From: Laurence Paul Hemming[SMTP:llh21@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 19 April 1996 10:21
<<How do you interpret and answer the following:
1 [Nietzsche lectures, Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, Volume I p. 183
(Krell vol 1, p. 156)] ... Das wort >Gott ist tot< ist kein atheistischer
Lehrsatz, sondern die Formel fur die Grunderfahrung eines Ereignisses der
abendladischen Geschichte
(The word "God is dead" is not an atheistical doctrinal-proposition (Krell
has "proclamation"), but the formula for the basic experience of an event
of western history)
2. [Beitraege zur Philosophie p. 410]. Der letzte Gott hat seine einzigste
Einzigkeit und steht ausserhalb jener verrechnenden Bestimmung, was die
Titel "Mono-theismus", "Pan-theismus" und "A-theismus" meinen.
"Monotheismus" und alle Arten des "Theismus" gibt es erst seit der
judisch-christlichen "Apologetik", die die "Metaphysik" zur denkerischen
Voraussetzung hat. Mit dem Tod dieses Gottes fallen alle Theismen dahin.
( ... with the death of this God all theisms collapse) including a-theism?
3. [Gesamtausgabe 50 Grunderfahrung und Grundstimmung section 6 Gott- und
Weltlosigkeit des neuzeitlichen Menschen, (e) p 115.] Solange der Mensch
gott-los ist, muss er auch welt-los sein.
(For as long as (hu)man is godless, must (s)he be also worldless)
Please note these citations all pre-date your date of 1945.>>
Hi,
First - you don't cite any texts prior to H's move into mythopoetic
thinking. H. uses a variety of technical languages to attempt to speak
about the preworldly, primal something. I attempted to relate the
complexities of speaking of faith in relation to H's phenomenological work
on this preworldly, primal something.
In one way H. sometimes wants to say that faith - not the Divine, nor a
god, nor the Holy - but faith in, as you might say, the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob is nothing to do with the thinking of Being.
A transcription of H. respondonding to students questions at the University
of Zurich in 1951 - 'If I were yet to write a theology, as I sometimes am
tempted to do, the word 'being' ought not to appear there'. He continues
'Faith has no need for the thinking of Being.'
But things as ever are more ambivalent - eg in H's letter to Elizabeth
Blochmann of 1929 about staying at Beuron monastery - that mythopoetic
thinking is in some ways a critique of faith or christianity (these two not
widely distinguished). My guess is that the twist into mythopoetic thinking
(and lets not forget the unambiguously key place given to the German people
in this twist - which is why I settled on 1945 as the end point of this -
he no longer unambiguously hopes for this revolution from the german
people.) is allied to an ontic atheism on H's part - a more or less
complete loss of faith - and that this language is an implicit alternative
to what he calls 'dying christianity'.
In his early thinking methodological atheism at least began as an attempt
not to criticise faith but simply to remove it from the sphere of the basic
question of phenomenology. Thus for a time he was both methodologically
atheist in this philosophy and ontically faithful (in some way). Later,
atheism becomes (not just a bracketing off) but actaully opposed to faith -
indeed, some implicit comment on faith's genuine possibility - that atheism
becomes the revelation of an experience basic to the West. It's key here to
understand that for H. neither faith, nor faith's impossibility - atheism,
is fundamentally about doctrine - it is first about facticity (experience,
if you want).
The word God is dead passage you quote actually summarises this change -
for in his early thought it is faith itself that is no doctrine but
something like a temporally particularised facticity that yields the
possibility of philosophical apprehension. It is worth remembering, of
course, that H. is clear that he philosophises out of his own concrete life
context - one in which, at least in the very early twenties, he was able to
refer to, in a kind of short hand, as being that of a 'christian
theo_logian_'. Clearly later on, he moved from this - so that it is no
longer christian faith (of any kind) that offers an opening onto the
trembling radicality of the preworldly something (life in and for itself) -
but rather - faiths impossibility - dying christianity - the experience not
of the possibility of faith but, as I said, of its impossibility (thus, the
death of God).
<<Some questions.
1. What is "methodological" that it could also be "atheistic" (What is
being said here)? >>
You're a bit to gnomic for me here - it is methodological in the sense that
it is part of the phenomenological reduction. It isn't an ontic, factical
life experience - it's, as you might say, a preocedure to allow
phenomenology to engage with its subject matter.
<<2.Is methodological athesim precisely that path (remember gk., he met'
hodos = traverse, path) one might traverse to discover with Nietzsche "Zwei
Jahrtausende beinahe und nicht ein einziger neuer Gott!" (Two thousand
years nearly, and no new God) - that God is a "creation" of (hu)man? >>
I do sense that H. in some way travels this path in his reflection - the
questioning of Being - is of its essence, as of have said, bracketed off
>from the life of God's grace. This need not imply anything about the
possibility of christian faith - it simply says that the thinking of Being
has nothng to say about it. Indeed H. himself in the early twenties, and in
some way late in his life, was ontically a believer.
However, at some points, and it seems to me roughly between the late 20's
and maybe the mid to late 40's, H. sense was that faith was actually
impossible, that it was not a genuine reality - in the way that he both
earlier, and later, concerned hiself with (in his own idiosyncratic way).
He is increasingly concerned not with the expereince of faith - but with
the experience of its absence.
H. says enough of faith itself in the 20's and 50's to be clear about his
direction. However I'm curious to know what he actually says in the 30's
and early 40's. He writes much of atheism - or of pantheism, theism and
atheism (etc) - or God's death - but what of simple christian faith. He
railes against the Catholic church and has no hope in the Protestant.
<<3.If this is so, what happens in and to the Kantian systematic unity of
"der Gott, die Welt, der Mensch" (cf Opus Postumum, English translation p
240. For Heidegger's view of this, cf the Schelling lectures, Gesamtausgabe
42, one of the earliest places where Heidegger speaks of onto-theo-logy)?>>
H. apparent sense of the impossibility of faith does not, of course, stop
him talking about god, or about the Holy. Even as late as the famous
Spiegel interview. But it is transferred into the new register of
mythopoetic thought - Holderlin, Parmenides, Sophocles. When H. writes to
Elizabeth Blochmann in 1933 - he enthuses about the new beginning the
german people are making - a beginning which can only be made by exposing
themselves 'to being itself in a new manner and appropriation' but which
will only 'mature in a confrontation with the adversarial spirit of
communist world and _no less with the dying spirit of Christianity_.' [my
emphasis]
In the 30's and early 40's does H. hold open, in the way he does both
earlier and later, the possibility of the life of faith? My sense is that
he does not.
[text deleted]
<<A pointer: I do not particularly think that the earlier Heidegger is in
conflict with these later statements and questions.>>
There are clear continuities that run across H.'s thought - lines of
possibility. There are also real and genuine changes. I believe that in
this middle period, among many continuities, both H's ontic and
philosophical attitude to christian faith, was different to that which he
had held and in a strange way would again hold.
I am genuinely curious to know if in all his many lectures and texts of the
30's and early 40's H. reflected not on god, not on the Holy, but on
christian faith or again not on onto-theology but on the possibility of
genuine theology.
Cheers,
Jacob Knee
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---