Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 18:02:48 +0200
Subject: Re:  Knowing the Ontological?
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 18 October 1998

Henk van Tuijl schrieb:
> Do you imply that the American Indians from the plains 
> do or did not have a religion? Or that they have or 
> had a relgion in which the question of Being and 
> beings does or did not play role? 

Henk,
Of course the American Indians have a religion, as do all peoples. The sense of 
the ‘binding’ in the religion (from L. ‘religare’, to bind back), however, can 
vary widely, i.e. not all religions bind in the sense of the Jewish religion as 
a submission to the law laid down by the one and only god. 

All religions also have a kind of cosmology, at least in the sense of narrating 
a story about the world, how it arose, its order, etc. In this sense, all 
religions provide an answer to the ‘question of beings’ in an ontic sense.

But no religion explicitly poses the question of being, which would imply asking 
the peculiarly Greek question “ti to on;” With Parmenides and Heraclitus the 
question of being is posed in these thinkers concern with _to einai_ and _ho 
logos_ resp. The closest that any religion comes to these questions is probably 
the Christian gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the _logos_...”, 
which also owes something to the Greeks. But even John’s gospel is not 
philosophical questioning of being as such. 

By the way, thanks very much for the reference to Foti's articles on Moerike, 
Trakl, Rilke, Hoelderlin and Celan published under the title "Heidegger and the 
Poets" by Humanities Press, New-Jersey 1995, in the series Philosophy and 
Literary Theory.

Yours truly,
Michael
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