Abstract
The question of how faith relates to philosophy is an enduring controversy. Aut fides aut ratio? was an age-old query. One view was that philosophical thinking about Being was a mere ‘handmaiden’ to theology, and could at best serve to provide rational explanations and proofs of God. Another, particularly strong in the late middle ages, was that there were in fact ‘two truths’ at issue here: one pertaining to the worldly realm of ontology and science, the other to the heavenly sphere of religious belief. As the adage went: quasi sint duae contrariae veritates.
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology” in The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger, trans. J. G. Hart and J. C. Maraldo ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976 ), 7, 10–11.
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 80. This series of lectures was delivered at Marburg in 1925 and considered by many to be the first and to some extent ‘unexpurgated’ version of Being and Time.
Ibid.
See John Caputo’s revealing account of Heidegger’s move from early theistic interests to a position of “methodological atheism” and ultimately to a frankly “agressive atheism” in the late twenties, “Heidegger and Theology,” Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1993), 277–278: “If (Heidegger) had begun as an ultraconservative Catholic, and if he had after 1917 become deeply involved in a dialogue with liberal Protestant historical theology, he was after 1928 deeply antagonistic to Christianity in general and to the Catholicism of Freiburg in particular, and he gives indications of having become personally atheistic... He would not accept the young Jesuits who came to Freiburg as his doctoral students and he treated other Catholic students like Max Müller exceedingly badly. When their dissertations were submitted... Heidegger treated them with disdain... When Martin Honecker died unexpectedly in 1941, Heidegger succeeded in having the Chair (of Catholic Philosophy) abolished, the very one to which he himself had aspired a quarter of a century earlier... his position during the thirties was that Christianity was a decadent falling away from the primordiality of experience.”
Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 ), 107.
Reported by Jean Beaufret in La Quinzaine Littéraire,no. 196, 1974, 3. See my discussion of this theme in Kearney, Poétique du Possible,(Paris: éd. Beauchesne, 1984), 252 f.
Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking„ 34, 36. See also my Poétique du Possible,253, notes 2 and 3.
Heidegger, “Address to students in the University of Zurich,” November 1951. See The Piety of Thinking, 65.
Der Spiegel,31 May 1976.
Heidegger, Letter On Humanism, trans. F. Capuzzi and J. Gray, in Basic Writings, ed., D. Krell ( New York: Harper and Row, 1977 ), 193–242.
The Origin of the Art Work“ in Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 44. For Heidegger this poetic ”naming of the holy“ epitomised the original Greek mythos of aesthetic experience where the gods showed themselves as part of a larger cosmic-ontological poeisis. See my development of this theme in my essay, ”Heidegger’s Gods“ in Kearney, Poetics of Modernity,(New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), 50–64.
Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” 283.
See Heidegger’s famous preface to An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935).
See my Poétique du Possible,253, note 3.
Ibid. 554, note 4
See my discussion of the contrast between the eschatological Peut-être and the ontological Pouvoir-être in Poétique du Possible,parts 2 to 4.
See my Poétique du Possible,254, note. 6.
Ibid.,252, note 1.
This eschatological-Pauline vision of universal citizenship seems to have deeply influenced Immanuel Kant’s theory of cosmopolitanism and more recently that of Julia Kristeva, see Etrangers à nous-mêmes, Fayard, Paris, 1988 and Nations without Nationalism, trans. L. Roudiez, ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 ).
While the ontological notion of Spiel remains elusive in Heidegger’s own work, it is developed by later phenomenologists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Eugen Fink and Mikel Dufrenne. See my discussion of the central role of ‘ontological’ play in these thinkers in Poétique du Possible,260–267.
Jerome, Commentarii in Zachariam, II, 8,quoted by Rahner, op.cit.
See my Poétique du Possible,269, note 25.
Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life,(New York: Owl Books, 1996), 174.
Ibid.,176
Here one would have to distinguish between notions of power (potestas) as eschatological possest rather than potentia/possibilitas,as auctoritas rather than imperium.
Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life,192–193.
Meister Eckhart, God Awaits You,ed. Richard Chilson (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1996), 36. The passage continues: “A pure heart is unencumbered, without worry, and not attached to things. It does not desire to have its own way, but is content to be immersed in God’s loving will. A pure heart is forgetful of self.” In this connection see also Etty Hillesum, op.cit. 204: “Truly, my life is one long hearkening unto (hineinhorchen) my self and unto others, unto God. And if I say that I hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me. The most essential and the deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other. God to God.” See also Hillesum on “soul,” Ibid.,229: “Sometimes it bursts into full flame within me... And though I am sick and anemic and more or less bedridden, every minute seems so full and so precious... ‘I rejoice and exult time and again, oh God: I am grateful to You for having given me this life’... A soul is forged out of fire and rock crystal.”
Poétique du Possible,270, note 27.
Ibid.,271.
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Kearney, R. (2002). Poetics of a Possible God — Faith or Philosophy?. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_30
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