Heidegger

allen scult wrote:

>> In a message dated 1/18/2008 6:18:47 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>> artefact at t-online.de writes:
>>
>> “Der Bezug der Griechen zu den Göttern ist überdies ein _Wissen_
>> und nicht ein ‘Glauben’ im Sinne eines willentlichen
>> Fürwährhaltens aufgrund autoritativer Verkündigung. Wir ermessen
>> es noch nicht, in welch anfänglicher Weise die Griechen die
>> Wissenden gewesen. Weil sie es gewesen, deshalb fanden sie den
>> Anfang des eigentlichen Denkens. Nicht etwa waren sie Wissende, weil
>> sie eine Philosophie besaßen.” (Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 55
>> S.15 “Heraklit”)
>>
>> “The relationship of the Greeks to the gods is moreover a
>> _knowledge_ and not a ‘faith’ in the sense of a deliberate
>> holding-to-be-true on the basis of an authoritative annunciation.
>> We do not yet fathom in which incipient way the Greeks were the
>> knowing ones. Because they were, they found the beginning of
>> authentic thinking. They were not knowing just because they had a
>> philosophy.”
>>
>
> Doesn’t it make a difference that it is the RELATIONSHIP to the gods
> that Heidegger calls a knowledge? That is, open to philosophical
> questioning[knowing] as a dimension of Dasein’s existence? Heidegger’s
> point, it seems to me , has to do with with that most significant
> founding distinction between philosophy and religion first made by
> Heraclitus. As a relationship in which dasein participates, religion is
> a phenomenon ( “as real as the train station in Freiburg”)which
> philosophy must take seriously in its investigation of dasein as “das
> Lichtung des Seins,” that is the relationships that dasein en-lights as
> being-in-the-world.

I agree that that is Heidegger’s “point.” But doesn’t that point presume
precisely the initial philosophical subordination of religion to
ontology (by framing religion from the start in terms of en-lightening
AS precisely being-in-the-world)? And as such, wouldn’t it then be
vulnerable to a critique which parallels Husserl’s subordination of
ontology to scientific thinking? Just as Heidegger reverses that
priority with his initial subordination of scientific objectivity to
concernful dealing, why couldn’t Heidegger’s subordination of the
religious to ontology (from the very start!) be subjected to a similar
reversal?

> Heraclitus opens up this primary relationship of religion to
> philosophy’s way of knowing, when he focuses on ambiguities like, “The
> lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives
> signs(which then must be interpreted). (93) Heidegger expresses a
> similar idea in his discussion of “the call.’ (Pardon my approximations
> here, my copies of Sein und Zeit are in another place, so to speak). He
> distinguishes between the experience of “the call”as coming from a
> foreign power invading dasein, and the truth of the phenomenon–dasein
> as both the caller and the called. The recognition and understanding of
> this distinction enables something like “The Phenomenology of Religious
> Life,” the early twenties course also absent from my present place.of
> being there.

That work, as usual with certain pages missing, is online at Google books:
 http://books.google.com/books?id=FltO7qh…

Posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
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