek tragedy showed human beings and their actions "not as things that can be defined or described, but as problems," resulting in "a questioning to which there can be no [final] answers."27 Socrates thoughtfully echoed and acknowledged the question and questioning that we are by acknowledging his daimonion and the mission he had been given by the god. Heidegger, thoughtfully responding to the Greeks, to HölderUn, to Nietzsche's madman, speaks of the gods and the "last" god. AU agree: the measure given by daimön, by the uncanny, by the "last" god, is questioning. Questioning, because it violates the familiar understanding of things and ourselves, "makes" things strange, "makes" us strange (who was and remains stranger than Socrates?). As Sophocles says, echoing HeracUtus: "There is much that is strange, but nothing/ that surpasses man in strangeness" (Antigone 332-33). Human beings are the strangest among many strange things because in their (ordinary) deeds and activities they are cast out of the familiar. However, by violating those famiUar Umits, human beings show what is essential to who they are (see GA 40, 158ff.; IM 148ff.; GA 53, 63ff.; HHI 51ff.). In questioning we become who we are, open to possibilities, open to the mysteries of the world and ourselves. To stop questioning, to lead an unexamined Ufe, is to lead a Ufe not worth living - because it is no longer a meaningful life, the Ufe of a human being. Questioning is the piety of thinking (GA 7, 36; QCT 35) because it is a submission and response to "the god"-"the god" as daimön, what is uncanny, the "last" god - and the strangeness indicated by "the god."
The god of the thinker then is not the God of the philosophers. Philosophy speaks of god onto-theo-logicaUy - as the most universal or the highest being/the first cause - and that reduces what is divine (and ourselves) to an answer, to some thing that can be calculated. Likewise the daimon/the last god then is not "a sense of God which is distinctly powerful, monotheistic, and devoted," as one commentator recently has put it.28 This too is a calculating determination of what is divine, a calculation which Heidegger repeatedly undermines in his frequent reference to "the gods." All theisms collapse before the hinting of the gods and the last god; "the multitude of gods cannot be quantified."29
However, even though the originary, essential thinking initiated here by the daimon/the last god seems like a "faith" compared to the "knowing" of philosophy (GA 65, 369; CP 258), the god of the thinker also is not the God of the faithful. This can be seen in Socrates' indictment; his daimonion is "strange" and dangerous to reUgious orthodoxy. That danger is apparent in Plato's Euthyphro, in which Socrates raises questions that undermine (or should undermine) the confidence and faith Euthyphro has that he is doing what the gods want. With his famous question - "Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?" (Euthyphro 10) - Socrates shows us that a more fundamental thinking is caUed for than any attitude of faith. Thus, as Heidegger notes, the original experience of what is divine does not come from within "reUgion"; the daimon, the last god, do not appear through "faith" or personal, Uved "experiences," churches or cults.30
Nor is the god of the thinker the God of the theologians, or the philosopher-theologians, in our midst today who latch onto Heidegger's critique of the god of philosophy as preparation for some other kind of theology or authentic reUgion. Richard Kearney speaks of The God Who May Be, a God of possibiUties, but his God is a God of Umited possibiUties because it is a God of hope. As Heidegger notes, "all eschatology Uves out of a faith in the certainty of a new state of affairs" (GA 66, 245 ; M 216). That is not the daimon or the last god, which also acknowledge divine possibiUty, but a divine possibiUty that is not some expethent of human beings; the daimon/the last god confounds our expectations, does not fulfill our hopes, and grants us what remained undreamed (as Euripides told us). Again, what is divine cannot be calculated.
Despised by philosophers and the faithful (such that it eventually becomes an "evil spirif'or "demon" as early as Plato's later writing), the god of the thinker is the daimon, the uncanny, the last god, that caUs for questioning, whereby we are true to ourselves as thinkers - and as human beings. It is despised because it yields what is a "god-less thinking" (GA 1 1 , 77; ID 72) to both philosophy and religion yet is closer to what is divine than either reason or faith. This essential thinking is a "faith in doubt," where the "faith" of philosophy, religion, and theologians is in doubt, in question, even as it shows faith in questioning, in inquiry, in asking the meaning of being. "Faith in doubt" reveals, and is revealed by, the daimon, the last god.
West Liberty State College, West Liberty, WV 26074