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2 Oxford University Faculty of Theology: Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought

Heidegger and Religion: from Neoplatonism to the Posthuman

A one-day colloquium on ontotheology and the interpretation of metaphysics, faith, and technology.
Morning Session: 0930-1250 Ontotheology and Metaphysics

*Wayne Hankey (Dalhousie University) The Ineffable immediately Incarnate: Interplay between French 20th Century Neoplatonism and Heidegger *Aidan Nichols (Cambridge), Von Balthasar and Heidegger Laurence Hemming (London), Beginning again: beyond Ontotheology
Afternoon Session: 1400-1730: Ontotheology and technology

*Bradley Onishi (UCSB) Heidegger and information technologies: Tracing Views of the Posthuman *Mark Sinclair (Manchester Metropolitan University)Heidegger and the technological Absolute Response by Joanna Hodge and Jeff Malpas (University of Tasmania), followed by closing panel discussion.
* Indicates paper included in this file

THE INEFFABLE IMMEDIATELY INCARNATE. INTERPLAY BETWEEN TWENTIETHCENTURY FRENCH NEOPLATONISM AND HEIDEGGER.

for a conference on Heidegger and Theology at The Oxford Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought, Christ Church, Oxford University, May 24, 2008. Wayne J. Hankey Dalhousie University and Kings College

Augustine remained especially at home there [in the Catholic Church] until the modern Catholic school of apologetics in France, which at the same time appropriated Bergsonian ideas (which, in turn, were determined by Plotinus.)[1] If I knew enough to do justice to my title, I would commence with this suggestive and problematic judgment at the beginning of Martin Heideggers (1889-1976) 1921 lectures on Augustine and Neoplatonism and, starting with Henri Bergson, trace the interplay between twentieth-century French Neoplatonism and Heidegger. However, I do not. Nonetheless, I do understand something about twentieth-century French Neoplatonism and its Heideggerian character my brief One Hundred Years of Neoplatonism in France[2] is the only extended treatment.[3] My essay has many limits. First, it looks only at the effect Heidegger had on French thinkers, making no endeavour to investigate what the German took from the Frenchis scholarship not generally prone to this one-sidedness in favour of the German side of any intellectual meeting? Second, I did not trace howby reading what works? when?Heideggers thought effected the influence it undoubtedly had. Happily, others have laboured at this,[4] and fortunately, a young Italian scholar, Luca Lera, who is about to receive his doctorate from the Universit degli Studi di Pisa, has made some progress in considering what of French Neoplatonism Heidegger knew. His thesis[5] will underlie an article he is publishing in the next issue of Dionysius: Heideggers Lese- und Lebemeister. Eckhart as the Neoplatonic Hidden Source of Heidegger's Thought. Largely either because of what I have learned directly from him, or from that to which he has pointed me, this paper can have a secondary aspect, suggesting a little of what Heidegger knew about, and may owe to, the French with whom we are concerned. The substance of my paper today will reiterate my thesis that a distinctive form of Neoplatonism developed in twentieth-century France and that, either because of influence and interchange, or because of a like-mindedness, what characterised it had a shape which some of Heideggers work shared. Before moving to a few interchanges and coherences between Heidegger and twentieth-century French Neoplatonism, I should say a word about what I regard as the general ironic connection between Neoplatonism and Heideggerian questioning. [6] Because of Heideggers Seinsfrage, scholars either presented Platonism in

order to reveal the faults of Heideggers account, or they turned to Neoplatonism, having accepted Heideggers critique of metaphysics as onto-theology, in order to find an alternative way for Western philosophy, theology, and religion. For example, our understanding of Aquinas was much affected and these alternatives emerged: (1) Neoplatonisms were developed in opposition to Thomism as the paradigm of the worst onto-theological metaphysics. (2) Alternatively, Aquinas own thought was reinterpreted in a Neoplatonic fashion, using his connection to the Pseudo-Dionysius, and his likeness to Meister Eckhart, in order to turn his teaching into a negative or mystical theology. Thus, it appeared as the very opposite of ontological and rationalist Thomism.[7] (3) Or, in a more balanced approach, Aquinas thought was located with respect to a Platonic henology, on the one hand, and to an Aristotelian metaphysics of pure being, on the other hand, both constructions of a history of metaphysics rethought through Neoplatonism.[8] (4) Recently, this last approach has been pushed further. The Heideggerian history itself, and the alternative fundamental philosophy to which it belongs, are called into question and the various Neoplatonisms, among which Thomas theology is numbered, are defended against Heideggers characterisation of metaphysics, on the grounds that they do not match what he describes, and that, whatever the problems with Neoplatonic metaphysics, they are not so great as that to which Heidegger would lead us instead. Jean-Marc Narbonnes Hnologie, Ontologie et Ereignis (Plotin-Proclus-Heidegger) is the best example of the last approach and is also the most complete examination to date of the relations between Heidegger and Neoplatonism.[9] Narbonne joins others in showing that, although even the henological systems have katholou-prtologique metaphysical structures, these do not place them fatally within the dilemmas of onto-theology, and that, by representing them in this way, Heidegger does them unacceptable violence. Narbonne writes about Heideggers representation: Rather than a pure and simple ignorance of the Neoplatonic traditionin itself not very probable one would be inclined to speak in his case both of a misunderstanding and of a banalisation of this current of thought. The beyond being of the Neoplatonists, the One freed from all the limitations of beings, located beyond thought and objectification, in itself infinite and incomprehensible, all that, with Heidegger, is apparently reduced or brought back to a simple case of Stufen des Seienden, of degrees or stages of being , understood as a continuous series, without the decisive opening by the One in the direction of the infinite and the rupture of the totality of being which it introduces ever being recognised.[10]

Heideggers own thought contains important features which are common to him and the Neoplatonists, such as the positive necessity of nothingness, and the non-existence and ineffability of the fundamental ground. Narbonne judges that Heideggers language here is no less paradoxical than that of the Neoplatonists. Moreover, when the Ereignis is examined through the eyes of Emmanuel Lvinas (1906-1995), it is far from clear that this is a better account of the primal than the Neoplatonists give. Narbonnes liberating study invites more complete explorations of the relation between Heidegger and Neoplatonism. This is Luca Leras enterprise and I am grateful for being able to take advantage of it. THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING: FROM HENRI BERGSON TO MICHEL HENRY It is not difficult to sketch a somewhat irregular Neoplatonic ellipse with more than one focus beginning with Bergson (1859-1941) and turning back to its start with Michel Henry (1922-2003). They share the logic I reduce to a formula as the ineffable immediately incarnate, and, as with Heidegger, this involves the primacy they give to lifeeven though its signification is quite different for each of these three. As Heidegger indicates, what moves Bergson has an important relation to Neoplatonism through Plotinus, although this relation is deeply ambiguous. In contrast, Henrys connection to Neoplatonism is through Meister Eckhart, something he shares with Heidegger,[11] and is thus to a significantly different tradition within that movement than what attracted and repelled Bergson. Beyond what he owed to Augustine, and thus to Plotinus, Eckhart is under the influence of the Iamblichan tradition of Neoplatonism we largely associate with Proclus. A sympathy for this tradition, simultaneously incarnational and theurgic, and also so strongly apophatic that it pushes beyond negation to silence before a nothingness by excess which some of its authors will not even name as the One, gives French Neoplatonism in the second half of the twentieth century its particular character. Besides meeting this Neoplatonism through whatever he knows of Greek Fathers like Gregory of Nyssa, Eckhart encounters it either directly, by way of the Elements of Theology, or indirectly, by way of the Liber de causis, the pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Avicenna, Moses Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. Like Aquinas, but in contrast to other Rhenish mystics and Nicholas of Cusa, Eckhart probably did not read Moerbekes translation of Proclus commentary on the Parmenides, where the nothingness of what is both first and last, is more deeply considered than in the Elements.[12] Heidegger is implicated in both traditions of Neoplatonism by way of early reflections on Augustine and Plotinus (1921), [13] as well as through a still earlier considerations of Eckhart (1918-19), and of the sources of Eckharts Neoplatonism, some of which he lists when considering the origins of the medieval distinction between essence

and existence in his lecture course for the Summer of 1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology .[14] There, a little after his survey of these sources, we find his well-known (and, problematic) [15] remarks on Eckharts mystical theology in terms of the doctrine of essentia and existentia. Heidegger writes: It is the characteristic quality of medieval mysticism that it tries to lay hold of the being ontologically rated as the properly essential being, God, in his very essence. In this attempt mysticism arrives at a peculiar speculation, peculiar because it transforms the idea of essence in general, which is an ontological determination of a being, the essentia entis, into what is properly actual. This remarkable alteration of essence into a being is the presupposition for the possibility of what is called mystical speculation. Therefore, Meister Eckhart, speaks mostly of the superessential essence; that is to say, what interests him is not, strictly speaking, God God is still a provisional object for himbut Godhead. When Meister Eckhart says God he means Godhead, not deus but deitas, not ens but essentia, not nature but what is above nature, the essencethe essence to which, as it were, every existential determination must be refused[16] After quoting Eckhart on the non-being of God, Heidegger continues, using Hegel to understand nothingness and the mystic encounter: This God is for himself his not; that is to say, he is the most universal being, the purest indeterminate possibility of everything possible, pure nothing. He is nothing over against every determinate possible and actualized being. Here, too, we find a remarkable parallel to the Hegelian determination of being and its identification with nothing. [17] The concluding remark is confusing, given the very negative judgment of Hegel on Neoplatonic mysticism: The mysticism of the Middle Ages, or, more precisely, its mystical theology is not mystical in our sense and in the bad sense [the Hegelian sense?]; rather, it can be conceived in a completely eminent sense.[18] For Hegel, that would mean intellectualising it. In Heideggers Summer 1931 course on Aristotles Metaphysics 1-3, Eckhart appears in much the same light when he comments on the analogia entis. Heidegger refers to the indubitable problems of the doctrine, which he says had been handed down to the theology of the Middle Ages via Plotinus. It was thus a Neoplatonic problem and has the characteristics he ascribes to

Neoplatonism. It was not real philosophical thinking, it was not a solution but a formula, a welcomed means of formulating a religious conviction in philosophical terms. [19] However, one figure did some real thinking: Meister Eckhartthe only one who sought a solution [to the dilemmas]says: God is not at all, because being is a finite predicate and absolutely cannot be said of God. (This was admittedly only a beginning which disappeared in Eckharts later development, although it remained alive in his thinking in another aspect.) [20] Thus, because he engages Bergson and both Neoplatonic traditions, and because he is important to Henrys working out of his phenomenology, Heidegger is within the irregular circle we trace. Nonetheless, it is important that, according to Heidegger, Eckhart is not thinking radically because he is deeply Neoplatonic, but in spite of that. By the end of this decade, Heidegger is explicit that Neoplatonism, because of its association with Christianity, or late ancient religion, is no longer part of the great Greek Philosophy. [21] He seems to have returned in the thirties to an importantly different version of his first conception of the mysticism of Eckhart as a counter-movement against Scholasticism in terms of the atheoretical immediate religious experience of the living subject.[22] However, Eckhart is no longer an exemplar of medieval mysticism but rather of German thinking.[23] The twentieth-century retrieval of Neoplatonism in France extends outside this circle, but Bergson starts it and, with him its purposes and peculiar modifications begin to show. It is generally opposed to the Western metaphysical tradition insofar as this is understood to determine modernity, and it is also generally antiIdealist, endeavouring to link the sensuous and corporeal immediately with the first Principle. This second characteristic sets the twentieth-century retrieval against that in the nineteenth century, when Germany was its centre, and even to the ancient and medieval Neoplatonisms generally. The fundamental character is established in the first half of the century. Besides Bergson, mile Brhier (1876-1952), the great historian of philosophy and the sole figure in the French history who adopts an Hegelian interpretation of Neoplatonism, is crucial, as are also the relations between Brhier and Andr Festugire, the Dominican priest, who, in contradistinction to Brhier and Bergson, worked on hermetic and post-Iamblichan Platonism, fusing Plato the mystic with Plato the intellectual, thus disgusting Brhier. There may be connections between Heidegger and Brhier for which Luca Lera and Daniel Wilband have argued, and the issues raised by Festugires fusion of philosophy and mysticism are important. This is why I mention him, even though the limits of this paper prevent my treating him today.

Brhier, who attended Bergsons lectures on Plotinus commented that: Plotinus is one the very rare philosophers with whom Bergson felt an affinity he treated him, as if he recognized himself in Plotinus.[24] This may justify Heideggers assertion that Bergsons ideas were determined by Plotinus, but, in fact, his evaluation of Plotinus was profoundly ambiguous, and he inverted the Plotinian system for his purposes. Bergson found in Plotinus not only a dynamic schema[25] which corresponded to his own understanding of reality, but also what for him comprised the most fundamental error of the metaphysical tradition, viz. the ignorance of the difference between intellect and the fluidity of reality. Indeed, for Bergson, Plotinus sums up and brings to an end the falsifying intellectualism of Greek philosophy: Action was a weakened Contemplation, duration a false, deceptive, and mobile image of immobile eternity, the Soul a fall of the Idea. The whole of that philosophy which begins with Plato and ends with Plotinus is the development of a principle that we should formulate thus: There is more in the immutable than in the moving, and one passes from the stable to the unstable by a simple diminution. Now the contrary is the truth.[26] Despite his making Plotinus philosophically significant, there is much here which reminds us of Heidegger, and, as with the atheist mystic of the Black Forest at early moments in his teaching, mysticism surpasses philosophy. Its final end for Bergson is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort which life itself manifests. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself. [27] True or complete mysticism is very rare and would be simultaneously action, creation, and love. However, despite impregnating Greek intellectualism with mysticism, Plotinus was unable to overcome the limits the Hellenic tradition sets on experience; thus Bergson arrives at this final judgment: In short, mysticism, in the absolute sense in which we have agreed to take the word, was never attained by Greek thought.[28] This is usefully compared with the well-known remarks in Heideggers sketch for an undelivered lecture for 1918-19 on The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism. There we encounter comments on Eckhart; just before these, is the following Supplementary note: Already in the strongly natural-scientific, naturalistic theoretical metaphysics of being of Aristotle and its radical elimination and misrecognition of the problem of value in Plato, which is renewed in medieval Scholasticism, the predominance of the theoretical is already potentially present, so that Scholasticism, within the totality of the medieval Christian world of experience, severely endangered precisely

the immediacy of religious life, and forgot religion in favour of theology and dogma. And already in the early days of Christianity, these dogmata exercised a theorizing, dogmapromoting influence on the institutions and statutes of church law. An appearance such as mysticism is to be understood as an elementary counter-movement.[29] With these fundamental and fatal flaws, what then does Bergson love in Plotinus? In fact, Bergson prizes not the goals which he supposes that Plotinus seeks but rather: 1) a mystical ecstasy which he judges Plotinus to have only partially attained, 2) the harmonious self-moving and self-explicating life of Soul, which Plotinus takes from Stoicism and which, significantly, lies at the bottom of the spiritual hierarchy as he represents it, and 3) despite his privileging of intellectual vision, the Plotinian attention to the experience of the individual soul. [30] In other words, he reverses Plotinus, placing him firmly on his feet in the experience of embodied life. In respect to mysticism, Bergson seeks to remove the intellectual mediation, the Nous which is essential both to the way up and to the way down in Plotinus. Bergson wants to join immediately the bottom to the top, i.e. he connects the moving vital to a creative energy, which is a pure love beyond what he conceives as the fixity of the intellectualised One of Plotinus. In the relation of life to thought, the intellectual is not for Bergson, as it was for Plotinus, the realm of perfect actuality, the always-complete motionless activity which the vitality of soul imitates weakly. Instead, for Bergson, inverting the locus of strength within the schema, intellectual effort shares the character of psychic life. He constructs a parallel between the intellectual and the vital, and seeks to understand how the material emerges from the immaterial, as Plotinus also does. However, whereas, for Plotinus, soul is an image of Nous which reigns over it, for Bergson, the vital is the paradigmatic and normative. Bergsons ideas here are determined in opposition to Plotinus, and, on this the twentieth-century thinkers with whom we are concerned, including Heidegger, will generally side with Bergson. Michel Henry, at the end of the circular movement we would trace, gathers the crucial features it acquired in the development from Bergson. (1) Beginning with a rejection of modern metaphysics in its Cartesian origins, he (2) endeavours to find the transcendent within immanence. (3) This quest is undertaken by way of an examination of consciousness which avoids abstraction from life and the sensuous, because a body is subjective and is the ego itself. Thus there is a material phenomenology. [31] (4) He engages Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, and (5) unifies philosophy and religion with one another and with life. (6) God is the Unknown God. Finally, (7) Henry undertakes a positive engagement with Marx and

locates atheism within, rather than outside, our philosophical and religious tradition.[32] Henrys approach complements that of Jean-Luc Marion (born 1946).[33] He turned not to Dionysius, but to Eckhartalthough recognising Dionysius and Proclus as crucial sources for what attracts him to Eckhart.[34] Whereas Marion aims to prevent the reduction of the source of knowledge to the conditions of the subject, Henry wants to protect the affectivity of the subject against objectification and his analysis is of its internal structure. He does this by unifying the soul with the ontological structure of the absolute. Henry, commenting on one of the passages which also continuously engaged Heidegger, writes that according to Eckhart: [I]t is the absolute who, in the accomplishment of his task, constitutes the essence of the soul, the essence which as such is not different from this work, or as Eckhart says, from the operation of God. When God made man, he declares, he put into the soul his equal, his acting, everlasting masterpiece. It was so great a work that it could not be otherwise than the soul and the soul could not be otherwise than the work of God. The identity here affirmed between the essence of the soul and the operation of God must be understood in its radical meaning. For the operation with which the soul is identified in its essence in no way adds, as would a creation strictly speaking, to the original and ultimate Being of God himself; it in no way constitutes anything extrinsic in relation to him but is rather identified with his own foundation.[35] While ultimately unifying philosophy and revelation, Henry understands the propriety of the post-Heideggerian determination not to submit God to the priority of Being, and judges that one can well say God is, but, as Being itself is subordinated to the givenness of appearing, the meaning of God is decided only in the latter.[36] Against Heidegger, in the archetypical Neoplatonic move, Henry subordinates Being to the unknown: One must therefore reverse Heideggers propositions, according to which the experience of God and of his manifestedness, to the extent that the latter can indeed meet man, flashes in the dimension of Being; the sacredcomes into the light of appearing only when Being has been clarified beforehand. For it is only when this light of appearing is extinguished, outside the clearing of Being, that access to the Immemorial is possiblein Oblivion. The Oblivion that passes beyond all memory belonging to thought, and thus all conceivable Memory, gives us access to the Immemorial. [37]

Thus, Henry, who turned to Eckhart through the mediation of Heidegger, has found in Eckhart a way around Heidegger. [38] Through Eckhart, he constructs a metaphysical phenomenology and also finds a way to unite philosophy and religion. Among those overthrowing the reign of Nous or uniting philosophy and religion, we may not, however, count Brhier. Luca Lera has discerned a probable influence of the great Plotinus scholar on Heidegger. This counters a movement the other way posited by Daniel Wilband. Brhier presents two sides of Neoplatonism and, at the very least, establishes a problematic within which Heidegger makes his decisions. However, it is in relation to Heidegger, that Wilband sees Brhier take one Neoplatonic path, while Jean Trouillard (and others like Henry) take the opposite way.[39] BRHIER, TROUILLARD, AND HEIDEGGER: A TWO-WAY STREET. Brhier confronts us with two opposed Neoplatonisms. One is exposed in a early article praised by the deepest and most creative Neoplatonist of the twentieth-century, Jean Trouillard, who paradigmatically explicates the principle as the ineffable immediately incarnate. The other appears in Brhiers representation of Plotinus in Hegelian termsones which Heidegger also sometimes employs. Trouillard was the first to undertake a Catholic philosophical and theological revolution which substituted for Aristotelian-Thomist ontology a Proclean henology based in the interplay in the selfconstitution of soul of Nothingness by excess and Nothingness by defect. The revolution also reorders the relation of religion and reason. Mystagogy is the heart of religion and of philosophy because of the One-in-us. In virtue of its being in the Nothingness of the One, the soul unfolds the entire procession and the material is indispensable to the return, hence theurgy (sacramental religion). The choice of Proclus beyond an earlier devotion to Plotinus is essential. Trouillard perceived that the universe was united in very different ways for these two. For Proclus, the One was present and powerful throughout the whole, even in the material. After noting the well-known divergence, between the rationalists Plotinus and Porphyry, on the one hand, and and Iamblichus, Syrianus, Nestorius, and Proclus, on the other, who give first place to the Chaldaean Oracles and theurgy, in the Preface to his translation of the Elements of Theology, he writes: The important thing here is the repercussion of this difference in the system of Proclus as compared to the approach of the Enneads. Plotinus returns to the One through a severe negation, or, better, he gives way to a purifying motion which, springing out of the ecstasy hidden in each of us, detaches it first from the empirical world, and then from intellectual vision.If Plotinus ultimately saves nature and the forms, he keeps them at a two-fold distance. He goes to the divinity by

night. Proclus shows rather a will for transfiguration. Without doubt his universe is arranged on horizontal planes like that of Plotinus, but it is also traversed by a series of vertical lines, which like rays diverge from the same universal center and refer back to it the furthermost and the most diverse appearances. These chains tend to absorb the hierarchical ordering of the levels and to link them all directly to the One. The sensible is thus susceptible to a transposition and a purification which announces and perhaps prepares for the intelligible expanse of the Cartesians .A stone is itself able to participate in the divine power to purify. To tell the truth, this primacy of theurgy which disconcerts reason is again a form of night and accentuates the mystery. But it also reveals the concern for integration and continuity which in Proclus reminds one of Leibniz.[40] Trouillard realized that Proclus must be interpreted in what we now call the register of immanence and that of transcendence, at the same time.[41] The principle of such an immediate union of the transcendent ineffable and the sensuous is Nothingness by excess. This is not the nothing of Hegel, or of a Hegelian Heidegger, which is the indeterminate. Rather, the character of the nothing of Proclus, as the heir of Iamblichus, exposes itself when what proceeds first from the One are both limit and unlimited. Thus, the principle of matter is at the top of the system, but the Primal is also revealed as positively full. Iamblichus justifies theurgy in the De Mysteriis because matter belongs to the gods and can be the holy means of their uplifting activity. For both him and Proclus the human soul is altogether descended into genesis; against Plotinus, no part of it remains in NOUS, and Proclus devotes his De malorum subsistentia to showing, also against Plotinus, that matter is neither evil nor evils cause. If Trouillard moved from Plotinus to Proclus, Brhier moved the other way. He deals with Nothingness in an article written in 1919 whose importance was recognised by Trouillard, who praised the isolated initiative as une belle tude.[42] Brhiers analysis is entitled, The Idea of Nothingness and the Problem of the Radical Origin in Greek Neoplatonism. In it he showed that he understood the basis in Neoplatonism for the religion, mystical theology, and negative henology found there later, especially by priests like Jean Trouillard. These would be joined by Pierre Hadot and others in bringing about the re-evaluation of these aspects of the Platonic tradition. Pierre Aubenque describes, in a way which will recall Heidegger, the Neoplatonic endeavour to prevent the One as source of being from becoming itself an entity. He explains the problematic of Brhiers belle tude: . Brhier commented very well on this movement of thought, which characterises under diverse forms all of Neoplatonism,

when he writes: The origin [of being] is not able as such to possess any of the characteristics which are possessed by the beings to be explained or derived, because then it would be one thing among other things, one being among other beings. But, possessing none of the characteristics of beings, it appears to the thinking which tries to grasp it as a pure nonbeing, a nothingness of being. Let us for now leave open the question, raised by Brhier, of knowing if to make of this nonbeing the one, is not to determine it and, as a result, to make it once again into a being, apropos of which because it is a being, one would be required once again to ask what is its origin. It remains that the relativisation of ontology, and the correlative necessity of passing beyond it, are logically inscribed in the question, considered radically, of the Being of the existent [ltre de ltant].[43] As Aubenque hints, Brhier went on in this article to explore the confounding of two opposite elements in Neoplatonism, summing up the difficulty in this problematic formula: if nothingness is what underlies all reality, the origin is, on the contrary, what is above.[44] He searches the history of Neoplatonism beginning with Plotinus, travelling by way of his successors up to Proclus, and concluding with Damascius, trying to discern what this formula means and to discover if and how the two terms, both of them situated outside all thinkable reality, can be prevented from being confounded with one another. [45] Trouillard, and the Neoplatonic radicals associated with him, will take up this search again in the second half of the twentieth century. Wilband gives a thorough account of the article and shows that for Brhier: Proclean negation does not indicate the Ones deprivation of certain characteristics, but rather shows its liberty from any essential predication whatever. [46] Its liberation from essence is a power over it and negations are not only superior to affirmations but they are even productive of them. [47] Trouillard will repeat these positions. However, as Wilband explains, In Brhiers final view, the Ones unspeakable nothingness is a real problem without a solution in the Neoplatonic tradition itself. It expresses philosophys historical need to overcome the intimate link of Greek intellectualism with the linguistic expression of thought.[48] He reports correctly, using my One Hundred Years of Neoplatonism, that Brhiers later work triesto isolate the intellectualist in Plotinus, turning against the non-intellectual, ritualistic pragmatism of Iamblichus and Proclus. [49] Wilband judges that: By 1928, concerned with preserving the purity of Western philosophical reason, Brhier is fully persuaded by Hegels reading of Plotinus. Brhier writes: the idea of the Plotinian philosophy is an intellectualism or an elevated idealism,[50]

wherein Plotinus had the idea that the essence of God is thought itself and that the essence is present in thought. [51] Against Eric R. Dodds, Regius Professor of Greek here, who showed its Greek origins, and convinced the rest of twentieth-century Neoplatonic scholarship, Brhier sided with Hegel and attributed the mysticism of Plotinus to Oriental influences. [52] For Brhier, this element is not Greek: [W]e find at the very center of Plotinus thought a foreign element which defies classification. The theory of Intelligence as universal being derives neither from Greek rationalism nor from the piety diffused throughout the religious circles of his day.Thus I am led to seek the source of the philosophy of Plotinus beyond the Orient close to Greece, in the religious speculations of India, which by the time of Plotinus had been founded for centuries on the Upanishads and had retained their vitality.With Plotinus, then, we lay hold of the first link in a religious tradition which is no less powerful basically in the West than the Christian tradition, although it does not manifest itself in the same way. I believe that this tradition comes from India.[53] As an explanation for this shift Wilband supposes that Brhier is choosing Hegels treatment of Nothingness as against Heideggers. He employs Eli Diamonds analysis of Heideggers purpose in What Is Metaphysics? [54](1929). For Diamond, Heidegger: is self-consciously attempting to undermine the necessity of the first determination in Hegels Doctrine of Being, the absolute identity of indeterminate Being and Nothing. In opposition to this first determination, Heidegger attempts to show how these two nearly indistinguishable terms belong together.[55] Luca Lera supposes that it is just as probable that Heidegger was reading Brhier and learned something about the history of Nothingness from him. [56] Both Wilband and Lera may be right. In any case, we can assert that when Jean Trouillard and his followers developed their Neoplatonic response to Heidegger what they wrote was more Heideggerian than Hegelian, [57] more Proclean than Plotinian. Before his works expositing Proclus, Trouillard, told us that the Platonic tradition brings before us: the infinity of absence which all presence implies, more exactly the positivity and efficacy of this absence.[58] He goes on: If then the normative dominates presence and absence both, if it commands both possession and privation, the name Being [tre] seems badly chosen to designate it.

The normative is beyond ontology [une hyperontologie]. [59] Wilband gives a convincing comparison between Heideggers account of how the Nothing functions as the condition of negation and of thought and Trouillards account of how the One-in-us as Nothingness by excess enables the soul to constitute its life by productive negation. Certainly, he is right that what Trouillard brings out of Proclus is close to statements like these from What Is Metaphysics?: the nothing is more original than the not and negation. If this thesis is right, then the possibility of negation as an act of intellect, and thereby the intellect itself, are somehow dependent upon the nothing. Then how can the intellect hope to decide about the nothing? Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings. It emerges as such existence in each case from the nothing already revealed. Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing. Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call transcendence. [60] Wilband concludes, correctly in my view: For Heidegger, and also for Proclus: we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing through our own decision and will.[61] The relation between the Heideggerian nothing and Dasein is analogous to that between the Proclean One and the soul, as Trouillard interprets them.[62] Crucially also for the comparison, as Brhier discerns, the Proclean soul moves toward Nothingness by excess, and away from defective nothingness, not in virtue of an intellectual discrimination, but by sentiments and an extralogical notion.[63] Thus, for the critical movement, intellect fails, and we enter the sphere of religion and mystery. Brhier, certainly, turned his face against such undermining of the autonomy of reason. Whatever the connections between Brhier and Heidegger may be, Trouillards Heideggerian inspiration cannot be doubted, and it belongs to his Proclean mystical theology in which the ineffable is immediately incarnate. CONCLUDING REMARK In part, Luca Leras article for Dionysius seeks to explain Heideggers negative evaluation of Neoplatonisma question Jean-Marc Narbonne leaves open, having found that Heidegger was not ignorant of Neoplatonism, yet continually misrepresented what

is most fundamental to it. Lera locates the problem in an anti-Jewish twist, which Heidegger gives to Hegel and Brhier. Accepting their common ascription of the mystical to the Oriental, it seems to me that Heidegger intensifies a new opposition Brhier sets up. Brhier couples the mystical and the religious, which, in his early study of Philo,[64] are associated with Judaism, and opposed these to philosophy, a fragile plant, which he sought to discern and protect.[65] Yet there is no desperation with Brhier. For him the mixture of religion and philosophy in Philo had a certain rhythm, a certain elegance of thoughtwith his allegorical method, which, as totally absurd as it appears to be, does not any the less indicate an essential process of the human spirit, that which moves from the image to the idea. [66] Equally for him, reason was purified and strengthened by its subordination to Christianity in the Middle Ages, and he attributes this view to Comte and Hegel. [67] Heidegger shows no such confidence in philosophy, which he associates with the Greek and the German, and sets against the Jewish-Christian, where he places mysticism and religion; what obscures the great. Not without some inconsistencies, Neoplatonism is located there. I quote Lera: As we have seen, in the course of 1921, Heidegger says that the Neoplatonic doctrine of the First Principle prevented Augustineand Christian thinkers in generalfrom grasping the facticity of Christian life. In the course of 1926, Plotinus criticism of Aristotle does not count, in Heidegger's eyes, as a real philosophical development; and in the Summer Semester course of 1936 on Schellings Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), when his distance from Christianity is as great as his proximity to Nazism, Neoplatonism is represented as extraneous to the western and German philosophy. It is conceived as a late Greek philosophy compromised with Jewish-Christian (i.e. Oriental) thought. [68] In the Beitrge, Neoplatonism is connected with the Christian doctrines of creation, of God as summum ens, and of analogia entis. In the Winter Semester course of 1937/38, Basic Questions of PhilosophySelected Problems of Logic, Neoplatonism is held responsible for the lack of true philosophy in the Middle Ages. This is on account of the union with Christianity, resulting in the oblivion of the great Greek philosophy. That arrived at its end with Aristotle. [69] In the section on Mysticism,[70] belonging to a treatise from the same period, Besinnung, Heidegger construes Neoplatonism as the starting point of all the subsequent development of mysticism, which, in turn, is considered as the specular image of metaphysics. The treatment of Mystik in Besinnung makes no mention of Eckhart. In contrast, when he alone is named as one of the old

masters of thought[71] in Gelassenheit, this is not because he is Christian, or deeply Neoplatonic, but in spite of these. He is Meister because he is German, and, thus, capable of great philosophical thinking, in the way the Greeks from Anaximander and Aristotle once had been. Already, in the Winter class of 1934-35, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein ,[72] Eckhart is set at the beginning of the German thought.[73] Luca Lera writes: Through the 30s and the 40s Heidegger interprets Hlderlin and his conception of the Holy with the help of Eckharts mysticism. This mysticism, however, loses not only its Christian aspect, but also the Neoplatonic one: Eckharts Neoplatonic (and Christian) conception of the origin as spring of the reality becomes the origin of the Vaterland; Eckharts Neoplatonic (and Trinitarian) epistroph becomes the return to the origin.[74] I conclude by testifying that I rejoice in the many forms of miscegenation which characterise Neoplatonism, and that, through this encounter between it and Heidegger, I am more convinced than ever of its philosophical greatness. Tuesday, May 20, 2008

HANS URS VON BALTHASARS APPEAL TO MARTIN HEIDEGGERS PHILOSOPHY

Introduction Universities, with their programmes of study, their colleges, their degrees, and their professorships, are products of vain heathenism. They are as much good to the Church as the devil is.[75] This proposition, drawn from the writings of the Oxford divine, John Wyclif, and condemned by the Council of Constance in 1415, a condemnation confirmed three years later by Pope Martin V, whether fortunately or otherwise passed by the Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von Balthasar who, though he never held an academic post himself, thought it desirable to enter into dialogue with Martin Heidegger, a major figure in twentieth century European philosophy in the University setting. For those who are not so familiar with Catholic theology, I should perhaps explain that Balthasar was a startlingly original as well as encyclopaedically well informed theological writer, best known for a trilogy of theological aesthetics, dramatics and logic, who was created a cardinal of the Roman church shortly before his death in 1988 and is now the object of a booming industry of comment and extrapolation in Western Europe and the United States. His writing can be described as a fusion of dogmatics with mystical theology, but includes a sizeable philosophical component. Unlike Karl Rahner, the other giant of

twentieth century Catholic theology, whose work is far more obviously a system, Balthasar never attended Heideggers classes. That did not prevent him from electing to make him a focus of special concern.

Balthasars two main accounts Balthasar considered the early Heidegger in the 1939 third volume of his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, a study which presents itself as an account of how German-language philosophy and literature in the preceding century and a half had dealt with eschatology, or in a de-theologised version of that word, ultimate realities.[76] (For the sake of accuracy of information, I should say that a few non-Germanophone writers were also covered, Kierkegaard in the first volume, Bergson and Dostoevsky in the second, but this was owing to their reputed influence in the Germanspeaking world.) In Apokalypse der deutschen Seele volume three, the particular sub-title of which is The divinization of death, Balthasars treatment of Heidegger amounts to a little monograph of some 130 pages.[77] If quantitative assessment is the order of the day one should note, however, that Balthasar interweaves with his account of Heidegger a companion account of the poet Rainer Maria von Rilke, owing to the affinity he found between the thought and sensibility of the two men.[78] This was astute, since Heidegger had

not yet incorporated the poets above all Hlderlin, Trakl, and Rilke into his published work. A quarter century on, Balthasar considered the later Heidegger in the 1965 volume of his theological aesthetics, Herrlichkeit, dedicated as this particular volume was to the realm of metaphysics [in the modern age].[79] That is the fifth volume of the English translation, which corresponds to the second half of the third volume of the German original. Here the compass is much smaller. Some twenty pages of ex professo discussion are followed in the conclusion to the book by a return to dialogue with Heidegger, among others.[80] The disparity of scale in these two treatments may be misleading. In the fuller pre-War discussion Balthasar confines his discussion to Heideggers publications from the later 1920s: Sein und Zeit, obviously, of 1927, but then the Kant book of 1929 and two major essays from the same year: Was ist Metaphysik?, and the rather intractable Vom Wesen des Grundes, a response to Leibnizs principle of sufficient reason, highly influential as that principle became in modern Scholasticism.[81] The comparatively restricted nature of the corpus Balthasar considers has a simple explanation. That is all there was to it. The years between 1929 and 1939 were a fallow time for Heidegger so far as publishing, as distinct from lecturing and thinking, were concerned. An exception is the 1933 Die Selbst-behauptung der deutschen Universitt, Heideggers controversial inaugural lecture as Rector of the

University of Freiburg. Balthasar reserves any reference to this for later. That may have been a wise decision from a publishers standpoint. By the time of the third volume of Apokalypse der deutschen Seele the principal place of publication of the work, Salzburg, was a city of the Reich. As it was, Balthasars disapproving comments on the National Socialist appropriation of Nietzsche brought this work into bad odour in the new Germany.[82] In coming to terms with the later Heidegger, Balthasar seems to have been, if also concise, extremely thorough. Virtually everything Heidegger had published by 1961 is footnoted, including the two Nietzsche volumes which had appeared in that same year. This amounts to a very considerable literary production, even if it pales by comparison with the massive Gesamtausgabe with its integration of Heideggers lecture course materials. While Balthasars comments on all this are extremely condensed, their purview is wide.

Balthasars reading of the early Heidegger How, then, did Balthasar see the early Heidegger? In Sein und Zeit, Balthasar would say, Heidegger attempts to enlarge a philosophical anthropology so that, by exploring what is ultimate in human existence (Dasein), he can reach the foundations of a general metaphysic. This is correct inasmuch as Heidegger seeks to indicate an opening to the wider realm of being through a consideration of the structural characteristics of distinctively human

existence. Some might consider the term general metaphysics more questionable. On the basis of his reading of Heideggers Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Balthasar accepts that the metaphysics of Dasein in Being and Time is not really -- or at any rate is not only -- a metaphysical study of existence, which is, no doubt, how classical ontology would seek to view it, assuming it did not spurn this work as excessively impressionistic.[83] To Heideggers mind the theme of Sein und Zeit is, rather, a metaphysics that of its nature happens as being-there. For Balthasar, the (in effect) shared task of Heidegger and Rilke was to integrate the contributions of Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology with what he calls the testing and denial he associated with the names of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The upshot is an existential phenomenology which goes beyond the ahistorical investigation of patterns of intentionality in human consciousness that had exercised phenomenologys founder, Husserl.[84] It involves exploring what Balthasar terms the brokenness of finite existence, and that means, for Rilke and Heidegger, so he reports, the brokenness of an existence which understands itself (even eschatologically) as referred to the world in its very roots.[85] Balthasar got the point that, for the author of Sein und Zeit, transcendence and being in the world are not alternatives. Being in the world not in the sense, merely, of enjoying animal life in the cosmos, but in the more significant sense of moving within the web of reference which is the world as Dasein

finds it, is itself the exercise of transcendence. The structure of spirit, as Heidegger describes it in just such terms, is, Balthasar notes, a paradoxical identity of life and death, subjectivity and anonymity, presence in all things and disappearance into all things. [86]

The need for theological intervention Balthasar does not dispute the rightness and even adequacy of this identification of the existential dimensions of human life, which provide, then, so far as they go, an ontology proper to characteristically human being. But the overall structure Heidegger has described is a paradoxical one, suggesting to Balthasar the pertinence of theological intervention. The meaning of the structure which Sein und Zeit exhibits cannot be seen from within the hermeneutical circle of phenomenologically existential interpretation. It can only be seen from outside that circle, which is possible owing to the way revelation permits an inversion of perspective by its disclosure of divine freedom. Divine address permits the lighting up of the paradox, whereupon everything looks different. Heideggers running forward, Vorlaufen, towards death and authenticity can then recognize itself as a Vorlufig-sein, a provisional being towards God (we note Balthasars attempt to replicate Heideggers etymological word-play).[87] Heideggers metaphysical endeavour takes place as the fulfillment of being-there in its very finitude, placed as this is

between being and nothing. This is not simply a recognition of transience, where forms are threatened by nothingness in the midst of being. Instead, it is being itself which is nothing-like. Nothingness is not on the margins of life but at its innards. As Balthasar puts it, In its innermost heart [human existence] feels time and death.[88] For Balthasar, this raises two questions, one more philosophical, the other more theological. The first concerns the meaning of such negativity or what he calls nothingness as the ground of finitude and subjectivity and which originates the ontological anxiety, Angst, with which existence strikes us.[89] The second asks after what he terms the possible totality-being, Ganzsein, which might accrue to being in so frighteningly finite a temporal mode,[90] and if it may so accrue that could only be, notes Balthasar, eschatologically. Neither question, he thinks, can be adequately answered under the early Heideggerian rubric of being in the world. These questions cannot be answered in inner-Heideggerian terms for two reasons. First, when Heidegger treats the progressive illumination of the understanding of being as ipso facto the ongoing constitution of being, his historically self-realising, progressive ontology (Balthasars words)[91], by substituting itself for the primacy of logos to which Western philosophy had testified up until the time of K ant, incorporates from Lebensphilosophie an irrationalist tradition which is at war with intelligibility. In the later philosophy, one might add, leaving here Balthasars text, such

irrationalism will take further flesh in the bewildering notions of the destiny of being, Seinsgeschick, and the delivering, Austrag, which between them send the God of metaphysics, the Causa sui, as well as the more divine God Heidegger was, it seems, expecting. [92] Secondly, the sharpness of Heideggers distinction between ontic truth concerned as that is with the facticity of existents -and ontological truth concerned, rather, with a far less clear-cut a priori understanding of how we recognize the existent as such and can refer to being at large -- introduces a potentially pernicious double-truth account of the real.[93] While existential (or hermeneutical) phenomenology represents for Balthasar an advance on the Husserlian variety in refusing to bracket out concrete reality as distinct from theoretic consciousness, nonetheless on Heideggers bifurcated account ontic slash ontological -- what Balthasar terms a total darkness covers the ground of things, their whence and their whither.[94] These weaknesses are obviously pertinent to the issue of the relation, in existence, between being and nothingness. But they also relate to the other problem, the one about possible totalitybeing. Heidegger had well described how Dasein wrests its selfunderstanding from within the horizon of being towards death, thereby allowing its truth to unveil itself, to come out of hiddenness (if indeed, amid the idle curiosity, chatter and ambiguity of the human mass, this actually happens). Fallenness, anxiety, and the

more comprehensive existential Sorge, care, all point to the exceptional character of the human creature, for, we may ask, what other animals exhibit these dimensions? What these structures can never point to, however, is mans possible wholeness. It is axiomatic for Heidegger that as long as existence persists it never reaches totality. Dasein is its own possibilities and therefore it is its own non-being too. Balthasar asks, Is this a phenomenological description or is it a metaphysic? Supposing we allow it the grander claim, to be a metaphysic, Balthasar finds the enterprise unfinished. When Dasein in its primal self-determination renders itself actively passive to the life-field, is this primordial act itself originated, and if so, by what or whom? Heidegger speaks of thrownness as the way Dasein first finds itself. Is there not then a Thrower (with a capitalized T)? Alternatively, if what Heidegger offers is only phenomenological description should we not say that thrownness is the sign par excellence of Daseins relativity, whereupon we should ask, Relativity to what? (Or is it, perhaps, to whom??) In more rhetorical terms, Balthasar queries, What is the ontic? Is it the creation of God or [is it simply to be defined as the subject of] nihilating anxiety?[95] If the ontic discloses divine creative agency then, certainly, it has nothingness as its permanent condition, since creation is ex nihilo. But by that same token the ontic is itself gratuitous gift,[96] and in its giftedness open to further gracious bestowals. I add parenthetically: oddly enough, that category of gift

would come into prominence in some philosophical theology towards the end of Balthasars life as a way of sidestepping the question of ontology altogether.[97] If Heidegger had spoken of the revelation of the being of beings through what he termed the clear night of the nothing of anxiety,[98] in Christian Post-modernism, the language of gift, by replacing that of being, seeks to privilege a theology of revelation over above, and even over against, a theology of creation. For Balthasar, as his final thoughts in Herrlichkeit will show, neither school Heideggerianism, Christian Post-modernism -- is correct. The key concept of ontology is (freely) gifted being.

The anxiety about Idealism Balthasar was also exercised by the way the early Heidegger, in his opinion, gave hostages to Idealism. Though Balthasar praises Heidegger for having opened our eyes to how deeply historical finite being really is (he takes Heideggers concern with the inner face of time to be the novel of the modern soul, or, in another formulation, the most significant new eschatology in philosophical form[99]), nonetheless he cannot accept the way Heideggerian Dasein would in the writings of the later 1920s swallow up an account of being. After all, Heidegger himself, towards the end of his Kant book, put the question, Finitude in existence can it be developed as a problem without a presupposed infinitude?[100] Balthasar sympathises, of course,

since fundamentally despite all borrowings from later philosophy -he belongs, if I may invoke some words of Derrida, to the epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality.[101] For Balthasar, who saw himself as a phenomenological realist in a new variant of the Thomist tradition, the distinction between essence and existence (when rightly seen -- which in Scholasticism was not always the case), is crucial to understanding the relation of finite and infinite reality. For the early Heidegger, however, this distinction (essence/existence) is only what Balthasar terms a tension within an identity, the identity of transcendence, or, in Heideggerese, the transcendental-horizonal structure, where essence equals understanding as Dasein gives meaning to things, and existence equals Dasein itself in mans unique way to be.[102] For Balthasar, Heideggers refusal to allow into philosophy any considerations over and above Daseins construal of entities in their presencing (for Heidegger, any further move would be cryptotheology) in effect renders the a posteriori a form of the a priori and so rejoins the Idealism Heidegger believed he had left behind. Fairly or not, Balthasar objects that Heideggers fundamental ontology in the pre-War writings is too epistemologically absorbed. It continues to ask about the conditions of knowing the subject matter of an enquiry before it takes up the subject matter itself, rather than asking about the conditions of possibility of the factual existence of the subject matter or, better still, the conditions of its

actuality. Only the latter can count as the approach of a thoroughgoing realism. When in 1965 Balthasar came to look back on the Kant book in the light of its second edition, from 1950, he would take its new preface to be a complete disavowal by Heidegger of its approach.[103]

Heidegger and Catholicism In 1939 Balthasar considered that Heideggers thought had an obvious Christian background. In more recent scholarship, this chimes with John Caputos view that Sein und Zeit was in part the issue of an attempt to formalize the structures of factical Christian life.[104] The word Christian is certainly more suitable than the phrase Catholic Christian. In working out his existential analytic, Heidegger, who declared in 1919 that the system of Catholicism was no longer acceptable to [him],[105] appears to have been influenced by the trio Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, and if we recall that Augustine was a Father of the Catholic Church we should also bear in mind the maxim of Reformed theology, Augustinus totus noster.[106] Be that as it may, Balthasar felt Heideggers philosophical enterprise was open to a future Christian development (once again, the unqualified adjective recurs), though, as he writes, which road he is taking and will take, we know not. [107] He was presumably unaware of the shifts in Heideggers attitudes and professorial practice whereby, in Caputos words, his work after 1929 lost its ontological neutrality and became hostile to

Christianity,[108] whether Christianity in general or its Freiburg Catholic incarnation in particular.[109] Admittedly, that did not prevent Heideggers seeking the assistance of the Catholic archbishop in the vulnerable position in which he found himself when the War ended, nor insisting towards the end of his life that he had never left the Catholic Church, nor indeed arranging for his funeral Mass, with a homily preached by a leading student of the relation of his philosophy to St Thomass, Bernhard Welte.[110] Welte was not only a Messkircher, a fellowtownsman of Heideggers. He had also been in the mid 1950s a successor of Heidegger as Rector of the University. Qua philosophical theologian, he shared Heideggers dislike of NeoScholasticism, and his interest in Meister Eckhart and Zen. And until 1948 he had been secretary to the archbishop, thus in the period of Heideggers somewhat desperate appeal for help. One suspects there was little about him Welte did not know. Balthasar lacked these advantages. But granted Heideggers highly public role in the Nazification of Freiburg University, and, less overtly, the abolition of its chair of Catholic philosophy, as well as the neo-pagan language of much of his post-War writing (even if this was indebted to a longstanding German Philhellenism), at the point when Balthasar resumed writing about this subject in the early 1960s he must surely have realised that Heideggers personal evolution had not taken the form he, Balthasar, might have wished. How, then, did he see the later Heidegger?

Balthasars reading of the later Heidegger In point of fact, surprising as this may seem, Balthasar was by no means disappointed. Heideggers development dispelled Balthasars anxieties about an opening to Idealism, delighted him by the role now given to the ontological difference, which brought to light instead the enabling role of Being vis--vis beings, and gained his approval by its acerbity of aspersion on the primacy in a technocentric era of calculative thought rather than the contemplative thinking, open to surprise and disclosure, intimated by the affinities Heidegger found between denken, dichten, and danken: to think, to poetize, to thank.[111] As a consequence, the place of the later Heidegger in the metaphysics volume of Herrlichkeit, Balthasars theological aesthetics, is not only assured but pivotal. Balthasar places his treatment of Heidegger at the climax of a line of Renaissance and Post-Renaissance writers whom he surveys under the heading classical mediation. These were thinkers who turned for help to, as he puts it, classical piety [i. e. the ancient Greeks] to be rooted afresh in the primordial tradition, die Urtradition, at a time when, in the wake of late mediaeval Nominalism, thought about being was suffering major disorientation.[112] Heidegger, so Balthasar judged, was right to surmise that thinking would only develop along healthful lines if it took place within the horizon of that primordial tradition, where the depths of Being as a whole have been

disclosed in archetypal fashion.[113] In effect, Balthasars question is, How now may we recover the mind-set and sensibility of the Hellenic dawn when Beings self-gift was found truly beautiful? That is why he sub-titles his Heidegger section in Herrlichkeit, The Way Back, Der Weg zurck. Along with Rilke, Heidegger renews the inspiration which had reached the German sensibility from Goethe, carefully eschewing the other possibility, die andere Mglichkeit, [114] a metaphysics of the subject which runs from Descartes to Hegel and then -- in inverted but equally unaesthetic fashion -- to Marx. Heideggers Destruktion of metaphysics is not to be read as negatively deconstructive but as a re-appropriation through rethinking the tradition in dialogical form: precisely what Balthasar himself was seeking to do in Herrlichkeit III/1.[115] More strikingly still, Balthasar reverts to Heidegger at the finis of his entire volume of metaphysics seeking not only to engage him in dialogue with the tradition of Catholic ontological thought from which Heidegger had detached himself soon after the First World War but to co-opt him for that tradition will-he, nill-he. My account of why Balthasar regretted that detachment seems confirmed when he tells us that: the history of the modern period has no clearer result for or against the Glory of Being, and history has fashioned the Either--Or so simply that it has become a decision between Christianity and nihilism.[116]

This might be called an anticipation in a different idiom, more aesthetic, but equally dramatic, of the English Radical Orthodoxy school of Professor John Milbank. Basically, the Balthasar of Herrlichkeit accepted Heideggers claim in the Letter on Humanism: [T]he holy, which alone is the essential sphere of divinity, which in turn alone affords a dimension for the gods and for God, comes to radiate only when Being itself beforehand and after extensive preparation has been illuminated and is experienced in its truth. Only thus does the overcoming of homelessness begin from Being, a homelessness in which not only man but the essence of man stumbles aimlessly about.[117] In this perspective, Heideggers project, declared Balthasar, remains the most fruitful one for a potential philosophy of glory. [118]

Conclusion Only potential, then. Fortunately for the Church, Balthasar held that Catholicism had meanwhile an adequate substitute in the kenotic splendour, the generous self-spending, of its saints, who are for him icons of Being in its self-giving in the beings that are. The celebration of kenosis in those who have abundance is, he reports, a

version of sanctity which emerges with especial vigour in the early modern period when, under the double impact of Nominalism and Cartesianism, Being itself was otherwise occluded, even eclipsed. Such saints supply for Seinsvergessenheit, the forgetfulness of Being. This unexpected suggestion turns on the isomophormism Balthasar finds between the holy fools of hagiography and the disclosure of Being in a mature Heideggerianism read through a lens provided by the tradition of Thomas. Balthasar equates later Heideggerian Being not with God but with the referent of Aquinass term actus essendi, act of being, glossed by Balthasar as the nonsubsisting abundance which, from out of and in finite realities, comes to itself, comes to stand, while reciprocally essences, essentiae, attain to reality from this act, by way of it, without ever reducing it or sub-dividing it, and in that way receive their own beauty.[119] By a strange analogy which emerges from Balthasars metaphysics volume as a whole, the charity of kenotic saints to those around them replicates or iconises the self-emptying fullness of Being in its favouring of beings.[120] In this dual context, wonder, whose philosophical importance Heidegger recovered from the Greeks,[121] points to a freedom which Heidegger does not want to acknowledge. The question now runs, if the Thomist actus essendi is no more ultimate than is Heideggerian Being, from where, pray, does all this issue? Balthasars answer is: from a gracious Freedom, ultimately triune in

character, to which Being and the saints alike attest in different ways, of course, but ways that mutually reflect.[122] Going beyond the text of Herrlichkeit, the Trinity, or what Balthasar would call the event, Ereignis, of the Trinitarian communion, is the source of all sending. The manner in which Being, freely gifted and in turn gifting, and its icon, which is charity, have been understood, or misunderstood, in diverse epochs, are all included in the providence of the triune God.[123] In his Heidegger and Aquinas John Caputo wrote: Heidegger eventually came to the conclusion that the word Being belongs to the metaphysicians and that it could no longer do service for what he wanted to think, for the genuine matter to be thought. Being has been the subject of every metaphysical or, as he says, onto-theo-logical account of beings from Plato to Nietzsche. The real concern of thought is, not the Being of the metaphysicians, but that which grants Being as the subject matter of metaphysics.[124] It seems to have gone unnoticed that that which grants Being had become exactly Balthasars interest too. And perhaps, then, Balthasar exemplifies the path described by Dr Laurence Hemming in Heideggers Atheism when he writes: The place that Heidegger reserves for faith

answers the question about God, but to understand this place requires simultaneously asking the question he asked: the question of being. The place Heidegger holds open, he holds open for anyone who follows the path he has opened up.[125]

The Technical Absolute

Mark Sinclair Oxford, 23 May 2008
rd

The interview with Heidegger that was published in Der Spiegel after his death derives its title from what is perhaps the most difficult and provocative assertion within it: nur ein Gott kann uns retten, only a God can save us now.[126] What we are to be saved from is, to be sure, not sin, but rather modern technology, which is, as Heidegger claims, destroying the earth, deracinating the human being, and transforming existence as a whole into technical functions and relationships. This transformation is now not merely a European, but a planetary phenomenon, and occurs according to a relentless, implacable logic that surpasses human intentions, despite our pretensions to have finally subjected the world to our mastery. Indeed, in response to a question concerning the task of thinking in the present age, Heidegger asserts that philosophy will be incapable of effecting an immediate transformation of the present state of the world. This applies not only to philosophy, but to all merely human thinking and doing. It is due to this human impotence in the face of the power of technology that we might call on a God to save us. Salvation cannot come solely from ourselves, and we require something akin to divine grace in order to be saved. To be sure, Heidegger does not state exactly how a God might save us, and one doubts whether it is a question of divine intervention resetting the world on its hinges. In any case, on this account calling for a God seems to become the essential task of thought, since the sole possibility of being-saved (eine Rettung) lies in preparing readiness in thinking and poetising (im Denken und Dichten) for the appearance of a God, or for the absence of the God in its decline.[127] The allotting of such a religious task to philosophy or thought is, at the very least, surprising to those more prepared to accept Heideggers assertion of 1925 that genuine philosophical research is and remains atheism,[128] and his argument concerning the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics; an argument presented as a way of accounting for how God came into philosophy at all. [129] Yet

reactions to Heideggers conjoining of the questions of theology and technology, of course, often go beyond surprise: for many, this is an expression of a politically unacceptable and dangerous quietism that is the result, and perhaps even the mirror image, of his failed and ultimately disastrous political engagement of 1933-34. Hence it is argued that in the place of, on the one hand, the absurd, even hubristic heroism of an attempt to delimit and confront modern technology as a whole, and, on the other hand, the fatalism of a much older man who admits, in the same interview, to be frightened by photographs of the earth taken from the moon, we should, as our common sense seems to demand, focus on the liberatory effects of some technologies whilst protecting ourselves from the pernicious effects of others, all the time attempting to keep technology in hand.[130] No matter how philosophy might be called upon to serve this purpose, we require genuine and localised critique rather than mere denunciations of technology, as the French philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, put it to me on his recent visit to Manchester. Heidegger is not, however, the only thinker of the 20
th

century to conjoin the questions of technology and theology, reflecting on a god, on his absence or abandonment of us, in response to the perils of the modern technical world. [131] In the work of the French sociologist, historian, technology-critic and Christian theologian, Jacques Ellul, we find a comparable analysis of our present technological and theological situation, an analysis that is nevertheless worked out independently from Heidegger and even at a deliberate remove from philosophy as such. In what follows, I will sketch the broadest outlines of a comparison of both thinkers on the question concerning technology, with the aim of gaining an understanding of the stakes and significance of the invocation of God expressed in the Spiegel interview. The hermeneutic strategy involved in this comparison, however, is not one of moving from the clear to the obscure, from an imagined limpidity of Elluls work to

Heidegger the riddler, but rather of exposing a basic problem, difficulty or paradox encountered by both thinkers; a paradox which inheres in their respective attempts to recognise and to think the danger of the becoming absolute of technology in our world.

Bearing Witness to the Disaster: Autonomous Technology The fundamental elements of Jacques Elluls conception of technology, and his critique of its rationalisation, standardisation, automatism, and destruction of tradition and nature, are presented in the first of his three texts on the subject: La technique: lenjeu du sicle of 1954, translated with the title The Technological Society. What was taken to be merely a reactionary denunciation of the evils of technology, however, was ignored in a France enthusiastically experiencing the white heat of the post-war acceleration of technoscientific development. He seems to have been unread, perhaps surprisingly, by those French philosophers, such as Jean Beaufret, who were led by Heidegger to reflect philosophically on technology, and it was not until the text was translated into English, on the recommendation of Aldous Huxley, that it gained a serious reception. Preferring to safeguard the proper meaning of the word technology for the study of technical things, systems and processes, for Ellul, la technique has been transformed in the modern age; it has taken substance, has become a reality in itself. It is no longer a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon. [132] This new quality and independence proper to modern technology, as the opening pages of The Technological Society declare, cannot simply be ascribed to the machine. Certainly, the machine is deeply symptomatic of technique, insofar as it is the ideal towards which technique strives; insofar as the machine is solely, exclusively, technique [TS 4]. Yet technique is a broader or a more profound phenomenon. The provisional definition offered, one undoubtedly influenced by Max Webers analyses of rationalisation, is that technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency [TS xxv]. Comprising not only the work of the techno-sciences, but also, and more generally, methods of

organisation,

management,

education,

information

and

communication, technique, at once theoretical and practical, is what enables the machine to be integrated into society and what enables society as such to function with a structure akin to that of a machine [TS 5]. Such a broad conception of technology as a kind of rationally purposive action, may seem to be imprecise, but with it Ellul seeks to establish a central point: as long as technique is thought to relate solely to machine technology then it might still be possible to conceive of the human being as external to it, and thus as the master of it, whereas we must recognise that technique has become the very substance of the human being [TS 6]. The independence that Ellul claims for modern technology is thus not a form of isolation from the human being; technique has become independent of us in the sense that it encompasses and incorporates us. Ellul draws out the stakes of his claim in offering what he terms a characterology of technique, whose three fundamental characteristics are: autonomisation, self-augmentation and monism. Technological development is autonomous in the sense that it is self-directing: decisions are made on the basis of one criterion, namely efficiency, and technologies are implemented solely because they can be actualised.[133] What can be actualised, must be actualised and to refuse to accept this would be mere romanticism, an abnegation, to cite Gordon Brown, of ones moral duty. Dominated by the criterion of efficiency, the human being, for Ellul, is no longer in any sense the agent of choice [ TS 80]. This self-directing of technique is, however, at once self-augmenting, in that technology comes to encroach on domains of human life, which were previously spontaneous and non-rational. Moreover, technological innovation comes to depend less on the creative inspiration of individual researchers than it does on an automatic growth inherent in technology itself. It is in this sense, it should be noted, that researchers can state that a solution for a particular technical problem will be found within a certain time-frame, even if

one cannot be found at present. It is also in this sense that the physicist Werner Heisenberg could argue that the word guilt does not really apply to atomic physicists after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since as individuals they have only played their part in the fulfilment of the modern scientific project instigated many centuries ago, which would inevitably have attained the heights, or depths, of atomic physics without them.[134] The third characteristic of technique is its unicit or monism. Under this heading Ellul argues that it is abstract and ultimately dishonest to isolate good from bad, or proper from improper uses of technology. To lament, for example, the impoverished state of modern journalism as an accidental deformation of the positive educative possibilities inherent in the printing press is to fail to see the full picture; it is to fail to see that tabloid journalism is, in a sense, necessary in the mass society that printing technology helps to establish [ TS 95]. What we evaluate as either the positive or negative effects of technology, then, all belong to the singular essence of technique. According to these characteristics, Ellul presents technology as a totalising, monolithic phenomenon, with its own internal logic, necessity and ends; technique in the modern world is becoming absolute. To be sure, Ellul does not deny human freedom, or the possibility of individual actions that would run counter to these characteristics of technique, but he does argue that at what we might call the macro level such freedom is not visible, and that we should not imagine that it is solely on the basis of humanist assumptions.[135] In this way, The Technological Society offers what can be understood as a strong or radical version of the idea of technological determinism, at the ground of which lies the recognition that technological change is the primary motive force of historical and social development. Ellul is certainly not the first social thinker to advance such an idea: although technological determinism was anathema for much of 20 century Marxism it is
th

nevertheless the young Marx who writes that the hand mill gives

you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist.[136] Technological determinism amounts to the recognition that, in the words of Langdon Winner, artefacts have politics; that certain technologies bring about or even necessitate certain social and political forms.[137] Yet in opposition to the Marxist eschatology of the relations of production finally becoming adequate to the modern forces of production upon the assumption of power by the proletariat, Ellul refuses any instrumental or anthropological, to use Heideggers terms, conception of technology according to which we could get technology fully in hand. Technique has its own logic and ends to which we are inevitably submitted. Hence The Technology Society offers more than a mere moral condemnation of technology, and it can be understood to be driving at an ontological conception of modern technology which challenges our liberal, humanist understanding of ourselves and our relation to things that we have made. Of course, such a diagnosis of the technological problem renders all the more problematic any possible solution: the recognition that modern technology is a danger because it essentially, and not accidentally, escapes complete human control compromises any attempt to do something to transform the situation. In other words, and this is one version of the paradox I mentioned in the introduction to this paper, the more we recognise the seriousness of the situation, the less we find ourselves able to do anything about it. Elluls pronouncements on how we should respond to technique, however, are ambiguous: although he will come to speak of the new thing for which humanity is waiting [138] he openly admits that any contemporary attempt to conceive of this non-technological new beginning would be abstract, idealistic and fanciful. Moreover, he suggests that the moment for genuine resistance may well have passed, since the possibilities for it are being progressively eroded. On this point, as on many others, commentators have wondered whether Ellul does not overstate his

case, particularly when he writes that: man in our society has no intellectual, moral or spiritual reference point for judging and criticising technology. This, of course, seems to undermine the very possibility of his own reflection. [139] In any case, in the place of a political strategy and immediate practical goals, we seem to be left solely with what emerges in his other works as a theologically inspired hope. This hope is grounded, as Ellul writes in his 1972 text, Lesprance oublie, translated as Hope in a Time of Abandonment , on three modes of human comportment: indolence, prayer and realism. If, through indolence, we are able to escape from modern technique and to find time for prayer, then prayer, and the hope manifest in it, must, through bearing witness to the technological disaster, be grounded in a concrete realism, if that prayer is to have any genuine meaning or purpose. Technology and the Turning My purpose in referring to Ellul in the context of this paper is not to convince you of the veracity of his method and findings, which a 5 minute summary of a book of 600 pages would be hardpressed to do. The point is rather to apprehend better the specificity of Heideggers problematic in its similarity to and difference from that of Ellul. For all that both thinkers consider conceptions of the neutrality of technology to represent the greatest of all dangers, Heidegger offers a philosophical, that is ontological, conception of the essence of technology. [140] To begin to clarify what is at stake here, it should be noted that when attempting to ascertain the specificity of modern technology, Ellul criticises, as does Heidegger, the idea that technology is simply applied modern science. The Technological Society argues that the interrelation of the sciences and technology, not just in contemporary techno-scientific research, but already at the beginning of modern science itself, is such that it

is impossible to maintain a precedence of one over the other. Yet Heidegger goes further than Ellul on this point, questioning the very meaning of both theory and practice in modernity, rather than merely wondering about what precedes the other. It can be said that, for Heidegger, modern technology is as much a radically transformed praxis that has put the modern mathematical sciences to use, as it is an application of those sciences.[141] Here praxis has been radically, ontologically transformed from what it originally was, to use Heideggers reference point, in ancient Greece. According to Aristotle, the carpenter addresses wood in which the form of the finished product is already hidden, i.e. potentially present.[142] The task of the producer is thus simply to extract or to unearth this still hidden form.[143] Hence Aristotle can analogically compare the relation of the craftsman to his wood, and, more generally, the relation of the agent to the patient as such and in general, to that of a teacher and her pupil.[144] Only on a bad day, if at all, might we be able to entertain the idea that teaching consisted of action upon an inert matter. Consequently, the craftsman does not merely act on his material, nor does she simply force it to become what it is not; in the end, the craftsman is rather co-responsible, with the matter, form and telos of the finished product, for its being-there in the unhidden.[145] For a Greek of the 4 century BC, then, if Aristotles
th

testimony is anything to go by, praxis in the most general sense is much more revelatory than it is creative. Modern praxis, however, knows little, if anything, of this. The modern-day practical worker, in the words of Marx, stands before a primary matter, using the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of things to make them act as forces on other things in conformity with his goal.[146] This praxis is not, however, as Marx goes on to claim, merely a mechanically modified version [147] of ancient praxis, if by that we mean only that machines increasingly come to stand as an intermediary between man and the world upon

which he now acts.[148] What has changed in modern praxis, it might be said, is rather our conception of things, and, at the same time, our real relation to them. All has become, indeed, an issue of action, calculated force and the essential inertia of things, whereas once it was a question of being responsive to their ability to come into presence from the unhidden. As Heidegger argues, then, modern technology is a transformation of theory and practice in their very essence. It is the unity, and the prior ground, of this changed theory and practice that is to be thought as the essence of technology; [149] an essence which is a mode of revealing [VA 22/324]. In distinction to ancient Greek techne, which Aristotle describes explicitly as a mode of revealing or being-in-the-truth,[150] the predominant form of revealing in modern technology, as Heidegger argues, is a challenging or an extracting. Where once it was a question of responsibility and letting-appear, it is now a question of a challenging that puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy, which can be extracted and accumulated [VA 18/320]. Through such scientifically mediated challenging things present themselves to us as such and in general as a standing resource of energies that can be quantified, ordered, captured and stored. They present themselves to us, no longer even as independent objects, but rather as a mere standing-reserve or Bestand [VA 20/322], things which have significance only in relation to the network of production and consumption in which they appear. Clearly, much more can be said concerning the meaning and possibility of such a delimitation of the essence of modern technology; an essence that would work itself out, and become increasingly manifest, in the movement from classical physics to the contemporary techno-sciences and our world of information. Yet according to the claim that technology is a mode of revealing we are led to recognise that technology is no merely human enterprise and concomitantly that modern technical artefacts are not the

neutral vehicles of our intentions. Technology is a manner in which things are, a manner in which they show themselves a revelation which is no mere human feat. On this point, it might be said that the miracle of the modern world is that the 17
th

century

mathematisation of nature actually works, that it has come to grant us such apparent power over the world; [151] but this miracle belongs originally to being itself. It belongs to what must be thought as a sending or a destining of being, precisely because we have not decided that nature is able to present itself in such a manner to us. Now although this philosophical account of the essence of technology makes an advance on Elluls sociologically oriented approach, the diagnosis of the dangers of modernity are similar, if not identical: for Heidegger, a principal danger is that the human being itself becomes enframed, that it takes itself for a technologically manipulable entity. We are at present, of course, further along the way to this, according to the peculiar logic that the cleverer we become, the further our techno-sciences develop, the less we actually value ourselves. Yet still more disturbingly, for Heidegger, as for Ellul, in a sense the disaster has already happened. The technological revelation of being is of such a nature that, blinded by its prowess and successes, that we take it to be the only possible mode of revealing; the danger is that it is taken to be truth per se. The danger is that technology no longer seems to meet any resistance to its machinations; that, as Heidegger asserts in the Spiegel interview, we only have purely technical conditions left. [152] As he writes in the essay Overcoming Metaphysics, written between 1936 and 1946, modern technology advances as the absolute calculation, die unbedingte Verrechnung, of all things; a calculation which encounters only a brute matter that is infinitely open to technological manipulation. The danger, in other words, is that we will only understand the technical production of the absolute possibility (die unbedingte Mglichkeit) of producing everything.[153]

What, then, is to be done in the face of this danger? The idea of Gelassenheit that Heidegger inherits from Meister Eckhart, which we might translate more or less happily, borrowing a word from Ellul, as indolence, or as detachment, can be only a preliminary to any possible solution. Moreover, the paradox that I noted above in relation to Ellul, takes on a heightened, more problematic form from Heideggers perspective, precisely because of his more directly philosophical apprehension of the problem itself. The more we take seriously the non-neutrality of technology, the less we find ourselves in a position to restrain it or mould it to our purposes. Yet, thinking with Heidegger, it becomes clear that the problem is not simply one of our incapacity to alter technological development that has its own logic and momentum. More profoundly, the very idea that we can simply do something about technology, that we can get it in hand, is, in the end, another instance of technological thinking. It presumes that what there is in the world can be controlled, mastered and subjected to our will. Technological thinking is, in other words, a function of the humanism that grounds many of our most cherished assumptions. This is not to say that we should not take all available measures to avert disaster. Nor is it to say, as does Michael Zimmermann in the conclusion to his important, and by now classic commentary of 1990 which has recently been reprinted, that Heidegger is a historical determinist who affirms the necessity of being in the place of human freedom. To be sure, viewed from one perspective, Heidegger is a technological determinist if these terms designate solely the claim that technological development is the primary motive force of historical and social change, with the proviso that on Heideggers account modern technology is granted and made possible as a mode of the destiny of being. This destining is something quite other than the idea of necessity involved in the undergraduate conundrum of freedom or necessity. To think technological destining in this way as an ineluctable fate is, as

Heidegger remarks in the Spiegel interview, to think it too absolutely, zu absolut.[154] The very possibility of our freedom, freedom thought as other than a sphere removed from worldly causality, is to be found in our destiny; and the question concerning our technological to destiny is the as attempt opposed to to gain being a free blindly relationship[155] subjugated to it. Of course, we still seem to be stuck in an impasse, all the more so considering that, as Heidegger acknowledges, there can be no simple escape from technology, no post-technological future: this is not only because it seems extremely idealist to imagine that we will discard our modern devices, but also because to attempt to turn our backs on history, on the history that we are, by pretending to construct such a future would be an impossible move akin to Descartes attempt to be non-medieval and non-Greek; an attempt which makes the task of inheritance an unknown subjugation. The hint of a solution, the new thing for which we are waiting, can only come from being itself; and if, as Hubert Dreyfus says somewhere, we cannot plan for a new manifestation of being as a committee of experts can plan a nuclear power station, then, more positively, reflecting on the difficulty and what I have described as the paradox of our technological situation is already the beginning of a transformation of being and human being itself. It is already a step towards the leap into Dasein of which Heidegger speaks after Being and Time. To cite the titles of two of his essays, essays which express a thinking that had its origin in the pivotal years of the mid1930s, The Question Concerning Technology is made possible by The Turning. It is in this sense, independently of the question of art as a possibly different mode of revealing, that where the danger lies, the saving power also grows. But, to conclude, how can the recognition of the technological impasse inform an understanding of the invocation of a declining God of a God to come in the Spiegel interview? There is technology

doubtless

an element of Heidegger the provocateur

in the

statement that only a God can save us now, and it must be underlined that a thinking of god cannot take precedence over being-historical thinking. This is evident in a much less exoteric context, that of the Beitrge zur Philosophie a text translated, at times strangely it must be said, under the title of Contributions to Philosophy. In the section entitled The Last God it is argued that a possible god needs being in the sense that the god can provide a hint of its absence only in the experience of the mystery of being as a coming to presence that at once withdraws itself.[156] The preparation for a god in thinking and poetising of which Heidegger speaks in the interview is thus nothing but being-historical thinking. And, of course, if the God we are to receive is to be allied with Christianity, the task is not only to think this god outside of the framework of onto-theology, but, and at the same time, to think it as something other than an absolute force able to create the world ex nihilo. Such a conception of the divine, and of the world that is creates, as Heidegger begins to argue even in 1927, is one step along the way from the early Greek experience of being as comingto-presence to the absolutisation of emframing in late modernity. [157]

Heidegger and Information Technologies: Tracing Visions of the Posthuman Bradley B. Onishi Some time ago Nietzsche's Zarathustra proclaimed, Man is something that must be overcome. Over the last quarter century thinkers from every corner of the academic universephilosophers, critical theorists, science-fiction writers, scientists, literary critics, and othershave come to agree with him. However, strategies for overcoming the human have not been employed in terms of the bermensch, but rather in discourse surrounding the posthuman, which has emerged in a wide set of fields through a diverse set of thinkers such as feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, inventor Ray Kurzweil, transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, and political theorist Francis Fukuyama, just to name a few. Inevitably, with discussion and rumination coming from such different academic contexts, visions of the posthuman vary tremendously. For some, becoming posthuman means simply overcoming the humanist dream of a discrete, autonomous subject it is a way of re-envisioning models of selfhood. For others, the vision is more radicalit could include living a bodiless existence as an avatar in cyberspace, or inhabiting a completely artificial body connected to the brain. Despite this disparity, two characteristics are constant throughout posthuman discourse. First, posthumanism must be understood as reflection

upon and discussion of humanism. To be somewhat trite, it is

natural that one's understanding of the human will inevitably influence their vision of the posthuman. As I will demonstrate below, one way to characterize the differing trajectories of posthumanism is to place them into two general camps: ultra-humaniststhose who want to extend the humanist project to hyperbolic ends, and literally post-humaniststhose that want to overcome the humanist understanding of the human in favor of a revised model. Second, these theorists agree that if Zarathustra's dream of overcoming the human is to become reality, it will do so through an intimate relationship with the technological, more specifically, with new information technologies. This is no coincidence. During the last quarter century, information technologies have accompanied humanity into previously unimaginable

subjective and technological territory. Every time one turns on satellite or digital television, uses a card for a cash withdrawal from an automated bank teller, or makes a point of sale purchase at a restaurant, one is using a technology which is able to store, send or transform information over a non-physical, informational network. Furthermore, wireless information technologies, such as personal organizers and mobile phones make wireless communication possible, can store a librarys worth of information in a hand-held device and can even act as a word processing unit. All of this is not to mention the most influential and revolutionary information technology which has only been in widespread public use for less than two decadesthe Internet. For

many people all over the globe the Internet is an integral aspect of daily life as they send e-mails to friends or colleagues, look up information related to work or leisure, join chat rooms with people of similar interests, play various roles in online communities, and explore the vast expanse of the Internets informational space. Driving directions, weather information, biographical details about any number of public figures, ideas for potential travel destinations, networks of potential romantic partners, avenues for communicating with friends and family, libraries of information on any topic imaginable, home-made videos and other amateur multimediaall of this lies on hand ready to be accessed through the Internet. Quite simply, the proliferation and dissemination of the Internet has changed the ways in which we communicate with other human beings and machines, but more importantly, it has changed how we interpret reality and interpret what it means to be human. In response and in anticipation theorists from various fields have declared the emergence of the posthuman as a means to account for the developments wrought by these rapidly developing

technologies. In what follows I will use Heidegger's critique of technology to trace two visions of the posthuman that are tied intimately to new information technologies. For those seeking to extend humanist ideals information technologies are employed to extend the understanding of the human as an autonomous, self-legislating subject, standing over against a world of objectsthis is a vision of

a scientific posthuman. Within this framework the human itself is objectified as it becomes a calculable and reducible set of informational patterns participating in what Heidegger calls the standing-reserve, albeit in this context, the standing-reserve of information. On the contrary, an alternative trajectory can be developed along the lines of Dasein's Being-in-the-world, one which posits the self as constituted by a lack or abyss, enabling the formulation of a new understanding of the human in conjunction with information technologies, without reducing humanity to a participant in the standing-reserve of information. Within this trajectory a mystical posthuman emerges; networked, multiple, and fluid, it is never fully present, nor decipherable to itself.[158]

Part I: The Standing-Reserve of Information and the Emergence of the Scientific Posthuman Visions of the scientific posthuman are illustrated most vividly in the scientific movement called transhumanism, which promotes the radical alteration of human minds and bodies in order to develop a new posthuman species that has the ability to transcend current human capabilities. Nick Bostrom,[159] the

director of the Future of Humanity Institute, which is a member of the James Martin 21 st Century School at the University of Oxford,

defines the movement as follows, The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the

human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.[160] Transhumanism understands itself as an heir of the humanist project due to its understanding of individual freedom and autonomy as the highest values of human existence. Thus, for transhumanists, It is not our human shape or the details of our current human biology that define what is valuable about us, but rather our aspirations and ideals, our experiences, and the kinds of lives we lead.[161] These ideals can best be established through the development of technologies which will allow humans to reshape material existence, especially the human body. In response, Brent Waters has argued critically that the main tenets of the transhuman vision are based on the belief that the worlds only underlying and universal feature is information.[162] This core belief has serious consequences, as he points out: Since information has no inherent meaning it can be recast, conveyed and interpreted in virtually endless arrays. The fluidity of information means that all borders are temporary, and any definition permeable. Reality is a construct of shifting patterns of information within and through various media. [163] Noteworthy is how the technological advances being sought by the transhumanists all share the goal of procuring, processing and distributing information for the purposes of extending the humanist goals of freedom and autonomy to a revolutionary level.

Let

me

highlight

briefly

only

few

of

the

main First,

technological developments envisioned by transhumanism.

nanotechnology, which is based around the notion that microscopic machines will someday be able to arrange and rearrange atoms. Bostrom explains, Nanotechnology, by making it possible to rearrange atoms effectively, will enable us to transform coal into diamonds, sand into supercomputers, and to remove pollution from the air and tumors from healthy tissue.[164] Nanotechnology is not unrelated to the second technological development which is central to the transhuman visionwhat Bostrom and others have called uploading. Uploading consists of transferring the informational patterns of a human brain onto a hard drive. [165] In transferring the brain from the biological body to a computer, all that is needed to retain the identity of the individual would be the successful transfer of the informational patterns which were stored on the brain (to another medium). As Hans Moravec has said, The rest is mere jelly[166] Thus, transhumanists envision posthuman creatures that will inhabit prosthetic bodies, or live virtually as avatars in cyberspace. The point is that the body is understood as an outdated model of hardware that needs to be replaced in order to eradicate inherent human deficiencieshunger, fatigue, disease, and most of all, death. In the meantime, the human is reduced to a set of informational patterns which can be stored, manipulated, and transformed all for the sake of the possibility for limitless posthuman freedom and autonomy.

It is at this critical juncture that Heidegger's critique of technology can help to illuminate the consequences of the transhuman vision. I want to suggest that this vision of the posthuman leads to the reduction of existence to what Heidegger calls the representable and the calculable, resulting in human participation in what Heidegger calls the standing-reserve and an epoch lacking anything question-worthy. Of course, for Heidegger, the problems with the transhuman begin with its Cartesian assumptions. For Heidegger, Descartes formulation cogito ergo sum is the beginning of modern metaphysics. By instituting a selfassured, self-legislating ego, Descartes metaphysics is the

decisive beginning of the foundation of metaphysics in the modern age.[167] By taking the ground of reality to be the individual human consciousnessthe individual IHeidegger points out that

Descartes effected a fundamental change: Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth.[168] With the human subject as the ground of the real, following Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that existence is leveled to the will to power: The ousia (beingness) of the subiectum changes into the subjectness of self-assertive self-consciousness, which now manifests its essence as the will to will. The will is, as the will to power, the command to more power. [169] When the will to power is eventually posited as the last metaphysical force governing the ego, the logic of mastery implicit in the Cartesian framework comes to the fore: There begins that way of being . . .

for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole.[170] In this way, modern technology is intimately related to modern subjectivity. The modern subject naively understands technology as an aid to be used in the will to dominate the objective world, demanding that nature stand-by in service of humanity: The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. [171] Yet, technology is never a mere instrument in humanitys service. For Heidegger,

when the ego becomes the Being of beings, all material entities within the world are evaluated according to their use-value in reference to it. He says, Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We shall call it the standingreserve (Bestand).[172] In terms of the standing-reserve it is essential to note the interweaving paths of subjectivity and technology. Technology allows for the enlargement of the ego's power in a manner beyond mere human capability, metamorphisizing reality to the point that the object is transformed into standing-reserveWhatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.[173]

When the material world is transformed from the res extensa into the standing-reserve, the modern framework of the subject standing over and against the world of objects is dissolvedthis is the decisive role technology plays in the transformation of the modern subject. This challenging-forth of the material world placing it in a state of perpetual standing-bywhich stems from the employment of modern machine technology, changes not only the world-picture represented by the subject, but the subject itself, as it becomes subordinate to the orderability of the standing-reserve and enables the entities of the standing-reserve to be available on demand.[174] Eventually, humanity itself must be taken as part of the standing-reserve, as modern technology makes explicit what was always implicit in modern metaphysics, namely the

objectification of the subject.[175] Thus, Heidegger's reflections on technology help to explain how the transhuman vision of a scientific posthuman leads to human participation in a new version of the standing-reservethe standing-reserve of information . For Heidegger the standing-reserve is characterized by the storage of raw material, its distribution and its being switched about ever anew, or perpetually re-ordered. Examples of how new technologies have enabled the storage of expansive volumes of information are numerous. Mitchell explains, We can now keep almost unimaginable quantities of digital information on servers the size of domestic appliances. And we can effortlessly carry entire libraries around with us in compact, lightweight, portable devices; pocket MP3 players,

for example, can now contain the sorts of music libraries that once took the form of shelves of vinyl disks.[176] Furthermore, the storage of voluminous amounts of information, coupled with the connection of these databases to the Internet, has enabled the sharing of large and diverse collections of information by an unlimited amount of users at the same time. Moreover, this stored information can be distributed without the inconvenience of traversing physical distance. The proliferation of access points and wireless technologies (which allow for access to the Internet without the hindrance of connecting the computer to an outlet using a wire) allow mobile users to access the large vaults of stored information. Without having to overcome physical distance or physical bodies, information is now distributed at the speed of light. One way to highlight how these technologies facilitate human participation in the standing-reserve of information is through an examination of the way in which they enable subjective presence beyond the body. Shery Turkles comment on the process of identity construction for those individuals that participate in online communities is helpful: When people can play at having different genders and different lives, it isnt surprising that for some this play has become as real as what we conventionally think of as their lives, although for them this is no longer a valid

distinction.[177] Information technologies allow the subject to rearrange patterns of information in order to create a different sense of selfa self constructed of stored informational patterns. As a

result, there is a transformation of the experience of the limitations of the body. The insertion of the subject into the world of cyberspace has the potential to transform the relation of the subject toward its own sense of embodiment, as Scott Bukataman points out: Through the construction of the computer itself, there arises the possibility of a mind independent of the biology of bodies, a mind released from the mortal limitations of the flesh. . . . the invisible processes of cybernetic information circulation and electronic technology construct a body at once material and immateriala fundamental oxymoron, perhaps, of postmodernity.[178] However, subjective presence beyond the body is not the principal danger of new information technologies, or

transhumanism. Following Bukataman's analysis, problematic is how transhumanism elevates the possibility of a purely informational body to a different level through its transposition of what takes place in cyberspace into the realm of the 'real,' material world. By understanding material existenceincluding the human bodyas constituted by informational patterns, the human is reduced to mere patterns of information within the standing-reserve. Consequently, the implicit logic of the humanist frameworkthe separation of the mind from the body, the mastery of the material world, and the quest for further autonomy and freedomis extended to a hyperbolic end, while the human itself is taken to be part of the standing-reserve as a reducible and calculable set of informational

patterns amidst the sea of information which now makes up the res extensa. This posthuman vision is problematic on two levels. First, it follows that if the human, and for that matter, the posthuman, is understood as a re-presentable set of informational patterns then the ability of asking questions of meaning will have been, to use a Heideggerian term, concealed. In his important, if perplexing text Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger points out that when only the representable is the only possible goal of human existence can be further elaboration and extension and enlargement. [179] When existence is reduced to that which can be re-presented there is nothing question-worthy that could be esteemed through enactment of questioning as such.[180] If we follow Heidegger here, it seems that the transhuman quest to become posthuman claims to want to give humans the freedom to pursue their highest values, yet fails to recognize that by positing the human as a representable, informational participant in the standing-reserve it has already made the choice of what is esteemed as highest. As Heidegger argues in the Letter on Humanism, Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. . . . Rather valuing lets being be validsolely as the objects of its doing. [181] Values are born out of metaphysical assumptions. In this case, by reducing existenceincluding the humanto what Heidegger calls the representable, transhumanism brackets all questions which fall outside of the goals of enlargement of human freedom and

autonomy, which means that questions escaping the purview of these values, questions of telos, meaning, responsibility, or what Heidegger might call Being, are covered over. This bracketing of questions of meaning and responsibility points to the second problematic aspect of the transhuman vision. Transhumanism, because it understands the material world, the body, and eventually the human in terms of the use-value logic of the standing-reserve, forfeits the human potential for responsibility and singularity. As problematic as Heidegger's analysis of Dasein in Being and Time may be, his analysis demonstrates that it is indeed death which is the singular or irreplaceable aspect of every human being. Many of Heidegger's heirs and critics remain indebted to this basic insight. Even if Levinas, one of Heidegger's most critical heirs, argues that it is not one's own mortality, but the mortality of the other which constitutes the whence of one's responsibility, he does so on the grounds of mortality as the phenomenal ground of human responsibility. As Derrida says: Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. Irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, 'given,' one can say, by death. . . . It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible.[182] Mortality constitutes the possibility for singularity and responsibility, whether my own or that of the other's. Mortality is a matter of the body. Thus, if we are to avoid taking both the human and the posthuman as participants within the standing-reserve this basic

insight must remain at the fore: Any definition of the human or posthuman which understands the bodyincluding the natality and mortality inscribed thereinas an optional, limiting factor, rather than the topos of responsibility or singularity, leads to the continuation of the modern metaphysical trajectorya trajectory which leads to the nihilism of an age in which nothing is questionworthy. In response, we must come to an understanding of what remains irreducible regarding the human; we must locate what is beyond, or otherwise than information, in the Information Age.

Part II: Tracing the Mystical Posthuman[183] Following Heidegger once again, in what follows I will argue that an alternative vision of the posthuman appears when the human is understood not as a representable, self-legislating ego, but as constituted by a nullity or absence-from-itself. This mystical posthuman is characterized not by mastery, calculation, or

reducibility, but by absence, passivity, and endless self-creation. Here, the vision of the posthuman is not of a technological extension of the Cartesian ego, with limitless power and autonomy, but a selfabsent creature that inhabits a network of relations which it can neither master nor comprehend. Through his analysis of Dasein in Being and Time Heidegger attempted to reframe our understanding of the human being, or perhaps more accurately, Being human. In contrast to Descartes self-grounded ego, Heidegger argues that Dasein is

constituted by a fundamental nullity. Dasein is Being-in-the-world it is a thrown being whose being is always an issue for itself: As being, Dasein is something that has been thrown; it has been brought into its there, but not of its own accord. [184] Dasein's past is one it wasnt present forone from which it was absent, but which determines its ongoing presence. Thus, Daseins Being is imbued with a fundamental absence in that Dasein appears always after itself in its thrownness and ahead of itself in its projected possibilities: In being a basisthat is, in existing as thrownDasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis. Thus Being-a-basis means never to have power over ones ownmost Being from the ground up.[185] As a thrown beingas never-present-to-itselfDasein has been released not through itself but to itself.[186] This self-absence reveals an ineffability which prevents Dasein from ever being reduced to another object in the world. And, indeed, this nullity or absence is in fact the basis of Daseins Being: Care itself, in its very essence, is permeated with nullity through and through.[187] Essential here is how Heideggers understanding of Dasein opens up a trajectory within which the human is understood as passive, ineffable, and always self-creating. To be human is not to be a self-grounded master of the res extensa, but to be a thrown being with the perpetual task of creating and re-creating itself in interaction with the world that always precedes it. Criticisms of Being and Time aside, important for the present purposes is

Heideggers understanding of the human as constituted by a fundamental nullityan absence-from-itselfwhich stands in

opposition to the humanist framework that dominates modern metaphysics. In texts such as the Age of the World Picture, The Question Concerning Technology, Gelassenheit, Contributions to Philosophy, and other works, Heidegger demonstrates the inherent connection between the modern subject and the will to mastery embodied in modern technology. Yet, Heidegger never explicitly suggests that the interpretation of the human set forth in Being and Time could be matured and furthered in convergence with the technological. Heidegger does assert that modern technology is somehow related to Being, but unclear as to how this is so. In characteristically opaque fashion, he says in the Memorial Address : I call the posture in virtue of which we hold ourselves open for the concealed meaning of the technological world openness towards the Mystery.[188] I want to suggest that some of what Heidegger implies herethis openness to the mystery of the meaning of technologyemerges when a self-absent understanding of the human converges with information technologies. Recent reflections on information technologies and the human have argued that indeed new technological developments can be interpreted as purveyors of a posthuman, which instead of extending the humanist subject to hyperbolic ends (as in the Transhuman vision), reveals a dispossessed, networked and

perpetually self-creating postmodern subject related to Heideggers self-absent Dasein. N. Katherine Hayles explains: But the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.[189] Within this alternative trajectory, the posthuman marks the end of the self-certain ego in favor of a new model of subjectivity inscribed in what Hayles describes as interactive processes from which both mindbody and world emerge together. [190] Hayles vision of a being created out of the relationship of mind, body and world resembles the Dasein that inhabits a world which preceded it; one in which it was thrown without choice, will or consciousness, and yet must perpetually render itself in terms of its future possibilities. Dasein is thus always beyond itselflagging behind its immemorial past as a thrown being, and projecting ahead of itself toward an

unactualizable future possibility in death. Forced back upon itself in its possibilities, Dasein must re-create itself in each moment in terms of its future possibilities handed over to it by the past for which it was not present. Similarly, Hayles's posthuman participates in the perpetual process of self-creation in relationship with mind, body, and world, albeit in a framework tied intimately to the technological. For both Heidegger and Hayles the perpetual

creation and re-creation of the self is constituted by human mortality. Temporality prevents humanity from ever reaching a

point of existential homeostasis. In anticipating the possibility of one's own impossibility, the self is forced again and again beyond itself. Mortality renders the self as always irreducible to itself. Following Hayles's Heideggerian insistence on a posthumanist posthuman, Thomas Carlson has argued that the Christian mystical tradition is a fruitful resource for envisioning a posthuman that offers an alternative to the ontotheological lineage of the modern subject. He argues that the posthuman is akin to a creature created in the imago dei of an ineffable creatorthat is, in an indiscrete image of an unimaginable, un-representable God. In order to so, Carlson points to pseudo-Dionysius's understanding of the world and the human: a notion of world as infinite and

incomprehensible . . . and a related definition of the human as indefinable.[191] Carlson goes onto to suggest that the posthuman can be thought of in terms of Nicholas Cusa's notion of the human as Infinite Art: The human inhabits an infinite openness, or ongoing opening, of creative possibility insofar as it is the image of an inaccessible God.[192] Thus, instead of an extension of the Cartesian framework, in this case the posthuman would extend a Heideggerian vision of the human as radically open and ineffable. Carlson continues, . . . the posthuman subject would be instead an indeterminate, irreducibly relational, and endlessly adaptive figure whose intelligence and agency are not simply possessed or controlled by the individual or his will, but always already distributed throughout complex networks that exceed, even as they constitute, any individual.[193]

Within this trajectory, the multiple, fluid, and networked identity(s) enabled by information technologies does not mark human

participation within the standing-reserve of information, but rather uncover the self-absence of the human in a revolutionary manner. Rather than subjecting the human to conditions of tyrannical and total calculation, these new technologies have the ability to reveal the mortal ineffability that lies at the center of the human; a mortality that prevents the human from ever being reducible to calculable or representational terms: Beyond the possibility for this or that eventual actuality, which might lend itself to determinate representation, calculation, and management, the possibility of the human as indiscreet image remains indeterminate or infinite. The subject of such possibility remains always yet to be, in excess of the objectified actualities contained or controlled by fore sight, and thus that subjects constitutive involvement in processes of creation, and, and self-creation, are ever underway, always incomplete, and conditioned by unknowing.[194] For Carlson, instead of revealing the human as a conglomerate of informational patterns, the emergence of the posthuman in fact signals the irreducibility of the human to mere information in and among the Information Age. The mystical posthuman is perpetually beyond itself inscribed as a node within networks biological, cultural, and

technological. These networks overlap in various ways, enabling the unforeseeable emergence of relationships, interactions, and

possibilities. As a multiplied, fluid, and overall networked subject, the self is present in places, in modes, and at times unbeknownst to itself. It is absent from itself as it becomes present in locales

untraceable and unlocatable. As Poster says, Subject no longer stands opposed to object, man to nature, or essence to existence. . . . Electronic language . . . is everywhere and nowhere, always and never. It is truly material/immaterial.[195] Instead of using

information technologies to superimpose a view of the world that fosters escape and mastery, the mystical posthuman understands its interaction with the technological inscribing it within an ever growing and complex set of networks. As a networked subject, the mystical posthuman understands itself and the world as an irreducible set of relationsunimaginable due to its inability to be represented; manifest in its need to perpetually re-create itself within the network of relations that it inhabits. Thus, instead of leading the posthuman to view the material world as a limiting, inessential obstacle, this process of perpetual re-creation, which is constituted by the inescapable factor of mortality, leads it into an ever more complex and radically open relationship with the world. The task, I think is to see the incomprehensibility of the human as a function of its inextricable ties, both mortal and natal, with the worldand to see that world, itself no more captured or conquered by picture than is the human, as in which, and for which, love would open rather than close possibility and temporality.[196] Here we see how an alternative anthropological framework results in a different understanding of the body and the world in relationship to new information technologies. Within this trajectory,

experiences in cyberspace do not result in an understanding of the body and the world as limiting, bothersome obstacles. Instead, such experiences highlight and extend the notion of the self as irreducibly relational; inscribed within a network of relations it cannot comprehend, much less master. This mystical vision of the posthuman does not include leaving the body behind, after all, that is the mistake of the scientific vision based on the onto-theologic of the Cartesian ego. Thus, the importance of Hayles insistence that to be posthuman is to remain embodied: If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of a human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continual survival.[197] The mystical posthuman is also an embodied and mortal

posthuman. To forget this is to fall into the trap of the scientific posthuman, and in turn, to fall into the nihilism inherent therein.

Conclusion New information technologies have transformed human modes of interaction, communication, and understanding of the world. Most of all, they have revealed radical new possibilities for understanding what it means to be human. This paper has sought to

demonstrate how Heideggers critique of technology is helpful for interpreting the changes wrought by these new technological developments. Heidegger's reading of modern metaphysics and its convergence with modern technology reveals the danger of the human itself being taken as part of the standing-reserve. While the transhuman vision is based on yet undeveloped technologies, it represents a vivid example of the end goal of this trajectory. The alternative trajectory related to the mystical posthuman

demonstrates how information technologies are able to reveal the absence which lies at the heart of human existence. Instead of attempting to define or redefine the human, this trajectory highlights the undefinability and irreducibility of the human in relationship to its own mortality. This entails a lack of definition of the human which, in the end, defines it: to define the human is perhaps more to lose it . . . [198] Thus, to be posthuman may not be to overcome the human after all. Instead it is to realize with greater clarity than ever before that it is its lack of definition that enables human responsibility and creativity.

[1] Martin Heidegger, Augustine and Neo-Platonism, in The Phenomenology of

Religious Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), Introductory Part, 115. This volume of translations by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna GosettiFerencei contains the Augustine and Neo-Platonism of 1921, and the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, Winter Semester 1920-21, and The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism, which are outlines and sketches for a Lecture, not held, 1918-19. [2] W.J. Hankey, One Hundred Years of Neoplatonism in France: A Brief Philosophical History, by Wayne Hankey (pages 97-248), published with Levinas and the Greek Heritage, by Jean-Marc Narbonne (pages 1-96), Studies in Philosophical Theology (Leuven/Paris/Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2006). This is my translation and expansion of my Cent Ans De Noplatonisme En France: Une Brve Histoire Philosophique, par Wayne Hankey (pages 123-268), Collection Ztsis (Paris/Qubec, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin/Les Presses de lUniversit Laval, 2004). [3] Beginnings may be found with Alain Ph. Segonds. Liminaire, in Proclus et la Thologie Platonicienne. Actes du Colloque International de Louvain (13-16 mai 1998) en lhonneur de H.D. Saffrey et L.G. Westerink, dit par A.Ph. Segonds et C. Steel, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy De Wulf-Mansion Centre Series I, XXVI (Leuven/Paris: Leuven University Press/Les Belles Lettres, 2000), ixxxv1 and Jacob Schmutz, Escaping the Aristotelian Bond: the Critique of Metaphysics in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, Dionysius 17 (1999): 169200. On the matters of interest to us, Philippe Capelle, Neoplatonism and Contemporary Philosophy, for Neoplatonism and Contemporary Philosophy: International

Society for Neoplatonic Studies Meeting in Qubec 2006 is substantially derived from my Cent Ans De Noplatonisme En France. [4] I mention particularly the late lamented Dominique Janicauds (1937-2002), Heidegger en France, 2 vols. Ides (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), but it is not particularly concerned with Neoplatonism, and it says nothing about many of the formative figures who gave that movement its distinctive character in the 20 century. [5] Entitled Il fascino dell'origine. Meister Eckhart Lese- und Lebemeister di Heidegger. [6] See my Why Heideggers History of Metaphysics is Dead, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78:3 (2004): 425-443. [7] John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas. An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982) provides an example. [8] Much of my own work on Aquinas may be located here. My Oxford D.Phil. thesis published as God in Himself, Aquinas Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and reprinted in 2000 in the series Oxford Scholarly Classics was undertaken in to opposition a Heideggerian representation of Aquinas doctrine of being, which I countered by placing Aquinas within the history of Neoplatonism. This comes out in an article based on the concluding chapter of the thesis which was not published in the monograph: Making Theology Practical: Thomas Aquinas and the Nineteenth Century Religious Revival, Dionysius, 9 (1985): 85127. The then Lady Margaret Professor, Dr Ian MacQuarrie, supervised the dissertation with his usual charity, generosity, humility, and care. [9] Jean-Marc Narbonne, Hnologie, Ontologie et Ereignis (Plotin-ProclusHeidegger), Lne dor (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001). [10] Narbonne, Hnologie, ontologie et Ereignis, 1956. [11] Besides what I derive from Luca Lera and Michel Henry, I depend largely on John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heideggers Thought (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1978), Reiner Schrmann, Meister Eckhart. Mystic and Philosopher, Translations with Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) although I tend to think that Schrmanns judgment of Caputo generally speaking, Caputo seems to me more reliable on Heidegger than on Eckhart, 255, holds also for him, and Philippe Capelle, Philosophie et thologie dans la pense de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Cerf, 1998), 217-221. [12] See my Misrepresenting Neoplatonism in Contemporary Christian Dionysian Polemic: Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa versus Vladimir Lossky and Jean-Luc Marion, for the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming; with its references to C. Steel (ed.), Proclus, Commentaire sur le Parmnide de Platon. Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke. Tome I: Livres I IV (Leuven/ Leiden: Leuven University Press/ Brill, 1982), 34*-42*, A. de Libera, La Mystique rhnane dAlbert le Grand Matre Eckhart (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 30, and S. Gersh, Berthold von Moosburg on the Content and Method of Platonic Philosophy, [2001] reprinted in idem, Reading Plato, Tracing Plato (Aldershot: Ashgate / Variorum, 2005), 493-94. [13] On this aspect I rely here primarily on the documents translated in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, on the essays gathered in The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger: The Emergence of an Augustinian Phenomenology , ed. Craig J. N. de Paulo (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), especially that of Theodore Kisiel, Situating Augustine in Salvation History, Philosophys History and Heideggers History, 53-88, and Philippe Capelle, Heidegger: Reader of Augustine, in Augustine and Postmodernism, eds. J.D. Caputo and M.J. Scanlon (Bloomingdale: Indiana University Press, 2005), 115-126. The only treatment of Heideggers relation to both traditions known to me is Narbonnes Hnologie, ontologie et Ereignis. [14] Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Translation, Introduction, and Lexicon by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University
th

Press, 1982), Chapter 2, 10 [113-114], 81: Avicenna, the Liber de causis, Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. I owe this reference to Luca Lera. [15] In light of the deeper reflections of Jean Trouillard and his associates. I also mention my own analyses of the treatment of the essence and existence of God in Aquinas Summa theologiae which looks at it within the history of Neoplatonism (e.g. my God in Himself) and that of Narbonne in Hnologie, ontologie et Ereignis. [16] Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Chapter 2, 10 [128-129], 90-91. See the remarks of Laurence Paul Hemming in Heideggers Atheism. The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 14. [17] Ibid., Chapter 2, 10 [129], 91. See the remarks of Daniel Wilband, Much Ado about Nothing: A Note on Trouillards Use of Proclus, Dionysius 24 (2006): 20922. [18] Ibid., Chapter 2, 10 [129], 91. [19] Martin Heidegger, Aristotles Metaphysics 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Introduction, 6, 38. [20] Ibid., 38. See Hemmings remarks in Heideggers Atheism, 197. [21] Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected Problems of Logic, translated by R. Rojcewicz and Andr Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), Appendix III.8 from the first draft, p. 185: the great Greek philosophy, whose beginning and end are attached to the names Anaximander and Aristotle. What arises later as so-called Greek philosophy has another character, no longer the original: what we then have are either scholastic trends or practical-moral philosophies like those of the Stoa and Epicurus, or even attempts at a renaissance of the ancient Greek philosophy under the influence of Christian faith or the religious systems of later antiquity, renaissances which go by the name of Neoplatonism. Subsequently, all these philosophies became historically more influential than the genuine and originally great Greek philosophy. The ground of this fact resides in the linkage with Christianity. The great Greek philosophy fell more and more into oblivion. That Aristotle became the principal master of philosophy in the middle ages does not contradict this, for on the one hand what was called philosophy in medieval times was not philosophy but only a preamble of reason on behalf of theology, as was required by faith. And, on the other hand, Aristotle was precisely therefore not understood in the Greek way, i.e. on the basis of the primordial thought and poetry of Greek Dasein, but in a medieval fashion, i.e., in a Arabic-Jewish-Christian way. [22] Martin Heidegger, The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism (1918-19) in The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 238-41. There are no remarks about the greatness of Greek philosophy. [23] For a brief account of previous representations of Eckhart as paradigmatically German, see Schrmann, Meister Eckhart, xi. Heidegger modifies these. [24] . Brhier, Images plotiniennes, images bergsoniennes, (1949) in idem, Les tudes bergsoniennes, tome 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 107108 [25] R.-M. Moss-Bastide, Bergson et Plotin, Bibliothque de philosophie contemporaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 8; see 29 for the ambiguity in Bergsons citations of Plotinus. [26] H. Bergson, The Creative Mind, translated by M.L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946) [La Pense et le mouvant, Essais et confrences. from 1903 to 1923, 1 d. 1934], 227228. [27] Ibid., 209. [28] Ibid. [29] Martin Heidegger, The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism, in The Phenomenology of Religious Life [313-314], 238.
re

[30] See Moss-Bastide, Bergson et Plotin, 39; Leszek Kolakowski, Bergson, Past
Masters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 82. [31] M. Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, translated by Girard J, Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975) [Philosophie et phnomnologie du corps. Essai sur lontologie biranienne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965], 11; see M. Lemoine, Affectivit et auto-affection: Rflexions sur le corps subjectif chez Maine de Biran et M. Henry, Les tudes philosophiques (avril-juin, 2000). [32] M. Henry, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Reality, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); idem, The Essence of Manifestation, translated by Girard J. Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) [LEssence de la manifestation. 2 tomes, pimthe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963], 429; idem, I Am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) [Cest moi la vrit. Pour une philosophie du christianisme. Paris: Seuil, 1996], 23747. [33] For a recognition by Marion of the Henrys work on the auto-affectivity of the subject despite their differences, see Marion, Being Given. Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) [tant Donn. Essai dune phnomnologie de la donation. pimthe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997], 231 and 366, n. 86. [34] M. Henry, La signification ontologique de la critique de la connaissance chez Eckhart; idem, Speech and Religion: The Word of God, in Janicaud, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate , 216241 at 223ff. See N. Depraz, Seeking a phenomenological metaphysics; S. Laoureux, De Lessence de la manifestation; and S. Breton, Deux Mystiques de lexcs: J.J. Surin et Matre Eckhart (Paris: Cerf, 1985). [35] Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 30910. [36] Henry, Speech and Religion, 228. [37] Ibid., 229, quoting Heidegger Seminar at Zurich also cited by Marion, God without Being, 61, and Heidegger, Questions III : Le chemin de campagne ; L'exprience de la pense, traduit de l'allemand par Andr Prau, Roger Munier,et Julien Hervier (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); see also, for the same rejection of Heidegger, Henry, I Am the Truth, 157. [38] On the Heideggerian mediation, see D. Janicaud, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate , Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Franois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrtien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 70 & 76. [39] Wilband, Much Ado about Nothing: 213: Martin Heideggers early work, published throughout the 1920s, appears to have influenced Brhiers departure from the approach he took in 1919. [40] Jean Trouillard, Prface, in Proclus, lments de Thologie, traduction, introduction, et notes par Jean Trouillard, Bibliothque philosophique (Paris: Aubier, 1965), 2325. [41] J. Trouillard, Lun et lme selon Proclos (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1972), 4. [42] Trouillard, Prface, in Proclus, lments de Thologie, 10. [43] P. Aubenque, Plotin et le dpassement de lontologie grecque classique, in Hadot (d.) Le Noplatonisme, 101108 at 103, quoting from . Brhier, Lide du nant, 248; see also his Mysticisme et doctrine chez Plotin, (1948) 22531. [44] . Brhier, Lide du nant et le problme de lorigine radicale dans le noplatonisme grec, in idem, tudes de philosophie antique, 248283 at 250. [45] Ibid. [46] Wilband, Much Ado about Nothing: 212. [47] Ibid.

[48] Wilband quoting Brhier, Lide du nant, 475 (Wilband uses the original
pagination, in Revue de mtaphysique et morale 26 (1919): 443-475, I use the numeration in the reprint in Brhiers tudes de philosophie antique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955.). [49] See . Brhier, The History of Philosophy, vol. 2, 204. (Wilbands note). [50] Wilband, quoting Brhier, La philosophie de Plotin (Paris: Boivin, 1928), 181. [51] Wilband, Much Ado about Nothing: 213 quoting quoting Brhier, La philosophie de Plotin, 180. [52] See W.J. Hankey, Re-evaluating E.R. Dodds Platonism, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007): 499541. [53] Brhier, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 11618. [54] Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? in Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1993). [55] Eli Diamond, Hegel on Being and Nothing: Some Contemporary Neoplatonic and Sceptical Responses, Dionysius XVIII (2000): 183-216 at 199. [56] Lera writes Brhiers article [of 1919] written when Heidegger was still young and unknown, could have influenced Heidegger himself. [57] For a fundamental rejection of Hegel see J. Trouillard, Pluralit spirituelle et unit normative selon Blondel (1961): 23. [58] Ibid.: 27. [59] Ibid.: 28. [60] Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 100 & 105. [61] Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 108. [62] For a similar conclusion see Albert Peter Durigon, Heidegger And The Greeks: Hermeneutical-Philosophical Sketches Of Ignorance, Blindness And Not-Being In Heidegger's Beitrge Plato, Plotinus And Proclus , Doctor of Philosophy dissertation for the Centre for the Study of the Hellenic Traditions, Trinity College, Dublin, 1998 found on-line at http://www.geocities.com/peterdurigon/. [63] See Wilband, Much Ado about Nothing: 212; and Brhier, Lide du nant: 268: Cest donc par une notion extralogique, par la notion de direction, que le non-tre du Premier est distingu du non-tre de la matire; ils sont distincts comme notre sentiment de plnitude et de fcondit est distinct du sentiment de vide [64] . Brhier, Les ides philosophiques et religieuses de Philon dAlexandrie [1 d. 1908] 3 d., tudes de philosophie mdivale 8 (Paris: Vrin, 1950). For an account see my One Hundred Years, 127-28. [65] Brhier, Comment je comprends, 8. [66] Brhier, Comment je comprends, 3. [67] Brhier, The Formation of our History of Philosophy, in Philosophy and History, essays presented to Ernst Cassirer, edited by Raymond Klibansky and H.L. Paton, 1 ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936) reprint Harper Torch Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 159172 at 168. [68] See for example, Martin Heidegger, Schellings Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, translated Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio/ London: Ohio University Press, 1985), (HGA42, 49), 27-28: the so-called summas of medieval theology, too, are not systems, but a form of doctrinaire communication of the content of knowledge.[T]he summas are primarily directed toward teaching. They are handbooks. Heidegger goes on a little later If an affinity to system is present in medieval shaping of knowledge, it is in the manner of subdividing and ordering degrees of the realms of Being. He fits the Periphyseon of Eriugena here, and says: The influence of Neoplatonism is evident here too, that late Greek philosophy which is already permeated with Judaeo-Christian and Roman thought and which later actually was not without influence on the manner of the formation of systems. At Heidegger, Schellings Treatise, 31 (HGA42, 54): Through German Protestantism in the Reformation not only Roman dogma was changed but also the Roman-Oriental form of the Christian experience of Being
re e st

was transformed. What was already being prepared in the Middle Ages with Meister Eckhart, Tauler, and Seuse and in the German Theologia is brought to bear in a new beginning and in a more comprehensive way by Nicolaus Cusanus, by Luther, Sebastian Frank, Jacob Boehmeand in art by Albrecht Drer. At Heidegger, Schellings Treatise, 146, we find: For the great beginning of Western philosophy, too, did not come out of nothing. Rather, it became great because it had to overcome its greatest opposite, the mythical in general and the Asiatic in particular, that is, it had to bring it to the jointure of a truth of Being, and was able to do this. (Hankeys note). [69] HGA45, 220-1. (Leras note). [70] HGA66, 132, Mystik, 403-4 (written in 1938-39). (Leras note). [71] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking. A Translation of Gelassenheit [1944-45], by J.M. Anderson and E.H. Freund (New York: Harper, 1966), [72] HGA 39, p.123, 133-4. [73] I owe this reference to Luca Lera. [74] See for example the course of WS 1941/42 Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, HGA 52, 59, pp.172-175, 62-63, pp.182-188). (Luca Leras note). [75] Cited in A. Dulles, S. J., Church and Society. The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988-2007 (New York 2008), p. 1. [76] H. U. von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele III. Zur Vergttlichung des Todes (Salzburg 1939). Cited below as Apokalypse III. [77] Ibid., pp. 193-315. [78] See A. Nichols, O. P., Scattering the Seed. A Guide through Balthasars Early Writings on Philosophy and the Arts (London 2006), pp. 203-219, on which I have drawn in this small study. [79] H. U. von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische sthetik III/1 Im Raum der Metaphysik (Einsiedeln 1965), pp. 769-787. Cited below as Im Raum der Metaphysik. [80] Ibid., pp. 943-981. [81] J. Gurr, The Principle of Sufficient Reason. Some Scholastic Systems 17501900 (Milwaukee 1959). [82] Information furnished by Edward Oakes, S. J., in a conversation of 10 April 2008. [83] Cf. M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (English translation, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990), pp. 157-158: The metaphysics of Dasein is not just metaphysics about Dasein, but is the metaphysics which occurs necessarily as Dasein. [84] Not that Husserl was insensitive to the theme of time. For his thick account of the present a including a retentive aspect (what it retains of the past, but to be distinguished from memory) and a protentive aspect (what it anticipates of the future, but to be distinguished from hope or expectation), see R. J. Dostal, Time and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, in C. B. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge 2006, 2 edition), pp. 120-148 and especially pp. 125-126. This multi-authored volume includes some new essays, such as this, but where articles appear unchanged in both the first and second editions of this work I have cited them according to the first edition. [85] H. U. von Balthasar, Apokalypse III, op. cit., p. 194. [86] Ibid., p. 323. [87] Ibid. [88] Ibid., p. 199. In the account of the relation between time and death in Theodramatik III. Die Handlung (Einsiedeln 1980), pp. 88-124, Balthasar uses Heideggers analysis in Sein und Zeit to underline the radical finitude of human life. [89] Apokalypse III, op. cit., p. 200. [90] Ibid.
nd

[91] Ibid., p. 206. [92] M. Heidegger, Identity and Difference (English translation, New York 1969), p.
72. Kevin Hart comments: if there is any theological programme to be deduced from Heidegger and grafted on to any current theology, it comes down to a form of quietism. Heidegger offers the possibility of a divine God being revealed to us through one that is far removed from the God of biblical revelation, and about whom we cannot say anything at all. The burden is upon Heidegger to describe what sort of revelation would count as a revelation of God rather than being, and nowhere does he offer such a description: thus The Trespass of the Sign. Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (New York, 2000, 2 edition), p. 94. In such hermeneutics, all of our certainties become contingent and revisable in light of new experience or a new announcement. In other words, truth and Being will be inherently historicized: A. C. Sciglitano, Jr., Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasars Trinitarian Response to Gianni Vattimos Secular Christianity, Modern Theology 23. 4 (2007), p. 529. [93] Cf. M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 9: Apparentness of beings (ontic truth) revolves around the unveiledness of the constitution of the Being of beings (ontological truth); at no time, however, can ontic knowledge itself conform to the objects because, without the ontological, it cannot even have a possible to what. [94] Apokalypse III, op. cit., p. 208. [95] Ibid., p. 247. One might think of some words of Heideggers in What is Metaphysics?: Being held out into the nothing as Dasein is on the ground of concealed anxiety is its surpassing of beings as a whole. It is transcendence Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same. This proposition of Hegels is correct. Being and the nothing do belong together not because both from the point of view of the Hegelian concept of thought agree in their indeterminateness and immediacy, but rather because Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing, D. F. Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings (London and Henley 1977), pp. 108, 110. This collection will be cited below as Basic Writings. [96] That could be said, presumably, even if nihil were taken in the NeoPlatonist sense advocated by some twentieth century retrievers of the Proclean tradition as nothingness by excess a way of adverting to the ineffable One: see J. M. Narbonne, Hnologie, ontologie et Ereignis [Platon-Proclus-Heidegger] (Paris 2001); D. Wilband, Much Ado about Nothing: A Note on Trouillards Use of Proclus, Dionysius 24 (2006), pp. 209-222. I owe these references to Professor Wayne Hankey. [97] In J.-L. Marion, God without Being (English translation, Chicago 1991). Subsequently, however, Marion modified his position, both in the more favourable way he came to see Thomas as the thinker par excellence of divine being in the West, thus his Saint Thomas dAquin et lonto-tho-logie, Revue Thomiste 95 (1995), pp. 31-66, and also in his own constructive re-thinking of these issues, for which see his Being Given. Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness (English translation, Stanford, CA, 2002). [98] Cf. M. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? in Basic Writings, op. cit., p. 105: In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings and not nothing. But this and not nothing; we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather it makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general. The essence of originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such. Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings. But since existence in its essence relates itself to beings those which it is not and that which it is it emerges as such existence in each case from the nothing already revealed. Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing. Heidegger goes on to write, Being and the nothing do belong together because Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing The old proposition
nd

ex nihil nihil fit is therefore found to contain another sense, one appropriate to the problems of Being itself, that runs ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit [from the nothing all beings as beings come to be]. Only in the nothing of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their most proper possibility that is, in a finite way come to themselves, ibid., p. 110. [99] Apokalypse III, op. cit., p. 271. [100] I prefer here my own translation from Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Bonn 1929), p. 236. [101] J. Derrida, Of grammatology (English translation, Baltimore 1976), p. 13. [102] Apokalypse III, op. cit., p. 264. Being for the author of Being and Time belongs to Daseins understanding of Being, and it is nothing apart from that: J. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas. An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York 1982), p. 53. And the same writer adds that in the (1928) lectures Die Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie, the origin of essence and existence is traced back to a way which in which Dasein projects the Being of beings, to Daseins projective understanding of Being, ibid., p. 84. [103] Im Raum der Metaphysik, op, cit., p. 770, note 13. [104] J. Caputo, Heidegger and Theology, in C. B. Guignon, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge 1993, 1 edition), p. 274. [105] In a letter to Engelbert Krebs, a professor of dogmatics at Frieburg, sited in J. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, op. cit., p. 56, from B. Casper, Martin Heidegger und die Theologische Fakultt Freiburg, 1909-1923, in R. Bumer, K. S. Frank, H. Ott (ed.), Kirche am Oberrhein: Beitrge zur Geschichte der Bistmer Konstanz und Freinburg(Freiburg 1980), p. 541. [106] On this, one might, however, note Etienne Gilsons comment that Augustines God heals a nature, whereas the God of Luther saves a corruption, Le moyen ge et le naturalisme antique, printed as an appendix to idem., Hlose et Ablard (Paris 1938). [107] Apokalypse III, op. cit., p. 271. [108] J. Caputo, Heidegger and Theology, art. cit., p. 277. [109] Ibid. [110] J. Caputo, Heidegger and Theology, art. cit., p. 285, who draws attention to B. Welte, La mtaphysique de Saint Thomas dAquin et la pense de lhistoire de ltre de Heidegger, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Thologiques 50 (1966), pp. 601-614; what one supposes is the German original was later published as Thomas von Aquin und Heideggers Gedanke von der Seinsgeschichte, idem., Zeit und Geheimnis (Freiburg 1875), pp. 181-202. There is a cameo of Welte and his work by W. Schneider, Bernhard Welte (1906-1983), in E. Coreth, S. J., W. M. Neidl, G. Pfligersdorffer (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. III. Moderne Strmungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Graz 1990), pp. 305-317. For the general subject of the later Heidegger and Catholic theology see R. Schaeffler, Frmmigkeit des Denkens: Martin Heidegger und de katholische Theologie (Darmstadt 1978). [111] Im Raum der Metaphysik, op. cit.., pp. 772-774. The contrast there between rechnendes Denken and besinnliches Denken is well described by J. M. Anderson, Introduction, in M. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (English translation, New York 1963), pp. 31-32. In the theodramatics Balthasar will return to Heideggers animadversions on technology in his Nietzsche studies. Just as for Heidegger (on Balthasars interpretation) the primacy accorded technology belongs to the forgetfulness of being, so for Balthasar it marks a guilty forgetfulness on the part of finite freedom of its Geschenktsein, its own being as gift, Theodramatik. III. Die Handlung, op. cit., pp. 135-146. Balthasar returns to the subject later, at pp. 410420, seeing this as an aspect of the mysterium iniquitatis which gathers momentum as time approaches the Parousia. In the New Adam, freedom is ever more Christoform and theocentric, in the Old Adam, ever more inclined to make itself God, heedless that autonomy is gift. Thus M. Imperatori, S. J., Heidegger
st

dans le Dramatique divine de Hans Urs von Balthasar, Nouvelle Revue Thologique 122 (2000), pp. 191-210. [112]Im Raum der Metaphysik, op, cit., p. 593. [113] Ibid., p. 594. Balthasars view of Heidegger in this regard is amply borne out in Heideggers Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy (English translation, New York 1984). [114] Im Raum der Metaphysik, op. cit., p. 788. [115] Ibid., p. 770. For the comparability of their two projects in this respect, see C. ORegan, Von Balthasars Valorization and Critique of Heideggers Genealogy of Modernity, in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity (Grand Rapids, MI, 1998), pp. 123-158. [116] Im Raum der Metaphysik, op. cit., p. 595. [117] Letter on Humanism in Basic Writings, op. cit., p. 218. [118] Im Raum der Metaphysik, op. cit., p. 786. [119] Im Raum der Metaphysik, op. cit., p. 783. Essentia for Thomas signifies a principle of reception of esse: see on this W. Carlo, The Ultimate Reducibility of Essence to Existence in Existential Metaphysics (The Hague 1966). Balthasars account of the actus essendi as non-subsistent follows from two points in Thomass doctrine: (i) the divine esse is possessed by no other nature but is itself the very nature or essence of God, Summa contra gentiles I. 26. 129; (ii) nevertheless, the created esse which formally belongs to the creature originates in God who as subsistent esse ipsum esse subsistens, cf. (i) above -- is the source and exemplar of all esse, having the whole virtue of being, Summa theologiae 1a, q. 4, a. 2, corpus. It is thanks to the non-subsistent actus essendi that creatures, which are beings by participation in the actus essendi (compare In Boethium, De hebdomadibus, lectio 2, No. 22), are intrinsically but imperfectly what [God] is intrinsically but perfectly, J. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, op. cit., p. 142. This is the generous donation on which Balthasar would focus, for it leads to its own free Source. To participate in God himself is, of course, for Thomas, as for the entire orthodox Christian tradition, a question not of creation, the first gift, but of the second gift, Grace. [120] I develop this claim in Von Balthasars Aims in his Theological Aesthetics, Heythrop Journal XL (1999), pp. 409-423. [121] As early as What is Metaphysics? we read: Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder the revelation of the nothing does the why? loom before us. Only because the why is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds, and ground them. Only because we can inquire and ground is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher, Basic Writings, op. cit., p. 111. [122] What is one to make, if anything, in this context of the statement in On the Essence of Ground: Freedom is the origin of the principle of reason [ground]; for in freedom, in the unity of excess and withdrawal, the grounding of things that develops and forms itself as ontological truth is grounded, citing from the translation of the third (1949) edition in M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill (Cambridge 1998), p. 132. For the Trinitarian perspective on the ground of non-subsistent Being, see the closer sections of A. C. Sciglitano, Jr., Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasars Trinitarian Response to Gianni Vattimos Secular Christianity, art. cit., and notably pp. 545-550. [123] Perhaps this is the concrete form of the analogy sought by William Richardson in his Heidegger and Theology, Theological Studies 26 (1965), pp. 86-100: as philosophical thinking is to Being, so theological thinking (the thinking of faith) is to the self-revealing God, ibid., p. 87. The suggestion apparently arose from oral comments of Heidegger himself (to theological students at Marburg in 1960). [124] J. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, op. cit., p. 3. Italics added.

[125] L. Hemming, Heideggers Atheism. The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre

Dame, IN, 2002), p. 17. [126] Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 671. [127] Ibid. [128] Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1925), Gesamtausgabe Bd. 20, p. 109: Philosophische Forschung ist und bleibt Atheismus. [129] Cf. Die Onto-Theo-Logische Verfassung der Metaphysik in Identitt und Differenz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cota, 2002). [130] This mode of critical engagement with technology is common, but has received a recent, more or less philosophical expression in Bernard Stiegler and Ars Industrialis Renchanter le monde (Paris: LHarmattan, 2006), according to which the World Wide Web represents a positive, liberatory advance on television. [131] For a survey of the confluence of technological and theological concerns in the 20 century, see George Pattisons Thinking about God in an Age of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). [132] The Technological Society, tr. J. Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. . I refer to this volume henceforth as TS. [133] Technical automatism may not be judged or questioned; immediate use must be found for the most recent, efficient, and technical process [TS 81]. [134] Cited in Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977), p. 69. [135] If, as Ellul states, in discussing technique today it is impossible not to take a position [TS 62]., his position is informed by his particular sociological method, according to which a collective social reality can be isolated which is independent of individual choice [TS xxviii]. [136] Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 109. [137] Langdon Winner, Do Artefacts have Politics? in The Whale and the Reactor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), pp. 19-39. Heideggers reflections on the social changes brought by the typewriter or television are instances of this recognition. [138] The Technological Bluff, tr. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), p. 55. [139] The Technological System, tr. J. Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980), p. 318. [140] Of course, the terms ontology and philosophy are always to be used with a certain reserve in relation to the later Heidegger, given his decisions concerning first ontology in the 1930s and subsequently philosophy in the 1950s. [141] On this point, see Jean Beaufret Le dialogue avec Marxism et la question de la technique in Dialogue avec Heidegger La Philosophie Moderne (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1973). It should be noted here that in what is an otherwise excellent article, Beaufrets concern to relate Heideggers questioning concerning technology to Marxism lacks consideration of the full depths of Marxs reflection on technology, and particularly of the technological determinism that other commentators have found within it. [142] Cf., for example, Metaphysics , 1048 a32-3. [143] Ibid. [144] Physics III, 202a 33-34. [145] On the doctrine of the four causes, see Physics, II, 3; Metaphysics, A, 1-10; ), 2 (which reproduces Physics, II, 3); H, 4, 1044 a-b; Z, 17; 7, 4; Second Analytics, II, 11-12; On the parts of animals, I, 1. For the interpretation of aition as being-responsible, see VA 13/315. [146] Kapital, I, 187.
th

[147] Ibid., p. 390. [148] Admittedly, Marx does recognise the importance of Descartes in the
foundation of a practical philosophy, and, consequently, if only indirectly, the role of philosophical preconditions in the practical transformation of the world. Cf. Le capital, p. 640, n.26 and Dominique Janicaud, La puissance du rationnel (Paris : Gallimard, 1985), p. 272. [149] Mir scheint, die aus der Metaphysik stammende Unterscheidung zwischen beiden verbaut den Weg zur Einsicht in das, was ich unter Denken verstehe ; Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, p. 676. [150] Cf., in particular, Nicomachean Ethics, VI. [151] As Heidegger says in the Spiegel interview: Es fonktioniert alles. Das ist gerade das Unheimliche, dass es funktioniert.; op. cit., p. 669. [152] Ibid., p. 670. [153] Uberwindung der Metaphysik in Vortrge und Aufstze (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 2004), pp. 90-91. [154] Reden und Andere Zeugnisse , p. 677.

[155] [156] [157] Somewhere in GA 24, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. [158] My use of the term mystical posthuman is indebted to Thomas A. Carlsons
forthcoming work, which draws comparisons between the apophatic anthropology characteristic of certain Christian mystical texts with recent discourse on the posthuman. While the term mystical evokes a number of different connotations, in the present context it signifies a subject never fully decipherable to itselfan ineffable and dispossessed subject. It is not meant to imply subjective mystical experiences such as visions, revelatory dreams, etc. See, Thomas A. Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). [159] Nick Bostrom is currently the director of the Future of Humanity Institute which is a member of the James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford and also a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Oxford. [160] Nick Bostrom, The Transhumanist FAQ (Willington, CT: World Transhumanist Association, 2003), 4. [161] Bostrom, Tranhsuman, 4. [162] Brent Waters, From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 31. [163] Ibid. [164] Bostrom, Transhuman,9. [165] Ibid., 17. [166] Hans Moravec, Mind-Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117. [167] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume IV: Nihilism (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1982), 100. [168] Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1977), 128. [169] Heidegger, World of Nietzsche, 88. [170] Heidegger, World of Nietzsche, 88. [171] Heidegger, QCT, 320. [172] Ibid. It should be noted that Heideggers original conception of the standing-reserve was in response to Jungers idea that the masses should give in to the nihilistic will to dominate via machine technology. Zimmermans comment is insightful: Heideggers later notion that in the technological era humanity is challenged forth by Gestell, i.e. compelled to treat itself and all other entities as standing-reserve (Bestand) for total mobilization, was analogous to Jungers notion that the Gestalt of the worker compelled humanity to mobilize itself and the earth as

standing-reserve for enhancing the technological project of total control. Michael E. Zimmerman, Heideggers Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics Art (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 80. [173] Heidegger, QCT, 320. [174] Heidegger, QCT, 323. [175] Simon Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory: In Service of the Machine?(London: Routledge, 2002), 25. [176] William J. Mitchell, Me ++: The Cyborg, Self and the Networked City (Boston, MIT Press, 2003), 58. [177] Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 14. [178] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Duke University Press, 1993), 208. [179] Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 76. [180] Ibid. [181] Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism in Basic Writings, 251. [182] Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 41. [183] The following discussion is indebted to Carlson's reading of Heidegger and his understanding of the posthuman in the Indiscrete Image. See also, Thomas A. Carlson, Modernity and the Mystical: Science, Technology, and the Task of Human Self-Creation, in Science, Religion, and the Human Experience, ed. by James Proctor (Oxford: Oxford University. Press, 2005). [184] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Fransisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), 329. [185] Ibid., 330. [186] Ibid. [187] Ibid., 331. [188] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1959), 55. [189] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 286. [190] N. Katherine Hayles, Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments in Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, ed. Robert Mitchell (London: Routledge, 2003), 246. [191] Carlson, Indiscrete, 75. [192] Carlson, Indiscrete, 111. [193] Ibid., 15. [194] Ibid., 208. [195] Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 85. [196] Carlson, Indiscrete, 215. [197] Hayles, Posthuman, 5. [198] Carlson, Indiscrete, 207.