File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0309, message 29


From: "Henk van Tuijl" <hvtuijl-AT-xs4all.nl>
Subject: Re: God and Philosophy
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 22:01:36 +0200



Allen,

You wrote:

> The thinking of the gods dwells in teorein, as does the thinking of 
> Men.  The way someone put it,
> "The gods come to earth to observe and be observed."    Teorein as 
> the highest,  most fully realized, most fully integrated thoughts of 
> the One are where the spectatorship of gods and men comes together in 
> language.  Without a commitment to the romantic possibility of making 
> this connection, thinking and language simply cannot go far enough. 
> And so Heidegger sees philosophy and theology as arising out of the 
> same motivation.

Could it be that the "same motivation"
is the "same ground" - i.e. 
phenomenology and theology arising out 
of Dasein?

> Thanks for the citation.  I'm not surprised that Heidegger looks to the
> romantically contexted passages in the Phaedrus to bring this idea out.
> I think traditional liturgy and ritual are intended (at least in 
> Judaism) as a way
> of retrieving/repeating the "how" of "authentic historicity."  In 
> Judasim, those
> are the moments in which God and Man meet, moments which can only be 
> repeated in
> their "how."  I sense similar attempts at retrieval in Hesiod and 
> Homer, especially the
> refinements and revisions in the latter through the creative sayings, 
> and re-sayings
> by the bards who kept on trying to get Homer right ( the 
> Homerikoteros).  The same
> urge to make the language perfect is present in the revisions of the 
> Pentateuch.  This is how
> philosophy dwells poetically as well as theologically.
 
It reminds me of the story I once was
very fond of.

A child was pushing an empty baby-car 
up and down a courtyard. When asked 
what it was doing, the child explained 
its behavior by answering that the 
Child Jesus was in the car.

Ritual does not answer but raises 
questions. So do the answers to these
questions. 

The example seems to make clear - at
least for me - that there is _nothing_ 
in the ritual itself and that the 
explanation of _nothing_ cannot be 
anything but a reference to tradition.

Could this be a theorein in the
Heideggerian/Platonic sense? 

Regards,
Henk
     
  

     
  
 


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