The Religion of Existence by Noreen Khawaja

Author:Noreen Khawaja [Khawaja, Noreen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978--0-226-40465--3
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Meaning of History (The Merger of the Chiliastic and Ascetic)

I am not arguing here for a purely reductive approach to Heidegger’s chronological rhetoric. We cannot simply translate the discussion of metaphysics as a historical-intellectual epoch into an idea of metaphysics as a perennial temptation issuing from the essential questionability of being. But I would insist that Heidegger’s philosophy is torn between these two ideals at the deepest level. On the one hand, he wants to maintain the historical inflection his thinking acquires in the 1930s, which takes cultural and institutional formations much more seriously as the decisive contexts in which any act of thinking takes place. None of us are mere visitors in the age of techno-nihilism, and the path out of this age (which Heidegger, at least, fervently seeks) cannot be found by trivializing our complicity in this history. On the other hand, Heidegger is unwilling to grant history any autonomy in relation to philosophy. Throughout Heidegger’s many reflections on history, there is really only one type of question being asked: To what extent does this cultural formation intensify the oblivion of being? To what extent does it remind us that being itself “is” nothing more than the abyssal showing up of a world? There are plenty of grey areas in Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte; televisual culture is involved in a deeper form of oblivion than the work of the graphic artist, and Descartes was more of an obfuscator than Leibniz. But there is only one color. In the way that Heidegger narrates the development of European civilization from out of preclassical Greece, there is only one thing that happened: being hid, as it tends to do, and we, in the wake of this concealment, developed a language that repressed this initial nondisclosure by framing reality exclusively in terms of beings acting on other beings—everything real in terms of subject beings and object beings—a language so encompassing that whenever we reflect on the question about how it is that things come to be, we are unable to shake the feeling that another being, somewhere, must be responsible. Heidegger’s story of being is color blind to just about everything that we would normally understand as history.

Heidegger seeks to make sense of Western history using the resources of philosophical criticism, but his seynsgeschichtliche monocle makes it very difficult for the history of his analysis to remain in contact with the sort of history in which we ordinarily consider ourselves as taking part. Even where he explicitly flirts with an “epochal” determination of Western thought, this language quickly defaults on any promise it had to distinguish between chronologically and geographically concrete traditions, practices, and institutions. The “epoch,” it turns out, is just one more way to describe the operation of being qua enowning.117 On the one hand, the ability to connect with recognizable formations of culture should be the primary aim of Heidegger’s antimetabolical procedure. By introducing enowning as the latent ground of familiar acts and social practices, Heidegger wants to remind us that enowning is nothing other than the structure of the real—of whatever is and how it is.

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