Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking by F. Schalow

Author:F. Schalow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

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Gods do not create humans; humans did not invent the gods (GA 66, 235/208). Rather, Heidegger writes, the “truth of be-ing decides ‘on’ both but not by prevailing over them but by enowning itself between them and thus by first enowning them themselves unto the countering [Ent-gegnung]” (GA 66, 235/208). Therefore, everything depends on how be-ing finds into its truth and on how this truth is grounded in the en-countering of man and god(s). Only thus, accordingly, will the enactment of the naming of gods be fulfilled (GA 66, 235/208-9). The gifting-refusal of be-ing shelters the mystery (Geheimnis), which historically comes to pass as the flight and the arrival of gods. As mentioned at the outset, Emad’s two interrelated clues – the methodological issue of the relation of hermeneutic phenomenology to being-historical thinking, and the question of the flight of gods – point to the “undecidability” of “deciding” Da-sein’s place on the earth through its openness to this mystery.

Every objectification of the god and the “explanatory reckoning” with the god, for example, as creator, has its ground in beingness (Seiendheit) as the production of presence (GA 66, 236/209). When this happens, being-a-cause as such is made the criterion of divinity, and God as highest cause constitutes the divinization of causality itself (GA 66, 240/212). This creates the appearance of transcendent spirituality, and therefore, in respect to iconoclasm, every “material” representation of the god in the image must be mis-apprehended as a degradation of the divine. For the beingness of God as highest cause is presupposed in this experience of the image; the image itself is represented for a subject; and this constitutes a being-lost to beings, even if and when the image is “broken” and cast aside, for it is cast aside as a false image of God. The casting-aside presupposes the distinction of true and false images and in this way degrades God to being a representation. Calvin’s injunctions against images illustrate this clearly, for he proposes that the Eucharist and Baptism, both revealed in the scriptures, are the sole true images of God (Institutes I. xi. xiii).45 Re-presentation in fact reduces the image to its being-present; no longer a “window” to the divine, it loses its unique character as Bild. The subjective positing of the image as idol as well as the destruction of the image-idol are both exemplary evidence of the flight of the Christian God: “God” as causal ground signifies that beings are to be understood as produced, and as produced they not only suffer a loss of being but also, by presupposing God to be a causal ground, God is deprived of his godhood, the sheltering, and safeguarding of a mystery.

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