Ontotheology, Beyond Being, and Being Itself

The philosopher Martin Heidegger employed the term "ontotheology" to denote the view that the understanding of Being-our grasp of what it is for something to be-is to be explicated by reference to a pre-eminent being ,or entity. Traditionally this entity was termed, and was regarded as, God, though Heidegger claimed that certain other entities-such as consciousness-have more recently been attributed essentially the same role. There are, according to Heidegger, two problems with ontotheology. The first is that by focusing on a particular entity, philosophers have missed their goal of elucidating Being as such, or our understanding of what it is to be as such. The second is that when the pre-eminent being in question is indeed viewed as God, the genuinely divine, transcendent dimension of God is lost, by bringing God down to the level of other beings. Heidegger himself was most concerned with the first of these two problems. A number of post-Heideggerian thinkers, however, most notably, perhaps, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, have focused on the second problem. It is this second problem with which I shall be concerned.
When one looks through the history of religious thought with this second problem in mind, one apparently obvious place where it may seem that the second problematic feature of ontotheology has been avoided is the tradition, developed most fully in Eastern Orthodox theology, that regards God as "beyond being". By contrast, the Western theological (and philosophical) tradition seems to be mired in ontotheology, because of its characteristic claim that God is to be understood as "being itself".
On the basis of a detailed consideration of the philosophical and theological developments from the patristic period to the high Middle Ages of these two traditions-of viewing God as "beyond being" and as "being itself"-I demonstrate that essentially the same understanding of God and God's relation to being is to be found in the two traditions-despite the manifest discrepancies in the use of language. The conclusion of my investigation is that if the predominantly Eastern "beyond being" tradition escapes (the second problematic feature of) ontotheology, then so does the predominantly Western "being itself" tradition.

The primary goal of the Fellowship is to enable e to complete the lengthy paper "Ontotheology, Beyond Being, and Being Itself", and to publish it in the journal Inquiry. After the appearance of the paper, however, I intend to organise a conference on the theme of ontolotheology, so that the issues that separate me from those I criticise in the paper can be fully discussed.