Abstract
Having now considered the thinking of Heidegger with respect to truth, the gods, and the response that thinking itself is, and having attempted to bring this to bear on religion and religious thinking, we are left with an important question and criticism of the thinking of Heidegger which is of no little consequence for our understanding of religious thinking. That question is one of hope and nostalgia, of whether Heidegger’s thinking is nothing but a foolish longing for a paradise lost, for that primordial origin to which we must return if we are to save ourselves from destruction in this nihilistic age. The criticism has been raised in a number of different ways. On the one hand, one may point to Heidegger’s “critique” of science which, combined with an apparent degeneracy theory of history (i.e., metaphysics since the Greeks as the oblivion of being culminating in Nietzsche and today’s nihilistic, technological world), seems to ally Heidegger with a romantic tradition that wishes to escape the modern world and return to some rustic idyll, free of technology.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing... T.S. Eliot
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Notes
See Gründer, “Heidegger’s Critique of Science,” trans. William Kramer, Philosophy Today 25 (1963), pp. 21, 26–27
Derrida, “Différance,” pp. 159–60; and Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy p. 256, for these criticisms.
Also, for other, similar criticisms of Heidegger by Derrida, see Of Grammatology trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 18–20
Positions trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 54–55, 111
and Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 81 and passim.
Gegenständigkeit is not to be confused with Gegenständlichkeit (objectivity); it is a coinage by Heidegger meant to indicate the kind of presence [Anwesenheit] of beings that appears in the modern age, i.e., the way in which being shows itself and endures as constant presence when things show themselves as object.
Cf. Nietzsche, The Will to Power #466: “It is not the victory of science that distinguishes the 19th century, but the victory of scientific method over science.”
Heidegger often uses this Latin term and a German cognate (Subiectität subiectity) in describing the “subject” in modern metaphysics so that we do not reduce Descartes’ ego cogito to something “subjective”, i.e., an incidental quality of just this particular human being (FD 85); such only happens after being is understood as will, will to power, and will to will. See also “Metaphysics as the History of Being” in N II.
Technik may be translated as either technology or technique, and both meanings are meant by Heidegger. For simplicity, “technology” is used to translate Technik in the rest of the chapter.
Cf. Gründer, pp. 18–19.
William Lovitt, in a note to his translation of this essay (p. 17) in an essay on Heidegger and science (“A ‘Gesprach’ with Heidegger on Technology,” Man and World 6 [1973], p. 60 n.12), tells us that this word, carrying the connotations of the verb bestehen and its dual meaning of “to last” and “to undergo”, ordinarily denotes a store or supply or stock that is on “stand-by”. It is also of considerable interest (to Heidegger) that the verb bestehen often simply replaces the verbs “to be” and “to exist” in modern German.
We could make hundreds of citations here, but we will only direct the reader to some of the key texts: the first essay in G; “The Age of the World Picture” in HW; the essays on metaphysics and nihilism in N II; SG, passim; SZ 170ff for a discussion of inauthenticity and das Man; “Overcoming Metaphysics” in VA. See also Chapter 2, which discusses these matters largely in terms of the history of metaphysics (onto-theo-logy) rather than in terms of the fulfillment of metaphysics (technology) as we are doing here.
As Werner Marx, for instance, tends to do; see Heidegger and the Tradition pp. 174ff, and “The World in Another Beginning: Poetic Dwelling and the Role of the Poet,” pp. 235f f.
See Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger and the New Images of Science,” Research in Phenomenology 7 (1977), pp. 162–81, and Rouse, “Kuhn, Heidegger and Scientific Realism,” pp. 269–90
and Theodore Kisiel “Heidegger’s Later Philosophy of Science,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (1985), pp. 75–92, for greater elaboration on the continuity between Heidegger and the most recent work in philosophy of science. Particularly interesting is Rouse’s attempt to bolster the thesis of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by correlating Kuhn’s descriptions of normal and revolutionary science with Heidegger’s description of the everyday/inauthentic and authentic modes of being.
See also Carl Raschke, “The New Cosmology and the Overcoming of Metaphysics,” Philosophy Today 24 (1980), pp. 375ff, for further elaboration on the correlation between the new conception of reality holding sway in the physical sciences and the anti-foundationalist thinking of Heidegger.
For a short history of this retreat and the consequences it has had for theism (and atheism), see MacIntyre, “The Fate of Theism,” pp. 3–29.
Raschke, “Overcoming,” pp. 344, 386.
See Nietzsche, Zarathustra III, 2:1: “… and where does man not stand at the edge of abysses?”
See Conflict of Interpretations especially “The Hermeneutics of Symbols” I and II, pp. 287ff, 315ff, and “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” pp. 402f f
and “The Critique of Religion” in Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 217, 219. See also Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: The Texas Christian University Press, 1976), in which the idea of the “surplus of meaning” is expanded on (e.g., symbol systems as “a reservoir of meaning”, p. 65).
Cf. EM 186; G 66; HW 325–26; ID 42, 65; SG 84; TK 39, 41, 44, 46–47; US 32–33, 169; VA 78, 99, 108, 183; WM IX, 175, 368; and David Farrell Krell, “Results,” The Monist 64 (1981), pp. 473, 475.
See Karsten Harries, “Meta-Criticism and Meta-Poetry: A Critique of Theoretical Anarchy” in Studies in Phenomenology and the Human Sciences ed. John Sallis (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 70–72; Krell, “Results,” p. 276; Raschke, Alchemy of the Word pp. 45–46
David Couzons Hoy, “Forgetting the Text: Derrida’s Critique of Heidegger,” Boundary 2 VIII (Fall 1979), pp. 223ff
John D. Caputo, “‘Supposing Truth to be a Woman…’: Heidegger, Nietzsche and Derrida” in The Thought of Martin Heidegger ed. Michael Zimmerman (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1984), pp. 20–21, for criticisms of deconstruction and deconstruction vis á vis the “hermeneutica1” thinking of Heidegger.
See Raschke “The Deconstruction of God” in Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp. 29–30, for the link between deconstruction and (the Nietzschean) Dionysus, and in the same volume, Mark C. Taylor, “Text as Victim,” p. 70, and Thomas J.J. Altizer, “History as Apocalypse,” pp. 147ff, for characterizations of the death of God in terms of a radical Christology and in terms of the omnipresence of God.
See also, Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
See Hermeneutics and Deconstruction ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Don Ihde (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), for recent discussion of the issues between Heidegger and Derrida.
Jean Beaufret, “Heidegger vu de France” in Die Frage Martin Heideggers ed. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1969)
translated by Bernard Dauenhauer as “Heidegger Seen from France,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 8 (1970), p. 437.
Inständigkeit is perhaps best translated as “instancy” (as Richardson does in From Phenomenology to Thought) capturing the “momentary” character of man’s standing in the clearing of being (i.e., that man stands in the moment [of vision]), but the standing-in character obviously meant by Heidegger is lost.
Caputo, The Mystical Element pp. 246–54.
It should be noted that Rorty’s essay on Dewey and Heidegger, in which this complaint is lodged, is primarily concerned with scrapping the whole of the Western tradition in favor of getting something practical done today, and therefore finds Heidegger’s concern with thinking and philosophy wanting. For an excellent criticism of Rorty from the side of Heidegger, see Caputo, “The Thought of Being and the Conversation of Mankind,” Review of Metaphysics 36 (March 1983), pp. 661–85.
Cf. Krell, “Results,” pp. 470, 478 n.15; Perotti, On the Divine pp. 4, 94–95, 116–17; Raschke, “Overcoming,” p. 385.
As Perotti, p. 94, and Karsten Harries, “Heidegger’s Conception of the Holy,” The Personalist 47 (1966), p. 185, claim respectively.
Cf. Danner, p. 3; Krell, “Nietzsche and the Task of Thinking,” pp. 162, 174–75; Perotti, p. 75; Raschke, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” p. 386; Gadamer, “The Religious Dimension in Heidegger,” p. 206.
Cf. my “Beyond Theodicy: The Divine in Heidegger and Tragedy,” pp. 110–20.
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets,” pp. 126–27.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Gall, R.S. (1987). Waiting: The Future of Religion and the Task of Thanking. In: Beyond Theism and Atheism: Heidegger’s Significance for Religious Thinking. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3683-6_6
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