Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 11:34:49 +0000
From: Allen Scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Re: Language?


         Reply to:   Re: Language?

Henk van Tuijl wrote:

> >With all possible reservations. The following comes from secundary
>literature.
> >Barth repeatedly and strongly opposes the incorporation of
>Heidegger's Daseinsanalysis in theology. Nevertheless, he is in
>some ways closer to Heidegger than Bultmann. They both see language
>as having the structure of _aletheia_. The main difference is, of
>course, the content. For Barth the Word is the announcement of and
>at the same time the making-present of God. It is religious
>revelation.
> >In this context it is interesting to notice that Michael Staples
>refers to Steiner and Kovacs who reportedly suggest that Heidegger
>also might have been drenched in a theology of revelation. Rafael
>Capurro denies that this is has any influence on Heidegger's
>thinking about language. I am not so sure. Nevertheless, it is
>not such a big deal. Suppose there is a direct influence, even by
>Barth, whose _Grundfragen_ was published in 1935?

I agree, Henk.  The big deal is not whether or not there is a direct influence, but rather how proximate Heidegger's early work on hermeneutical phenomenology especially his way of reading the "sacred texts" of Greek philosophy, is to a "theology of revelation."  As I think I have suggested in other discussions on the list,  Heidegger's way of  "close reading" classical Greek philosophy,  especially in his lectures on Plato's Sophist and Aristotle, seems to me very much an attempt to build a way of practicing philosophy as a "religious"  way of life.  That is a way of life devoted ( he uses the word "Hingabe" a lot in the early twenties, which I understand as a kind of devotional stance towards a sacred textual object) to the study of these texts by way of realizing the fullest possibilities of the "Dasein within" ( an expression he uses in a letter to Elizabeth Blockman talking about his teaching and writing as a kind of sacred calling).  This devotional orientation towards a "sacred text" is, of course, very reminiscient of the practice of Torah study in rabbinic Judaism( Elizabeth Blockman was also Jewish, I believe) and in that same sense is a "theology of revelation," appropriate when the actual time of revelation has past, and what we have left is the verbal trace of the revelation left to us in a text-- a text which requires us to "re-trieve" its "revelation" by means of a devotional practice of reading and study.

And so when Daniel writes


> The
> philosophical questioning of language as Heidegger shows the way, is
> not to
> discover what language is, the thing language is, whether a system of
> signs
> or whatever, but to pursue one's own orientation to language, such
> that one
> intensifies one's own language-being,

and then Michael beomoans Daniel's observation:

>So I have fallen once again into the trap of asking after "things" in a
manner that perpetuates the tradition of such metaphysics. You just
can't take me anywhere.

I say where Daniel takes you is the only way to go and it's NOT metaphysics.  It's rather a way of "being philosophical" which is similar to some ways of "being theological" both of which have a sense that certain texts disclose themselves as texts of revelation.

I seem to be in a rather sermonic mood this morining.  Sorry.

Thanks,



Allen



> >Kindest regards,
>Henk
>
>
>
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>Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 22:04:50 +0200
>From: Henk van Tuijl <Henk.van.Tuijl-AT-net.HCC.nl>
>Subject: Re: Language?
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