Is being a candidate for the role of God in Heideggers philosophy? That would mean he had a doctrine of God very similar to the one taught by Tillich, who probably derived his concept of being from Heidegger in the first place. It is in his Brief über den Humanismus that Heidegger uses the most exalted language about being in its relation to human beings, though we have already noted that as early as the lecture Was Ist Metaphysik? being (which is also nothing) has a numinous, awe-inspiring character. Now, in the Brief über den Humanismus, we are told that before he speaks, man must let himself be addressed by being. He is the recipient of beings self-communication, the being among all the beings that can respond to the wonder and mystery of being. It is true that Heidegger explicitly says that being is not God, but in the very next sentence, he makes it clear that by God he understands a supreme being in the onto-theological or metaphysical sense. On the other hand, he explicitly dissociates himself from atheism, and especially from the atheism of Sartre. The latter had quoted a sentence from Sein und Zeit which says that only as long as a human understanding of being is possible, is there being, and Sartre had taken this to mean that man himself is the ultimate and that being is an idea produced by human subjectivity. Heidegger claims that this is a misinterpretation of his thought. In German, the phrase there is Being is written es gibt Sein, and although the words es gibt are used in everyday German in the weak sense of there isSartre, in fact, had translated them into French as il y athey mean literally it gives. Heidegger insists that he meant these words to be taken in their literal sense as denoting an act of giving, and in the original text they do indeed appear in inverted commas to show that they have a special sense. We may ask then: Who or what gives? Heideggers answer is that being gives itself and communicates itself to human beings. Thus, in contrast to Sartres existentialism, which is also an atheistic humanism with man as his own ultimate, Heidegger is able to declare: Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of being. At this point we seem to have come very close to the identification of being with God or God with being. But for Heidegger the word God is so closely tied to the onto-theological idea of the supreme being that he explicitly denies, as we have seen, that being is God. Again, although he dissociates himself from atheism, he leaves the question of God open. Nothing, he tells us, is decided about God. One would have to move beyond the traditional metaphysical question about Gods existence or nonexistence. Now Heidegger tells us in cryptic terms: Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word God is to signify.
