Hardly the Last Word

Once Heidegger has established anticipation (the engagement of particulars in the upcoming moment as a being having-been part of a robust world) as the character of authentic resoluteness, the next logical step is to talk about how that resoluteness might relate to history as a philosophical category.

“Only that entity which is ‘between’ birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking” (425). ?So Heidegger summarizes the being of Dasein, and from there he starts to trace out what, if anything, Dasein can retrieve of “the past” that he denied at first.

The double meaning of “the past” is the key: on one hand, the life of the agora in Socrates’s Athens is not meaningfully part of anyone’s having-been existence in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. ?On the other, people living even in 2009 have ready-to-hand translations of Plato, can behold as present-at-hand the ruins of ancient Athens, and might even learn enough Attic Greek to make it part of our equipment for thinking. ?So even as the molecules in the marble in Greek temples’ columns persist (some of them anyway), the continuities that actually mean something to Dasein are still rooted in our being. ?Such is not to say that there are no objective columns or even that human beings cannot say anything about objective columns; it is to say that any statements about the columns will necessarily be framed by the particular beings of those human beings saying something about them.

Although the columns, I imagine, are something to behold (I’ve never been), questions with some more pertinence for us Christians have to do with traditioned communities, and Heidegger has something to say about them. ?Everyone, maintains Heidegger, because we are thrown into existence, is part of some kind of “handing down” of custom and tradition, and most people, he maintains (sounding like Kierkegaard), live among those traditions for the most part accidentally. ?In other words, everyone faces the changes and events of fortune, but most people, because they do not face the particulars of those events resolutely, ?”can ‘have’ no fate” (436).

So “having” a fate for Heidegger means taking a stand on one’s being, locating one’s self in a history and owning one’s cooperations with and resistances against the particulars of every tradition. ?Once again, Heidegger avoids passing judgment on the content of any given person’s ownership; he simply says that the prior condition for good ownership is ownership itself. ?To be loyal to the best of one’s traditions, he insists, is to repeat authentically, to do as a member does on purpose. ?Such “repeating of that which is possible does not bring again something which is ‘past’, nor does it bind the ‘Present’ bck to that which has already been ‘outstripped’” (437). ?Such repetition, of course, has-(already)-been part of every Dasein’s Being before that Dasein becomes able to take a stand on it, so the differrence is not the repetition but the stand.

This has probably been the easiest section to translate into Christian thought. ?As people who worship a man who lived, died, and rose in a particular place and a particular time, we Christians are historians to the extent that we meditate on the real Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah of Israel. As people who have received and who pass down traditions from generation in the face of persecution (ancient and modern), apostasy (ancient and modern), heresy (ancient and modern), and scorn from the educated (ancient and modern), we Christians know full well that our Being as Christians is not of our own making, despite some people’s conversion “testimonies” that try to minimize the work of our forebears. ?And because we claim (rightly, I think) artists such as Dante, Milton, Eliot, and O’Connor, we know that loyalty to the Christian Way as often as not means taking a stand on things that das Man, even Christian das Man, would disregard or even oppose.

I honestly don’t think that such taking-a-stand necessarily happens first, best, or most notably among academics like me. ?I think that we do our best work when we keep our eyes open and our mouths still, watching and listening for the stories of the saints who teach us to be Christians in history and to own the history of the Church. ?Our training is not in sainthood (there’s no Ph.D in sainthood), but God has, through channels as sullied as anything else in human history, the training to articulate what saints do. ?Such is not to say that there are no saints in classrooms, just that there’s no necessary connection.

That tangent aside, tomorrow’s post will attempt to put some kind of closing comment on this little romp through Being and Time. After that, I don’t know what I’ll write about, but I’ll get to that when I get to that.

by ngilmour