The early Heidegger and medieval philosophy: phenomenology for the godforsaken

4. Duns Scotus

Chapter Four DU N S S C O T U S That I was constantly concerned with Duns Scotus and the Middle Ages and then back to Aristotle was by no means an accident. Heidegger The influence of Scotus on Heidegger, while long a subject of general speculation, has not yet received a careful study. Heidegger’s debt to Scotus manifests itself on the opening page of Sein und Zeit. Heidegger asks about the meaning of being, that is, to what essence (logos) does the word “being” refer (SZ 2/1). He assumes a single meaning of being, a univocatio entis, which determines and makes possible all thinking and discourse. And he assumes that this notion of being is the a priori possession of Dasein ; it is pre-understood in all that Dasein thinks and says. Further on, Heidegger writes: “higher than actuality stands possibility” (SZ 38/34). With Scotus, the factuality of the existing thing, what Aquinas describes as the pure positivity of esse, is displaced and subordinated to the intelligible conditions of the thing’s possibility. Even Etienne Gilson, the great enemy of “essentialism,” and Gustav Siewerth, his German counterpart , failed to recognize the Heidegger-Scotus connection. Gilson used to recommend Heidegger’s 1935 Einführung in die Metaphysik to his undergraduates . This suggests that he completely misjudged the polemical relationship of Heidegger’s ontology to Aquinas’s. Siewerth passionately believed that Heidegger was one with him in his project of ridding metaphysics of the influence of Scotism! He assumed that Heidegger’s forget88 fulness of being was the forgetfulness of the act of being, esse. Gilson and Siewerth failed to see that being for Heidegger is not Aquinas’s esse, the pure positivity of that which is; it is, rather, historical understandability. This oversight is due to the widespread neglect of the Habilitationsschrift . We have too long assumed (on the later Heidegger’s suggestion) that this is a youthful work lacking direction, with no intrinsic connection to Sein und Zeit. On the contrary, the text is shot through with a concern for what Heidegger will later call facticity.1 Medievalists for their part ignore the work because one of Heidegger’s principle source texts, De modis significandi sive Grammatica speculativa, long attributed to Duns Scotus, was discovered by Martin Grabmann in 1922 to be a work of Thomas of Erfurt.2 The text-critical problem is compounded by Heidegger ’s hermeneutical approach, which typically annoys medievalists. Heidegger is explicitly suspending historical questions in the interest of a Sache-oriented discussion, which will allow him to expose the resonance between the philosophy of language of Scotus/Erfurt and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. The Habilitationsshcrift is not a historical study of medieval texts but a phenomenological treatise, which draws on medieval sources. It is in fact the first of Heidegger’s many “violent” interpretations . Heidegger assumes historical access to the matter at issue in the text. He is not interested in determining precisely what the author said on an issue, or what he intended in a particular text. He is not all that interested in who said it, either. He is, rather, zeroing in on the issue itself, on the assumption that it shows itself in our historical epoch dif1 . While earlier commentators had difficulty drawing connections between the Habilitationsschrift and Sein und Zeit, Kisiel writes that Heidegger’s first book “is totally governed by the tendency toward facticity.” Kisiel, Genesis of Being and Time, 20. 2. Martin Grabmann, “De Thoma Erfordiensi auctore Grammaticae quae Ioanni Duns Scoto adscribitur speculativae,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 15 (1922): 273–77. Grabmann later showed that the misidentification occurred as early as the first half of the fifteenth century. Martin Grabmann, “Die Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen Sprachlogik,” in Mittelalterliches Geistesleben. Abhandlung zur Geschichte der Scholastik und Mystic, ed. Ludwig Ott, vol. 1 (Munich: Max Heuber , 1926), 116–25. Erfurt’s treatise was printed along with authentic works by Scotus in volume 1 of Luke Wadding’s seventeenth-century edition of the Opera omnia of Duns Scotus (Lyons, 1639), reprinted in the nineteenth century by Juan-Luis Vivès (Paris, 1891). On the mistaken authorship and Heidegger, see Jack Zupko, “Thomas of Erfurt,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2003 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL = >. DUNS SCOTUS 89 ferently than it did in the fourteenth century. Grabmann appears to have understood this subtle point, while noting how...