too much of a good thing
April 30th, 2007, search relatedRelated posts :: just a silent test…3 :: what is it good for? :: too much of a good thing :: Is it merely Trivially True?
In a message dated 4/28/2007 3:48:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
allen.scult at DRAKE.EDU writes:
As I reflected on the familiarity, a similarity of structure between his
reading relationship to the words of ancient Greek philosophy, and mine to the
words of the Torah began to appear. In this similarity, I sensed a
hermeneutical affinity-perhaps even an intimacy-between Judaism as a way of life,
grounded in an intense interpretive relationship to a sacred text, namely the Torah;
and Heidegger’s view of philosophical practice, as a similarly intense
interpretive relationship to what he considers to be the founding texts of Western
philosophy, especially Aristotle and the Presocratics. Could my experience and
his be examined “inter-textually”- that is as mutually shedding light each
upon the other? And, if so, what would that light reveal? Could the similarity of
structure have philosophical, even ontological significance? And finally,
could these connections be meaningful despite the fact that the content in each
case was so different?
I found a strong suggestion of this possibility in a central concept in
Heidegger’s phenomenology, namely the formale Anzeige. The formal indication. One
of Heidegger’s clearest and most useful explications of this elusive concept is
in the introductory section of the Phenomenology of Religion:
Dear Allen:
Hermaneutics as a part of religious revelation or philosophical discursion
have much in common. But the various organons of Hermaneutics vary with regard
to intention. Thus I stand in amazement for your correlation of the Torah with
Heidegger’s qua saeculum explications. My old Professor, Hans Jonas, who
educated me in the matter of the pre-Socratics, was a colleague, if not close
friend of Heidegger, when they studied under Rudolph Bultmann, Both were
phenomenologicaly and existentially concerned in their hermaneutic approach but parted
when Jonas had to leave Germany because he was a Jew. But it is his Jewishness
that accounts for his difference of intention with regard to his former
friend and colleague. In a 1964 address to an assembly of Christian theologians at
Drew University, and publised in his *Phenomenon of Life,* Tenth Essay:
*Heidegger and theology,* Prof. Jonas notes his difference in approach to the
question of Being:
“…But as to hedieggre’s being, it is an occurrence of unveiling,. a
fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Fuhrer and the call of German
destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right,
fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heifdegger’s thought provide
a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls– linguistically or
otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution and sheer force of being that issues the
call. but to the believer, ever supicious of this world, depth may mean the
abyss, and force, the prince of this world. As if the devil were not part of
the voice of being! Heidegger’s own answer is, to the shame of philosophy, on
record and, I hope, not forgotten (ftnote: University of Freiburg, address to
student body, Nov. 1933: ‘Not doctrines and “ideas” be the rules of your being.
The Fuhrer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its
law. Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and every thing demands
decision, and every action rsponsibility. Heil Hitler.’ (p.247).
“….It must be clearly an unambiguously understood that the ‘being’ of
Heidegger is, *with* the ‘ontological’ difference,’ inside the bracket with which
theology must bracket in the totality of the created world. The being whose
fate Heidegger ponders is the quitessence of the world, it is *saeculum.* Against
this, theology should guard the radical transcendence of its God, whose voice
comres not out of being but breaks into the kingdom of being from
without…My theological friends, my Christian friends– don’t you see what you are
dealing with? don’t you sense, if not see, the profoundly pagan character of
Heidegger’s thought? rightly pagan, insofar as it is philosophy, though not every
philosophy must be so devoid of objective norms; but more pagan than others from
your point of view, not in spite but because of its, also speaking of call
and self-revealing and even of the shepard. Consider these two statementsd where
objectification helps to show up what is irreconciliable: ‘The world is God’a
handiwork’; ‘being reveals itself.’ However objectifying, and therefore not
to be taken literally, the first statement may be–
in even in its most demythologized sense it most certainly excludes the
(equally objectifying) statement that being–i.e.., the Being of the beings–
*reveals itself,* by its *initiative,* in experience, in the encounter of beings
(human) with beings (things); i.e., that the world is divine. Quite consistently
do the gods appear again in Heidegger’s philosophy. But where the gods are,
God cannot be…” (ibid., p. 248). Hence, Allen, I find little to correlate the
Torah and Revelation with Heidegger’s unveiling qua saeculum.
sincerely;
Bernard
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