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Chapter Five M YS T IC I SM There is an analogy of ineffabilities here: As the mystic is immediately related to the influx of the Divine Life, so am I immediately related to my own life. Theodore Kisiel “The most extreme sharpness and depth of thought belong to genuine and great mysticism,” Heidegger wrote in 1955.1 The insight came to him far earlier. Joseph Sauer’s course in the history of medieval mysticism, which Heidegger took in 1910–11, was the beginning of a lifelong interest in Meister Eckhart.2 In the Habilitationsschrift, Heidegger spoke of mysticism as the other side of the Middle Ages, “the living heart of medieval Scholasticism” (GA1 205–6). The fragments published in GA60 under the erroneous title “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism [Outlines and Sketches for a Lecture, Not Held, 1918–1919]” actually date back as early as 1917 to the young Heidegger’s first researches in the phenomenology of religion. Phenomenological research into religious consciousness discloses mysticism as a particularly intensive experience of facticity, “the fulfilment of a totally original ‘I can’” (GA60 306). Mysticism remained Heidegger’s lifelong interest. In the 1955/56 lecture course “Der Satz vom Grund,” Heidegger returns to Eckhartian tropes. The course is a concentrated critique of metaphysical traditions that presume a self-suf120 1. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, 3rd ed. (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1965; reprinted in 1997 as Gesamtausgabe, vol. 10), 71; English: The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, Studies in Continental Thought, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 38. 2. Van Buren, Young Heidegger, 62–63. ficient explanatory ground of beings, the causa sui. Heidegger juxtaposes the principle of sufficient reason, the law formulated by Leibniz as “nothing is without ground,” with a text from the seventeenth-century Eckhartian mystic Angelus Silesius. “The rose is without why,” Silesius writes, “it blooms because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.”3 Just so, we only enter into our essence when we are content to exist without explanation, ohne warum.4 At this stage in Heidegger’s thinking, metaphysics and mysticism are polarized as paradigms of calculative and meditative thinking respectively. In the Habilitationsschrift, however, Heidegger saw medieval mysticism as the complement to Scholastic metaphysics. In 1916, the retrieval of the mystical tradition would not run counter to the rehabilitation of Aristotelian-Scholasticism; on the contrary, it would support it: “For the decisive insight into the basic character of Scholastic psychology, I regard a philosophical, more exactly, phenomenological elaboration of the mystical, moral-theological, and ascetical writings of medieval Scholasticism to be crucial. By pressing forward on such paths, one first penetrates to the living heart of medieval Scholasticism , as that which decisively grounded, enlivened, and strengthened a cultural epoch” (GA1 205–6). The mysticism notes in GA60 show that as early as 1917, Heidegger had reversed his 1916 position on the symbiosis of Scholasticism and mysticism . Scholasticism is presented as part of Catholicism’s emphatically unmystical effort to freeze life, translate it into theory in order to control it.5 Only one year after publishing the Habilitationsschrift, his thinking on the philosophical value of Scholasticism had undergone an extreme transfor3 . Heidegger, Satz vom Grund, 72/39. 4. Caputo has shown that Silesius’s poem popularizes a doctrine of Meister Eckhart’s, the notion of the groundlessness of the self that is grounded in the self-grounded. Eckhart writes: “God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground. Here I live on my own as God lives on His own....... You should work all your works out of this innermost ground without why. Indeed I say, so long as you work for the kingdom of heaven, or for God, or for your internal happiness and thus for something outward, all is not well with you.” Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, ed. Josef Quint (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1965), 180, 5–13; English: Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation , trans. Raymond B. Blakney (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), 126–27. See John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 100. 5. In the 1917 note “Das religiöse Apriori,” Heidegger wrote: “medieval Scholasticism renewed ...... Aristotle’s natural-scientific and naturalistic theoretical metaphysics of being with its radical exclusion and eclipse of Plato’s problem of value” (GA60 313). MYSTICISM 121 [13.58.252.8] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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