Abstract
Why Schelling, why should he enter into the forefront of Heidegger’s creative exchange with the philosophical tradition? It is incumbent for us to ask this question in the course of the present chapter. On the surface, the easiest response is that Heidegger acknowledges Schelling as an important counter thrust to the tradition through his emphasis on being over thinking.1 Indeed, Schelling describes the opposite tendency to “give priority to thought over being” as the “general affliction” of modern philosophy.2 There are two elements of Schelling’s philosophy which typify this critical orientation: 1) his appeal to nature as including a nascent tendency toward order, as we have already noted and 2) his emphasis on myth as an adjacent matrix of concern and meaning which lends further depth to philosophical inquiry. As Otto Pöggeler indicates, Schelling is the philosopher of myth par excellence.3 For Heidegger, myth will prove significant by offering the space into which thought can enter in order to be struck by what otherwise withdraws from the philosophical tradition, the grandeur of being’s mystery. If we imagine that diverse ways are hidden within the tradition, then these can unfold only by taking a detour around the rough edges of our concepts, a detour supplied by myth. As the counter pole to the logos, myth preserves the trace of heterogeneity, the differentiation of patterns, which interjects novelty into the genesis of new meaning(s).
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Reference
Interestingly enough, Heidegger looked to Carl Braig as following in Schelling’s tradition of emphasizing being over thought. See Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, p. 49.
Schelling, “On the Source of Eternal Truth,” trans. Edward A. Beach, The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 22/ 1(1990): 56.
Pöggeler, “West-East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao-tzu,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), p. 73.
Schelling, Bruno, pp. 174–177.
GA 12, p. 116; tr. 30.
O’Meara, “The History of Being and the History of Doctrine,” pp. 350–351.
GA 2, pp. 392–393; 342–343.
Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, p. 63.
GA 2, p. 393; tr. 343.
GA 2, pp. 290–292; tr. 262.
GA 2, pp. 386–387; see Translators’ notes, p. 338.
GA 20, pp. 441–443; tr. 319.
GA 2, p. 53; tr. 63–64. See Heidegger’s plan for a “destruction” of the history of ontology as projected Part Two of Being and Time.
Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, pp. 153–158.
GA 2, pp. 354–355; tr. 313.
Michael E. Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), pp. 25ff.
Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger (1920–21) on Becoming a Christian: A Conceptual Picture Show,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start, p. 188.
See Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, pp. 84–85.
van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 183.
Kisiel, The Genesis, p. 201.
Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology, p. 104.
van Buren, The Young Heidegger, pp. 308–309.
GA 2, pp. 379–380; tr. 331–332.
Kisiel, Heidegger (1920–21) on Becoming a Christian,” p. 175. Also see John van Buren, “Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start, p. 160.
van Buren, The Young Heidegger, pp. 308–309.
Ibid., pp. 308–309. 27. Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises, Vol. I, ed. M. D. C. Walsh (England: Element Books, 1989), p. 3.
GA 2, pp. 392–393; tr. 342–343.
Caputo, The Mystical Elements in Heidegger’s Thought, p. 148.
GA 2, p. 360; tr. 316.
See Kisiel, The Genesis, p. 18.
Ott, “Martin Heidegger’s Catholic Origins,” p. 151.
Franco Volpo, “Being and Time: A‘Translation’ of the Nicomachean Ethics?,” trans. John Protevi, in Reading Heidegger from the Start, pp. 265–266. See Gadamer’s report of Heidegger’s emphasis on alleviating the difficulty of translating phronesis by saying “‘ it’s the conscience”’ (p. 208).
Heidegger, Die Metaphysikdes deutschen Idealismus (Schelling), GA 49 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), pp. 142ff.
GA 2, pp. 353–354; tr. 311.
Kierkegaard, “The Present Age: A Literary Review,” trans. Alexander Dru, in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 265–267.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 342–343.
Ibid., pp. 399, 407. 39. GA 2, p. 367; tr. 321.
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 140.
See Heidegger’s discussion ofresolve in Die Grundprobleme derPhänomenologie, GA 24 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostrmann, 1975), pp. 406–408. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 287.
GA 2, pp. 365–366; tr. 320.
GA 2, pp. 365–366: tr. 320.
GA 2, pp. 388–389; tr. 339.
GA 2, pp. 388–389; tr. 339.
van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 344.
GA 24, pp. 192–193; tr. 136–137.
Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), pp. 155–160. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 102–112.
GA 2, p. 360; tr. 316. See Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1957), pp. 60–62, 103.
Volpo, “Being and Time: A‘Translation’ of the Nicomachean Ethics?,” p. 208.
Heidegger, “Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltanschauungen,” in Wegmarken, GA 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), pp. 32ff. “Comments on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews,” in Pathmarks, pp. 32ff. See David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality (University Park: PA: The Pennsylvannia State University Press, 1986), pp. 11–26.
52, GA 9, pp. 47ff; tr. 40ff.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 471, 477.
GA 2, p. 361 (note); tr. 317 (note).
GA 2, p. 373; tr. 326.
GA 2, pp. 379–380; tr. 331.
GA 2, pp. 3 79–3 80; tr. 331.
GA 31, pp. 296ff. See Reiner Schürmann’s ‘transcendental’ reinterpretation of Heidegger’s view of responsibility, Heidegger on Being and Acting, pp. 7–21;; 225–229. Schürmann makes the most compelling case for the practical a priori as the key to redirecting ethical inquiry.
As Jacques Taminiaux also indicates, there is an “ultimate joining of phenomenon and logos” in the call of conscience which directs Dasein back to the locus of its responsivenesss as a “wanting-to-have intimate knowledge (Gewissen-haben-wollen).” See Taminiaux, “The Husserlian Heritage in Heidegger’s Notion of the Self, trans. Francois Renaud in Reading Heidegger from the Start, pp. 286–290. In pointing to a Husserlian legacy of consciousness hidden in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, Taminiaux argues that there is an almost too perfect coincidence in the self’s heeding the call which inhibits one’s ability to acknowledge the claim of otherness. Also see Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 64–68. Cf. John McCumber, “Authenticity and Interaction: The Account of Communication in Being and Time,” The Thought of Martin Heidegger, Ed. Michael E. Zimmerman, Tulane Studies in Philosophy 33 (1984): 44–52. Levinas develops a further criticism in maintain that Heidegger’s ontology of the self precludes the appearance of the “face” of the other as radically singular. See E Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 50–52, 194. For a response to these criticisms, see Peg Birmingham, “Logos and the Place of the Other,” Research in Phenomenology, 20 (1990): 35–40.
See Peg Birmingham, “Ever Respectfully Mine: Heidegger on Agency and Responsibility,” in Ethics and Danger, ed. A. Dallery, C. Scott, and H. Roberts (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 109–124.
Also see Lawrence Hatab, Ethics and Finitude (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), pp. 77–86.
GA 2, p. 382; tr. 334.
A further appreciation of the power of logos, of our manner of co-responding to it, is necessary to make the transition from Heidegger’s analysis of conscience to developing the question of ethics as such. In this middle-voiced expression of answerability resides the clue to developing a phenomenological ethics. Such an ethic faces the special challenge of exacting a shift in questioning which can acknowledge the alterity and otherness in our response to obligations, while avoiding the tendency to subordinate ethics to ontology. See E. Levinas, Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingus (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 52. Also see John D. Caputo, DemythologizingHeidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 174–181.
Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 14. See Roger J. Sullivan, An Introduction to Kant ’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 78–79.
Niebhur, The Meaning of Revelation, pp. 79–80.
Ibid., pp. 79–80.
Barth refers to Tholuck, see Barth, “An Introductory Essay” to Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, p. xxi.
See Kisiel, The Genesis, pp. 339–340, 347–348, 498. From a sharper point of criticism, Jacques Derrida finds a latent onto-theo-logy at work in Heidegger’s analysis of guilt and in his attempt to develop the anticipation of death as a boundary-concept of human existence. See Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 76–81.
Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, pp. 57ff.
See Sikka, Forms of Transcendence, p. 221.
GA 2, pp. 252–253 (note); tr. 482 (note #4, Division One).
O’Meara, Romantic Idealism and.Roman Catholicism, p. 185. As O’Meara points out, Kierkegaard sometimes expressed disappointment” over Schelling’s lectures.
GA 42, p. 264; tr. 156.
Schelling, Of Human Freedom, p. 74.
GA 31, p. 154.
GA 65, p. 488; tr. 343.
A. Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 50ff.
Schelling, The Unconditional in Knowledge, trans. Fred Marti (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), p. 82.
Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), p. 190.
See O’Meara, “The Presence of Schelling in the Third Volume of Paul Tillich’s,” Systematic Theology,” pp. 196–199.
Schelling, Of Human Freedom, p. 50.
GA 65, pp. 386–388; tr. 269–270. Also see William J. Richardson, “Dasein and the Ground of Negativity: A Note on the Fourth Movement in the Beiträge-Symphony,” Heidegger Studies 9 (1993): 35–52.
Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), p. 203.
GA 42, p. 270; tr. 156.
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 220.
GA 42, p. 270; tr. 156.
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, pp. 18–21.
Jean-Luc Merion, “The End of Metaphysics,” pp. 18–21.
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Schalow, F. (2001). The Mystery of Conscience and the Turn to Language. In: Heidegger and the Quest for the Sacred. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9773-9_3
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