Abstract
Following Heidegger along the way in which the question of the meaning of being is raised anew with the dissolution of any sort of transcendent-transcendental world, thinking is immediately confronted with questions concerning truth and the corollary subjects of world and meaning. Traditionally, the locus of truth has been found in assertions (judgments), and the essence of truth (i.e., how truth manifests itself) in the agreement of the assertion with its “object”, i.e., the “true” world, however construed (ideas, sense-data, the divine plan of God, the plan of reason, etc.). Meaningful and true knowledge was therefore obtained through a correct orientation to that “true” world. Now, however, at the end of philosophy and onto-theo-logy, that “true” world dissolves before the suspicion that assertion is exactly that — assertion, of the will to power and permanence that decides what is really in being and hence what is justified as the correct orientation toward the world. Truth as adequation becomes an exercise in justification of one’s own stance vis á vis the world, a world that has become nothing more than what can be justified for securing the permanence of the will to power.
At the still point of the turning world. T.S. Eliot
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Notes
As J. L. Mehta points out (in Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision, p. 149n.11), “destination” is a much better translation of the word Bewandtnis than “involvement” (as translated by Macquarrie and Robinson), since what Heidegger is talking about is the end, object, point, of the use of the piece of equipment — its raison d’être.
Joseph Rouse, “Kuhn, Heidegger and Scientific Realism,” Man and World 14 (1981), p. 288.
Richardson, Through Phenomenology to Thought, p. 193.
Note the difficulty of this language, in that transcending “to” and “toward” world could suggest a metaphysical scheme in which the world is above and beyond Dasein as the “true” world; Heidegger even says that the world is transcendental. Yet since he does not mean this in a metaphysical sense, he eventually drops the whole vocabulary of transcendence and the transcendental in order to emphasize his distance from the tradition. For an interesting attempt at reinterpreting “transcendence” in Heideggerian terms, see Robert P. Orr, The Meaning of Transcendence: A Heideggeriah Reflection (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1981).
For discussion of this problem, see US 109–10, and the following articles: Otto Pöggeler, “Metaphysics and Topology of Being in Heidegger,” pp. 3–27, and Thomas Sheehan, “Introduction: Heidegger, the Project and the Fulfillment” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, pp. vii-xx, especially vii-xii. See also: Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Ontological Difference, Hermeneutics and Language” in On Heidegger and Language, p. 211, and Kenneth Steiner, “Appropriation, Belonging-together and Being-in-the-world,” Journal of British Society for Phenomenology 10 (May 1979), p. 130.
This translation is suggested by Theodore Kisiel and Murray Greene in their translation of Werner Marx’s Heidegger and the Tradition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 191n. Macquarrie and Robinson translate Verfallenheit as “fallenness”, keeping the connection with the verb verfallen, which must usually be translated as “falling”. However, this could suggest a “fall” from a “purer” and “higher” primal status, given our metaphysical and religious tradition, all of which has nothing to do with Verfallenheit as Heidegger is using it (SZ 233).
Cf. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, and Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both Kuhn and Feyerabend provide us with a variety of historical evidence that science depends on a variety of amethodical, “irrational” elements in its discovery and maintanence of various theories, elements that are ignored, forgotten, or concealed by the method of science. Unfortunately, their philosophical insight has not been a match for their historical insight, causing some difficulties. For a masterful attempt at showing how Kuhn’s philosophy of science may be “rescued” with the help of Heidegger’s insights, see Rouse, pp. 269–90.
Cf. Michael Gelven, “Heidegger and Tragedy” in Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature, ed. William V. Spanos (1976; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 221; Rouse, pp. 286–87. See N I 460 for how this applies to philosophy as well.
Gadamer, “Heidegger’s Later Philosophy,” pp. 222–23.
Cf. Marx, p. 143. The inadequacy of the circular image is undoubtedly one reason Heidegger eventually dropped all reference to the famed “hermeneutical circle”; see US 151. Note that Gadamer, who emphasizes the idea of the hermeneutical circle in his own thinking, is one who tries, despite the evidence, to see a great deal of Hegel in Heidegger, much, I think, to the misunderstanding of the “polarities” in Heidegger’s thought. See Gadamer, “Hegel and Heidegger” in Hegel’s Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 100–116.
Barrett, Illusion of Technique, pp. 193–194; Ronald Bruzina, “Heidegger on the Metaphor and Philosophy” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, p. 196; John McCumber, “Language and Appropriation: The Nature of Heideggerian Dialogue,” The Personalist 60 (1974), pp. 378, 392. The latter two essays are excellent for an understanding of Heidegger on language.
Cf. Albert Hofstadter, “Enownment” in Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature, p. 21, and Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), p. 125.
Cf. Williams, Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion, in which Williams reads Ereignis as God in Heidegger’s “philosophy”, since It gives being and time. This insistence on reading Es gibt Sein in a subject-predicate mode reminds one of a saying from Nietzsche: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” (Götzendämmerung, III, 5).
“Différance” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 134–35.
Kockelmans, “Ontological Difference, Hermeneutics and Language,” p. 215.
Heidegger’s talk of the ontological difference is also one of the more controversial formulations for those who do not think he has gone far enough in his radical rethinking of Western thought, and still retains some “nostalgia” for metaphysics and its emphasis on presence; see, for example, Derrida, “Différance,” pp. 155ff, and Charles Fu, “The Trans-onto-theo-logial Foundations of Language in Heidegger and Taoism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 5 (1978), pp. 301ff, the latter criticizing Heidegger from the standpoint of Taoism. Whether these criticisms read Heidegger more metaphysically than he wanted to be read, i.e., take Heidegger’s apparently metaphysical language metaphysically, will be taken up in Chapter 6.
Henri Birault, “Thinking and Poetizing in Heidegger” in On Heidegger and Language, pp. 167–68; Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Topology of Being” in On Heidegger and Language, pp. 123–27, and “Metaphysics and Topology of Being in Heidegger,” pp. 23, 26; Mehta, p. 44.
Examples of such an approach are: Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, trans. Peter Townsend (New York: Harper & Row, 1975)
Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
Huston Smith, The term “transcendental esotericism” is Carl Raschke’s; see his article “Religious Pluralism and Truth: From Theology to a Hermeneutical Dialogy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50 (1982), p. 38.
A classic example is Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (1958; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1963)
Another taking this approach is Ninian Smart; see “Truth and Religions” in Truth and Dialogue in World Religions, ed. John Hick (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), p. 55.
God and the Universe of Faiths (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 139–40, 146–47. Cf. Philosophy of Religion, 2nd, revised ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 125–29.
Cf. Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 163, 170–71; The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 152–53, 156–57; Towards a World Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 26–27, 59, 66. For an excellent summary and criticism of Smith, see Raschke, pp. 37–38.
Towards a World Theology, pp. 18, 21.
Cf. Raschke, pp. 40–41.
Raschke, pp. 39–40.
Here we must seriously doubt Raschke’s criticism of Heidegger’s “dialogue” (in Alchemy of the Word [Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979], pp. 85ff) as vapid and lacking the “concrete” tension of reciprocal speakers as found in Buber’s I-Thou relationship. The suggestion that dialogue between two present interlocutors is more “concrete” than thinking shows a metaphysical bias in favor of the present. We would have to say instead that thinking is primary, for in order for a dialogue between two present people to be successful the two would have to be thinking and thereby open to the possibilities of their own and the other’s saying.
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets,” p. 119.
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Gall, R.S. (1987). Religion as True: Disclosure of a World. In: Beyond Theism and Atheism: Heidegger’s Significance for Religious Thinking. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3683-6_3
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