Gary C. Moore With Dr. Allen Scult and Dr. Michael Elden

Chapter One: Introduction

15: . . . Heidegger is always careful to draw attention to the fact that eidos does not mean form, but the look a thing has. 35 (For why Heidegger interprets eidos in this way, see Platons Lehre von der Warheit in Wegmarken (GA9), esp. 214. Eidos and morphe are routinely translated with the same term, form, in the overwhelming majority of English renderings of Aristotle's and Plato's texts.) In normal perception, the appearance or look something has is understood to be grounded in its form. The shape it has gives it its look. Heidegger argues that "for Greek ontology, however, the founding connection between eidos and morphe, appearance and form, is exactly the reverse: the appearance is not grounded in the form, but the form, the morphe, is grounded bin the appearance. 36 (Grundprobleme (GA24), p. 149. "Fur die griechische Ontologie aber ist der Fundierungszusammenhang zwischen eidos und morphe, Aussehen und Geprage, gerade umgekehrt: nicht das Aussehen grundet im Geprage, sondern das Geprage, die morphe grundet im Aussehen" author's italics.) Heidegger concludes that this can only be understood through the mode of production: what is formed is a product . . . All such forming and producing of things use an image as the guide against which a thing is produced. The guiding image is the image that exists before the thing is formed, so that the thing is con- formed to its prior image: "The thing is produced by looking to the anticipated look of what is to be produced by shaping, forming. It is this anticipatedlook of the thing, sighted beforehand, that the Greeks mean ontologically by eidos, idea".

37 (Grundprobleme, p. 150. "Alles Bilden von Gebilden vollzieht sich am Leitfaden und am Richtmass eines Bildes im Sinne des Vorbildes. Im Hinsehen auf das vorweggenommmene Aussehen des Dinges ist es, was die Griechen mit eidos, idea, ontologisch meinen.") . . . For the Greeks . . . a thing is produced according to the idea which exists for it in advance of itself, in advance of its actualization.

16: Precisely that power of anticipation in production ascribed by Heidegger to the potter, Greek techne, is ascribed by Aquinas to the divine intellect in the whole order of nature.

The mark of the shift from the ancient ontology to an ontology which distinguishes between the essences and the existence of a thing is therefore to be found in the natural articulation of God.

16/17: . . . Heidegger traces the genealogy of how God has been thought. However, the genealogy that he traces turns out to be the genealogy of the question about being, since it should be clear that if Aquinas in particular has projected the ancient understanding of human being onto the divine, then the supposed natural articulation of the divine turns out to be a transformation of the ancient articulation of what it means to be human.

17: In his analysis of the two poems "Der Ister" and "Andenken" Heidegger explains how the gods of themselves "persisting in their essence, are incapable of comporting themselves toward beings". 40

(Holderlins hymne `Der Ister' (GA53), 194. "In ihrem eigenen Wesen beharrend, vermogen sie nie zum Seienden sich zu verhalten." McNeil & davis translation, p. 156, "So the gods `feel themselves warm by one another' [`The Ister', line 56], they must be able to feel something in general. `Of themselves,' however, they `feel nothing.' The gods are `without feeling,' `of themselves,' that is, remaining in their own essence, they are never able to comport themselves toward beings.")

18: . . . [T]his does not make a pagan out of Heidegger, but rather is his unfolding of the holy within the thinking of the Greeks, even when he relates it to Holderlin . . . Heidegger understands the holy in Western thinking to move in a province thought essentially by the Greeks, even when articulated by others. Heidegger's atheism, on the contrary is an explicitly Christian affair . . .

Heidegger] tells us that "the whole situation of modern metaphysics" arises out of "the Christian representation of beings as ens creatum and the fundamental mathematical character (of thinking about beings)"42 (Die Frage nach dem Ding (GA41), p.

85. "Der ganze sachverhalt der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik . . . 1. die christliche Vorstellung vom Seienden als dem ens creatum; 2. der mathematische Grundzug.") Irrespective of the assumed atheism of modern science, this is exactly the universe as both Newton and Descartes conceive it, an intensification of the medieval insistence of the origins of the cosmos in God. {GCM: It is specifically through Galileo's reading of the Neoplatonist Christian philosopher Philoponus (circa 500 CE), according to Richard Sorabji, that he gained the basic groundwork of his thinking. Philoponus argued against many of the propositions in Aristotle's PHYSICS that offended Christian theology, especially the eternity of the universe.} H[eidegger] adds: "Nature or the cosmos have, since the rulership of Christendom in the West, been considered as created, not only in the Middle Ages, also through the whole of modern philosophy. Modern metaphysics from Descartes to Kant, and also the metaphysics of German Idealism after Kant, is unthinkable without basic Christian conceptions."43 (Die Frage nach dem Ding, p.

84. "Die Natur oder der Kosmos gelten aber seit der Herrschaft des Christentums im Abendland als das Geschaffene, nicht nur im Mittelalter, sondern auch durch die ganze neuzeitliche Philosophie hindurch. Die neuzeitliche Metaphysic seit Descartes bis zu Kant, und uber Kant hinaus auch die Metaphysik des Deutschen Idealismus, ist ohne christlichen Grundvorstellungen nicht zu denken.")