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HEIDEGGER AND AUGUSTINE

Ranson (before he died in a car crash while on a pilgrimage in Greece) edited a large collection of mostly hostile essays on Augustine. It includes two essays on Heidegger. In 1921, as perhaps his last foray into the domain of theology, Martin Heidegger gave a series of lectures on 'Augustine and Neo-Platonism.' It followed from an intense engagement with the thinking of Martin Luther and St Paul:

'According to Heidegger, Paul's message and its explanation by Luther, witnessed a profound faithfulness to "the actual experience of life", the experience of life in its radical irreducibility, and therefore its resistance to being definitively captured by any speculative system of conceptualisation ... If, according to Heidegger, there are many passages to be found in Augustine showing that he is inspired by the "actual" experience of life ... the idea of the "summum bonum" nonetheless presupposes a hierarchy of values whose consequence is that the "restlessness" inherent in the unfolding of life in its actuality is trapped in the midst of categories that are static. This hierarchy of values closes God and man up in a single speculative system in which the finality of life receives a predetermined definition. The falsification [détournement] of the character of life in movement of the actual experience of life can be seen clearly in the Augustinian idea of this finality in terms of "quietude" in the light of the eternal divinity. The influence of the Platonist and NeoPlatonist metaphysics in Augustine has, as Heidegger has indicated, played a preponderant role in the constitution of a Western tradition, considered in its totality.' (9)

(9)  Jeffrey Barash: 'Les sciences de l'histoire et le problème de la théologie. Autour du cours inédit de Heidegger sur saint Augustin' in Patric Ranson (ed): Saint Augustin, Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme (series Les Dossiers H), 1988. My translation from the French.

So, if we take that as an accurate account, there is Heidegger more or less endorsing Nietzsche's view that Christianity, or at least Western Christianity in the wake of Augustine, is Platonism for the "people", taking 'Platonism' to mean a coherent hierarchy of values continuous from God throughout creation. God is identified with a 'highest good' which in turn is identified with immutability, while distance from this highest good is measured by increasingly chaotic changeableness. From the age of fourteen Heidegger had been trained for the Catholic priesthood, given a solid grounding in Thomist philosophy. His 'habilitation' thesis, presented in 1915, was on Duns Scotus but he was already withdrawing from the scholastic systemisation  of human experience and the rational arguments that supported it, emphasising actual ('phenomenological') experience while understanding that actual experience is underpinned by historically determined preconceptions. In his much later Essence of Truth, discussing Plato's allegory of the cave in Book VI of The Republic, Heidegger argues like Laos that Plato's 'ideas' had been badly misunderstood in the West which interpreted them as thoughts abstracted from the experienced world rather than a more intense seeing (idea in Greek means appearance, idein is to see), a fuller experience, of the things we encounter in everyday life.

Nietzsche singles out 'Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself' as the characteristics of Platonism that Western philosophy has to (indeed he suggests it already has) overcome. The 'good in itself' would be the summum bonum at the top of the hierarchy of values, the Augustinian process by which contemplation of earthly goods raises us up to contemplation of divine goodness, the idea of the 'Great Chain of Being' which fails to recognise the radical gap that separates Creator and created. 'Pure spirit' would refer to the notion - Heidegger and Laos would say a misinterpretation of Plato - that the truth or 'being', of the material world lies outside the material world.  

But Nietzsche also says that 'now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier sleep - we, whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered ... the struggle against Plato ... produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such has had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals ...'

It was however a Platonism that had very little to do with Plato. And a tension that wasn't much experienced in the Orthodox world where Plato was known. The Greeks incidentally gave the Slav world their Christianity but kept their pre-Christian classical culture to themselves, probably feeling that, despite their own fondness for it, it wouldn't be much use to anyone else. So the Russians too missed out on that 'magnificent tension of soul'. It was only in the closing days of the Roman Empire before Constantinople fell to the Ottomans that the Greek classical texts began to pass into the West. So it is only with the 'Renaissance' that Plato himself, as opposed to Augustine's Christianised version of Neo-Platonism, becomes influential in the West and when it does the effect, together with other aspects of classical culture, is to contribute to that mental estrangement from Christianity - that huge loss of the dimension of depth in human experience - that goes under the name of 'Humanism'. (10)

(10) See in the 'Form and History' section of this website my essay Humanism and technology as understood by Albert Gleizes and Martin Heidegger, http://www.peterbrooke.org/form-and-history/humanism/