Re: Heidegger, Bacon, Science


Regarding the question of the inevitability of the 'Destining of Being:'
I think that a crucial element has been missing from the discussion,
and that is the fact that the history of Being has, for Heidegger,
a strong component derived from Christian theological eschatology.
Being has turned its face from us; it has left humanity in the darkness
of the absolutely destitute (duerftiger) era of the triumph of subjectivity.
Human beings have, as it were, fallen from grace, out of the light
of disclosing _aletheia_ into the darkness of the forgetfulness of
Being (sorry about all those darkness metaphors -- I'm typing
extemporaneously, not composing, so bear with me). Assuming that
Being and the eschatology of its oblivion - and possible return -
has such a theological component, which I don't think can be denied,
and considering Heidegger's strongly anti-anthropocentric standpoint
(Being turns its back on _us_, not vice-versa), I believe that
an argument that the History of Being is anything but a teleological
one in a very strong sense is going to be very difficult to defend.
The Greeks did not determine Being as Anwesenheit. Being itself
bequeathed itself to them in that way, and in so doing it lay
the groundwork for its own future development.
Being, in other words, determines its own history and it does so
itself, without human 'discovery' or 'innovation' being necessary
for the development of this history. Such discovery and/or innovation
is itself the gift of Being to humanity.
It could be argued, I suppose, that Heidegger's history of the west
is still valid even if one drops the theological component. In
that case, one would be talking about the evolution of concepts
or _Weltanschauungen_, human creations of various types, and
different rules would hold; the retrieval of Being might turn
into something like a Foucaultian genealogy, I suppose, and
contingency would be able to enter through a much wider door.
However, this is not the way that Heidegger himself usually speaks.


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