Abstract
Thus far, in our last three chapters, we have been working our way toward uncovering the nature of the thinking that Heidegger undertakes in order to prepare for a reorientation of religious thinking. In Chapter 2, under the guidance of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, we undertook the task of mapping out how Heidegger’s thinking is not a “theological” thinking, i.e., not a thinking to be based or founded on the certainty of either faith, God, revelation, or the subject, and is not involved in apologetics and justification of any particular system of signs and symbols. Since such “abysmal” thinking “begins” with the loss of the traditional issue for thinking — i.e., the transcendent-transcendental basis on which thinking is secured — our attention shifted in Chapter 3 to characterizing the issue or matter [Sache] of Heideggerian thinking. Here reflections on truth and world led to a “topological” thinking, a situated thinking that takes place and comes-to-pass within an opening region in which truth “happens” — within which thinking takes place and is appropriated in an event of meaning [Ereignis] in which thinking comes into its own.
These are only hints and guesses Hints followed by guesses... T.S. Eliot
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Notes
George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 55.
Cf. Caputo, The Mystical Element p. 26, and especially Krell, “Nietzsche and the Task of Thinking,” pp. 264n, 295, “Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes: On a Theme in Heidegger and Trakl,” Research in Phenomenology 1 (1977), pp. 243–44, and “Death and Interpretation,” pp. 241ft for emphasis on the fact that anxiety, “freedom unto death” and Gelassenheit are not different comportments (the first two willful, the other not-willful), and thus the emphasis on the unity of Heidegger’s thinking.
Cf. WD 64, and Otto Pöggeler, “Being as Appropriation,” p. 93. See also Pöggeler’s other essays: “Heidegger’s Topology of Being” and “Metaphysics and Topology of Being in Heidegger”.
Otto, “Die Zeit und das Sein,” p. 25.
See Chapter 3, p. 69, note 7.
Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Topology of Being,” pp. 114–15.
Perotti, Heidegger on the Divine p. 80.
Cf. Adamczewski, “On the Way to Being: Reflecting on Conversations with Martin Heidegger,” pp. 18, 22; Mehta, The Way and the Vision pp. 4, 47; Steiner, p. 20; Vycinas, Earth and Gods pp. 82–83.
See my “The Inside and the Outside: Religious Experience and Religious Thought,” Auslegung 12 (1986), pp. 122–133. I also deal with this issue in “Mysticism and Ontology: A Heideggerian Critique of Caputo,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986), pp. 463–478.
Pöggeler, “Being as Appropriation,” p. 100.
Cf. Pöggeler, “Metaphysics and Topology of Being,” p. 23; Vycinas, p. 286. Compare this account of the poet by Heidegger with Walter F. Otto’s in Homeric Gods pp. 195–96, 206, 213, and passim in which Otto describes how in the thoroughly natural Greek religion it is left to the poets, the “most enlightened of all,” to see through the natural course of events to their divine background, and thus show the miracle in the natural event.
Sandra Lee Bartky, “Heidegger and the Modes of World-Disclosure,” Phenomenology and Phenomenologica1 Research 40 (December 1979), p. 234, and Perotti, pp. 98–99.
“... the thinker’s task is to be open to Being — but not specifically Being as holy.” Perotti, p. 111.
Such is Perotti’s thesis, pp. 100ff.
Cf. Bartky, p. 222, in which she says she can find no evidence for a poet who brought the German people (one of the three “historical” peoples Heidegger cites) its characteristic modes of thought and ways of grasping being, leading her to cast aspersions on Heidegger’s “thesis” that the poet founds the truth of a people. Besides the possibility of taking “poet” too narrowly, the criticism assumes chronological order.
Bruzina, “Heidegger on the Metaphor and Philosophy,” pp. 198–99 and passim. See also Kockelmans, On the Truth of Being pp. 196–208, and Arion L. Kelkel, La légende de l’être. Langage et poésie chez Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1980), for a discussion of the relationship between thinking and poetizing.
Cf. Kockelmans, “Thanks-giving: The Completion of Thought” in Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, pp. 163–83; Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self p. 247.
Cf. T. R. Martland, “To Glorify: The Essence of Poetry and Religion,” Religious Studies 16 (1980), pp. 413–23, who gives a variety of examples, from Hinduism, to Mariolatry in Catholicism, to the Buddhist declaration of emptiness, to Christian mysticism and Confucian moral action, to help illustrate the annihilative-creative nature of religious activity, in line with the corresponding-responding-unspeaking disclosure of Heidegger’s thinking.
See my “The Inside and the Outside,” p. 129–30.
Cf. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollington, 1954), in which he insists that “interest in the ‘irreversible’ and the ‘new’ in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity” and that on the other hand “archaic humanity defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the novelty and irreversibility which history entails” (p. 48), and thereupon goes on to glorify the “paradise of archtypes and repetition” of archaic man vis á vis fallen, historical man.
Otto, “Die Zeit und das Sein,” pp. 7–28.
Caputo, The Mystical Element pp. 254–57, finds ethics disappearing in Heidegger into either “cybernetic” or the vague and undefined “original ethics”. Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition pp. 249–50, likewise claims that Heidegger does away with ethics, morals, and politics. Reiner Schürmann, “Questioning the Foundation of Practical Philosophy” in Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges ed. Ronald Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 11–21, argues forebodingly that Heidegger’s thinking deprives ethics of its legitimating ground.
Cf. his Le principe d’anarchie. Heidegger et la question de l’agir (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
Illusion of Technique p. 251.
See, e.g., Gregory Schufrieder, “Heidegger on Community,” Man and World 14 (1981), pp. 25–54, and Kockelmans, On the Truth of Being pp. 250–74.
John D. Barbour, Tragedy as a Critique of Virtue: The Novel and Ethical Reflection (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), pp. ix, 154.
Vycinas, p. 2.
Otto, Homeric Gods pp. 104ff.
Cf. Krell, “Nietzsche and the Task of Thinking,” pp. 199, 211, 307; Raschke, “Religious Pluralism and the Truth,” p. 41.
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets,” p. 136.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Gall, R.S. (1987). Religion as Response: The Call of Being. 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_5
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