Reflections on Being and Time 1: Why Heidegger?

Since I’ve got no classes to teach this week, and since paper-grading and dissertation research don’t strike me as blog material, I’m going to do three posts on division one of Being and Time. For those who don’t know much philosophy, Heidegger’s 1927 book is a bear to read but stands as one of the texts that shook up Continental philosophy in the early twentieth century and made way for writers like Sartre and Derrida. My friend Michial Farmer and I are reading through this difficult book together, he for his comps and I because I’m using some theology in my dissertation that builds pretty directly off of Heidegger.

Heidegger was himself an atheist and for a span of time a member in good standing of the German Nazi party, yet he demonstrates time and again significant influence from Augustine and Kierkegaard among other Christian writers.? As I hope to show in these posts, I see in the shape of his philosophy not a system into which Christianity must shape slavishly itself but nonetheless a source for illuminating certain points of Christian thought. In particular his analysis of “world” as a philosophical category, his moral examination of everyday life (and his denial that he’s doing morality), and his drawing-upon of classical alternatives to modern correspondence theories of truth stand to be helpful to Christian thinkers, and thus my next three posts will explore those three ideas in Being and Time.? But first I should explain why I’m reading Heidegger at all and why I think that Christians would do well to do so.

One could reasonably ask why I’m so concerned with Christian uses of such philosophy–after all, when I read and teach Hume or Diderot, I have little interest in synthesizing them with Christian revelation.? Part of the answer, of course, is that among others, John Milbank and Graham Ward have undertaken what I see as helpful attempts to do post-Heideggerian (again, not slavishly conformist but creatively corrective) theology, and now that I’ve read this book, I can see some of what they’re seeing.? Another part of the answer is that, given Heidegger’s particular kind of atheism and affiliation with one of the most monstrous political regimes in recent history (I’m always torn on whether to call Nazi or Stalinist life more horrific), a reading of his philosophy necessarily participates in a debate about the relationship between writers’ biographies and the goodness or badness of their ideas.? As will become evident soon enough, I tend towards the side of that debate that would allow for bad people’s ideas to be true, something that tends towards a bodiless idealism if I go too far but ultimately, I think, more fair in a universe in which a good God can make even Balaam’s ass to speak truth.

Theologically, I also would draw an analogy from Israel’s history (and at the same time implicitly critique a common reading of Romans, but that’ll come in a moment).? Ancient kingdoms imagined their gods in terms not dissimilar to the ways that we moderns imagine our relationships with our philosophies: they were in a zero-sum game, and if one kingdom defeated another in battle, that meant a corresponding defeat for the conquered kingdom’s deity or deities.? So if the Moabites took on the Edomites and took over their cities, then Chemosh, by the theories of the day, would have also defeated Moloch.? One of the many theological and ethical revolutions of the Israelite prophets was to situate their own God not in that contest but above it. So when Assyria marched armies on Samaria, according to Isaiah, those idolatrous soldiers were not the bearers of some foreign god fighting against YHWH in a pitched battle; on the contrary, Isaiah says that they are the agents of YHWH himself, punishing wayward nations, including Israel, and woe to Assyria should its king become so arrogant as to set himself up as the Morning Star who sits above the heavens.? (If that sounds familiar, look at Isaiah 14 and for a moment try not to let John Milton into your head.)? And in the ensuing chapters and centuries, the theology got even more revolutionary: when Jerusalem falls to the goyim and they’re taken from the land that YHWH promised, this is not any kind of defeat but a lesson for Israel, and after a spell, a new oracle comes to Israel saying not that reinforcements have arrived in the grand struggle of gods but that Israel’s punitive sentence is over.? (If that sounds familiar, look at Isaiah 40.? I still know the text of Isaiah better than any of the prophets other than Jonah, and I have Chris Heard to thank for that.)? In other words, when the visible Israel seems to have lost out, often the case is that down the pike, for those looking down the pike, comes a new kind of Israel, perhaps even an anointed one of Israel.? In fact, in the Christian New Testament Paul picks up this line of reasoning when he tells the Christians in Rome that, although vengeance is ultimately the Lord’s and that they should not take up arms, nonetheless the godless Roman magistrates also take the sword from the Lord, and not in vain but to punish evildoers.? So although they still stand as an empire tempted to arrogance (and few empires did arrogance better than the Romans), nonetheless they play a role in God’s scheme of things not identical to the Church’s but nonetheless ordained.

So where has Heidegger gone in all of this?? As I read the history of philosophy, Heidegger is in the intellectual sphere one of those people who tears down philosophical kingdoms.? (Nietzsche and Marx did their share as well, let the record show.)? What Descartes and Kant and Hegel constructed they did with the idea that the human mind, whether that mind be a detached eye or a manifold that categorizes phenomena or the world’s apparatus for thinking about world’s self, was ultimately intelligible through a lens of radical, secularizing doubt.? While Nietzsche and Heidegger are no Christians, nonetheless they call radically into question the metanarratives (that word, of course, comes later in the game) that would elevate universal–sometimes mathematical, sometimes not–reasoning and purportedly eliminate the need for particular experiences, particular articulations, and especially particular moments of revelation. ?At the end of division one of Being and Time?Heidegger does say that true philosophy needs to eliminate the last vestiges of Christian theology (and I’ll get to that on Thursday, I promise), but along the way he’s broken down the assumptions that Descartes and Kant used to reduce the rich theology of the Church to a flat theism.

So in the next few days, as I reflect on a few high points of Being and Time, I invite Christians who view Lent as a season of repentance ?to follow Merold Westphal’s lead in Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism?and consider these philosophers’ texts as a sort of intellectual wilderness in which the Devil tempts the faithful with those idols that promise good things but ultimately stand empty. With Heidegger’s help smashing the idols, perhaps faithful minds will find more space, in the absence of Descartes’s and Kant’s systems, to love God.