Bonaventure's "Contuition" and Heidegger's "Thinking": Some Parallels

BONAVENTURAS "CONTUITION" AND HEIDEGGER'S "THINKING": SOME PARALLELS There are a number of considerations that should, by rights, discourage a paper such as this. Bonaventure and Heidegger are obviously very different. One systematically presupposes Christian doctrines; the other is called an atheist. One is superbly medieval; the other emphatically contemporary. One aspires to be a true metaphysician ; the other to overcome metaphysics. Bonaventure and Heidegger appear to be an odd couple indeed. And yet as I read Heidegger, having read Bonaventure, I cannot help but be struck by a kinship between these two thinkers that may be even deeper than their admittedly profound differences, specifically between Heidegger's central notion of "thinking" and "contuition " within Bonaventure's symbolic theology. The effort to determine and express the nature of that kinship will require an approach that dépars somewhat from historical comparison studies, an approach borrowed to some extent from Heidegger. There is a temptation in the study of the history of ideas to limit comparisons and contrasts to doctrines, systems, concepts, and the use of words: that is, to what this and that thinker explicitly said. Obviously it is necessary in the study of the history of ideas to be bound by what each thinker said. This is essential if there is to be any kind of precision or clarity, any claim to intellectual rigor. And yet we know from the frustrating experience of trying to put living insights into words that there is more to every thinker's thought than what he manages actually to say. There is the experience, the encounter with reality, the intuition — all of which give rise to the urge to speak whatever is explicitly said. And the doctrines, systems, concepts, and words which the thinker produces appear then as a kind of desperate groping to capture living thought in a tangible form. Heidegger suggests an approach that is more rigorous: it is capable of reaching to what is "unsaid" within the language of a Bonaventure's Contuition and Heidegger's Thinking19 thinker, reaching to the "origin" of his thought, which lies concealed within the thinker's words, and to which his words call his hearers to return.1 For Heidegger, the thought of the past is not done and beyond question; it has not ceased to be, and the encounter with Being at its origin still approaches us as fresh as does the future.2 To hear the thought of a thinker means then to acknowledge and respect it, to let it come to us as unique and inexhaustible, and indeed to be shaken to the depths by what is unsaid, unthought in his thought3 — the very encounter with Being. Such a hearing calls for an openness on the part of the hearer — not simply an absence of prejudice, but a delicate balance, a resonant holding oneself in relation to the origin, the truth of Being itself.4 Yet how can we come to know if our hearing is faithful to the thinker? In the context of such a comparative study, what might we possibly present as evidence verifying a kinship at this depth? While the logical structure of a thinker's thought tends to speak what he says and no more, the poetic structure of his thought can provide a kind of language which in its saying indicates much more that is not, indeed cannot directly be said.6 Hence a kind of evidence appropriate here might be that sought in the interpretation of poetry: a similarity of style and a similarity of action, or the dynamic movement by which the thinker draws his hearer to insight. A. Style Neither Bonaventure nor Heidegger produced systems of thought as such. Bonaventure's mode of thinking led him to produce writings that relate to each other not in a linear or systematic development, logically organized, but rather as a series of concentric circles. There1 Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in W. Barrett and H. Aiken, eds., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 297. 2 Martin Heidegger, "Souvenir," [Andenken] in Approche de Hölderlin (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962), p. 105. 8 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper and...