“The atrophy of theology and philosophy”?
The New Yorker has a piece by David Brooks on “how the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.” Some interesting stuff, although I think it was a mistake to present things in terms of a model young man. Here’s an introductory paragraph:
We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.
But I wonder if by the end he hasn’t returned to some of the key themes of theology and philosophy. The essay could raise the question, however, of the relationship between these sciences and the two traditional disciplines.
(I would also love to know whether Brooks has ever studied philosophy or theology.)
I found the article quite interesting. The picture of the self-made technocrat corroborates the other recent article about the new super-rich who are indeed “educated” but in instrumental sorts of pursuits like computers (an≠≠= ultimate tool) and business/econ (how to make money, another ultimate tool). That the technocrats are starting to wonder “why this life?” is, I think, a very good development.
But the problem is incomplete education. Most colleges skimp on the humanities/core curricula and are quite willing to turn out technocrats and call them educated. But they aren’t. They’re just trained — techne’ v. episteme’ or sophia. (By the way, I checked Brooks at Wikipedia, and he has a BA in hisory from Chicago. That probably means he had some real philosophy, if not much of it.)
Is phiosophy atrophied or dead? Some philosophers think so. See C. V. Boundas’ intro. to The Columbia Coompanion to Twentieth Century Philosophies. He grants that certain strains seem to have reached a dead end or at least they’re faking philosophy. But he grants that there is good historical work being done (see Chharles Taylor on the self), and the other big strain (the one that hasn’t abandoned rationality) isn’t dead yet.
But as I see it the analytic/anglophone rationalists are foundering in fragmented linguistic studies because, as per Wittgenstein’s instructions, they’ve abandoned metaphysics (except for the analytic Thomists and a few others). The post-modern continentals, having admitted the failure of secular rationalism to stem the tide of irrationality such as Nietsche’s and to prevent the horrors of th 20th century. They have been struggling to find a substitute world-view to make civilization possible. Some, like Derrida, simply gave up on even the possibility of communication, and there went philosophy for them.
But people are curious, and non-philosophers in avant-guard fields are asking some basic questions about their own fields. Some philosophers of logic have returned to thinking about what necessity, contingency, and possibility, and truth and falsity mean (standard old topics). The AI people are very interested in the philosophy of consciousness, as are some of the neuroscientists who are making such extraordinary headway in brain science. Unfortunately, they are usually reductionists who are convinced only matter is real. However, I’ve seen “matter” defined up, so to speak, so now brains are doing some of the non-material things that the ancients used to attribute to soul. I’ve even seen the word “soul” appear in print lately! And there’s a new field, meriology, which studies “wholes”, a metapphysical cncept if ever there was one. NOt to mention complexity theory which is also coming from computer theorists, if I[m not mistaken. They don’t always *call* this philosophy or metaphysics, but it is.
Then there are the “neurotheologians” such as Damasio and Newberg (of whom I don’t think much because they know very little about mystical experience), but at least they’re trying.
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any really great brains working in philosophy (or theology?) these days, and this is the sort of period in which great brains are needed. But who knows what’s going on in some freshman’s head :-)
Didn’t Heidegger claim to have deatroyed ontology, and thus all of Western philosophy? Perhaps these geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, and economists have unknowingly bought into that. A bleak and frightening prospect…
Make that “destroyed” ontology.
Bob S. ==
I doubt that the scientists have been directly influenced by Heidegger. I’ve never even heard of a scientist reading H. (I think he was slightly mad, myself.)
But Wittgenstein, who said that metaphysics had to be abandoned, was extremely influential over the Vienna Circle (which included such luminaries as Mach, Godel, and Carnap). That; group in turn had tremendous influence over science and higher education. They orginated logical positivism which was the foundational philosophy of science for most 20th century scientists.
Their explicitly proposed program was to substitute science for philosophy by discovering the fundamental principles of physics/science, and then deducing all knowledge from those physical principles. It was a thoroughgoing materialism. However, they themselves finally realized that it is theoretically impossible for science to answer all questions, and few if any philosophers of science are logical positivists anymore. But its influence is still pervasive.
In my experience few scientists even ask what justifies their confidence in science. Some of them have heard of the positivists criticisms of their own foundations (about the intrinsic limitations osf scientific method), but not too many are interested, it seems. And, unfortunately, some of the discoveries of 20th century physics seem to lead to self-contradictions (though some scientists claim that isn’t so). At any rate, there’s more than one scientific reason why scientists are no longer so confident of their own knowledge, as, say the original scientists of the Enlightenment were.
I agree that the intellectual landscape of the West is pretty bleak. I think the skepticism has affected the young, at least the college educated. Nothing is sure for them anymore, and I think this is another factor affecting their spiritual lives, their Faith. We really do need that new Aquinas — but if he or she does not take into account the current criticisms of the old disciplines there won’t be any winning back of the young. In other words, the new Aquinas will have to be more critical, less sure about some thing — especially language — than the old one was. And that, I suspect, goes for his/her theology too.
By the way, one thing that contemporary philosophers seem to agree on is that understanding of how language works has improved by leaps and bounds. The new Aquinas will also have to be aware of that.
The writing in that article is lovely.
Is Brooks suggesting that philosophy and theology are concerned primarily with happiness? Or that they should be–and avoiding that subject (as naive, perhaps) leads to atrophy?
Brooks insinuates rather than argues. If there are grounds for what he seems to claim, he does not give them. Why take him seriously? When someone explains how a linguistic and potentially philosophical and theological animal evolved from a languageless animal, I will worry.
I don’t think Brooks means to give answers, I think he’s asking questions that a lot of people have never asked seriously — what is happiness? Does happiness consist in reaching a goal? Or is life just an endless series of steps with no ultimate fulfillment ? Is happiness possible?
He uses the word “flourish” a couple of times, which makes me think that Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking has somehow infiltrated his consciousness. That’s how philosophy gets into the non-academic culture, I think — through the use of words that are laden with philosophical meaning. This word ‘flourish’ has done more to re-introduce natural law theory to the English speaking West than centuries of scholastic argumentation.
Ann: Your 7:53 post was awesome! The sharply focused snapshot of the abandonement of metaphysics and Wittgenstein’s and the Vienna Circle’s influence therein made me fervantly wish I had a teacher like you. You ought to teach an online course on the subject of what you talked about. For myself, it seemed as if you handed me some very important pieces of a puzzle. Bravo!
It is a misconception to say that Heidegger destroyed metaphysics. Rather he wanted to get back to a phenomenology of being for which metaphysics, true and valid as it is, did not provide the appropriate tools.
Buddhist philosophy is alive and kicking at this particular moment, especially in the United States: again I list some of its most stimulating and brilliant practitioners: John Keenan, David Loy, Guy Newland, Georges Dreyfus, Jeffrey Hopkins, Elizabeth Napper, David Jackson, Anne Klein, Anne MacDonald, Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, Claus Oetke, Richard Gombrich, David Kalupahana, Charles Muller, Joseph Walser, Jose Cabezon, Ernst Steinkellner, Tom Tillemans, Paul Williams, Tilmann Vetter, Lambert Schmithausen, Mark Siderits, Jay Westerhoff, C. W. Huntington, Jay Garfield, Malcolm Eckel, Francis Clooney, John Makransky, Brook Ziporyn, William Ames, Sara McClintock, Helmut Tauscher, Chizuko Yoshimitsu, S. Katsura, K. Mimaki, M. Shimoda, S. Matsumoto, N. Hakamaya, Richard Hayes, Donald Lopez, Eli Franco, Karin Preisendanz, Matthew Kapstein, John Dunne, Robert Thurman, Fernando Tola, Carmen Dragonetti, Dan Lusthaus, Paul Griffiths.
Is happiness a valid human quest? Or is it considered somehow naive to philosophers, the way some artists consider beauty and symmetry to be naive?
Joseph O’Leary, Perfect Love is not self-love, which is why Perfect Love exists in The Blessed Trinity. ( It is also why The Filioque makes it clear that The Blessed Trinity could never become a blessed quadinity or a blessed quininity…) Are you perhaps one of those who believes we should all have our own personal religion and worship a bajillioninity? Just asking.
Here’s what Brooks currently reads — not much philosophy or theology.
“Newspapers are first, long magazine essays are second, books are third and blogs are probably fourth.”
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/David-Brooks-What-I-Read-1019
I believe Brooks has described his long struggle with Edmund Burke as transformative in the development of his views. In college he was hostile to Burke but over time he has grown in appreciation and now describes himself as a Burkean (as well as an admirer of Adam Smith and David Hume).
He first encountered Burke in his college years at the University of Chicago which at one time, as the saying has it, was a Baptist school where Jewish professors taught atheist students St. Thomas Aquinas.
I’m with Joseph Gannon. Brooke is good at rhetoric and short on substance. The constant identification with philosophical figures is a phenomenon which should alert us of our need for heroes rather than solid truths. Paul identified this well when he said who is for Apollo, who is for Paul, etc. Once it was Smith, then Nietsche, then Freud etc. It is like celebrities who keep coming up with new wonder religions like Julie Roberts recent embrace of far East philosophy. Like all those false prophets Jesus talks about. We have this need to come up or discover the new wonder thought.
Why the need to discover the new wonder thought when everything old is new again?
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/miscellaneous/cathedra.html
H/T- William Doino at First Things and with thanks and gratitude to Father Joseph for introducing me to Saint Cardinal Newman.
First, I would like to tell Ann Olivier how much I admire her always instructive, well argued, and illuminaing posts.
Next, I would like to make a small point and it is this: very few philosophers and, to be fair, theologians write for a broad educated public. This is especially true of those folks who have a Christian disposition. What we need are far more writers like Charles Taylor and Alasdair McIntyre in philosophy and in theology….? I speak here of the anglophone world because it is otherwise across the pond.
I agree with Lawrence Cunningham that Ann Olivier’s posts are “always instructive, well argued, and illuminating posts.”
I also agree with him both about the strength of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s work and the fact that there is very good work being done “across the pond.”
Let me say just a bit more about some European work. The hermeneutic tradition (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and in his own way, Habermas) has been around for a while, but good work continues to be done in this tradition, particularly on the vast topic of language and on what it is to be human. Taylor has shown considerable sympathy for this work, MacIntyre less so. It’s a mistake, I think, to fail to give due weight to Heidegger’s “Being and Time, ” especially Part I. Thnat’s a path breaking work whose importance has yet to be properly recognized in Anglo-American philosophy. This hermeneutic tradition, I believe, possesses =strong resources to counteract the reductionistic thruest of so much Anglo-
America thought.
So, Ann, much as I admire your posts, I have to say that your characterization of Heidegger as “mad” simply can’t be left unchallenged.
I have to agree with Bernard Dauenhauer: Heidegger wasn’t mad, merely incoherent, and some of the secondary Heigeggerian literature I’ve read simply continues and elaborates on that incoherence. Perhaps he was distracted by his affair with whatever-her-name-was (I can’t remember), and his involvement with National Socialism didn’t help either.
Surely you are not referring to Hannah Arendt? There is an interesting letter in the TLS last week about how she forgave Heidegger’s affair with Nazism and was deeply empathetic to his quest to get back to being via a renewed dialogue with the Greeks.
I must say that as a lifelong reader of Heidegger I have failed to spot the incoherence you refer to — perhaps you could explicitate your claim, with quotes or references?
This thread has moved from the knowedgability of Mr. Brooks (a fair question) to our previous argumentation about Heidegger.
I think the problem raised is how much of current philosophizing truly deals with the incresaing complexity of what we know of the world, universe(s) around us, our own consciousness, and the inner dynamics of the basic stuff of matter.
I think theology is in question because there are heavy strains of fundamentalism around and lack of engagement with modernity – at least in public perception.
Finally, I suspect there is an underappreciation of the behavorial sciences (“soft sciences” as some would say derogatorially) because they challenge simple obseration as a base of inference.
To begin with, there is a difference between platonism, paganism, and Christianity, which is why God said, “You shall be My people, and I will be your God”, rather than I will be your god and you will be a bajillion mini-gods.
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/john/john10.htm
For this reason, a saying from, for example, The Gospel of Thomas (108) is not compatible with John’s Gospel, and thus we can know that The Gospel of Thomas is a false gospel. Although the believer, through The Word of Love, becomes one with Christ, he is not Christ.
Bpb S. –
You bowled me over with the compliment Thanks :-) Unfortunately, it would take a much more learned and better teacher than I am to write for the educated layman, which is what I think is needed. There is a huge need for such work, especially for the young who are growing up not just skeptics but cynics in many cases. There used to be Catholic works on apologetics == I’m thinking for instance, of Frank Sheed, and before him, of course, Chestergon. But it takes a really great teacher with understanding of all the various rivers of thought of the day, both philosophical and theological, to do that sort of thing. So we need not just a new Aquinas but a new Chesterton as well.
Bernard –
And thank you too :-) I must admit that I’m too hard on Heidegger. But I did say he’s only “a bit” mad. I think he was probably one of those pan=en=henic mystics that R. C. Zaehner writes about — the ones with an intuition of things as both themselves and as other than themselves. I think (though I’m not really sure) that the relationship between Being and entities (Sein und seiendes) is a pan-en-henic one. See, for instance, how he struggles to maintain the identity of the knowing subject v. that of the Object, yet at the same time turns subject into Object. (Yes, I could be wrong.) Not to mention the peculiar unity of Being as he presents it.
Like just about everyone else I think he treated Arendt shabbily, but then she let him. As to the Jews, I suspect that like a lot of Europeans he had ambivalent feelings about them. As a Southerner you know that that can happen — I mean the acceptance of the general prejudice but making exceptions for individuals because they obviously don’t fit the stereotype. And people do change. Look at the French poet Claudel (a nasty man though a great poet). He too started out anti-Semitic, but his son-in-law was a Jew, and at one point after the German occupation he wrote a public letter to a newspaper condemning the way the Jews were being treated — putting himself in danger. I suspect that Heidegger had a similar history.
At any rate, his philosophy shouldn’t be judged by his politics. I really did try to appreciate him when I was young. I think his insight that man is essentially a temporal being is terribly important for many reasons, and he says some valuable things about authenticity. But his metaphysics? Hmmm. Since you guys are defending him I’ll have to go re-read some.
Lawrence –
And thanks to you too.
I agree whole-heartedly about Taylor and MacIntyre. So often when I was young Catholics academics complained that they couldn’t get a fair hearing in the secular schools. Taylor and MacIntyre have proven them wrong in spades. But the difference between Taylor and MacIntyre and other Catholic scholars was, I think, that the others really didn’t give the *seculars* a fair hearing. They criticized them without really knowing them, or they simply refused to admit the problems which the seculars raised. Here’s an unbelievable story: I worked for a year on a master’s thesis on Hume under the direction of a very smart Dominican. By the end of the year he still would not admit that Hume presented any philosophical problem. “There IS no problem”, were his very words as he totally ignored the prior two hundred years of European philosophy. So I gave up and did something about language.
Yes, we need apologists desperately, but I don’t think the official Church will help. I fear that the official Church has not given up thinking that Catholic philosophy can answer all relevant questions with old-fashioned certainty. At times Ratzinger has sounded as though he appreciates that fact — he has even talked movingly about the reality of honest doubt. But at other times . .
(It must be terribly hard being Joseph Ratzinger. I often get the feeling he is constantly pulled in two directions.)
Joseph:
OK. Here’s an example from Heidegger’s inaugural lecture to the Freiburg University faculties, where he is asking the question What is metaphysics?:
“First, every metaphysical question always encompasses the whole range of metaphysical problems. Each question is itself always the whole. Therefore, second, every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, placed in question.”
Here is a fragment of secondary literature (Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner, page 115)
“Truth, he [Heidegger] says, relates fundamentally to “”nothingness”.” This “nothingness”, however, is not nihil (“nothing”) or Vernichtung (“annilihilation”). It is Nichtung, an untranslatable neologism in which …” All italics in the original.
I have a lot of trouble with all that. Time for a cold beer.
To be or no to be? That question can give me a headache. In Metaphysics, why not start with the affirmative when contemplating Truth?
“IAM the Alpha and the Omega.”
“So we need not just a new Aquinas, but a new Chesterton as well.”
Father Joseph, I am wondering if you might consider this challenge? It appears there is a lot of work to be done.
Two comments about apologetics. First, a year and a half ago our parish had a seminarian in residence for the summer. He decided to give a talk on Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy.” That led me to re-read the book. It’s clever, but it is very dated. The seminarian, though, had the fervor of a new convert. For him, the book had all the answers. I don’t know what’s become of the seminarian, but I hope that he’s learned a few more things, e.g., about new questions.
Second, this past summer, apparently there was an”apologetics” workshop at the Franciscan University in Steubenville. Cardinal Rigali was among the participants. Another participant, a young priest, told me how happy he was with the material presented there. One of the big attractions for him was that the books were short and “to the point.” Scott Hahn was one of the principals.
I don’t want to throw stones. I have to say, though, that I doubt that this sort of apologetics will do much for the church’s reputation for scholarship.
I hope that these two episodes are outliers, not representative of what’s going on.
By the way: I incorrectly asserted that Heidegger was “incoherent”. I was wrong. He is, very simply, unintelligible, which by necessity encompasses incoherence. One cannot, after all, be unintelligible and coherent.
By the way: George Steiner had this to say about understanding Heidegger:
“I am not convinced that Martin Heidegger wanted to be “understood” in the customary sense of that word; that he wanted an understanding which would entail the possibility of restating his views by means of a more or less close paraphrase.”
“First, every metaphysical question always encompasses the whole range of metaphysical problems. Each question is itself always the whole. Therefore, second, every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, placed in question.”
Even without looking at the context, this is not particularly difficult. Scientific questions have a local reach: why does the glass not overflow even though the water is above the top of the glass? answer: the theory of surface tension. Metaphysical questions if they are really such are coterminous with the entire question of being. Take an absurd example, Pangloss’s question about the Lisbon earthquake: what can be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon? It reaches to the ultimate nature of being. The second point, about the questioner him/herself being placed in question in asking a metaphysical question is a quite profound one. Pangloss is amusing because he puts the question as if he were a completely uninvolved spectator. But a question about ultimate reasons must involves the ground of intelligibility of things for the subject that asks it; sua res agitur. This, by the way, is a discussion of METAPHYSICS, whereas Heidegger’s own thought, pace Ann Olivier, is NOT a metaphysics but an inquiry into the soil in which the tree of metaphysics and the sciences (Descartes’ image) sinks its roots, i.e. the phenomenality of being. Phenomenality does not lend itself to the hen-pan metaphysics that Zaehner reads into Heidegger.
“Truth, he [Heidegger] says, relates fundamentally to “”nothingness”.” This “nothingness”, however, is not nihil (“nothing”) or Vernichtung (“annilihilation”). It is Nichtung, an untranslatable neologism in which …”
In early Heidegger Dasein apprehends being by transcending beings toward what lies beyond them. But what it this? It appears as a nothingness. But it cannot be a mere nihil. Heidegger tries to do a positive phenomenology of this nothingness, talking of Nichtung etc., and finally presenting this nothingness as being in its no-thing-ness, as the withdrawal (Entzug, Enteignis) whence beings come into presence. Such language is not conceptual but points to a phenomenon or to the basic structure of phenomenality. Husserl put the eyes in Heidegger’s head (his own metaphor) to approach beings and being phenomenologically in this style.
I think Steiner is probably right. Heidegger would surely hate the bulk of Heideggerian literature that paraphrases his thought instead of being stimulated by it to think further. Jean Beaufret was Heidegger’s best exegete because instead of getting bogged down in paraphrase he simply reread the philosophers whom he already knew well in light of Heidegger’s insights. His readings of Parmenides et al. diverge from Heidegger’s own but one can see that the basic method of Heidegger’s thought is bearing fruit in them.
May I again recommend a stupendous work by Francisco J. Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger, Penn State Press, 2009. He is sceptical about the possibility of a preconceptual phenomenology, but his tracking of Heidegger’s readings of Plato is masterful. Heidegger is quite wobbly in his relation to Plato because he is always trying to read Plato’s metaphysics against the grain, back to its phenomenological roots, a difficult, paradoxical task, and one on which he prematurely gave up in his least happy utterance on Plato, the 1940 essay, Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (the earlier lectures on the Sophist, the Republic, and the Theatetus, now published, give a far richer picture of his dealings with Plato).
“First, every metaphysical question always encompasses the whole range of metaphysical problems. Each question is itself always the whole. “”
Thanks, Bob S. This is a perfect example of pan-en-henic thinking: the part is the whole (and the whole is the part). Maritain once put it this way, “Each thing is more than itself”.
The problem with such thinkers is that readers often think they don’t *really* mean exactly what they’re saying, that the nonsense is only *apparent*. But such thinkers *do* mean exactly what they’re saying — no interpretation is needed. But to the pan-en-henic they are not talking nonsense, or it’s “beyond” logic or other such nonsense. (Heidegger says somewhere that “thinking” — as opposed to metaphysics — is “beyond logic”.)
Arguments about what these thinkers really mean, of course, rage, but that’s because *all* interpretations of such writers are correct. When you’re talking nonsense you can get anything you want out of your premises. As the medievals put it, from falsity everything follows.
Bernard –
Oddly, I’ve seen Chesterton mentioned favorably in the secular press at least three times in the last month or two. I wonder if he does has lasting power. I must admit I find him too pat for my questions. But he does say some things quite clearly that need saying, I think. Same was true of Bishop Sheen.
When I say we need apologists I mean thinkers who know the current issues in philosophy quite well and can present at least alternate world-views or equally rational solutions to problems as those of the skeptics and the unchurched. The latter are a particular problem — they see no need or use for dogma, and that, I suspect, is the greatest challenge for the theologians. Not to mention the rejection of authority out of hand on all sides.
“Truth, he [Heidegger] says, relates fundamentally to “”nothingness”.” This “nothingness”, however, is not nihil (“nothing”) or Vernichtung (“annilihilation”). It is Nichtung, an untranslatable neologism in which …”
Fr. O’Leary ==
It is a common trait of schizophrenics to indulge in neologisms. See, when you invent a new word and give it *your* meaning (an actually nonsensical one) it can cover a multitude of problematic thought. They also sometimes just talk nonsense with ordinary words — “word salads” the psychiatrists call such speech.
By the way, Heidegger also has some odd things to say about space. The brain scientists have discovered that there is a tiny part of the brain that helps us distinguish our own space (the space each of us occupies) from the space of other entities. In schizophrenics this function stops or doesn’t work properly; Suggestive? Hmm.
By the way, Zaehner didn’t say Heidegger was pan-en-henic. That’s the way I see him.
“It is a common trait of schizophrenics to indulge in neologisms. See, when you invent a new word and give it *your* meaning (an actually nonsensical one) it can cover a multitude of problematic thought. They also sometimes just talk nonsense with ordinary words — “word salads” the psychiatrists call such speech.”
Joyce tried to redeem his schizophrenic daughter’s word salad in the polyglot portmanteau words of Finnegans Wake.
Heidegger’s neologisms are actually quite elegant in German, though in English translation they are ungainly. He also gave new meanings to common words such as Ereignis, Dasein, das Gerede.
Apart from the experimental coinages in his notebooks, Heidegger’s neologisms and use of common words in deeper senses, in his published works, are very elegant and eloquent: das Man, das Gestell, das Geviert, Enteignis, Entzug des Seins, Seyn, die Geworfenheit, die Befindlichkeit, in-der-Welt-sein, Sein-zum-Tode, die Sage, die Lichtung. In any case his lecture courses and most of his works contain virtually no neologisms.
“Heidegger also has some odd things to say about space. The brain scientists have discovered that there is a tiny part of the brain that helps us distinguish our own space (the space each of us occupies) from the space of other entities. In schizophrenics this function stops or doesn’t work properly; Suggestive?”
Where do you see Heidegger failing to recognize the authentic phenomenality of space? I seem to remember that he thinks of space in terms of the “between” (between one person and another or between person and thing), in his dialogue with psychiatrist Medard Boss and disciples. Being and Time, parr. 22-4, explores the spatiality of Dasein as a more fundamental phenomenon that space in the scientific objective sense, which “neutralized the regions of our Umwelt to the pure dimensions” — scientific space is thus an abstraction from lived, world-space. Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty would no doubt agree.
It is certainly a tribute to the vibrancy of Heidegger’s thought that whenever his name comes up on a Commonweal thread he instantly becomes the primary topic of discussion American Catholic theologians have still much, much to learn from Heidegger — very few of them have any understanding of him.
May I make a point about apologists. In the past I have written a fair amount about Thomas Merton. I still get, on a regular basis, messages from young people who have discovered his writings and want direction about more to read, etc. The question is this: why are people still attracted to his writings so long after his death? My own hunch is that Merton wrote powerfully of the experience of God in a language that was not “pious.” He wrote too much, had too many interests, but his very best had the ring of authenticity. The apologists of the future will have to somehow marry a sense of the tradition with experience in – dare I say it -prayer. In other words, we need a reimagining of how to marry theology and spirituality. We need, in short, theologians in the older sense of the term: “the theologian,” Evagrius of Pontus once wrote, “Is the one who prays and the one who prays is a theologian.”
Karl Barth famously remarked: “The best apologetics is a good dogmatics,” which, of course, is what he attempted in his massive work. Just as famously, Barth, at least the early Barth, refused the very notion of a “religious a priori,” some striving toward God (even if not so experienced) to which revelation comes as a reply, a “God-shaped blank,” as it has been called, perhaps rather abusively.
I have always appreciated Newman’s dictum: “That is no intellectual triumph of any truth of Religion, which has not been preceded by a full statement of what can be said against it.” Are the two positions utterly opposed? Must every theologian be equally adept at both efforts?
Bernard Lonergan divided the theological tasks into eight functional specialties: Research, Interpretation, History, Dialectics, Foundations, Doctrines, Systematics, and Communication. It is hard to imagine anyone who would equally able in all tasks. The traditional tasks of Apologetics is, I think, partly covered by Dialectics and partly by Foundations, with the latter, however, originating out of intellectual, moral, and religious conversion, the kind of thing that Evagrius of Pontus and Lawrence of Cunningham point to, which was very much neglected in classic modern Apologetics which was highly rationalistic, setting out arguments so “objectively true” that they did not need to reside in minds.
” I seem to remember that he thinks of space in terms of the “between” (between one person and another or between person and thing),”
Fr. O’Leary –
I grant you freely that Heidegger’s vocabulary is highly suited to what he is saying. But what he is best appreciated as poetry, a poetry of a pan-en-henic intuition. And, yes, not all of what he says is crazy, far from it. His considerations of “das Dem” are particularly valuable, I think.
As to the “between”, as I remember in What Is Metaphysics he says that Dasein IS das Zswischen (sp.?), the between. That being so it would confirm the interpretation of his work as similar to if not identical with certain Buddhist intuitions wherein the “self” is a no-self , that is, the emptiness of space in which the flux appears. This has the epistemological advantage of eliminating the problem of getting from the inside (the consciousness of the self-subject) to the outside (non-self, objects) (see also the beginning of Being and Time for that point).
I grant you Heidegger is interesting. I just went back and re-read the beginning of Being and Time and was amazed to find myself concluding that he is in fact very much a medieval scholastic! I shouldn’t be really surprised, given his interest and expertise in Scotus. What is particularly interesting to me about the beginning of Being and Time is that his project (what is Being?) is really an attempt to understand the most fundamental of the transcendentals, a project which I keep complaining is a still a fundamental problem for metaphysics.
But Heidegger’s solution is in the tradition of Parmenides and Spinoza and the other great philosophers who were pan-en-henics. I do wish you would take Zaehner seriously. You might find hm illuminating.
I should add that when Zaehner says that someone is a pan-enhenic he does not mean that the person is a schizophrenic in the ordinary sense of regularly out of touch with reality. He means that the structure of a pan-en-henic intuition has the same logical structure as the thinking of schizophrenics. He himself had such an intuition, but discounted it as having noetic value. (Amazingly honest man.)
Look closely at such thinking and you’ll see it consists in identifying things of the same species with each other on the basis of their generic similarity — e.g., a cat is an animal, a dog is an animal, therefore, a cat is a dog. What the pan-en-henics do apparently is identify all *beings* on the basis that all are beings == a cat is a being, the dog is a being, so the cat is the dog; I’m a being so i’m the cat; and the moon is a being, so I’m the moon; so . . . I”m all beings, and all beings are each other. It’s the fallacy of undistributed middle on a cosmic level.
Yes, philosophy is full of such intuitions, and this is one reason, I think, why many, many people reject “philosophy” as nonsense — some of it is.
Joseph:
I must confess that, to me, your elucidation of the Heidegger fragment I gave you was as – well-out there as Heidegger. I do not mean this as an insult to either you or H; I guess my mind simply cannot deal with the level of abstraction (if that is the right word) in his thought. But if Ann is correct, I don’t need to. I have been trained as an electronics engineer, which is heavily weighted with mathematics and analysis. I am not convinced that understanding Heidegger will get me closer to the Lord, be more kind, and take better care of my grandchildren, so I’ll take a pass.
But I do thank you for your efforts and generosity in making your argument.
And Ann, I especially thank you for your gift of describing H’s difficult writing so clearly and, I may add, humorously.
Lawrence –
I agree whole-heartedly about Merton. If any theologian has reached the educated public it is he. It astonishes me that Catholic theologians don’t seem to eve count him among the theologian, in spite of the fact that he was a mystical theologian and also wrote a lot about moral issues and the necessity of action by contemplatives. For instance, he has yet to be mentioned on Cathy’s thread on the state of Catholic theology.
Of course, he was controversial — he actually (gasp!) talked to Buddhists and considered the possibility we share some things with them! I say he was way ahead of his time. I note that his apologia, The Seven STory Mountain, is already available in a Kindle Edition at Amazon, a proof of his continuing relevance. Time for the theologians to listen to the people.
Bob S. –
Well, thank you, but I didn’t mean to make fun of Heidegger. One of his great appeals is, I think, that he was dead serious ( DEAD serious) about all these serious matters such as authenticity, the relationship of people to each other and to nature, and, yes, to God, if there is one. What I find encouraging about his efforts is that he saw that understanding of the foundations of our thinking is essential to being human, and that means thinking about metaphysics — or beyond (essentialist) metaphysics as he would put it, to what IS. (There is really no escaping Parmenides. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.)
If you can bear in mind that he means to be contradictory (or at least doesn’t care if he is) I think you’ll find him easier to read. Just go with the flow and you might like him, especially what he has to say about science and instrumentality and popular culture.
“He himself had such an intuition, but discounted it as having noetic value”
Oops — that should be: Zaehner himself had a pan-en-henic intuition but discounted it as having NO noetic value.
Heidegger, practically alone, considered the most basic issue of philosophy, namely beings. I do not think his basic premise of BEING is correct and I don’t think all his insights are adequate, but there was no philosopher who could approach his greatness. After the sterility of Wittgenstein, caught up in parsing language which is a secondary abstraction from phusis, and logical positivists, Heidegger inquired into the being of man in the lived world. Only when philosophy gets real can it merit serious attention.
Ann Oliver’s unfortunate contribution to philosophical discourse is to dismiss what she disagrees with, or fails to understand, with derogatory psychological language.
“I must admit that I’m too hard on Heidegger. But I did say he’s only “a bit” mad.”
The insights of others with whom Oliver disagrees are dismissed with a label, Zaehner’s pan-en-henic which Zaehner applies to manic-depressive and drug-induced mystics.
Elsewhere, Oliver states, “It is a common trait of schizophrenics to indulge in neologisms.”
This is neither philosophical discourse, nor respectable discourse and merits no response.
I must express my deep respect for Joseph S. O Leary for the depth and breath of understanding.
Mr. McGuire –
No, I did not just dismiss Heidegger with a “label”. I described him with a word with a very specific meaning as defined and defended by an extraordinary scholar of mystical experience at Oxford, a man who himself had such an experience but was honest enough to criticize it.
No, my post was not a monograph on Heidegger’s intuition of being, but I did provide some evidence of his distorted thinking that identifies whole and part, an irrational position if one exists.
This sort of thinking is too commonly called “wise” in philosophy and “schizophrenic” in psychiatry. Such aberrations do exist, and there is no reason whatsoever to think that philosophers are not exempt from them.
Neither did I say that Heidegger had no value at all. He does. As I noted, Ithink that his insistence that we consider the foundations of our thinking is particularly impo rtant, and his considerations of some specific topics have value. But he was not the wise man some people — only some — think he was.
Oops — Should have been : Such aberrations do exist, and there is no reason whatsoever to think that philosophers are exempt from them.