File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0309, message 118


Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 12:38:51 +0200
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: Godt, Wahrheit und Amerika


Cologne 14-Sep-2003

Anthony Crifasi schrieb  Fri, 12 Sep 2003 16:01:51 +0000:

>
> And did Heidegger use Husserl against him in order to save himself? He did
> with the being of the world precisely what I am doing concerning God.
> Heidegger took the being of the world at face value, applied
> phenomenological analysis to the being of the world despite Husserl's own
> EXPLICIT protests, and thereby circumvented Husserl's levelling of the being
> of the world in the phenomenological reduction. So whatever Heidegger
> himself may or may not have explicitly said about such encounters with God,
> such phenomena can also be taken at face value instead of just levelling
> them in the same manner that Husserl levelled the being of the world.
>
> -------------
>
> And what do you do when someone "looks around" and says, there's God, not in
> some spectacular burning bush or a pillar of fire, but in the "least of my
> brothers" on the streets of Calcutta (for example) - when someone like
> Mother Theresa "looks around" and sees that, what do you do? Level it by
> uniformly categorizing it along with atheistic encounters with the
> "non-existent godly," or take it at face value as a phenomenologist?
>
> ----------------------
>
> I'm not talking about anything "strange" or "creepy" (as Michael Eldred put
> it), like some supposed vision or miraculous burning bush. I'm simply
> talking about (if you believe that this part of the gospels is historically
> accurate) what Jesus himself said: "Whatever you do to the least of my
> brothers, you do to me." That is how Mother Theresa said she encountered God
> in Calcutta. A phenomenologist cannot just dogmatically assume that this
> type of encounter is not phenomenologically different from some atheistic
> encounter with a "non-existent godly." Nor should I even have to mention
> that a phenomenologist cannot characterize such encounters as some mere
> "subjective interpretation," since that is decidedly non-phenomenological
> analysis.

Anthony,

The epiphany of a god is a phenomenon, just as the voices heard by a mentally
ill person are a phenomenon, just as hearing a car pass by is a phenomenon. If
you are with me when the car passes by, we can both hear it and thus share the
phenomenon. If I tell you of the voices I am hearing, and you can't hear them,
then you just have to believe me and cannot directly share the unconcealedness
of this phenomenon with me. As evidence you have only my say-so. If Mother
Theresa speaks of encountering God in Calcutta, I can only believe her. The god
whom she encounters is mythologically founded. Without the Christian myth
casting the Christian God, there could be no encounter, just as for an
aboriginal tribe, the mountain ridge in the distance could not be a giant
sleeping lizard without the myth that casts the mountain range AS a sleeping
lizard (the apophantic AS which allows something to show up as what it is). An
encounter with a god or with a mountain range as a giant sleeping lizard can be
shared only through the respective myths that cast these possibilities and
through belief in these myths. Belief in a myth means to live in a certain
mythically cast historical world. You can only encounter God in the streets of
Calcutta if you have faith and you can only share this encounter with the
community of the faithful. The only way into faith is a leap (of the subject),
that is, unless it is inculcated from birth (into the non-subject) through the
heel of tradition.

The uncovering of the phenomenon of being itself is a different enterprise
altogether since it is not and cannot be based on belief. That is why it is a
contentious issue about which philosophers argue. The evidence for the
phenomenon is supposed to lie in the phenomena themselves and to be accessible
to each thinking human being directly, and not on the basis of taking someone's
(the Holy Scripture's or the tribal elder's) word for it.

The hiddenness of the phenonema of the being of beings or being itself can be
blamed on their blinding obviousness. Hegel says with regard to the former, "But
such a well-known thing is usually the most unknown. Thus, for instance, being
is a pure determination of thinking; it never occurs to us, however, to make the
'is' into an object of our contemplation". (Enz. I Para. 24 Zus.)


Michael
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> ----------------------
>
> This is not "a way out" of nihilism as Heidegger describes it. You are
> mistaking this for a traditional theology in which our essence is reduced to
> someTHING, such as a soul-substance or the like (thereby turning towards
> beings and away from the nothing). That is not how an encounter with God is
> analyzed phenomenologically, just as our encounter with Others is not
> phenomenologically explicated as two substances metaphysically meeting. To
> so analyze would be to try to escape nihilism in the sense Heidegger means -
> to turn away from the nothing by sinking into an interpretation of Dasein in
> terms of beings. A phenomenological interpretation of an encounter with God,
> however, would not have this problem.
>
> Anthony Crifasi
>




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