Heidegger's Critique of Metaphysics: Richard Wiltshire
Reposted from Richard Wiltshire's Facebook Page (9/3/2026)
see also New Traditionalists and Progressive Postmodernists by Richard Wiltshire
see also New Traditionalists and Progressive Postmodernists by Richard Wiltshire
Martin Heidegger’s famous statement, “Only a god can save us now,” has always struck me as far more profound than a simple religious claim.
The words come from Heidegger’s 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published after his death in 1976. They are sometimes interpreted as evidence of a return to conventional religious belief. But Heidegger’s meaning is considerably more enigmatic.
He was confronting what he regarded as the deepest crisis of modernity: the technological disclosure of reality in which everything increasingly appears as something to be calculated, ordered, controlled and exploited. Nature becomes a resource. Time becomes productivity. Knowledge becomes information. And even human beings increasingly become what Heidegger called “standing-reserve” - resources to be managed, measured and optimised.
The danger, therefore, is not simply that we possess too much technology. The deeper danger is that technology becomes the way Being itself is disclosed to us. We no longer merely use technology; we begin to inhabit a technological understanding of reality.
And this creates a profound paradox: we cannot simply think our way out of this predicament, because the very mode of thinking that has produced the crisis is itself implicated in it.
So what could Heidegger possibly mean by saying that “only a god can save us”?
He does not offer us a programme for salvation, nor does he simply return to the God of traditional metaphysics. Indeed, Heidegger deliberately leaves the identity of this “god” unresolved. The phrase points instead toward the possibility of a radically different way of revealing - a transformation in our relation to Being itself.
Perhaps salvation, in this sense, is not escape from the world but liberation from our compulsion to reduce the world to what can be grasped, explained and controlled.
It would mean learning again how to let beings be - to encounter reality not merely as an object standing before a knowing subject, but as something that can disclose itself beyond our conceptual mastery.
This is why Heidegger’s thinking ultimately moves beyond the project of traditional metaphysics. The answer cannot simply be another theory, another system, or another concept of God. What is required is something more fundamental: a transformation in how we inhabit the world.
And perhaps this is where Heidegger’s enigmatic “god” becomes most interesting.
A god that we could completely conceptualise, define and possess would already have been reduced to an object within our metaphysical framework. The possibility Heidegger gestures toward is something quite different: that which interrupts our mastery and opens us to what exceeds it.
Perhaps, then, salvation begins not when we finally possess the answer, but when we become capable of receiving what we cannot manufacture.
Not conception, but perception.
Not mastery, but releasement.
Not another explanation of Being, but a transformed way of dwelling within it.
And perhaps this is what Heidegger leaves us with in the twilight of the metaphysical age: we cannot save ourselves by becoming better masters of reality. We may need, instead, to become capable of letting reality disclose itself to us.
Only then might we begin to understand what it could mean for a god to save us.
The words come from Heidegger’s 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published after his death in 1976. They are sometimes interpreted as evidence of a return to conventional religious belief. But Heidegger’s meaning is considerably more enigmatic.
He was confronting what he regarded as the deepest crisis of modernity: the technological disclosure of reality in which everything increasingly appears as something to be calculated, ordered, controlled and exploited. Nature becomes a resource. Time becomes productivity. Knowledge becomes information. And even human beings increasingly become what Heidegger called “standing-reserve” - resources to be managed, measured and optimised.
The danger, therefore, is not simply that we possess too much technology. The deeper danger is that technology becomes the way Being itself is disclosed to us. We no longer merely use technology; we begin to inhabit a technological understanding of reality.
And this creates a profound paradox: we cannot simply think our way out of this predicament, because the very mode of thinking that has produced the crisis is itself implicated in it.
So what could Heidegger possibly mean by saying that “only a god can save us”?
He does not offer us a programme for salvation, nor does he simply return to the God of traditional metaphysics. Indeed, Heidegger deliberately leaves the identity of this “god” unresolved. The phrase points instead toward the possibility of a radically different way of revealing - a transformation in our relation to Being itself.
Perhaps salvation, in this sense, is not escape from the world but liberation from our compulsion to reduce the world to what can be grasped, explained and controlled.
It would mean learning again how to let beings be - to encounter reality not merely as an object standing before a knowing subject, but as something that can disclose itself beyond our conceptual mastery.
This is why Heidegger’s thinking ultimately moves beyond the project of traditional metaphysics. The answer cannot simply be another theory, another system, or another concept of God. What is required is something more fundamental: a transformation in how we inhabit the world.
And perhaps this is where Heidegger’s enigmatic “god” becomes most interesting.
A god that we could completely conceptualise, define and possess would already have been reduced to an object within our metaphysical framework. The possibility Heidegger gestures toward is something quite different: that which interrupts our mastery and opens us to what exceeds it.
Perhaps, then, salvation begins not when we finally possess the answer, but when we become capable of receiving what we cannot manufacture.
Not conception, but perception.
Not mastery, but releasement.
Not another explanation of Being, but a transformed way of dwelling within it.
And perhaps this is what Heidegger leaves us with in the twilight of the metaphysical age: we cannot save ourselves by becoming better masters of reality. We may need, instead, to become capable of letting reality disclose itself to us.
Only then might we begin to understand what it could mean for a god to save us.