Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit

5 Releasement to and from God’s Will: Excursus on Meister EckhartAfter Heidegger

122 5 Gott ist ohne Willen Wir beten: es gescheh, mein Herr und Gott, dein Wille; Und sieh, er hat nicht Will, er ist ein ewge Stille. Der tote Wille herrscht Dafern mein Will ist tot, so muss Gott, was ich will; Ich schreib ihm selber vor das Muster und das Ziel. Die geheimste Gelassenheit Gelassenheit fäht Gott; Gott aber selbst zu lassen, Ist ein Gelassenheit, die wenig Menschen fassen. —Angelus Silesius1 Heidegger, Mysticism, and the God of Will According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s purported “overcoming of metaphysics ” succeeded merely in “overturning” metaphysical oppositions, leaving these categories as such essentially unaltered. In a parenthetical remark in an essay on Nietzsche from 1939, Heidegger also rejects “mysticism ” as a “mere counter-image [Gegenbild] of metaphysics” (N2 28/182). “Still trapped in utter servitude to a metaphysics one thinks one has long since suppressed, one seeks an escape in some otherworldly realm beyond the sensuous.” Mysticism would repeat metaphysical oppositions either directly or by simply “reversing” them, fleeing, for example, from the hyperrational into the irrational. Any such countermovement necessarily remains , “as does everything ‘anti,’ held fast in the essence of that over against which it moves” (GA 5:217/61). Releasement to and from God’s Will: Excursus on Meister Eckhart After Heidegger A decade and a half later, however, Heidegger draws on the mystic Angelus Silesius’s poem “Ohne warum,” found in the same pages of The Cherubinic Wanderer as the epigraphs to this chapter, for intimations of a way beyond the metaphysical “principle of reason” (see SG 68ff.). Together with the idea of Gelassenheit (gelāzenheit) as ultimately a “letting go of God for the sake of God,” Silesius’s poetic thought of “living without why” can be traced back to Meister Eckhart. Heidegger, of course, is aware of this connection, and he is now, in 1955–56, even willing to acknowledge that “the most extreme sharpness and depth of thought belong to genuine and great mysticism. . . . Meister Eckhart gives proof of this” (71). Might the “depth of thought” found in Eckhart’s “genuine and great mysticism” point toward an alternative, “uniquely religious and non-Heideggerian way out of onto-theo-logic, a religious overcoming of metaphysics,” as John Caputo has suggested?2 Does philosophy need to thoughtfully recollect the profound dimension of experience that it has for too long dismissed as “irrational mysticism,” if it is to recover from its own metaphysical amnesia? Does the mystical path, for its part, need to undergo “thoughtful repetition” in order to free itself decisively from remnants of onto-theological bondage? Yet just as Heidegger takes care to maintain the distinction between “thought” and “poetry” precisely when meditating on their essential nearness , he is also concerned to avoid the “ring of a mystical assertion” (SG 183) in a thought which risks entering into dialogue with “genuine and great mysticism.” When he draws on Silesius’s “Ohne warum,” Heidegger writes: “But one might immediately respond that this source is indeed mystical and poetic. The one as well as the other belong equally little in thinking.” And yet, he adds: “Certainly notin thinking, but perhaps before thinking” (SG 69). Perhaps then for Heidegger, the word of the genuine mystic Eckhart, like the word of the great poet Hölderlin, belongs to thinking as what lies “before” it, both preceding and ahead of it. But unlike the case with poetry, about which he wrote many volumes, Heidegger never did fully clarify the relation of his later thought to Eckhart’s mystical word, or indeed, for that matter, to Christianity in general. Heidegger’s profound and recurring interest in Eckhart dates back to his theological studies and is reflected, for example, in his plans in 1918–19 for a course on “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism” (GA 60:315ff.).3 Indeed, the appreciation Heidegger shows for Eckhart late in life may signal another sense in which Heidegger’s turn involved in part a return to a critical repetition of his theological origins— the background without which, Heidegger confesses, he would never have come to his path of thinking (GA 12:91/10).4 Of course, even when these origins come to meet him once again from the future, Heidegger 123 R E L E A S E M E N T T O A N D F R O M G O D ’ S W I L L never simply returned to...