Reviews for Heidegger and Christianity

The average rating for Heidegger and Christianity based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-03 00:00:00 Taube Import Caputo's Demythologizing Heidegger (1993) takes a more critical stance toward Heidegger than did his previously published The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (1978). I take it that during the 15 years in between these two publications, Caputo's thought matured from a youthful, starry-eyed Heideggerianism to a more postmodern, deconstructed post-Heideggerianism (to be found in the likes of Lyotard, Levinas, and chiefly Derrida). The main thesis of this book is that Heidegger needs to be demythologized. As is now commonly known, Heidegger was a Nazi. For those who have spent any time reading Heidegger, though, it is hard not to be captivated by the depth of his thinking, his originality, his genius. He is a massive figure, and his influence upon the 20th and 21st centuries cannot be understated. From his analyses of human "factical life" as Being-in-the-world and Being-with-one-another, to his reflections on authenticity, death, and care, to his poetical writings about dwelling with things, to his destruction of philosophy since its genesis, he ultimately changed the way we think about ourselves as humans. But, God help us, he was a National Socialist. How could this be? How could a person who wrote such amazing books be affiliated with such terrible hatred, such evil? This is the question that Caputo takes up in this book. He refrains, unlike many commentaries, from analyzing the person Heidegger. His purpose, rather, is to provide a close reading of Heidegger's writings. Within such writings, Caputo seeks to locate the "mythologizing" tendency of his thought. Heidegger, especially from the 1930s onward, became obsessed with what Caputo calls the "Myth of Being." He became captivated by a Greco-Germanic myth about Germany's deep responsibility to heed the call of Being. What Caputo thinks we need is a demythologizing of Heidegger. We need to mythologize differently. In the place of the myth of Being's call to the great nation of Germany, Caputo -- following Levinas and Derrida -- writes about a myth of Justice. Heidegger's myth hears the call of Being, but it is deaf to an equally primordial call (a more primordial call) of Justice that issues from one's encounter with the Other. Heidegger's myth of Being is a noteworthy one, an explosive story that recounts the oblivion of Being, Being's withdrawal from us in the modern age. It alerts us to danger of the essence of technology, the danger of exploiting the world in the name of our technology, our will to power. Heidegger's project, in my estimate, attempts to awaken us to our Being, to alienate us from ourselves long enough to reveal the mystery of Being. He writes poetically about the most simple "things" -- like the jug which holds wine, the blessing of the earth's vine and the sky's rain, enjoyed by mortals in libation to the gods -- and his authorship, at its best, alienates us from our "inauthentic" existence long enough for us to see the mystery in which we live and move and have our being: Being's disclosure (dis-closure). What does this mean? I find Heidegger to be most helpful when he is talking about concrete ways of Being. Think of the carpenter. The carpenter is not merely a being which connects disparate pieces of wood, is not merely a subject taking different objects (pieces of wood, beings) and attaching them to one another to make a third object (being) which is a mere conglomerations of little objects (like a chair, for instance). No! The carpenter is attentive, rather, to the shapes slumbering within the wood, and allows the wood to "Be," to show itself, in itself, through the chair. The chair is a "thing that things." And insofar as we reduce the chair to an object created by a subject for such and such a purpose, we are overlooking the Being of the chair, its standing-forth of itself. This is the essence of technology: the way that technology utilizes beings for its own purposes, objectifying them, forgetting their Being, reducing them. The task, for Heidegger, is to let the being Be, that is, to let the being stand-forth of itself in its Being. The essence of technology, which is the oblivion of Being, is to forget Being, to reduce beings to whatever purpose they serve us -- and then to throw them away once we are no longer interested in them. Everything becomes mere "standing reserve" to be used when we want, stuff to be used whenever we see fit, and tossed to the wayside when we've lost purpose for it. One can see this, I think, everywhere today in our technological age. It is less of something we do and more of a way that we are Being. This story, the story of our forgetfulness of Being, is a heart-wrenching one. It is interesting. To be sure. It is a much-needed myth, I think, one that wakes us up to the mystery of things, to the way the "world worlds," to the call of Being in things. But it is not the only myth, says Caputo. And, in fact, taken at face-value, it is a truly dangerous (better, deadly) myth. Insofar as Heidegger's myth of Being neglects the Other, the call of the Other who is laid low, who is "otherwise than Being" (because the Other is too malnourished to stand-forth on its own) his myth fails to hear an equally primordial call, the call of one's neighbor, the ethical (Levinas) call. Heidegger's thinking must be challenged, demythologized, in the name of another myth: the myth of Justice. Heidegger's myth of Being forgets everything which is not Greco-Germanic, everything which does not stand in its Being (a-letheia in Greek). What about those, we must ask, who are weak, who are though as nothing, the least of these who cannot stand in the shining of Being, much less stand at all! What about the hungry and dispossessed, those who are as good as nothing (nihil), death, non-Being? This is the real rub, for Caputo, against Heidegger: he is too Greek, not jewgreek enough. The Judeo-Christian scriptures speak, chiefly, about Justice, about the neighbor, those who are pathetic, cast out, weak, and hungry. Heidegger's myth of Being excludes all of this, excludes Justice, excludes those who are "otherwise than Being" (Levinas). Caputo makes this (convincing) argument against Heidegger, on philosophical grounds, by a close reading of Heidegger's texts themselves. For those interested in Heidegger, it is a must-read.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-08 00:00:00 Gayatri Sharma Like many fields, philosophy consists of primary sources (Heidegger, Husserl, et al.) and secondary sources, scholars who comment on primary sources by providing criticism, analysis, extrapolation, etc. As one might expect, it's usually the primary sources who are the most interesting to read, who are the most worthwhile; secondary sources are usually a supplement, at best. There are, however, a few curious exceptions, thinkers who technically do not write their 'own' philosophy but work entirely in the orbit/sphere of primary sources, and who are nonetheless precisely as brilliant as any of the more famous philosophers. In the late twentieth century, I think it basically comes down to (for continental philosophy) Robert Pippin and John Caputo. Demythologizing Heidegger is the best 'secondary' source about Heidegger yet published, I think; obviously a tiny bit outdated now that we have more of Heidegger's lectures to work with, but the brilliance of this book can hardly be overstated -- entire fields of Heidegger Studies can be traced back to these essays.