MARTIN HEIDEGGER: IN MEMORIAM

...This accord cannot be grasped without first raising and settling the question: whence does Being as such (not merely beings as beings) receive its determination...

...He himself once described the initial experience...

...Metaphysics for him deals with beings (what-is) and therefore rests upon~but does not explore---the mystery of Being that is their ground...

...Eliot), and home for Martin Heidegger was Messkirch, a little Schwabian village near the Swiss border, where he was born...

...Finally, he is led to leave home and seek the "heavenly fire" (i.e., Being as such) of the Southland...

...It is as a consequence of this experience that "technology" becomes possible...

...the essential finitude of the experience (man's existence itself, as open to Being, is circumscribed from the beginning by limit, the absolute limit of human existence being "death"), etc...

...The details of the early steps of the journey seem less important at the moment: the essential role of man's existence (Dasein) in the experience of Being (for only man can say "is...

...How give it a proper name...

...Thus he becomes "at home" at home in nearness to the Source...

...By this he meant more than "technology...

...In a special way, A-l~theia intrigued him--"truth," yes, but in the sense of "non-concealment," hence "liberation" from darkness and in that sense "freedom" in its origins...

...That there were "compromises" along the way there is no doubt, but there is no doubt, either, that after his resignation he was regarded with suspicion by the Nazis, and that the many courses on Nietzsche that followed constituted a subtle, but genuine, confrontation with Nazi ideology...

...By all accounts, Heidegger's end was serene, and it is reported that at his own request he was buried with a Roman Catholic religious ceremony...

...In the early years, he sometimes even affected peasant dress in the classroom...

...Less well known is the fact that he accepted the position chiefly at the importunity of his University colleagues who hoped that his prestige would enable them to resist the invasion of the University by Nazi ideology...

...It is understandable, too, how faith would seem alien to thought if, indeed, "the unconditional nature of faith and the questioning character of thought are two different spheres that are a chasm apart...

...Hence his fascination with poetry...

...Those who admired his genius, learned much from his efforts and honored him for his fidelity to his quest - - f o r his own indefatigable readiness to wait---can only respect the silence of that moment...

...In retrospect, however, it is understandable that a personal God in the traditional sense would become more and more problematic for him as he probed further the nature of Being as different from beings, even if one of these beings was thought of (e.g., in metaphysics) as "supreme...

...Hflderlin was not just one poet among the rest who exemplified a certain theory of poetry, but the "poet of the poet" who articulated in lyric language the whole process of poetizing...

...Understandable, yes--but not entirely acceptable to all...

...the role of time in ~he process (for beings "are" inasmuch as they come-to-presence, hence, comport past-future, present, the dimensions of time...

...Martin's church behind the castle, and when he wrote in "The Pathway," "slowly, almost hesitatingly, eleven strokes of the hour sound in the night...

...The early steps in his search for the meaning of Being took him first to the Roman Catholic seminary in Freiburg, then to a brief postulancy in the Society of Jesus, before he returned to the University of Freiburg to commit himself definitively to philosophy...

...A secondary reason was the personal hope that he would have an opportunity to reorganize the faculties according to principles that were suggested in his inaugural lecture, "What is Metaphysics...

...His "Collected Works," already partially translated into more than 50 languages, will be published in 57 volumes...

...On the contrary, "only a god can save us...

...What is its meaning...

...We must wait for a new revelation from a god, then, but what kind of a god would this be...

...Through meadow, hills, woods, and moor it comes at last to the castle wall...

...At any rate, he seemed much more at home with simple folk of Messkirch than with his academic peers...

...What matters now is only the fact that Heidegger's own complexities developed out of an attempt to articulate the Simple, i.e., the simple experience of Being, with which alone he felt at home...

...To be sure, the task itself was not simple...

...Again, if one takes the "questioning character" of thought to mean (as he suggested) a "willing to know"wwhere "willing" means authentic "resoluteness," and "to know" means "to be able to stand forth in the truth," [i.e.,] "the manifestation of being"wthen is such a thought really separated by an unabridgeable chasm from faith, if this be taken as a resolute openness to self-manifesting Mysterywand "all in the waiting" (T...

...His search for the meaning of Being, then, was both an undermining (in that sense a "destruction") of Metaphysics and a founding of it on its essential ground...

...At the age of 18 (in his last year at the Gymnasium in Constance), a priest-friend had given him a copy of Franz Brentano's doctoral dissertation, On the Mani]old Sense o/ Being in Aristotle (1862...

...Not a personal being, it would seem, in any sense that is given to the word "GOd" in Western thought...

...In a sense, he never left it...

...The pa~way guards rich memories for the thinker, "the early games and first choices...

...Only his eyes--piercing, probing, relentlessly unsatisfied eyes--betrayed the depth, restlessness and rigor of the tireless quest to articulate what the peasant in him experienced as the simple nearness of home...

...In the woods he used to fashion toy boats out of the bark of the trees that his father felled and send them on make-believe journeys long before he knew what it was like to eraFATHER W~L]AM J. ~CH*RDSON, S.J., is pro]essor el philosophy at Fordham University and the author of Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought...

...It cannot be resolved here...

...Then there was the ancient oak sheltering a rough-hewn bench, where, as a university student, he would read the great thinkers of the past until, wearied by their complexities, he would put them aside to find comfort in the pathway itself that spoke to him only of . . . well, "the Simple...

...The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a g o d . . , we cannot bring him forth by our thinking...

...In the poems, "Homecoming" and "Re-collection," in particular, HiSlderlin articulates an experience that paralleled Heidegger's own...

...The Pathway," translated by Thomas F. O'Meara, O.P., Listening, II [1967], 88-91...

...He described the modem era as the epoch of "technicity" (die Technik...

...They describe the process by which the poet learns to poetize...

...The pathway leads from the courtyard gate over to Ehnried and back...

...It was the Simple that never ceased to captivate him--the primal Source, the silent Origin out of which all things emerge into light and announce themselves as what they are...

...This meditation on the nature of language became a means of access to the eminently Question-able, i.e., Being-asLogos, the Simple...

...What is clear is that Heidegger became Rector of the University of Freiburg in May, 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power, and resigned his rectorate prematurely the following February 'because of a conflict with the government over administrative (not ideological) matters...

...the value of phenomenology as a method of exploring it (for phenomenology lets beings reveal themselves as what they "are," i.e., in their Being...

...Home is where one starts from" (T.S...

...In an interview given in 1966 to the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, Heidegger declared that philosophy as such in its traditional sense was of no avail in achieving this insight...

...In all probability, Heidegger was using the word in the sense that it appears in the HNdedin interpretations, i.e., as a highly specified manifestation of Being as "the Holy...

...The lonely searcher found one fellow traveler along the way, the poet Friederieh H61dedin...

...For Heidegger, then, thinking and poetizinglnot technical achievementmbecame the "standard measure" of genuinely human activity...

...It is a brief pastoral meditation of the mature fhinker as he treads again a path back home that he first came to know as a boy...

...Let it suffice to recall that Heidegger's beginnings were deeply rooted in that tradition...

...What we know for certain is only that it was a return to where he started from, after the long origin here...

...He queried the early Greeks and found them speaking of Physis, Logos, A-l~theia, and each of these terms he meditated in turn...

...Martin's Church with its ancient bell "on whose ropes boys' hands have been rubbed hot...

...Having returned home from his journey ("Homecoming"), he can then re-trieve ("Re-collection") his experience of the heavenly fire as filtered now through the beings around him...

...bark on a journey that would leave all familiar shores behind...

...But by the same token, Being itself (as revealing and concealing itself in this experience) is all the more easily overlooked, so that man remains oblivious of his essential at-homeness with Being (the Simple...

...Then there was another kind of complication in his life: the ill-starred association with German politics in 1933, for which many of his critics never forgave him...

...Rather, technicity for him designated the manner in which Being manifests itself in the present epoch of history in such fashion that man experiences the beings with which he deals (including himself) as objects that can be submitted to his control...

...Martin's Church has struck midnight, and "with the last stroke the stillness has become yet more s t i l l . . . The Simple has become simpler...

...If it began with a phenomenologieal analysis of man's existence in its finitude (as Being-unto-death), it had to move to a confrontation with philosophy, i.e., with "ontology," or metaphysics as he understood it (from Plato to Nietzsche) in the philosophical tradition of the West...

...Like H~ilderlin thus interpreted, Heidegger announced to contemporary man as victim of technicity the need to become "at home" at home near his Source, i.e., Being...

...When, how, and why his disaffection from ecclesiastical Christianity began is, on the basis of presently available evidence, a matter of speculation...

...When he finally began to teach at Freiburg, his interest in religion did not wane--in 1920-21, for example, he offered courses entitled, "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," and "Augustine and Neo-Platonism...

...The task involved, too, a critique of contemporary culture, which he saw to be oblivious of Being...

...Soon the correspondence of man with the Simple in the form of thought was paralleled by the correspondence of man with Being-as-Logos, i.e., aboriginal Language, in the form of "poetizing" (Dichten...

...Particularly in the present state of man's dereliction, only a new revelation of Being can "save" man...

...In his youth, the poet grows up in familiar surroundings at home...

...May his knowing serenity indeed prove a gate to the eternal...

...I I I I I I I MART|N HEIDECGER: IN MEMORIAM WII.T.TAM J. RICHARDSON More at home with simple folk Eighty-six years old and ailing, the old man went back home to die...

...1929), and grounded in his conception of the unity of the sciences as founded in the experience of Being...

...Fascinated by beings, yet still unaware that it is their Source that he longs to experience more proroundly, the poet remains in-at-ease and unsatisfied...

...Then along the castle wall the pathway continues until it reaches again the courtyard gate to end where it began...

...S. Eliot...

...His poetic task is to bring this whole experience into words through authentic poetizing...

...To be sure, the first thing that he knew to call it was "Being," .but that was at the beginning of his way...

...It demanded, therefore, a type of thinking that was far more fundamental, i.e., "foundation," than metaphysics, thus understood, could achieve...

...At the same time, he insisted that this new awareness is not something that man can arrive at through his own resources...

...But there he is almost burnt up by its rays and soon learns that Commonweal: 17 he is not meant for sheer exposure to the blazing fire of Being but must return to the shade of the homeland, where beings (by their finitude) temper its heat...

...The old bell . . . shakes under the blows of the hour's hammer whose dark-droll face no one forgets," apparently there was recorded here something of an experience at home that he himself never forgot...

...The pathway's message awakens a sense which loves freedom and, at a propitious place, leaps over sadness into serenity . . . . This knowing serenity is a gate to the eternal . . . . The message makes us at home after a long origin here...

...So now the bell of St...

...How can they be brought into comprehensible accord...

...Allegations are many, facts are few~nor is this the place to review them...

...I translate: 'A being [Seiendes: what-is] becomes manifest (i.e., with regard to its Being) in many ways.' Latent in this phrase is the question that determines the way of my thought: what is the pervasive, simple, unified determination of Being that permits all of its multiple meanings...

...Behind the castle itself rises St...

...7 lanuary 1977:18...

...But these were all complexitieslwhat mattered was the Simple (i.e., Being...

...On the title page of this work, Brentano quotes Aristotle's phrase: to on legetai pollachos...

...The full circle of that quest finds a kind of selfexpression in a little-known essay with which he once commemorated (1949) the death of the Messkirch composer, Conradin Kreutzer...

...That is why contemporary man finds ,himself so uprooted and homeless ("alienated") in the world of objects, despite his technological achievements...

...Is the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition no more than a being like the rest--even though designated "supreme...

...Eliot...

...For him, there was only the relentless going of the way, i.e., the pathway whose message spoke only of . . . the Simple...

...At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him...

...But they can hope . . . that "the inexhaustible power of the Simple" (Al~theia, the Logos) finally rendered up its proper name to him, so as to "surprise" him--and "free" him~in the end...

...The short, squat figure, the rotund, mustached, somber face, the heavy hands, the rusty voice, the long, slow, stride--all belonged more to the peasant lumbering toward his morning chores than the university professor striding to the podium to address an audience as wide as the world...

...This much set him on his way, and even though he tired of the term "Being" ("that long traditional, highly ambiguous, now worn-out word"), the question itself would pursue him to the end...

...he steadfastly refused to ally their efforts to his own...

...The end is where we start from" (T.S...

...However this may be, Being as Heidegger experienced it, is not God as Heidegger understood him, and although he respectedwand encouraged--the efforts of theologians who found inspiration in his thought (e.g., Bultmann, Rahner, Macquarrie, et al...

...Surely to identify him with the causa sui of German rationalism, as Heidegger seemed to do, is to undersell the efforts of an entire tradition of thought that presumed to speak of God only by analogy and developed a whole "negative theology" as a result...

...Intrigued by the beings about him and yearning for deeper communion with them, he nonetheless fails to realize that the source of nearness to them is Being itself as their Source---Source that is known only through the beings that spring from it, while it, itself, withdraws within them...

...Then there was Logos, the original "gathered-togetherness," i.e., cohesion, of beings that found its correlative response in the logos, i.e., language of man...

...Was it, then, an end or a beginning...

...How all of this crystallized into 7 January 1977:16 the major opus, Being and Time (1927), is for philosol:~hers to explain...

...To be sure, such language is easily misleading and raises the whole thorny issue of the relationship between Heidegger's experience of Being and the GOd of the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West...

...His father had been sexton of St...