Summary Post of Division One of Being and Time
Division Two Posts
I remember well the final exam to my Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophy class at Milligan College. ?It was a take-home exam, and our task therein was to write a letter to a fictional elder of a fictional Stone-Campbell congregation who was concerned about Milligan’s teaching pagan philosophers to young Christians. ?I remember that, on the day our final was supposed to happen, we all met at the professor’s office and handed him our letters, and he promptly told us to load up in cars so that he could treat us to pizza.? I like pizza.? But even before that, I remember attacking that letter (which, I realize now, was a pretty sophisticated bit of college pedagogy) with a fervor that usually didn’t surface when I took final exams; this one was personal.
That was 1997. ?Twelve years later, having started to play the role of Assistant Professor, I still find myself articulating defenses of the liberal arts generally and philosophy in particular when I’m around church folks, and Christian-era atheists like Heidegger are topics of those conversation more often than even the Greeks. ?The worry is not insignificant: if education for the Christian consists at least partly in imitation of saints, and if philosophies that concern “the rudiments of the world” can be deceitful (Colossians 2:8), then one should be careful. ?So whenever I address these questions, as I do now, I take them very seriously.
I’ve said before (and the picture of Erasmus in the corner agrees) that I’m a Christian humanist by disposition. ?I think of Plato and Aristotle, of Sophocles and Aeschylus, as my teachers as much as I think of Augustine and Aquinas or of Marlowe and Shakespeare. ?I think that the gift of language is common to humanity, and I think that disciplined use of that language is not limited to Christians.? This far, Calvin’s Institutes agree with me.? Where I differ, as far as I can tell, is that when when I venture into the Christian era, I can see certain benefits in artists and thinkers who do not confess Christ.? I treat them basically the way I treat the Greeks and Romans, situating them inside the salvation-history of Christian theology but still looking for the best of what their dimmed-by-sin-but-not-extinguished intellectual gifts can offer.? And to borrow a bit from Augustine (I can’t remember whether it’s from the De Doctrina or from the Confessions, but it’s definitely an Augustinian allegory), I’ve always thought of classical, pre-Christian learning and Christian-era secular learning as something akin to the gold that the Hebrews plundered from Egypt in the Exodus: God gave us treasures not from His chosen witnessing people, and with that treasure one can build a golden calf, or one can adorn the Tabernacle.? Like the gold from Egypt, secular learning’s potential for good is precisely what makes its potential for harm so great.
So what about Heidegger in particular? ?I’ve tried to point to some good uses a Christian might have for him as I’ve gone along, but once again I’ve got to tip my hat to Michial Farmer, my Existentialist Calvinist friend, for reminding me that the contours of existentialism go all the way back to Augustine, who realized in clear and compelling ways that we mortals, bound by original sin and limited by our mortality, by definition can live in the world in certain ways but not others, that our best way of being in the world is faithful humility, not the dynamic magnanimity of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Although Heidegger (like Sartre after him) does not take the step of faith (or leap, if you prefer, Michial) to saying how eschatology might inform the ways that we live together, nonetheless Being and Time offers in very powerful (if not always clearly written) terms a philosophical vocabulary that takes into account the radical particularity of any given human life, framing the universal claims of the sciences not as useless (as the straw-man postmodernist sometimes does) but certainly as deferred, secondary to the actual world in which we actually live. ?Such does not take anything away from the sciences, and it lends some humility to our pursuits as scientists.
Likewise, although Heidegger was himself an atheist, he writes as a humble sort of atheist, insisting that his analysis articulates truthfully the character of being-towards-death at the same time that he concedes philosophy’s inability, unaugmented by revelation, to say anything beyond. ?Notably absent from Being and Time are the bits of cheap psychology and reductionism that characterize so much of the atheist writing that I’ve read. ?Heidegger provides the sort of opportunity within which, with a good deal of prudence and a heavy dose of humility, Christians might actually encourage our atheist friends to be better atheists. ?If existential being and scientific inquiry are as they say they are, then Heidegger seems to stop at just about the right spot to avoid wandering into a-theology and making theological claims.? Would that some of the noisier public atheists would try the same.
Being and Time is a blamed hard book. ?Michial and I took the entire spring 2009 semester and a good hunk of the summer to get through it together. ?There were few passages wherein Michial’s Kierkegaard knowledge didn’t help me understand, and I even got to help Michial in a spot or two with my Descartes and Hegel lore. ?That said, I can’t muster any regret for having slogged through it, and as a parting encouragement to my fellow Christian humanists (even those of you who have an image to maintain and can’t call yourselves that) to keep reading books that are beyond you. ?I’ll go a step farther and say that those of us who are teachers should encourage our students to do the same.
Gold isn’t light lifting, after all.
The fun thing as I go through my comps is to see the way that Christian theologians adapt and/or reject Heidegger and Sartre. Barth and Tillich are the obvious candidates, but you should sit down some afternoon with Gabriel Marcel’s “The Philosophy of Existentialism,” which is where he takes the things he thinks are wrong with “Being and Time/Nothingness” and subjects them to his own Catholic worldview.
Nice series both. As I mentioned in my first post in this series, quite thought provoking. I am grateful for people like you are not only willing to read these books (I tried to read Kant once. I thought I would rather put my head through a brick wall). But i am as or more grateful that you are willing to share your thoughts.
I aspire to Heidegger. Right now it is all I can do to wrap my head around Gunton’s short book, Enlightenment and alienation: an essay toward a trinitarian theology, with all his references to Locke, Berkeley, Coleridge, et. al, on how we learn. And then all the (other?) reading I am doing on universal, realism vs nominalism (talk about a misnomered discussion!). It has been interesting filtering your thoughts on Heidegger through that lens.
Joe