K
KyivAndrew
Guest
Well, since the subject is Heidegger, as an aside, I just completed reading an interesting article on him from last month’s First Things Religious Journal by David Bentley Hart, one portion of which reads:
"What, in the end, should we think of Heidegger’s genealogy of nihilism? It seems clear to me that we should neither embrace it nor reject it as a whole. The most unfortunately Hegelian element in Heidegger’s thought is its drive toward total synopsis. His account of the history of metaphysics is simply too uniform and comprehensive in its claims, and as a result it misrepresents or fails to account for other realities about the history of Western thought that cannot intelligibly be treated as part of a larger history of nihilism.
Of course, Heidegger was willing to grant that Western philosophy had never been nihilistic through and through. But he rarely demonstrated any very keen awareness of the ways in which, for instance, Plato’s understanding of the Form of the Good, or certain Christian understandings of the analogy between transcendent and created being (and so on), open up paths that certainly cannot terminate in nihilism. And he certainly never considered the possibility that the only way to preserve being’s self-disclosure against the human longing for conceptual mastery of reality might be a fully developed metaphysics of transcendent being. That, though, is an argument for another time.
What should be said here is that Heidegger’s renunciation of metaphysics did not, in the end, allow him to produce a coherent ontology of his own. His efforts to describe the relation of being to beings in purely immanent terms ultimately added up to very little; certainly they did not provide any convincing answers to such perennial questions as why there are beings at all. At most, all he could do was point to temporality, the ceaseless flow of beings out of nothingness and into nothingness again, and then—in a gesture that often seems as much one of hopelessness as of “piety”—point away toward the mysterious Ereignis, the “appropriating event,” that somehow brings this about.
Because he had left himself no room for any kind of language of analogy, which might have allowed him to say how transcendent being shows itself in immanent existence while still preserving its transcendence, and because, moreover, he had decided in advance that one cannot speak of being in other than temporal terms, he really could not escape lapsing into a certain fatalism regarding the history he described. Even he had to admit that, if there is no metaphysically “correct” way for being to show itself, perhaps the age of technology really is the next “proper” moment in being’s dispensation. If so, all he could do was hope that there might still be a truly human way of inhabiting the world that is coming to pass."
for the full article go to: firstthings.com/article/2011/01/a-philosopher-in-the-twilight
"What, in the end, should we think of Heidegger’s genealogy of nihilism? It seems clear to me that we should neither embrace it nor reject it as a whole. The most unfortunately Hegelian element in Heidegger’s thought is its drive toward total synopsis. His account of the history of metaphysics is simply too uniform and comprehensive in its claims, and as a result it misrepresents or fails to account for other realities about the history of Western thought that cannot intelligibly be treated as part of a larger history of nihilism.
Of course, Heidegger was willing to grant that Western philosophy had never been nihilistic through and through. But he rarely demonstrated any very keen awareness of the ways in which, for instance, Plato’s understanding of the Form of the Good, or certain Christian understandings of the analogy between transcendent and created being (and so on), open up paths that certainly cannot terminate in nihilism. And he certainly never considered the possibility that the only way to preserve being’s self-disclosure against the human longing for conceptual mastery of reality might be a fully developed metaphysics of transcendent being. That, though, is an argument for another time.
What should be said here is that Heidegger’s renunciation of metaphysics did not, in the end, allow him to produce a coherent ontology of his own. His efforts to describe the relation of being to beings in purely immanent terms ultimately added up to very little; certainly they did not provide any convincing answers to such perennial questions as why there are beings at all. At most, all he could do was point to temporality, the ceaseless flow of beings out of nothingness and into nothingness again, and then—in a gesture that often seems as much one of hopelessness as of “piety”—point away toward the mysterious Ereignis, the “appropriating event,” that somehow brings this about.
Because he had left himself no room for any kind of language of analogy, which might have allowed him to say how transcendent being shows itself in immanent existence while still preserving its transcendence, and because, moreover, he had decided in advance that one cannot speak of being in other than temporal terms, he really could not escape lapsing into a certain fatalism regarding the history he described. Even he had to admit that, if there is no metaphysically “correct” way for being to show itself, perhaps the age of technology really is the next “proper” moment in being’s dispensation. If so, all he could do was hope that there might still be a truly human way of inhabiting the world that is coming to pass."
for the full article go to: firstthings.com/article/2011/01/a-philosopher-in-the-twilight