Post Religious Theology, Fundamental Ontology and Non Philosophy

Some years ago I heard a minister in the United Church of Canada deliver a sermon discussing the meaning of Christianity in a post Christian era. Heidegger's early description of his enterprise as 'fundamental ontology', while in many ways abandoned as his work progressed, retains some cogency as a descriptive. Laruelle's Non-Philosophy, by its nature a quirky term (certainly Laruelle doesn't intend his work as a hatred of wisdom), while it may distance him from some of Heidegger's early, necessary, but temporary enmeshment with metaphysics, in other ways intends many of the same tendencies of thought as the later Heidegger, a Heidegger of course only possible on the basis of the accomplishments of the earlier. Non-Philosophy's odd relation with thinking as the end of philosophy seems at times merely an unnecessary formalization.

The line between philosophy in its non-metaphysical guise and speculative theology in a situation where god as a being is no longer posited blurs and recoils upon itself in multiple ways. Theology without a substantive being as its posit is in no way the same thing as the 'Death of God" theology, which remains within the posit of a substantive being, simply one that is no longer present but only past. Heidegger's 'thinking as thanking' implies a theological thankfulness that is no longer directed at a substantive being. Thinking is thanking no-thing, then, yet it remains a thanking. Saying is obligated by no-thing, but the obligation remains.

If anything that obligation grows all the stronger.

The revealing that is technology has already revealed a good deal to a nuanced eye. That much of the revelation took place in the most technical of sciences first then is not surprising. While other sciences meander between cartesian and postmodern definitions of their basic posits, or have lost contact with their base posit to the degree that each 'theory' is really another attempt at founding the science itself without understanding the nature of foundation, at least in the quantum and thermodynamic areas of physics the metaphors of metaphysics have had no meaning for a fair time.

Philosophy it seems, by its nature, is agnostic. Is the philosopher, though, also by nature a Gnostic? Is it possible to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, today reincarnated as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's hands, the impotence and uselessness of understanding wonderfully and wittily unable to share any transparency with the irrelevance and thoughtlessness of explanation?

Theism and atheism continue their bickering as two sides of the same coin, still probabilistically coming up heads or tails in their coveted determinism, but it's fiat money that lands on the table with a flat sound like the aluminium coins of the old East Germany, and like those coins, guaranteed by a World that no longer exists.

Behind all of the madness (pairing its nails perhaps?), and biding its time, the post religious collection of stories wrought with a complexity and severity beyond any testaments, Finnegan's Wake, reincarnates the Word itself in its newfound, though ageless, unsubstantial power.