HEIDEGGER'S ATHEISM – PART TWO – GARY. C. MOORE'S HEIDEGGERIANA

I am trying to sort out Catholic phenomenology and Heidegger's athiest phenomenology in my most recent letters which is crucial because the Pope is a phenomenologist of the Max Scheler school and seems to have got himself involved in a fundamental contradiction in Catholic philosophy! It's complicated but it would be cutting edge stuff. And, of course, this also involves Hume's thesis that a human being cannot act by reason alone, that he or she must accept the tradition born into (Heidegger would say "thrown into the world" and the Hemming I hope you will read about has established as the basic athiestic premise of phenomenological reseach re Heidegger as a further extention of Descartes' cogito ergo sum--that is, the foundation of existence is "I think" and "I am" where God is the creator and final authority, but logically and temporally this MUST come as an after-thought to the cogito, and then Heidegger sputs the "I" totally into question just like Hume did and similar to the primordiality of Hume's "sense impressions" says FIRST AND FUNDAMENTALLY ALL [you] KNOW IS THE "WORLD", Then you evolve a concept of "I" afterwards eventually whereby "God" then becomes a THIRD ORDER CONCEPT!!!!!

R: The homosexual issue is interesting. Andrea told me recently that John Singer Sargent was William James' lover! Did that mean something profound to me - no, but it was interesting to think about - not in a prurient way, but interesting to think about two brilliant men loving one another. When I read Ray Monk's excellent biography of Wittgenstein, there were strong indications that he was homosexual, then there is Foucault, etc. I suppose it only matters if it matters. Does the fact that Wagner was apparently despicable, selfish and blatantly egotistical and an anti-Semite matter when listening to his music? I don't think so. But if I were Jewish it might. Ditto for Heidegger's Nazism. But while I believe that music transcends the spoken word (it's a different kind of language) and can be separated from the composer's traits and foibles, I cannot see that one's political ideology (Nazism) can be separated from one's philosophy.

GCM2: I guess the point that needs to be impressed is classifying people in such groups really ends up reducing itself to meaningless because each 'homosexual' is A) a very dubious judgment by an external and especially non-eye-witness observer because for most all the evidence amounts to is that they had close male friends, and, on top of that, B) even assuming A) can even be a rational judgment at all--even putting in question someone who says "I am a homosexual"--is the fact that 'homosexual is a supposedly definition of a pattern of behaviour, a pattern few, maybe none actually, fundamentally, and consistently begin to fit. I am missing the so-called clues all over the place, and now I am beginning to mistrust very much the people who say there are any 'clues' at all because they are NOT disinterested observers but are pushing forward a cause. They want "homosexuality" interpreted in a specific way for their personal benefit. Though one might understand and even sympathize with their motives, this hardly presents the truth of the matter. And what the truth is, I do not have a clue.

Even so, that is still very different from Heidegger's saying "I am a Nazi" because HE DID FIT THE PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR! Therefore his Nazism MUST have MUCH to do with his philosophy. But he is a complicated maze of mirrors because A) he lied about it, he lied for different reasons at different times, and he lied in a number of very subtle ways at times, and B), approaching him from Hume as I am now trying to do, you can see in Heidegger's biography a respect for the traditional authority that, at first, he always takes on whole heartedly and fanatically, and afterwards begins to criticize when he finds self inconsistencies within the tradition. He did this for Catholicism, he did this for Lutheranism. Did he ever really do it for Nazism? Very much like Heidegger, Hume first plumbed the depths of Calvinism, deeply involved in the Calvinist scheme of self-questioning where every motive is examined for its truthfulness and religious validity. But he pulled a Franz Overbeck (Nietzsche's not closest but best friend), a protestant theologian who stated that the Christian insistence of finding out the truth of the matter essentially undid it. Hume found by religious methodology that he was really not religious. A somewhat similar thing could be said of Heidegger who acknowledges the minor but real importance of Franz Overbeck. Unfortunately, Overbeck is not well known at all in the English speaking world.

You have to, at the beginning, accept the tools you are born with. It is only after you are an expert (Hubert L. Dreyfus) at using then, can you then see the inconsistencies and how they can be made better. THEY CAN NEVER BE DUMPED ALTOGETHER! IT IS YOUR ONLY LANGUAGE! That is why I keep saying any residual belief in the reality of abstractions is supernatuarally based, therefore in the "everyday" usuage and acceptance of the truth values of language one is a practicing Neo-Platonist Christian. That is why Hemming is important. He is defining clearly for the first time what "atheism" really is in strict logic and phenomenological observation.

ATHEISM Part 3 - Remember: “Don’t trust the writer.”

QUOTATIONS FROM HEIDEGGER’S ATHEISM: The Refusal of a Theological Voice by Laurence Paul Hemming, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002

Chapter One: Introduction

11: Will it not be sufficient to say that Heidegger interpreted Aristotle in particular and the Greek conception of being in general, by an appeal to the gods as thematic representations of highest being, and therefore simply as structures of Dasein? Does Heidegger’s atheism, therefore, not simply operate as something like the demythologizing of his friend Bultmann, applied to the history of ontology instead of the history of the construction and reception of the New Testament? Although the gods are nothing human, they belong to Dasein as the possibility of Dasein’s utmost ‘ek-stasis’, standing out of itself, that means that the gods (for the Greeks at least) are worked out through an orientation toward the world. What is at issue in these lectures on Aristotle . . . is only a preliminary clarification, indicating the working out of a fundamental position that was to remain with Heidegger’s thinking to the end . . .

12: The Christian conception of creation de-divinizes the cosmos, which means the way in which Dasein stands out toward to theion and experiences divinity changes profoundly.

. . . Heidegger’s atheism is an attempt to show the genealogy of thinking itself, unfolding as it does through successive encounters with God. Atheism in this sense means bringing these encounters into relief. This does not mean . . . that there is no room in Dasein’s self-conception for faith, rather, that faith must be faith in something of my own (GCM: my italics).

13: God, insofar as God is discussed at all, acts as a marker for particular interpretations of being . . . [I]t is only when philosophy itself addresses the place of God in its interpretation of being, which means it is only when Nietzsche and to a lesser extent Hegel each proclaim that God is dead, that the question of God can emerge at all. Unless we have prepared ourselves adequately by understanding what in philosophy is intended by atheism, we will be unprepared for the meaning of the phrase God is dead.

Heidegger argues that for Kant, to say that something is real means that it is possible and not that it is necessarily extant . . . The roof fails because being is not (in these terms) a real predicate but would have to refer to something actual to be a proof. Something possible (in Kant’s sense of real) need not exist: existence would have to be added to it for it in fact to be actual and so extant. To take a thing, say God, with all its real predicates which might include omnipotence, omniscience, and the like), and say that it exists is to argue nothing about the thing itself, which would have its predicates whether it existed or not (just in order for it to be a concept). By asserting that it exists, I add nothing to it in and of itself (as a concept) but express only its relation to me. To co-posit the self alongside the thing in positing its actuality is, as Heidegger quotes Kant as saying, “nothing but a miserable tautology”.³¹

31 Grundprobleme (GA24), p. 56. “[ist] nichts als eine elende Tautologie^.”

14: . . . [T]he primary referent of existential assertion is to myself and not to what is asserted. Thus saying God exists or does not exist does not refer to God at all but to myself and the interpretation of being which is operative as the basis of what(ever) I say.

This is a transformation of the meaning of essence, because, instead of essence being an ontological determination of a being, it itself becomes understood as itself a being. Heidegger says that for Eckhart, what interests him most is “not actually God—God is for him a provisional object—but divinity”.³³

³³Grundprobleme (GA24), p. 127. “Es ist das Charakteristische der mittelalterlichen Mystik, dass sie versucht, das ontologish als das eigentliche Wesen angesetzte Seiende, Gott, in seiner Wesenheit selbst zu fassen . . . d.h. ihn interessiert nicht eigentlich Gott—Gott ist fur ihn noch ein vorlaufiger Gegenstand--, sondern die Gottheit.”

Heidegger cites Eckhart’s expression “if it were said of God that God is, that would be added on”³⁴

³⁴Grundprobleme (GA24), p. 128. Quoting Eckhart: “Sprache man von Gott er ist, das ware hinzugelegt”.

to show how existence cannot be added to God.

It is for this reason that God’s unknownness to human being is thematized metaphysically by Aquinas as God’s simultaneous transparency to God’s self: God alone knows God.

‘Sincerely’

Gary C. Moore
P. S. Never trust the writer.