Heidegger's Journey Chapter 23

At last, spirituality’s shiny borders we bid adieu. The journey into the wilderness to search for a new heart of lex has begun. Before beginning, let us skim what we have learned so far. Chapter 1 showed spirituality’s recondite lex predicament and various secular solutions. Chapter 2, in turn, described how secular belief produced its kobold. To various degrees, the already considered thinkers tried pushing beyond the pre-modern and secular forms of lex. In other words, each one reacted to some previous credendi or orandi. We too followed their kataphatic path up into the cloud-covered mountain.

Now, like Bonaventure’s Moses or St. Francis of Assisi, we must descend the mountain in discrete cataphatic steps. Similar to journeying into the

As Derrida (?:?) would also later illuminate, although Heidegger insists his writ is philosophy and not theology, the German seems to imply or ask for a negative, or at least, a dialectic theology with or without god. Indeed, from the sketch given by the son of Meßkirch above, any enquiry into the meaning of being, seems impossible without opening or destroying traditional metaphysics, theologies, and anthropologies. Here enters Heidegger’s self-reflective agent Da-sein which always already finds itself in an ontic world and temporality.

Let us allow Heidegger (?: 13) to explain again:
Sofern nun aber Existenz das Dasein bestimmt, bedarf die ontologische Analytik dieses Seienden je schon immer einer vor-gängigen Hinblicknahme auf Existenzialität. Diese verstehen wir aber als Seinsverfassung des Seienden, das existiert. In der Idee einer solchen Seinsverfassung liegt aber schon die Idee von Sein. Und so hängt auch die Möglichkeit einer Durchführung der Analytik des Daseins an der vorgängigen Ausarbeitung der Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein überhaupt

Man grenzt ein »zeitlich« Seiendes (die Vorgänge der Natur und die Geschehnisse der Geschichte) ab gegen »unzeitlich« Seiendes (die räumlichen und zahlhaften Ver-hältnisse). Man pflegt »zeitlosen« Sinn von Sätzen abzuheben gegen »zeitlichen« Ablauf der Satzaussagen. Ferner findet man eine »Kluft« zwischen dem »zeitlich« Seienden und dem »über-zeitlichen« Ewigen und versucht sich an deren Überbrückung[3].

Thus, for Heidegger time designates a unique place. Theologies and other theories of transcendence thrive not only in the stale god-of-the-gaps filling in spaces not yet (if every filled) with scientific knowledge but also persist, above all, in the recalcitrant dualism zeitlichen [temporal] versus über-zeitlichen [supratemporal]. Let us consider a few clear historical examples of the onto-theology of being and time. “As usual, everything begins in Greece” as Descola (2013: 63) quips. Indeed, from philosophy’s birth with the pre-Socratics, onto-theology was discernible – although one must mention Heidegger’s love affair with Parmenides (Heidegger's Linguistic Rehabilitation of Parmenides' “Being”). The Ephesian school, for example, emphasised obsolete difference and flux, while the Milesian school postulated an all-encompassing unity and stasis. Later, after the Socratic