Heidegger

Cologne 21-Jan-2008

Anthony Crifasi schrieb Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:13:50 -0600:

> Michael Eldred wrote:
>
> > ME: It’s not my distinction between knowing and faith, but one in a quotation
> > from Heidegger GA55.
>
> AC: Sorry - I thought you were using it to represent your own reply?
>
> > ME: You make the usual objection: Most people are not
> > philosophers, which is true enough, but, conversely, what ‘people think’ can
> > hardly be taken as the criterion for how the divine or human being’s
> > relationship to the divine is to be conceived. Heraclitus is certainly not the
> > only Greek thinker to regard philosophical thinking as a seeing of the divine
> > (_to theion_, not _ho theos_) in an entirely non-religious sense; it is to be
> > found throughout Plato and Aristotle as well. And it is questionable whether
> > the Greeks were religious in any sense comprehensible from within
> > Christianity. Their gods were present, not believed in. There is much from the
> > Buddhist tradition (which is not a religion in the Abrahamic sense) that
> > points to the presence of the divine in the mundane and inconspicuous. The
> > Buddha is there — whilist one is peeling potatoes, or cleaning the latrine,
> > and this is an experience which not only a philosopher can go through.
>
> AC: For Aristotle and Plato, though, the gods are in *no* sense there in
> cleaning the latrine or peeling potatoes, or any such productive
> activity. Aristotle quite explicitly states that there is only one human
> activity that has any kinship to the activity of the gods -
> contemplative wisdom:

ME: I said “_to theion_, not _ho theos_”. I am not talking about any “activity of
the gods”, but about the presence of the godly, _to theion_, in the everyday, even
when peeling potatoes. For both Plato and Aristotle, the presence of the _idea_ and
_eidos_ in beings is divine, by virtue of which the philosopher has a divine gaze.

>
> Art: “We assume the gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy; but
> what sort of actions must we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not
> the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so
> on? Acts of a brave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks
> because it is noble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give?
> It will be strange if they are really to have money or anything of the
> kind. And what would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise
> tasteless, since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through
> them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and
> unworthy of gods. Still, every one supposes that they live and therefore
> that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now
> if you take away from a living being action, and still more production,
> what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which
> surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human
> activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of
> the nature of happiness.” (NE X.7)
>
> AC: That’s quite different from Heraclitus. True, it is philosophical
> contemplation he is extolling here (not faith), but then again, a
> message from a Greek oracle would hardly qualify as “knowledge”
> according to any definition laid out in the Posterior Analytics or
> Metaphysics.

ME: What comes from the oracle is not “knowledge”, but “signs” which hint at the
possibility of self-knowledge.

>
> AC: Also, there is a long tradition in medieval Christian philosophy of
> thinking man as being in the “image and likeness” of God due precisely
> to our *reason*, with many of those Christian philosophers citing the
> above passage as well as others in which Aristotle similarly references
> reason as being the part of us that is most divine. So I don’t think
> that this Greek philosophical exposition of the divine is
> incomprehensible from within Christianity. Heraclitus, on the other
> hand, may be a different matter.

ME. There is a long debate within Christianity (and Islam) about whether the use of
reason (in theology) supports faith or ruins it. What interested Christianity about
Aristotle was _ho theos_ as the summum ens and causa sui, not the presence of _to
theion_ in the everyday.

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Posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 5:35 pm
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