3rd of March 2004
Gary C. Moore:
Dear Dr. Scult,
I am still slowly working my way through
your friend Laurence Paul Hemming's
book
HEIDEGGER'S ATHEISM, University of
Notre
Dame Press, 2002, and have not forgotten
your book review of it.
I am coming to the conclusion it is
very
possibly the best book ever written
about
Heidegger, better than Thomas Sheehan
whom
he thoroughly incorporates, and better
than
Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren
because
he has clearly delineates what the
real central
point of Heidegger is: the bringing
of Dasein
or 'Self' into thorough questioning
as the
only significant understanding of the
ontological
difference and Heidegger's turning
away from
Aristotle's identity of divinity with
'Being'
related to that. His argument is difficult
because one is very aware he is conscious
of the many subtleties of the discussion,
as for instance, Aristotle's view of
"Being
as divinity" is polytheistic,
something
most people miss and Richard Bodeus
presented
very well in his book ARISTOTLE AND
THE THEOLOGY
OF THE LIVING IMMORTALS.
I am becoming conscious, however, of
a possible
contradiction in Heidegger where on
the one
hand he has followed Heidegger's analysis
where Descartes has so evasively destructed
ontology as divine, God as Being which
reassures
all the reality of the world and things,
something made explicit in Malebranche,
Descartes'
student, and Bishop Berkeley but has
really
been around since Aristotle, into making
the Cogito the ground of all reality
and
logically therefore "God"
into
a second order and dependent concept--whereas
Heidegger does the same with the Cogito
by
making "world" and "worlding"
as the primal ground concept from which
the
Cogito is derived as a dependent second
order
concept and therefore "God"
as
a third order and even more dependent
concept.
Whereas, on the other hand, Husserlian
Idealism
seems to creep back into Heidegger
because,
however groundless the "self"
is,
there is a search for a true/real self,
there
is a phenomenological presencing of
beings
to Daseion as something "in themselves"
of a sort, and, as in "The Origin
of
the Work of Art", it is the work
of
art that most presences us to external
and
independent realities outside our own
imagination.
That oversimplifies Heidegger's actual
statements,
but cut down to the bare thread, that
does
seem to be a real possibility of his
thinking,
a shadowy 'Idealism' that guarentees
'external
beings' and yet again leaves open a
backdoor
to the concept of God because these
"Ideas"
must be thought and if there are any
kind
of internal versus external realities
and
the "Ideas" are real in both,
then
it must be God that thinks them. This
would
also be why certain threads of tradition
are essentially unquestionable in Heidegger.
Hume, on the other hand, employs as
his main
attack on the concept of God, his attack
on the reality of the concept of Identity
which also therefore attacks the concept
of Unity, of any kind of subjectivity,
therefore
of self and person-hood so that the
only
thing that is real AND thought is the
interface
between Radical Sceptical Reason in
and of
itself versus the "understanding"
of tradition, custom, and "common
sense"
one is born into, "thrown",
and
has to live with all of one's life
whether
one likes it or not. For Hume, there
is nothing
whatsoever that cannot be questioned
and
publically challenged. But he must
admit
the existence of the political reality
of
the Established Church which is not
going
to leave him alone simply because he
wishes
it. No one, however, would come to
the conclusion
that because that acknowledgment was
necessary
that he in any way rationally or morally
approved of it. One knows exactly where
Hume
stands (and he can be as complicated
in his
statements of what he believes as Heidegger),
but one never quite knows how one part
of
Heidegger's thinking really connects
with
all the other parts in a coherent fashion.
Both take experience as the final arbiter,
but I think Heidegger fudges often.
However, a link with four very good
essays
on the early Heidegger can be found
at
http://www.freewebs.com/smcgrath/index.htm
4th of March 2004.
Gary. C. Moore:
Dear Doctor Scult,
Thank you for your generous, very thought
provoking, and information laden reply!
I
truly appreciate it and think it will
help
me deal with Laurence Paul Hemming.
DOCTOR SCULT: I am just now working
through
Heidegger's struggle to dis-place the
Neo-Kantians,
culminating in the "Davos Disputation"
with Cassirer. One of the most appealing
aspects of Heidegger's talk at this
stage
is that he refuses to jettison his
own history,
which includes the the threads of the
theological
tradition which formed him, for the
sake
of making a cleaner, sharper argument.
But
he does not do so "unquestionably."
Gary. C. Moore: That was not the tradition
I was refering to, but that is not
important
in this context. You are perfectly
right,
Heidegger never "jettisons his
own history"
philosophy/theology-wise, and this
is one
of the things that is most important
about
him. One understands nothing in philosophy
unless one understands as best one
can each
philosopher in his context. He alone
has
made this actually into a moral and
philosophical
principle that he has shown we SHOULD
follow.
That he is avocating a moral principle,
and
that I am saying it, is a bit of a
surprize
to me but it directly falls in line
with
what I considered the only rational
ground
for morality and philosophy which is
strict
honesty to both one self and others.
However,
this is a principle, like all others,
that
operates in a real temporal and spatial
context.
Thomas Hobbes clearly wanted to "jettison"
much of his theological and philosophical
tradition as did John Milton, though
not
in each case for exactly the same reason.
But neither can be comprehended in
the slightest
in their depth without understanding
the
English Civil War and its aftermath.
That
is not only clearly evident to anyone
who
actually read all the way through LEVIATHAN
but Hobbes even wrote a book about
the Civil
War and its effects with BEHEMOTH.
Hobbes
hates anarchy of any sort because it
always
produces a "war of all against
all"
in which most people are destroyed
and no
one is made happy unless they are insane.
Religion in every aspect he held mainly
responsible
for the disaster of the Civil War whether
conservative or liberal. Just like
in Hume,
Hobbes wanted religion thoroughly under
the
thumb of government even if that meant
giving
him personal problems. Both Hobbes
and Hume
believed authority in government should
be
strong and effective in every relevant
aspect
of life. First, this meant destroying
any
tradition giving independent political
power
to the Church. Henry the VIII only
lesened
that power in England, but it was being
reasserted
again by Archbishop Laud to the point
real
Protestants could see he desired to
establish
either his own version of the Catholic
Church
or return to it. That was in itself
sufficient
reason for a revolution. And then the
incompetent
Charles I really stirred the pot. The
result
was total anarchy both politically
and socially
because there was no united Calvinist
front
at first and every possible shade of
Christian
religious belief not only asserted
itself
bbut acted upon their unique principles.
When Cromwell was finally in control,
he
reestablished many laws controlling
religious
disent, this time in favor of his Calvinist
faction. The law establishing censorship
brought Milton out against it in public.
This was a heroic act but he did many
things
like that almost putting his head on
the
chopping block. The opposit of Hobbes
in
the matter of religion, he loved the
religious
and social anarchy. All issues during
the
time of the absence of censorship were
discussed
publically. Most of the translations
of Jacob
Boehme, Hegel's personal favorite German
philosopher, that are still the only
ones
available today were made in that period
as he was probably the most famous
philosopher/theologian/alchemist
overall in that day. Hume, of course,
descends
from both of these newly born 'traditions'
but what is clearly operative in him
is the
necessity of internal rational criticism
within the surviving traditions he
was born
into but also the absolute necessity
of political
compromise in order to get along with
your
neighbors. Both Hobbes and Hume avocated
this in the form of the voluntary self-imposion
of law in which all parties had a voivce
in forming, but once made, all would
be forced
to obey. This was certainly not Heidegger's
tradition.
You are right. He never jettisons his
philosophical
history. Francisco Suarez has a minor
but
important part it it, so does Issac
Issacs.
He has read everything even if he never
mentions
it (or barely, like Hobbes and Hume:
PLEASE
illuminate for me if this is wrong!).
Even
his seemingly negative assesment of
Descartes
actually has numerous important positive
aspects about it. What also would be
interesting
to see is a thorough analysis of the
influence
of Henri Bergson if someone would treat
Bergson
fairly and comprehendingly which he
desrves.
DOCTOR SCULT:
The tradition must be undergone (GCM's
Italics)
as it insinuates itself from the past
into
the becoming of the future, and that
insinuation,
the "how" of the persistence
of
God in the metaphysics of presence,
must
be thought in order to be overcome,
and for
Dasein's as possibility, that is Dasein
in
the finitude of its temporality, to
be revealed.
As he thinks his way through the overcoming,
Heidegger risks sounding like an idealist
because the theological words still
have
a hold on his thinking, as well they
should.
Gary. C. Moore:
I agree completely with everything
you say,
but extrapolate that if the Idealism
in the
words lives on, to that extent he is
still
something of an Idealist. But this
is actually
true of all of us since the very notion
combined
with the usefulness of abstractions
makes
us all believe and act as if they were
real,
i. e., "America invades Iraq."
Logically, this statement is ludicrous,
but
everyone both understands what it means
to
say without difficulty and, when examined,
must bring the Idealistic statement
back
into factical reality.
DOCTOR SCULT:
He is after all a phenomenologist,
and phenomenology
is grounded in facticity, which, in
every
case, is necessarily once own: "Factically,
I am a Christian theologian,"
he said,
and MEANT it. This recognition amounts
to
a confession, akin to Cohen's confessing
his idealism, which he did at the end
of
his life.
Gary. C. Moore:
I have read little about Hermann Cohen
except,
unfortunately merely biographical without
philosophical depth, his close relationship
to Boris Pasternak as one of his graduate
students before WWI. Personally, he
sounded
like a truly great man and teacher.
DOCTOR SCULT:
The only way around subjectivity is
through
the thinking of facticity as Dasein
lives
it, as Dasein makes time its own. No
transcendence
here, no breaking out of the finitude
of
the temporal THERE of the I. After
all the
Kantian maneuvers, there remains Da-sein,
or as Rosenzweig put it, the "Ich-bin-noch-da."
God does have an "afterlife"
after
Nietzsche and THERE he is to be found,
smack
up against the nothing of finitude.
This
is the last god, requiring what seems
like
atheism to get there. But it's not.
It's
rather a commitment to think temporality
through and through, all the way up,
or all
the way around, or all the way down,
wherever
it goes. No not atheism at all. Just
not
belief.
Gary. C. Moore:
This is excellently well put! and gives
me
much spielraum for thought! And I think
both
Laurence Paul Hemming and David Hume
would
agree with you on this matter. With
Hemming
who is a Catholic theologian and deacon
of
the Westminister parrish, as well as
the
Catholic novelist, the wonderful Flannery
O'Connor, first of all theological
language
is dead, dead, dead. I am still going
too
slowly in Hemming to state what even
his
approximate conclusion is, but with
Flannery
O'Connor, her change of language from
theological
to purely factical "bible belt"
rural Geogia means such a change in
'religious
attitude', she is not even recognizable
as
a "believer" by the vast
majority
of Catholics, though she is a favorite
of
the Jesuits, and actually belongs in
the
tradition of religious mockery and
displacement
of Rabelais, Pieter Bruegel, Altdorfer,
Huber,
Bosch, and Holbein. When she writes
about
"belief", it is something
absolutely
different from what the local opreaching
is screaming about at his pulpit, something
I have had to listen to far too often.
She
also retains their tradition of showing,
not covering over, the extreme violence
constantly
going on throughout the BIBLE and the
same
violence constantly going on around
us today
that is almost totally suppressed in
surburban
areas, but in ghettos and rural areas--to
my personal experience--a social constant
that must ALWAYS be taken into account.
It
would seem logical to me that for people
to understand their moral actions,
they must
fully see the consequences of those
actions,
not have them removed by censors. And
everyone
thinks they act with justification,
even
the most 'depraved' criminal who may
have
thought through quite thoroughly and
rationally
why he did what he did. People do not
want
to consider that, since their motives
are
'good', that maybe the consequences
of that
'good' might really be extremely evil.
Which
is why one should thoroughly rationally
examine
one's own tradition through and through
as
Hume does.
As the man says at the beginning of
"The
Concept of Time": "Der Philosoph
glaube nicht." Talk about the
glass
being half full!
DOCTOR SCULT:
Glad you're still aboard Mr. Moore.
Best regards, Allen |
Athenaeum Reading Room
