A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus

The Heart of Concealment: A Response to Richardson

The Heart of Concealment: A response to Richardson John D. Caputo The guest editor of the special “Heidegger” issue of American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly in which “Heidegger’s Fall” originally appeared described Bill Richardson as “the dean of American Heidegger scholars, generations of American students having cut their teeth on his Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought,” and that he is here responding to the complaints of an “impudent admirer.”1 Very well said indeed. I could not have said it better myself. I am indeed one of those teeth-cutters, my worn out copy of his Heidegger book having practically fallen apart from overuse. If I spent a lot of time learning Aquinas from Norris Clarke, I also spent a lot of time learning Heidegger from Bill Richardson, so that if I am at present in a bad way it is very much the doing of two Fordham Jesuits. Indeed, if I persist in being ornery about Heidegger even after reading Richardson’s erudite and moving “Heidegger’s Fall,” I hasten to add that my orneriness goes hand in hand with a bottomless gratitude to someone who has shown a generation of American Catholics the way to fuse their faith with a creative engagement with the cutting edge of continental European thought. In the present piece, I am indebted to Bill Richardson once again for his searching analysis of Heidegger ’s thought, and for his response to my criticism which, coming as a contribution to this volume, is not only an occasion of further instruction but a very great honor for me. The basic point of disagreement between Richardson and me is that no modulation of “errancy” (Irre) can account for moral evil because evil is not a deviant modality of what Heidegger calls “truth” or “unconcealment,” but a deviancy in another order, in “justice” or the “heart,” where malice, murderousness , and hatred reside, which are otherwise than what Heidegger calls truth. Accordingly, even if truth is rethought as aletheia, as Heidegger has so brilliantly done, and as Richardson so brilliantly explained to English readers, as the emerging of things from the heart of concealment, that lethic heart is not to be confused with the heart of darkness, in Conrad’s phrase, which has to do with what Levinas calls the hatred of the other one, hatred of the “face” of the other. Levinasian “faces” never register in Heidegger’s history of 99 being—although the faces of the slaughtered black natives are central to Conrad’s tale—and consequently the whole register of evil is missing from the history of Being. Richardson holds that while Heidegger was tending other fields he did not exclude and indeed was supplying the basis upon which one could subsequently develop such an account, were one so minded. But I reject the claim that in Being and Time Heidegger is tending to the ontological foundations of evil and in the later writings to the “clearing” that precedes and makes possible the concrete good and evil that people do. I deny the primacy Heidegger is giving to something that somehow or another got there before the command issued by the face of the other not to kill, which I would say is at least as “primordial” as anything Heidegger can come up with. Furthermore, I go on to deny Heidegger’s logic of sorting out the originary from the derivative , which seems to me just more essentialism or hyper-essentialism, not of the hyperousios, to be sure, but of his Greco-European Ereignis which gathers its propriety to itself and wants to “own” Being and thinking to each other, to use the jargon of the ridiculous English translation of the Beiträge. As I said in the letter that Bill Richardson cites in note 14, one man’s “ontology” is another man’s (or woman’s!) “ontic” prejudices. The ontology you end up with will always be a function of the ontic phenomena you prefer. The ontological /ontic distinction ends up valorizing the ontical things to which you are attached, putting what you favor first, jacking them up a notch or two, and then declaring them “ontological” or “originary.” (When the facts are staring you in the face, you say that is “merely correct” but not “originary.”) I have been too much bitten by the bug of différance to put any stock in this distinction or to be drawn into that game. I sit and wait for someone to say something ontological so that...