Return of the Strong Gods by R. R. Reno

Author:R. R. Reno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gateway Editions
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Clearing Becomes Lightening

Vattimo’s eclectic interpretation of the philosophical and theological traditions of the West is evident in his use of Martin Heidegger, a twentieth-century German philosopher who powerfully influenced continental European thought in the early decades of the postwar era. Having come of age before 1914, Heidegger, like Max Weber, regarded disenchantment as a cold, hard fate. The retreat of the strong gods from the culture of the West leaves a dangerous vacuum. Spiritually inarticulate, abandoned, and vulnerable, those living in a god-abandoned world seek the narcosis of spiritual self-deception, busyness, and—most tempting of all—technological mastery, a mentality that promises empowerment but turns everything into resources at hand for exploitation and control.

Heidegger was concerned about our penchant for self-assertion, our grasping efforts to fabricate spiritual-philosophical consolations—in effect, false gods—which can have practical-technical manifestations. Heidegger’s outlook was strongly anti-American, regarding the United States as a soulless engine of production and consumption that threatened to overwhelm Europe with its cult of worldly success. But his lasting fame is the result of his analysis of the “metaphysics of presence,” which he regarded as the perennial source of philosophical false gods.

Like Popper, Heidegger interpreted the controlling impulse to “see” as the defining feature of Western philosophy from Plato onward. But unlike Popper, Heidegger did not worry that this “oracular philosophy” exposes us to bewitching images of higher truths that evoke uncritical loyalty, the seeds of authoritarian societies. Instead, the “metaphysics of presence” pictures reality as “before us,” available for our examination and manipulation. Put somewhat differently, Heidegger criticized the mainstream of Western philosophy (and theology) for being “theoretical” in a bad sense: eager to capture or encapsulate the essence of things in formulations that we can turn around and use to orient ourselves in the world. The “metaphysics of presence” is the foundation for our self-built house of knowledge.

Heidegger regards this dominant Western tradition—philosophy-as-technology going back to Plato—as the real source of disenchantment. The gods have not left modern man, he suggests in his often opaque and difficult reflections. Instead, modern man has been seduced by the metaphysics of presence, closing his eyes, stopping up his ears, and perverting the task of thinking. Instead of waiting, resting, and letting go of our desire for mastery, we have become relentlessly active. Instead of receiving truth as a gift, we transform our rational powers into manufacturing agencies that mint truth and declare it valid.

According to Heidegger, the task of philosophy is not to engineer a re-enchantment, as so many philosophers tried to do earlier in the modern era. Kant exalted the voice of conscience, which he saw breaching the divide between what is real (noumena) and our strategies for picturing and conceiving of reality (phenomena). Hegel turned our critical capacity into a sanctifying power. Insofar as we see the inner logic of history and the deeper historical meaning of our cultural experiences, we realize and complete them. Later thinkers turned to will, intuition, and the soul’s élan vital. In each case, something within us erupts and floods the disenchanted world with new urgencies and meanings.

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