Preface
PREFACE After Nietzsche, after the Holocaust, after modernity, can philosophy still ask about God? In the following work, I dare to suggest that not only can philosophy presume to ask about God, it must ask about God. Philosophy must lift the censure placed upon it by the main currents of twentieth-century thought. The two most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, both intensely preoccupied with religious questions, silenced any philosophy that presumed to speak of God. For Wittgenstein “God” belonged to the domain of that about which clear speech was not possible. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”1 Heidegger makes an equally ambivalent gesture of reverence and censure toward the religious: “We honor theology by remaining silent about it.”2 I wish to bring these wellknown acts of prohibition into question. Wittgenstein I do not discuss, although much of what I will say about Heidegger’s silence has some application to Wittgenstein’s “mysticism.” The present work is an examination of the motives, justification, and tenability of Heidegger’s theological silence. As Jean Luc Marion points out, silence is an ambivalent thing. “Silence , precisely because it does not explain itself, exposes itself to an in- finite equivocation of meaning.”3 Marion rightly questions whether the silence that Heidegger has enjoined upon us has any relation to the theological silence of a via negativa such as the one prescribed in the sixth century by Pseudo-Dionysius, who asked theologians to “honor the inef1 . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), prop. 7. 2. Martin Heidegger, quoted in Ebehard Jüngel, “Gottentsprechendes Schweigen? Theologie in der Nachbarschaft von Martin Heidegger,” Heidegger. Fragen an sein Werk. Ein Symposium (Stuttgart : Philipp Reclam, 1977), 42. 3. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 54. ix fable with a wise silence.”4 “In order to keep silent with regard to God,” Marion comments, “one must if not hold a discourse on God, at least hold a discourse worthy of God on our silence itself.”5 As Merold Westphal puts it, “not all theological negation is negative theology.”6 In medieval theology, mystical silence was not a general moratorium on theological speech, but an ascetical act appropriate to a certain stage of the itinerarium mentis in Deum. At the beginning of the spiritual life, silence was ill advised. The soul needed first to seek the path into the ineffable, a search that could only be accomplished by the patient exploration of belief. Heidegger is just as frequently dismissed as a charlatan as he is celebrated as the end of metaphysics. He seems to have reveled in inscrutability . His writing gives such a shock of fathomless profundity, unsettling glimpses of ineffable depths, that it is often difficult, even for specialists , to explain his meaning. Somewhat self-consciously and not without affectation, he presents himself as a voice crying in the wilderness of twentieth-century philosophy, an emissary from the “unthought” beginnings of the Western tradition, commanding us to remember “Being.” Yet in spite of his best efforts to emancipate himself, Heidegger belongs to a tradition. The subject of this book is the early Heidegger’s relationship to the Scholastic tradition. I am interested not only in historical source work—although this occupies a great number of pages—but also in a philosophical evaluation of Scholasticism after Heidegger. Early on in my study of both Aquinas and Heidegger, I was puzzled by their apparent convergence on the topic of “being,” and their radical divergence on its interpretation. I gradually came to understand that Aquinas’s analogia entis is annulled by Heidegger’s identification of temporality and being. “Time must be brought to light and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding and interpretation of being.”7 Sein und Zeit is an ef4 . Dionysius the Areopogite, Divine Names I, 3, Patrologiae Graecae, vol. 3, 589b, cited in Marion , God Without Being, 54. 5. Marion, God Without Being, 54. 6. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 234. 7. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 17th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 17: English: Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 15. Herex PREFACE [18.191.211.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 08...
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