Philosophy of Finitude by Winkler Rafael

Author:Winkler, Rafael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Like death, the last god is not present in the mode of the present. It is there as either not yet or no longer there. Or better yet, the last god is nothing save the ecstatic movement of historical time. It is the constant return and projection of that which has been as what is to come at any moment.

Put differently, the phrase passing away thinks the gods as figures of absence. That does not mean that the retreat of the gods is a metaphor that refers to a certain number of historical events in the past, such as the demise of the Greek or Roman age, the death of Christ on the cross or the secularism of the modern age. Instead, the absence of the gods is a possibility that can come to light at any moment. It is an absence that hesitates between arrival and flight (Ankunft und Flucht), approach and withdrawal (Anfall und Ausbleib).

Once the modern age is understood by the poet as the age of the retreat of the gods, and this retreat is understood in its ambiguity as signifying their imminent arrival or irreversible withdrawal, a particular humanity faces a crisis with respect to its way of being. Can it continue to live in forgetfulness of their absence? Or can it start living in remembrance of their departure and await their imminent return?

To experience the retreat of the gods in this way is, I think, one of the historico-ontological conditions of possibility for a particular humanity to enter a time of decision. It makes possible a transition to another beginning of history.

* * *

I started this discussion on the gods after citing a passage from Heidegger’s Germania lecture in the last section. The passage says that the native earth is nurtured for the gods. Given what I have shown in this section, I think that we can safely assume what that passage means. Exposing himself to and poetizing the retreat of the gods – that is, their imminent arrival or irreversible flight – the poet articulates the undecidability that constitutes the historical future.

At bottom, I think, the earth is this abyssal future from which there originates a destiny or history for a people or, more precisely, in the horizon of which a people can draw a homeland for the first time.

The great, pivotal times of the peoples (Wendezeiten der Völker) always emerge from the abyss, and, in each case, in accordance with the extent to which a people reaches into it – which is to say, into its earth – and possess homeland (Heimat besitzt).3

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