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| Karl Rahner, S.J. |
"There is a thinking more rigorous than the conceptual."
(Martin Heidegger)
(Martin Heidegger)
Martin Heidegger's 1966 essay "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" creates a "clearing" (Lichtung) that does not conceive of thinking as merely the utilitarian activity of asking a question and receiving an "answer" (a "propositional statement about a matter at stake," as Heidegger puts it). Thinking performs this task, to be sure, but should not be understood as limited to it. Heidegger was not a pragmatist.
Heidegger wrote this essay as part of his career-spanning attempt to understand the "cardinal problem" that he originally presented in his first and best known 1927 book Sein Und Zeit (Being And Time): the question of the meaning of Being in general. Beginning in 1930 and continuing to his death in 1976, Heidegger attempts to begin at the beginning again (and again) to phenomenologically examine this problem ("To the things themselves!") by turning the "task of thinking" from interrogating the metaphysics destructured in Being And Time, to inhabiting the poetics demarcated in his later 1972 collection of essays On Time And Being (in which "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" was published).
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| On Time And Being |
As a modern commentary on the ancient claim made by Heraclitus that "all is flux," what distinguishes Sein Und Zeit in the history of Western philosophy is the emphasis that it places on the word all. For Dasein (human beings for whom Being is an issue), to be-in-the-world (being) is to continually become in a world of constant change, a world that is both grounded in primordial-temporality (time) and experienced as the indefinitely continued progress-of-events (history). So, for Dasein to be-in-the-world is for Dasein to be-in-history (and no where else). This is true of all that is (without exception). Michel Foucault's important insight that we are all "historically condemned to history" is nothing but a footnote to Heidegger.
Sein Und Zeit presents the Being of this "condemnation" as the ground ("ἀρχής, αἴτιον, principle") for "the ontic causation of the actual, the transcendental making possible of the objectivity of objects, the dialectical mediation of the movement of absolute spirit and of the historical process of production, and the will to power positing values." Those who have read their philosophy know that this is Heidegger's way of name-dropping. Plato ("transcendental making"), Aristotle ("ontic causation"), Hegel ("dialectical mediation"), Marx ("historical process of production"), and Nietzsche ("the will to power") all find their respective place in this history of ontology. "Nietzsche's thought," Heidegger writes, "like all Western thought since Plato, is metaphysics."
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| Sein Und Zeit |
Heidegger reiterates in his 1966 essay that to focus thinking on what gets grounded ("the ontology of the ancients") to the exclusion of the ontological grounding ground must be abandoned because of its disastrous consequences: it perpetuates the history of the forgetfulness (if not the complete oblivion) of Being by not considering Time as its only hermeneutical horizon (working out the temporality of being phenomenologically). In fact, by the time the essay was published Sein was a term Heidegger no longer liked to use precisely because of its ontic residue. He said that it had only been a "preliminary word" in the development of his thought.
Heidegger's "turn" (Kehre) here away from thinking as doing toward thinking as dwelling (Gelassenheit) informs his suggestion that the present age in which we "do our thinking" is the beginning of the end of Western philosophy. Insofar as we move away from thinking about Being toward being grasped by Being, Heidegger's philosophy should be understood as both a product of, and a contribution toward, the beginning of this end.
Richard Rorty's response here that "Heideggerese is only Heidegger's gift to us, not Being's gift to Heidegger," is a pragmatic variant of this present age. It is what Blessed John Henry Newman once called a "notional apprehension" (a second-hand manipulation of words), as opposed to a "real apprehension" (a first-hand phenomenological encounter). Rorty could easily respond to this (in good Jamesian fashion) by asking whether there is "a difference that makes some difference" between Newman's "notional" and "real" apprehensions; and if not, then so much the better for our pragmatic age. Heidegger, however, was not a pragmatist precisely because he was not a modernist.
In the light of this further turn away from the ontic residue of Being, and in the wake of his continued attempt to break through the conceptual surface of this history of forgetfulness, Heidegger is led to ask the following question: "What task is reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy?" (and by "end" he means termination, not telos).
Heidegger never directly answered this question. However, he provided some indirect hints for those who would walk down the same path after him. He did this, in part, by describing "Being's poem" (Dasein) as the beings through which Being reveals (unconceals) itself. Dasein's role in this poetic disclosure is to create a clearing to simply let Being be in its finitude as a "call" to Dasein. In turn, Dasein responds to this call by shepherding the Being within human beings through acquiescing to Being-as-revelation. This Eckhart-like "potential receptivity" is what Heidegger refers to as "foundational thought."
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| Martin Heidegger |
Karl Rahner's 1966 essay "Theology and Anthropology" encaptulates the transcendental basis for his theological answer to this philosophical question. It is not without significance that this essay was published in the same year as "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," precisely because it is the product of having walked down the same path after Heidegger, whom he not only called his "one and only teacher" and "master," but who also claimed that "present-day Catholic theology...is inconceivable without Martin Heidegger."
It is important to point out here that Heidegger neither broke with the Catholic faith and worldview of his youth, nor abandoned the Catholic church (his philosophical and political history notwithstanding). He even went so far as to tell a personal confidant near the end of his life: "Ich bin niemals aus der Kirche getretten." Rahner obviously knew whom he was following, and his answer is not only informed by his history with Heidegger, but it also assumes what he thinks is the one thing that Heidegger's history has taught each and everyone of us: "that everywhere and in everything we can and must seek out that unutterable mystery which disposes over us, even though we can hardly name it with words."
While Heidegger has more than earned the philosophical luxury of abstaining from speech about this mystery by venturing "to step back out of philosophy into the thinking [dwelling] of Being," Rahner has the theological responsibility to utter (if not stutter) speech about it, especially since "the hesitant caution of philosophy cannot become a substitute for risking an understanding of existence which is always prior to philosophy." If theology is defined as the apophatic impossible possibility ("gesticulating with words," as Wittgenstein once put it), then Rahner is in the best position to answer his master's question given his duty as a Catholic and his ability as a theologian to gently and reverently gesticulate a thematic account of the hope that is within him (1 Pet. 3:15), knowing that "our human words always fall short of the mystery of God" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 42).
Rahner's apologia for both seeking and daring to hardly name this disposed "holy mystery" begins with his theological interpretation of the philosophical tradition that informs Heidegger's work. And like all good Thomistic theology (transcendental or otherwise), it begins with Aristotle.
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| Ludwig Feuerbach |
Aristotle's Metaphysics makes Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence Of Christianity possible. When Feuerbach states that he differs from those philosophers "who pluck out their eyes that they may see better; for my thought I require the senses, especially sight," he is echoing Aristotle: "All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else."
To therefore claim with Feuerbach that "theology is anthropology" is simply another way of saying with Aristotle that the essence of a thing is found in the form of the thing itself (and not merely in its matter): the form of the eye is seeing (one might say). It therefore turns out that not all philosophy is but footnotes to Plato. Feuerbach’s Essence is the exceptional exception here, especially since it provides the reason why Heidegger states in 1927 that you cannot ask the question of the meaning of Being without human beings: "In so far as Being constitutes what is asked about, and "Being" means the Being of entities, then entities themselves turn out to be what is interrogated." There is no Sein without Dasein.
Rahner appropriates his master's insight here by arguing that to carry out Feuerbach's program of reformulating dogmatic theology into theological anthropology does not necessarily mean that God gets atheistically reduced to man, since man is "the place where mystery is inscribed in the world" precisely because he is "the subject of unlimited transcendence, as the event of God's absolute and radical self-communication." In response to what Francis S. Fiorenza calls the "Kantian Problematic" (Kant's critique of both the transcendental ideal and the conceivability of an absolute necessary being), Rahner's interpretation and appropriation of Summa Theologiae, I, q. 84, art. 7 in his 1939 Geist in Welt provides the philosophical basis for this transcendental conclusion.
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| Geist in Welt |
It is possible to conclude otherwise. Karl Barth certainly did. But his reductive response to Feuerbach very well might be the result of a brand of Manichaeism produced through a thoroughly Protestant reading of Augustine (if anyone knows for sure it would be Hans Urs von Balthasar). For Rahner, to reject Feuerbach's reformulation as a false start is to forget about the only Aristotelian way to answer Heidegger's question: "As soon as man is understood as that being which has absolute transcendence toward God (and it is surely obvious that he is such), then anthropocentricity and theocentricity in theology are not contradictories but strictly one and the same thing seen from two difference aspects, and each aspect is unintelligible without the other."
"The Christian of the future," Rahner writes, "will be a mystic or not exist at all." This hints at how, in response to "a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence," we must seek out that unutterable mystery which disposes over us (especially after philosophy has died the death of a million Heideggerian words). Being "historically condemned to history" brings into very clear relief the fact that seeking and speaking this out is done within a dynamic integration between two imperatives: "If we fail either to preserve or to change," Rahner writes, "we should betray the truth, either by falling into error or by failing to make the truth our own in a really existential way." There is no truthful doctrine without thoughtful development.
In the end, the task that is reserved for thinking within the midst of Rahner's Vorgriff is as revealing as it is rigorous: to silently dwell within the inscribed mystery of being-in-the-world during our own time and place (Being-as-revelation), while bearing sacramental witness to this preconceptual awareness (beings-as-shepherds) through stuttering the unutterable Word to a very forgetful world (Exodus 4:10).
For Fr. Michael Eades, Cong. Orat.
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