The Writing of Aletheia by Martin Travers;

Author:Martin Travers;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang Copyright AG
Published: 2019-09-18T06:48:13+00:00

Regno: The Discourse of Domination: Latin

Heidegger must struggle in Parmenides to find adequate words to describe “aletheia”, not only because the word is internally complex, but because its meaning has been obscured by definitions of “truth” inherited from a culture and language that for centuries dominated the thinking of the Western mind: Latin. It was a language with which he had formed a relationship, both personal and scholarly. Latin was both the language of Heidegger’s Catholic faith as a child, and the lingua franca of his first course of study: theology.15 Latin provided a medium in which the young Heidegger worked as a matter of course, a medium that allowed him in his earliest work, such as the student essay “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy” (“Der Realitätsproblem in der modernen Philosophie”), a discussion of Bishop Berkeley’s principle of esse-percipi [to be is to be perceived], and the book review “Through Death into Life” (“Per Mortem ad Vitam”), a review of the memoir, Bekendelse [Confession] of the modernist Danish writer, Johannes Jørgensen, to move at will between the discourses of the liturgical and the philosophical.

These two modes merge in the short prose work, “Reflections on All Soul’s Day” (“Allerseelenstimmungen”, 1909). Its narrative depicts the inner turmoils of a young man who, suffering from the confusions and the turpitude brought about by the collapse of values in the age of modernity, flees, in an attempt to still his mind, into a church where a requiem mass (invoked in the story as a synecdoche of religious faith) is being performed. During the course of the mass, the young man is brought to recognise that those rationalistic, calculating, purely self-focused paradigms of the modern mind will not help him out of his plight. The concluding words of the story, Huis ergo parce Deus [Therefore, Oh God, spare him], taken from the Dies irae section of the mass, are intended to offer solace not only to the young man, but to all who seek a path out of the travails of modernity (2004 18–21).←122 | 123→

Latin was the language of medieval scholasticism, and it was in this area that Heidegger chose to work for his postdoctoral dissertation, The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus (Die Kategorien-und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus). Here, Heidegger applied the methodologies of the Marburg Neo-Kantians, Emil Lask and Heinrich Rickert, to medieval logic, in an attempt to make visible the complicated and largely untheorised interrelationship between language, logic and metaphysics that had underscored scholasticism. That applying this analytical perspective to scholasticism would eventually lead Heidegger to adopt a more critical position on its philosophical foundations is clear from a review that he published at this time of one of the standard theological textbooks of this period: Joseph Gredt’s Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae. Taking issue with Gredt’s formulaic account of the Thomist tradition, Heidegger argues that theology has nothing to offer modern philosophy when it is presented as a “settled summary of doctrinal theses”. If theology is to retain

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