Date: Fri, 07 Feb 1997 13:21:59 -0800
From: Michael Harrawood <harrawoo-AT-violet.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: "true believers"


Patrick.  I want to jump in here and get behind Tony Dowler's claims re
your last post on true believers.  It seems to me that there are a few
conflations going on in your account of certainty.  Most notably, there is
the hidden identification of certainty with zeal that I think runs through
your post (and which I also think many of your shorter declarative
sentences of the "This is that" order demonstrate perhaps more clearly than
you would wish):

>The spirit of inquiry negates belief.  Heidegger wants to deconstruct 
>both "belief" and "thinking"; 

and

>The question, as asked, is meaningless.  Belief 
>implies unbelief. To have belief means that you want to end 
>uncertainty by believing in something that transcends doubt.; 

and
 
>Certainty is eternity.  It is not in the temporal at all.  
>Hence, the best thing philosophy can do is bring doubt to belief, or 
>unbelief to faith.; 

and, most especially dogmatically:

>Faith is not a part of the self that wants belief to be "true."  
>Investigate it; examine the thinking that passes as "belief".  Then 
>see if true believers "belong" on any list.

I'm afraid that this account of "certainty" as "faith" flattens out the
many delicate distinctions and nuances of Heidegger's account of these
things, which, as Anthony suggests, are derived in large part from H's
engagement with late medieval and early-modern theology.  In Heidegger's
account, it is perfectly right for me to believe that in my hand there's a
hammer, because I can be certain of it.  Likewise, it is perfectly right
for me to move the desk out of my way as I enter the classroom while
knowing perfectly well both the "that" and the "what" of what I'm doing.
(These are Heidegger's own examples from B&T and History of the Concept of
Time).  As it will turn out, these forms of certainty are absolutely
related to time, through H's explanation of Husserl's Categorial Intuition.

This is a kind of certainty that was directly linked to theological
"knowledge" in an era when dictionaries began with "God" instead of
"Aardvark" -- check out Judson Boyce Allen's _The Ethical Poetic of the
Later Middle Ages_.  I think Heidegger's project is never very far from
this sensibility and all its implications: I think he wants philosophy to
explain how my certainty that I'm weilding a hammer is possible.  Our job
as readers would thus be to try and open up and explore these issues and
not to shut them down in advance of any real thinking.

The religiousness of the later Enlightenment, the stuff of Kierkegaard's
attacks on Christendom, is something else again.  True, Heidegger
reiterates most of the terms of K's attacks on the institution of
bourgeoise Christianity, but it would be a mistake to run that line of
thinking into his work on time, the logos and intuition.

Michael Harrawood



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