11/24/10

Christian Heidegger?

Before I finish those definitions, I’m going to voice some things I've been thinking about Heidegger's meaning.

First off, what I've been told is that all of H's work is more or less about the same thing. That is, they are addressing the same question, the question of Being. The Being of beings. I believe he claims something along the lines that his words are paths through the woods, in search of a clearing, and that his body of work, the paths, all lead to the same clearing. (What Is Called Thinking, I believe) So it begins to look as if as if each work is a different way, a different line of questioning, a different set of vocabulary and applicable concepts with which to address the ultimate question, the Being of beings.

I'll take a stab at what he's saying more generally, and in my own words as much as possible:

The world (non-transcendent reality) speaks to us both on its own behalf (nature) and upon provocation (art) in edifying ways. It is good for man to hear nature as it presents itself to him, to be receptive to it, and to be confronted by it as an Other, alien and mystical. Indeed all truth is granted to him by it inexplicably and astonishingly.

But man finds himself increasingly in a position of obliviousness to the Other as such, and in loosing this, risks losing himself, his humanity as such. This is because somehow H is claiming a relationship between man and the Otherness of nature such that man's essence is in his realizing the Other a such. So man's essence is as a receptacle for Being, the Other, in and of itself.

Yet he also places close to man's essence the capacity which man has to shape his destiny in relationship to Being. But man has increasingly shaped his destiny such that he comprehends nature, the Other, Being, not as those things at all. Rather he becomes preoccupied with his own willing-creating, and increasingly distracted and even forcibly compelled by the environment created by it to confront only it, ceases to hear the call of nature as Other. Worsening, he even forgets that there is an Other Being in nature on which he is imposing his willing-creating, and therefore even begins to forget that his creating is just that and not nature in and of itself.

So man risks obliviousness to the Other and therefore to himself. But it is true only to an extent or in a way that man shapes for himself his destiny in relation to being, and likewise only true in a way that the encountering everywhere only of his own creating-imposing is identical with oblivion. For in a sense, nature has given this circumstance to man, and calls out through the oblivious forgetting of the Other, illuminating its presence in the world-for-itself by drawing attention to its absence in man's world-picture; an act reminiscent of Christian redemption. (H was a Jesuit turned mystic-phenomenologist)

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