Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement by Ian Alexander Moore (review)

The medieval Dominican Meister Eckhart, who lived at the hinge of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, occupies a curious position in the history of philosophy. To some, he sits proudly alongside Thomas Aquinas as one of the heirs of Albertus Magnus. To others, he is more of a mystic than a scholastic, with obscurantist tendencies that stand in contrast to the linguistic subtleties emerging out of the works of Duns Scotus and Ockham. In this provocative volume, Ian Alexander Moore makes the case for Eckhart as an author worth reading not just for scholars of the Middle Ages, but also for philosophers rooted in the discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In order to make this case, Moore appeals to the reception of Eckhart in the works of an even more contentious thinker: Martin Heidegger.

One name for the indelible bond shared by these two thinkers is “releasement,” which covers both the gelâzenheit of Eckhart’s Middle High German and the “letting-be” (Lassen) of Heidegger’s later works. According to Moore, Heidegger is “indebted to Eckhart” when he contends that “the essence of thinking is releasement” or Gelassenheit in the updated German (139). Certain readers of Eckhart might render gelâzenheit merely as “detachment,” connoting a mendicant refusal of this-worldly attachments: attachment to one’s belongings, to one’s self, and maybe even to one’s idea of God. Moore sees this term as the point of demarcation for a new path forward in philosophy, which would combine self-overcoming with an embrace of the impersonal, “middle-voiced” dynamic of the arising and passing away of things (95–102). It is no mistake, then, that his analysis culminates in a reading of Heidegger’s first “Country Path Conversation” (123–38) and its emphasis on “letting-be” (in relation both to oneself and to all other entities). For both the Dominican and the phenomenologist, the “fundamental mood is imperative” here (139). Their intellectual motto is not just “know thyself,” but even more so “release thyself.”

This middle-voiced sense of letting-be is meant to skirt around the dichotomy between subject and object, thereby helping us understand how neither Eckhart nor Heidegger can be read as offering purely subjective or purely objective accounts of the self and its world (134–37). Thinking too subjectively, we might interpret releasement as the subject’s free or even “violent” decision to annul itself by annihilating its own self-image. Thinking too objectively, we might place too much emphasis on the role “nature” plays in annihilating us, as if we were simply passive victims in the process of arising and passing away. Yet Moore’s interpretation of letting-be is more rhythmic than that. The virtue of the middle voice, as he sees it, is that it allows us to see how the same fundamental process underlies both the nature of things and our response to it—both being and thinking. “Here,” he argues, “thinking has unfolded its identity with being” (80).

Crafting an argument concerning the underlying identity of noein and einai is no small task. To some readers of this volume, it might sound a bit too adventurous. Yet careful exegetes of Eckhart and Heidegger will appreciate Moore’s attention to detail, which extends to the poetically provocative mood of both the Dominican’s sermons and the phenomenologist’s lectures (xiii, 81–87). For the former, we must “leave off from the intellect if we are to reach the ground of the soul and of God” (70). For the latter, “releasement best names the way in which being appropriates [via the event—Ereignis] the human being, allowing them to belong to one another” (123). This stepping back from the brink of the presumption that intellectual reflection can unearth every last secret is akin to the recognition that the phenomena that make up our world rely on some kind of prior concealment. For “both...