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This paper returns to one of Heidegger’s pivotal references to ethics – his remarks in the “Letter on Humanism” – and attempts to follow up on a line of thinking in those remarks that Heidegger himself did not expand upon, namely, the... more
This paper returns to one of Heidegger’s pivotal references to ethics – his remarks in the “Letter on Humanism” – and attempts to follow up on a line of thinking in those remarks that Heidegger himself did not expand upon, namely, the link between ethics and Sophoclean tragedy. Reading Heidegger’s analysis of Heraclitus’s Fragment 119 on η῎θος with reference to Sophoclean tragedy and in conjunction with Heidegger’s thinking and his comments elsewhere on ethics and tragedy, the paper seeks to clarify how the thinking of being is, as Heidegger called it, an “original ethics” and what that means for ethical thinking following Heidegger.
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I. Introduction.- Notes.- II. God is Dead: The Destruction of Onto-Theo-Logy.- 1. The Problem - The Theological Use of Heidegger.- 2. The Death of God and the Matter to be Thought.- 3. Heidegger and Theology?.- 4. Toward a Different... more
I. Introduction.- Notes.- II. God is Dead: The Destruction of Onto-Theo-Logy.- 1. The Problem - The Theological Use of Heidegger.- 2. The Death of God and the Matter to be Thought.- 3. Heidegger and Theology?.- 4. Toward a Different Religious Thinking.- Notes.- III. Religion as True: Disclosure of a World.- 1. The Problem - What is Truth?.- 2. Toward Ereignis - Meaning, World, Truth.- 3. Truth and the Plurality of Religions.- Notes.- IV. Religion as Finding Man's Place: Gods and the Fourfold.- 1. The Problem - Thinking the Divine.- 2. Gods, the God, and the Holy.- 3. Building and Dwelling - Mortals Amidst the Fourfold.- 4. Rethinking What is Divine.- Notes.- V. Religion as Response: The Call of Being.- 1. The Problem - A Non-Metaphysical Thinking.- 2. Thinking - Responding and Corresponding.- 3. Thinking and Poetizing.- 4. Thanking - and the Piety of Thinking.- Notes.- VI. Waiting: The Future of Religion and the Task of Thanking.- 1. The Problem - Hope and Nostalgia.- 2. Science and Religious Thinking.- 3. Deconstruction and Religious Thinking.- 4. Faith and Religious Thinking.- Notes.- VII. A Pause on the Way.- Notes.- Selected Bibliography.- Indices.
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If we are to understand Heidegger’s sigificance for religious thinking and explore whatever religious dimension there is in his thinking, we must first consider what animates his thinking; we need to find out what matters to Heidegger,... more
If we are to understand Heidegger’s sigificance for religious thinking and explore whatever religious dimension there is in his thinking, we must first consider what animates his thinking; we need to find out what matters to Heidegger, i.e., what is the matter [Sache] of thinking for him. Heidegger tells us the matter on the very first page of his epoch-making Sein und Zeit: what matters for him and concerns his thinking is what he would later call the oblivion [Vergessenheit] of being, i.e., that the question of the meaning of being, of what it means to be, has been forgotten. We no longer ask about being, or understand what it would be to ask such a question, though this question enlivened the thinking of Plato and Aristotle and thereby provided the impetus for the whole of Western thinking. In the trivialization and forgetfulness of such a momentous questioning, Heidegger senses a darkening of our world, a creeping destitution and nihilism that pervades our thinking and thus lays claim to his thinking as what he has to think about. In this sense of foreboding Heidegger finds two kindred spirits in the most recent history of the West — Friedrich Nietzsche, and Friedrich Holderlin.
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Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency advocates a “speculative materialism” or what has come to be called “speculative realism” over against “correlationism” (his term for [nearly] all post-Kantian... more
Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency advocates a “speculative materialism” or what has come to be called “speculative realism” over against “correlationism” (his term for [nearly] all post-Kantian philosophy). “Correlationism” is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” As part of his criticism of “correlationism,” Meillassoux argues that it necessarily leads to fideism, referencing the return of the religious in contemporary phenomenology and the fundamentalist fanaticisms of contemporary religion to make his point. It is this criticism of “correlationism” that I will explore in this paper—in two ways. On the one hand, I argue that, at least in the work of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, what Meillassoux calls “correlationism” leads to faith in doubt rather than fideism. On the other hand, I argue that “correlationis...
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Research Interests: Religion, Comparative Religion, Philosophy Of Religion, Jurgen Habermas, Continental Philosophy, and 12 moreGilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, Émmanuel Lévinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Religious Experience, Religious Thought, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Auslegung
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... (kokoro) of others and what it means to be moved by things (mono no aware).18 Accordingly, we can understand how the way of the kami is "beyond good and evil" because it does not ... Andre Schuwer and Richard... more
... (kokoro) of others and what it means to be moved by things (mono no aware).18 Accordingly, we can understand how the way of the kami is "beyond good and evil" because it does not ... Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. ...
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Research Interests: Religion, Comparative Religion, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, and 14 moreJurgen Habermas, Continental Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, Émmanuel Lévinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Religious Experience, Religious Thought, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Auslegung
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... (kokoro) of others and what it means to be moved by things (mono no aware).18 Accordingly, we can understand how the way of the kami is "beyond good and evil" because it does not ... Andre Schuwer and Richard... more
... (kokoro) of others and what it means to be moved by things (mono no aware).18 Accordingly, we can understand how the way of the kami is "beyond good and evil" because it does not ... Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. ...
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... Yet Derrida shows us, repeatedly,3 that such a desire is infinitely deferred and comes to ... From the Old Comedy of Aristopha-nes, which included wearing hugh artificial phalluses and ...Deconstruction has made use of this same... more
... Yet Derrida shows us, repeatedly,3 that such a desire is infinitely deferred and comes to ... From the Old Comedy of Aristopha-nes, which included wearing hugh artificial phalluses and ...Deconstruction has made use of this same strategy, noting the phal-locentrism of logocentrism ...
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At one time or another, most Contemporary Continental philosophers of religion make reference to Nietzsche’s announcement that“God is dead.” However, their interpretation and treatment of that announcement owes nothing to Nietzsche.... more
At one time or another, most Contemporary Continental philosophers of religion make reference to Nietzsche’s announcement that“God is dead.” However, their interpretation and treatment of that announcement owes nothing to Nietzsche. Instead, they see the death of God as Hegel did, as a moment in a transition to a new way of talking and thinking about God or the Absolute. Their faith in God or the Absolute is not in doubt in the end.We argue that if one hears and thinks Nietzsche’s word “God is dead”—along with Heidegger’s critique of onto-theo-logy--then faith in the end is in doubt. Any affirmation or profession of faith is questionable; there is no promise that all conflicts will be resolved and that all will be saved and forgiven. Nietzsche’s saying that “God is dead” calls for thinking and questioning; it calls not for faith, but faith in doubt.
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... Again, answering the ques-tion means observing whether or not the thought, words, and deeds of that monk in that tradition make sense and demonstrate enlightenment. ... 19. See Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry,... more
... Again, answering the ques-tion means observing whether or not the thought, words, and deeds of that monk in that tradition make sense and demonstrate enlightenment. ... 19. See Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. ...
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... Titre du document / Document title. Living on (happily) ever after: Derrida, philosophy and the comic Auteur(s) / Author(s). GALL RS ; Affiliation(s) du ou des auteurs / Author(s) Affiliation(s). Sinclair community coll., Dayton OH... more
... Titre du document / Document title. Living on (happily) ever after: Derrida, philosophy and the comic Auteur(s) / Author(s). GALL RS ; Affiliation(s) du ou des auteurs / Author(s) Affiliation(s). Sinclair community coll., Dayton OH 45402, ETATS-UNIS Résumé / Abstract. ...
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Popular analysis of The Truman Show generally has focused on the comments the movie is making about our media culture and corporate influence in our lives. However, as the names of the lead characters (Truman, Christof) suggest, there is... more
Popular analysis of The Truman Show generally has focused on the comments the movie is making about our media culture and corporate influence in our lives. However, as the names of the lead characters (Truman, Christof) suggest, there is more to the movie than a critique of corporate media culture. With echoes of stories of the Garden of Eden, the Book of Job, and promises of heaven, the movie raises interesting and troubling questions about the nature of God and his relation to humanity in the Western tradition. With echoes of Descartes’ “evil genius” and how we come to know ourselves, each other and the world, the movie also addresses some fundamental assumptions of modern philosophy. The answers provided by the movie show that The Truman Show is a radical critique of commonly held assumptions about God, humanity and the world in which we live.
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Thus far, in our last three chapters, we have been working our way toward uncovering the nature of the thinking that Heidegger undertakes in order to prepare for a reorientation of religious thinking. In Chapter 2, under the guidance of... more
Thus far, in our last three chapters, we have been working our way toward uncovering the nature of the thinking that Heidegger undertakes in order to prepare for a reorientation of religious thinking. In Chapter 2, under the guidance of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, we undertook the task of mapping out how Heidegger’s thinking is not a “theological” thinking, i.e., not a thinking to be based or founded on the certainty of either faith, God, revelation, or the subject, and is not involved in apologetics and justification of any particular system of signs and symbols. Since such “abysmal” thinking “begins” with the loss of the traditional issue for thinking — i.e., the transcendent-transcendental basis on which thinking is secured — our attention shifted in Chapter 3 to characterizing the issue or matter [Sache] of Heideggerian thinking. Here reflections on truth and world led to a “topological” thinking, a situated thinking that takes place and comes-to-pass within an opening region in which truth “happens” — within which thinking takes place and is appropriated in an event of meaning [Ereignis] in which thinking comes into its own.
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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... more
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.
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Following Heidegger along the way in which the question of the meaning of being is raised anew with the dissolution of any sort of transcendent-transcendental world, thinking is immediately confronted with questions concerning truth and... more
Following Heidegger along the way in which the question of the meaning of being is raised anew with the dissolution of any sort of transcendent-transcendental world, thinking is immediately confronted with questions concerning truth and the corollary subjects of world and meaning. Traditionally, the locus of truth has been found in assertions (judgments), and the essence of truth (i.e., how truth manifests itself) in the agreement of the assertion with its “object”, i.e., the “true” world, however construed (ideas, sense-data, the divine plan of God, the plan of reason, etc.). Meaningful and true knowledge was therefore obtained through a correct orientation to that “true” world. Now, however, at the end of philosophy and onto-theo-logy, that “true” world dissolves before the suspicion that assertion is exactly that — assertion, of the will to power and permanence that decides what is really in being and hence what is justified as the correct orientation toward the world. Truth as adequation becomes an exercise in justification of one’s own stance vis a vis the world, a world that has become nothing more than what can be justified for securing the permanence of the will to power.
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Having brought truth and meaning down to earth such that it takes place and comes-to-pass in conjunction with a situated thinking — whereupon that thinking is granted ever-emerging possibilities to be thought — we can now more easily... more
Having brought truth and meaning down to earth such that it takes place and comes-to-pass in conjunction with a situated thinking — whereupon that thinking is granted ever-emerging possibilities to be thought — we can now more easily pursue the make-up of a “religious” world and a “religious” thinking. Specifically, we now turn our attention to one of the more controversial and misunderstood aspects of a most controversial and misunderstood thinking, a matter that gives even devotees of Heidegger’s thinking some discomfort: Heidegger’s speaking of the gods, and of the holy. Such talk is easily confusing. First of all, Heidegger’s talk is not at all “uniform” with regard to this matter, insofar as he talks of gods, divinities, angels, the god, aether, and the holy. In addition, since such talk arises first of all in the context of his elucidations of Holderlin’s poetry, it might be considered unimportant, a bit of poetic license with no bearing on “theology” and “religion”.
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We have travelled a long and twisting path in our reconsideration of religious thinking in light of the thinking of Heidegger. We would do well at this point to pause on our way and take stock of the changes in horizon that we have... more
We have travelled a long and twisting path in our reconsideration of religious thinking in light of the thinking of Heidegger. We would do well at this point to pause on our way and take stock of the changes in horizon that we have wrought — of where we have been and of where we are going.