Abstract
Dillard revisits Heinrich Ott’s thesis that there is a structural “correspondence” between Heidegger’s later philosophy and the theology of Karl Barth. Contra Ott, Dillard argues that Heidegger’s conflicting claims about the relation between being and the holy initially make it highly doubtful whether any coherent body of thought can be recovered from Heidegger’s later philosophy. Thus, it is premature to conclude that any interesting correspondence exists between what Heidegger says and Barthian or some other kind of theology without closer consideration of the relevant texts from Heidegger, some of which were not yet available to Ott and his contemporaries. A more optimistic conjecture is that Heidegger suggests several contrasting views of the relation between being and the holy, one of which may turn out to be preferable to the others. Dillard substantiates this conjecture in the next chapter.
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- 1.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 73.
- 2.
Ott’s paper “What is Systematic Theology?” is reprinted in The Later Heidegger and Theology, eds. James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 77–11.
- 3.
See ibid., 43.
- 4.
See Heinrich Ott, Denken und Sein (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1959), 29–30. Ott builds upon the Barth’s own analogia fidei, relationis, or operationis as a relation between human acts and divine acts rather than between human beings and the divine being. See also Robinson’s introduction in The Later Heidegger and Theology, 39–41.
- 5.
Ott, “What is Systematic Theology?”, 110.
- 6.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell and trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 234.
- 7.
Ibid., 242.
- 8.
Martin Heidegger, Hölderin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 120.
- 9.
Ibid., 156.
- 10.
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 88.
- 11.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniella Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 207. As a rule, rather than “beyng,” the present text will only use “being.” Appropriate adjectives and/or context will clarify whether the metaphysical conception of being the non-metaphysical event of appropriation is under discussion.
- 12.
Ibid., 189.
- 13.
Ibid., 206.
- 14.
Ibid., 207. As we shall see presently, Heidegger does not construe the non-metaphysical event of being as a being. Hence, his description of non-metaphysical being as “the strangest amid all beings” should not be taken to imply that non-metaphysical being is a being, any more than describing the arrival of spring amid the apple trees in the orchard implies that the arrival of spring is an apple tree.
- 15.
Ibid., 400.
- 16.
For an example of this complaint, see Karl Löwith, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1953). See also Ott, Denken und Sein, 71–72.
- 17.
The question of whether there is also an important sense in which being “needs” the holy taken up in Chap. 8.
- 18.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 6.
- 19.
The adjective “soft” is intended to mark a contrast between the methodological outlook adopted here and a “hard” pragmatism, according to which most—if not all—metaphysical “problems” are merely an artifact of the choice of some particular vocabulary and hence can be abandoned by choosing an alternate vocabulary in which the problem does not arise. For an example of the latter kind of pragmatism, see Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
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Dillard, P.S. (2016). Introduction: What Has Jerusalem to Do with Todtnauberg?. In: Non-Metaphysical Theology After Heidegger. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58480-9_1
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