Philosophy of Event of “The Last God” by M. Heidegger in the Context of “Post-Auschwitz” Theology
Authors:   Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk, Malakhov Danila 
Published: October 2023

Theological components of the historical memory of the Holocaust are the most important constitutive elements of the socio-political and value-ideological forms of understanding the causes and nature of the unprecedented evil committed by Nazism and ways of further development of the human community. Frankly false concepts and analogies that directly affect the memory of generations about the Second World War and are authorized to exist in Western society require raising questions about the specifics of the connection between the existing forms of theological intentions of understanding the Holocaust and the philosophical discourse associated with them with the features of social-political construction narrative of historical memory of this event. The attempted interpretation of the texts by M. Heidegger, which contain intuitions about the ontological-theological essence of the coming historical catastrophe, aims to identify the specific features of the existing ‘Post-Auschwitz’ theology, which legitimize the value-worldview negative transformations in the self-consciousness of Western society. The main method of research is the hermeneutic-phenomenological method, according to which the meaning, directly assimilated from the actual side of the event, cannot be identical to the constitutive meaning, which appeals to the essence of the event that is not revealed through facticity. The constitutive meaning of the event in this study is based on a comparison of the Thinker’s onto-theological intuitions about the essence of an event that has not yet occurred with the circumstances of its actual implementation. The specificity of hermeneutic work in relation to the correlation of the onto-theological contours of the tragic unity of human’s and God’s being revealed in the philosophy of the event ‘The Last God’ by M. Heidegger is determined by the correlation of these contours as constitutive elements of meaning with the event of the Holocaust, linking the fate of the Jewish people with the fate of God. In contrast to similar hermeneutic intentions present in the theology of the ‘Death of God’, M. Heidegger’s philosophy emphasizes the effective nature of human existence, which performs an act of gifting its own essence, leading it to death. The result of this gift is an act of ontological transcendence of human nature and the assimilation of divine nature, carried out by ‘The Last God’. As a development of this concept, an assumption is made about the act of ontological restoration by a person of the existence of God before the event. The interpretation of the difference of divine essences is carried out in a Trinitarian context. The interpretation and development of the philosophy of the event of ‘The Last God’ by M. Heidegger, proposed in this article, are a priority form of development of theology, which aims at the categorical hermeneutic construction of the theodicy of the Holocaust event, determining the essence of the object of faith, as well as preventing value-worldview and socio-political insinuations associated with the transformation of the discourse of ‘guilt and forgiveness’ in Western society.