Martin Heidegger: Ontology Beyond Metaphysics
Heidegger, who evidently ignores the metaphysics of St. Thomas and only knows that of Duns Scotus, Suarez, and Wolff, believed he could rediscover Being, 2600 years after Parmenides. Severino would do the same some decades later, stimulated by Bontadini, following Heidegger. In reality, since the time of St. Thomas, all serious metaphysicians know very well that it was Thomas who highlighted, beyond Aristotle, the importance of esse in metaphysics. Thus, if Thomas continues to say with Aristotle that the object of metaphysics is the being as being, it is clear that Thomas, when he says ens, thinks of esse as act, form, completeness, ultimacy, and perfection of being.
And mind you: as Father Fabro has rightly emphasized, it is not simply existence or being (esse in actu) as a mere actualization of the possible, because even the imaginary, the contradictory, the nothing, the negative, the void, and evil exist, yet they do not have the being, they are not reality; even thought exists, yet it is a mere ideal or intentional being.
Heidegger, then, ignorant of the history of metaphysics, felt obliged to propose, followed later by Bontadini and Severino, the "thought of Being": and since he believed that no metaphysician before him had thought of thinking Being, he thought it proper to found a supreme and foundational science, which he called "ontology" or "existential phenomenology", with the task of "overcoming" (überwinden) metaphysics, whose view, restricted to beings or, as Heidegger calls it, to the "ontic", would be incapable of rising to the "ontological", i.e., to Being as he conceives it, which is not true Being, as the act of being, the act of essence, but is an invention of Heidegger's, which he understands as non-conceptualizable, conscious, devoid of essence, temporal and finite being, open to nothingness, so much to deserve a harsh critique from Edith Stein in her work Finite Being and Eternal Being. [1]
The interesting thing is that Stein, like Heidegger, had been a disciple of Husserl, from whom she understood and maintained the interioristic instance of Platonic-Augustinian origin, as a necessity to intuit or see the essence of reality - the Wesenschau - with the gaze turned towards consciousness.
Edith was therefore perfectly suited to call Heidegger to truth. Precisely because she understood the Heideggerian instance deduced from Husserl of thinking Being, she was able to make a critique from within the same Heideggerian-Husserlian thought, showing that that instance could be satisfied only with Thomistic metaphysics, recently discovered by her after the encounter with Saint Teresa of Ávila, who had paved the way for her.
Stein, approaching by a fortunate chance, but certainly according to a divine plan, the egological spirituality of Saint Teresa of Jesus, realized that true interiority, the true gaze at one's self, at one's being, at one's consciousness, and the world present in it, presupposes the opening of the senses and the mind to external reality, sensible and spiritual, humble and sublime, to that extramental being, and therefore to the divine Ipsum Esse, which Husserl had put with arrogance and utmost imprudence in parentheses, imprisoning himself within the limits of his ego, as had happened to Descartes.
Now, for Heidegger, evidently bound to Descartes, being is the being that I am, I who question being. Being is the human being who poses the question about being. Being is therefore resolved in the human being here and now, or the so-called "Dasein" (Being-there). For Heidegger, being (sein) is different from the beings (seiende) not in the Thomistic sense that being is the act of beings, so that there is possibly and indeed necessarily a self-subsisting being, beyond and above beings understood as what has an essence in the act of being.
For Heidegger, the essence is not, as for Thomas, a potential being, potential concerning its being; it is not a universal nature, but coincides with the very individual being; it is not of a universal (nature(Ed.)), but, as for Ockham, it is a concrete and historical singular, an "event" (Ereignis), as Heidegger says, an "existential", a situated being, a "being-in-the-world" (in-der-Welt-sein). If God exists, He is essentially worldly, a God for humanity, a God-man, as for Luther.
As for Hegel, a God before the world and irrelevant to the world would be a mere "abstract" God, the "Greek god" (that is, Aristotle's), immutable, a mental abstraction. The real and concrete God, the so-called "biblical God", is the God that can be experienced, immanent, spirit-matter, being-becoming, and being-history. We find this God today in Küng, Kasper, Bordoni, Rahner, and Forte. [2]
Furthermore, for Heidegger, being itself (sein), although distinct from beings (seiende), cannot be immutable and eternal, pure act like for St. Thomas, but is finite, temporal, and borders on nothingness, as a human being.
For Heidegger, asking what the meaning of being is, is the authentic metaphysical question, which surpasses Aristotle's metaphysics, which is limited to asking what a being is. However, this question does not at all surpass metaphysics into a supposed superior knowledge that Heidegger calls "ontology". Metaphysics is the supreme knowledge of reason, so metaphysics and ontology are the same thing, with the difference that metaphysics evokes the idea that the investigation of beings elevates the mind to the discovery of the supreme spiritual being, while ontology says that the object of metaphysics is universal beings.
Moreover, the fact that it is man, in his temporality, precariousness, and finitude, who questions the meaning of being does not at all justify Heidegger's idea that ontology should limit itself to the consideration of the human being. Here we see the persistent influence of Descartes. Instead, being is not exhausted in the being that I am, but goes far beyond my ego to the point of being, like God, the creator of my ego.
Furthermore, Heidegger is mistaken in defining the mood of the metaphysician, which is not that of anxiety (Angst), but, as Aristotle observes, it is a wonder, which implies the joy of perceiving being and the desire to know its cause. The Bible insists greatly on the fact that wisdom brings true and highest joy to the spirit. Wisdom is a source of hope and not despair because it reveals to us that we are created by a God who loves us and we are not destined for death or to fall into nothingness.
But where does the anxiety of which Heidegger speaks come from? We understand it well: from the fact that he understands human existence is not founded on the divine being, on God, but on nothingness, similar to what Leopardi [3] believed. The existence of man is a "being towards death" (Sein zum Tode). And after death, what will there be?
In Being and Time, Heidegger intends to investigate and clarify the sense of being, showing genuine metaphysical interest. To this end, he makes an observation that is more than obvious, namely that it is the man who questions the sense of being. He rightly notes that the questioner, as a being, falls within the horizon of the object about which the questioner is questioning. So far, everything is obvious.
But here comes the undue passage, the sophistical artifice: since the human being is a determination of being, Heidegger does not conclude that being is understandable by abstracting from the human being, as Aristotle and St. Thomas do, but that being is understandable only concerning man, and precisely to my ego, confusing the questioner, that is, man with the questioned, that is, being itself, as if the metaphysical problem were resolved in asking myself what the essence of my being is.
In this way, metaphysics coincides with anthropology and vice versa. By pushing this anthropocentric ontology to its extreme consequences, since the absolute being is a subsistent being, which is God, by identifying man with being, one ends up saying that man is God.
Heidegger reasons as one who says: chemistry is the subject of human science; now, since man is composed of chemical elements, then chemistry has as its object the essence of man.
When Heidegger invites us to seek the meaning of being, my heart expands, and I feel a sense of exhilaration and freedom. But when I see that he, with the word "being", does not mean the actus essendi of St. Thomas, not the "I Am" of Exodus 3:14, but he means finiteness, precariousness, mortality, nothingness, temporality, my arms drop and I feel like I'm being made a fool of.
On the other hand, while Heidegger deifies man by assimilating him to ipsum esse, he pulverizes him into the contingent and the ephemeral. In fact, in Being and Time, he is so taken with the consideration of man's temporality and so connects the theme of being with that of man that he cannot see a being above time and independent of time. In this way, he does not seem to perceive the spirituality and therefore the eternity of being. What about the immortality of the soul? The ultimate end of man? Eternal life?
This suggests that Heidegger sees only contingent beings and not necessary beings. Now it is clear that only the latter can be eternal. Hence the triumph of becoming over being, of nothingness over being, and of death over life.
How did Heidegger come up with ideas so distressing and discouraging? It seems to me from the fact that he considers wise the question asked by Leibniz [4], who, showing little sense of being, wonders why there is being and not nothingness, without realizing that being necessarily exists precisely as the cause of contingent being. Therefore, it makes sense to ask why contingent beings exist, but not why necessary beings exist.
Whoever asks a question like Leibniz's perhaps identifies being with contingent being. Indeed, it makes no sense to ask why a necessary and absolute being exists. Yet, anyone who poses such a question hypothesizes the possibility of the non-existence of absolute being and the necessity of being explained, if it exists is an absurd hypothesis because it would suppose that necessary being is not necessary. Hence the absurd hypothesis of the existence of absolute nothingness, to which Leopardi seriously believed.
It is clear that if absolute and necessary beings do not exist, but only the contingent, this is suspended over nothingness, comes from nothingness, and returns to nothingness, just as Leopardi thought. Now, instead, of the intelligent and profound question, the metaphysical question is not why being exists, but why contingent being exists.
How did Leibniz come up with the possibility of the existence of absolute nothingness? Yes, it can be imagined; but how and with what good sense can one seriously hypothesize that absolute nothingness can exist? The intelligent and justified question is: why do contingent beings exist rather than only God exists? This is the question posed by St. Thomas. Certainly, nothingness exists if it is true that God creates from nothingness. But then it is simply a matter of nothingness relative to beings.
But once we acknowledge the existence of the contingent, the possibility that nothing exists or the hypothesis of absolute nothingness immediately appears absurd. Is it perhaps that God comes from nothing? If the existence of the contingent refers to a necessary being, how can we imagine that absolute nothingness can exist or that nothing can exist?
Heidegger considers Leibniz's question, also as a starting point for a meditation on nothingness as a possible object for metaphysics. In this he is right. However, it is necessary to see how nothingness is dealt with.
For Heidegger, metaphysics has as its object the being, which is negated by nothingness, whereas ontology has as its object nothingness, which is the truth of being. And since being transcends beings - and in this one can make an approach to St. Thomas -, the supreme knowledge for Heidegger is not metaphysics but ontology as he understands it, that is, the science of being, which is the nothingness of beings. In this sense, Heidegger says that "nothing nullifies". But Heidegger is not convincing: how can the being exist without beings? Only Ipsum Esse is being without beings, in that it can exist even without beings.
For Heidegger, nothingness is not only what we commonly understand by this word, it is not simple non-being; it is not Hegel's being-nothingness; it is not the non-existence or non-being of something ("there is nothing in this room"); it is not the nothingness from which God derives being; it is not an ens rationis; it is not the nothingness attributed to God when we say that God is nothing of what we understand as being.
The nothingness, according to Heidegger, exists. He does not accept Parmenides' thesis that nothingness is not. But he also does not accept Hegel's thesis that nothingness and being are opposites that identify themselves in becoming. On the contrary, for Heidegger, nothingness is the same as being: being is nothingness and nothingness is being, not in the nihilistic sense understood by Leopardi, namely that being comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness, no: Heidegger objectifies or substantializes nothingness, while at the same time affirming that nothingness nullifies beings but reveals being.
Nothingness is the truth of being, it is being as an event and as presence, which reveals itself to humans, illuminates them (Lichtung), and constitutes their home, dwelling, refuge, and protection. But then what is this nothingness? Is it God or not? Is Heidegger a theist or an atheist? He has said he is not an atheist, and he seems to believe in a personal God, but not in a first cause God, supreme being, subsistent being.
But then what is Heidegger's being? It is the being that appears and hides, that pre-understands and does not understand, towards which it tends and does not reach, that experiences without representing, being that does not give life but welcomes death, that is everything and is nothing, that remembers for having forgotten, that is in language and silence, being of which one speaks but without expressing, being on which one questions oneself, but that does not answer, being that attracts and repels, being that presents itself to him and before which he cannot decide, desired and rejected being. Perhaps because Heidegger wants to serve two masters? Heidegger says he is not an atheist. But does he not know that whoever is not for God is against God?
Gustavo Bontadini: Or the Impossibility of Becoming
Bontadini's metaphysics is also in line with Descartes with the aggravating circumstance that Descartes' cogito arrives at its extremely idealistic developments in Gentile so that the cogito that posits the sum has become the thought that posits being. It is no wonder he considers himself a neoclassic for admitting that the object of metaphysics is the being since he then conceives an idealistic being as immanent to thought and thought as identical to being, as we read from these statements of his in which he denies the externality of being to thought and its independence from thought. Bontadini says:
"Thought, which is identical with being, cannot presuppose anything" [5] (i.e., a being presupposed to thought). "Being, one can say, is thought"[6]; "there is nothing outside of thought"[7]. "Taking thought as a manifestation of being, it is the sense in which it must be taken to affirm its identity with being"[8]. "Just as it must not overshadow the concept of the ideality of the real, so neither that of subjectivity".
Moreover, Bontadini, convinced of valorizing the so-called "classical metaphysics" according him reconcilable with the "modern" one, that is, that of German idealism born from Descartes, and in particular that of Gentile, of whom he was enthusiastic, instead of referring to the Aristotelian-Thomistic school, which would have been expected in a Catholic University like that of Milan, intending by "classical" that of ancient Greece and following Heidegger's example, he went back to Parmenides not without understanding that he had had the intuition of the einai and therefore implicitly of the ipsum Esse, but he had a good game in connecting Parmenides with Gentile, because in Parmenides, even before Descartes, we find the first origins of the idealistic identification of thought with being.
In this way, Bontadini could demonstrate that both Parmenidean and idealistic metaphysics are thought of being, falsely accusing Thomistic metaphysics and realism of making being alien to thought and of annulling the dignity of thought before an unthinkable and unintelligible being, when, if there is an metaphysical gnoseology that accords thought and being without confusing them, while showing the intelligibility of being together with the highest dignity of thought, this is precisely Thomistic metaphysics.
But Bontadini paid dearly for his adherence to Parmenides since Parmenides does not distinguish at all necessary being from contingent being, becoming from immutable being, the one from the many, the identical from the different, thought from being, the finite from the infinite, matter from spirit, but for him, as Aristotle had already noted, everything is the same being, absolute, immutable and eternal denying any difference or distinction within being.
Thus Bontadini, trapped in the Parmenidean idealist and eternalist monism, and stubbornly attached to it, engaged with Severino, his former student, who was seduced even worse by Parmenides, an exasperating debate that lasted fifteen years, during which, in a continuous back and forth, the two endeavored to refute each other without any result, Bontadini in asserting the reality of becoming despite his Parmenidism, Severino in the always reiterated and futile attempt to induce the master to deny becoming in the name of Parmenides, when for the two professors at the Catholic University of Milan it would have been quite easy to agree by referring to the well-known doctrines of Aristotle and St. Thomas [10].
Karl Rahner: The Confusion of Being with the Human Being
Rahner proposes a concept of metaphysics inspired by Heidegger with the pretense of giving it a theological outcome, which Heidegger consistently rejects with his vision of being. However, Rahner, to achieve the theological outcome, without abandoning Heidegger's anthropocentric ontology that excludes God, combines Heidegger's conception of being with Hegel's, where we find pure, absolute, and divine being, which brings to mind the same esse of Thomas Aquinas or Parmenidean being, and yet we find the coincidence of being with thinking.
In this way, Rahner's metaphysics is both Heideggerian in reducing being to human being and Hegelian in confusing being with thinking or identifying being with divine being. Hegel recognizes himself very well in what he calls the "first proposition of general ontology":
"The essence of being is knowing and being known in an original unity, which we want to call consciousness or transparency ('subjectivity', 'knowledge') of the being of every entity" [11].
Given this Hegelian identity of thought and being, Rahner then proceeds in the same way as Heidegger to connect metaphysics and anthropology in such a way that anthropology expands and transcends into metaphysics and this is reduced to being anthropology:
"The problem of being, in general, is assumed as a positive and self-sufficient starting point for every metaphysical answer and affirmation not only for its content significance but also for its real and necessary existence in the man who inquires" [12].
The problem of being is present and posed by the man who inquires about being. So far, nothing to object to. But let's go on.
"One cannot do without metaphysics in answering the problem of being, because it is an integral and necessary part of human existence". Note already
"You cannot do without metaphysics in answering the problem of being because this is an integral and necessary part of human existence" [13]. Already here, note the ambiguity: what is an integral part of human existence? The act of posing the problem of being or the response to the question about being? Certainly, posing the question is part of human existence.
But the right answer to the question about being is not that being is "an integral part of human existence" because being is a value that goes infinitely beyond human existence. If anything, it is human existence that participates in the value of being. A similar confusion is noted in Jaspers, who simply calls human existence "existence", while on the other hand, he says that "God does not exist, but God is" [14].
Let's then see how Rahner skillfully shifts the reader's focus from the man who questions being to the response that defines what being is, and in this definition, he incorporates human existence. Being is the human being. The game is already set. But let's see further developments and clarifications.
Next, the "prior knowledge of being" [15] appears, which has a very important and fundamental role in Rahner's gnoseology, what he calls Vorgriff and which he deduces from Heidegger, what he calls the "pre-understanding" of being, the Vorverständnis. Before what? To all determined knowledge.
Therefore, for Rahner, the notion of being is not derived by abstraction and judgment from the experience of sensible things, but on the contrary, it precedes a priori notion. So for him, it's not that the intellect derives the notion of entity from the notions of particular entities, but on the contrary, the intellect forms the notion of particular entities because it already possesses the innate notion of entity, as for Descartes: "every affirmation refers to a determined entity and is carried out against the background of a previous, even if implicit knowledge of being in general" [16].
The basis of this thesis is the Hegelian idealist principle that the thinking coincides with the thought, metaphysics is an act of self-awareness by which the being, which is man, reflects on himself as a being. For this reason, Rahner states that
"After this knowledge of being, it is no longer necessary for man, so to speak, to be 'led back to being', but it is the knowledge of being itself, already existing in him, that must be 'brought back to itself'" [17].
That is, we are not here in the realistic context of a knower, man, distinct from the being external to him, the object of knowledge, but everything takes place in thought which is at the same time being. At this point, Rahner, considering that he has already convinced the reader, openly reveals:
"Since this starting point of every metaphysical problem is conceived a priori as a characteristic note of the human being, it follows that every metaphysical problem concerning being in general also concerns at the same time the being of the one who necessarily poses it: man. Therefore, human metaphysics is necessary and at the same time also an analysis of man.
The problem of being and of the man himself who investigates it constitute an original and constantly integral unity. This relationship at the same time guarantees us that we do not avert our gaze from man when at first glance it seems that we are moving in the most universal field of metaphysics" [18].
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, March 7, 2024
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/lavventura-della-metafisica-parte_16.html
[1] Città Nuova Publisher, Rome 1999.
[2] See my book "Il mistero della Redenzione" (The Mystery of Redemption), ESD Editions, Bologna 2004.
[3] See the interesting study by Severino "Cosa arcana e stupenda" (Arcane and Wonderful Thing), Rizzoli Editions, Milan 2018.
[4] See in "Che cosa è la metafisica?" (What is Metaphysics?), Adelphi Editions, Milan 2001, pp. 125-116.
[5] "Conversazioni di metafisica" (Conversations on Metaphysics), Vita e Pensiero Editions, Milan 1995, volume I, p. 9.
[6] Ibid., p. 10.
[7] Ibid., p. 11.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] The painful story, which has an almost ridiculous aspect, if it weren't laden with suffering on both sides, is narrated with abundant documentation by Marco Berlanda in "L'unica svolta di Bontadini. Dal fideismo attualistico alla metafisica dell’essere" (Bontadini's Only Turn. From Actualistic Fideism to the Metaphysics of Being), Vita e Pensiero Editions, Milan 2022.
[11] "Uditori della parola" (Listeners of the Word), Borla Editions, Rome 1977, p. 66. See Fabro's critique of Rahner's thesis in "La svolta antropologica di Karl Rahner" (The Anthropological Turn of Karl Rahner), Rusconi Editions, Milan 1974.
[12] "Uditori della parola" (Listeners of the Word), Borla Editions, Rome 1977, p. 63.
[13] Ibid.
[14] The etymology of existence is indeed ex-sistere, to exist-from, therefore to be caused to exist. But etymology does not always help understand the current, common sense of a term. Seeking to refer with refined linguistic preciosity to etymology in these cases does not create clarity, but confusion. In discussions about the existence or non-existence of God, which have been going on for three centuries now, no one thinks about ex-sistentia, but we all, atheists and theists, know what the term "existence" means. The term exsistere or existere is extremely rare in Thomas Aquinas. He usually uses the verb esse or subsistere. Thus, as is known, he does not ask whether God exists (utrum Deus existat), but whether God is (utrum Deus sit), but it is perfectly possible to translate: Does God exist? As Fabro points out, Thomas does not distinguish between essentia and existentia, but between essentia and esse, and it would be good to maintain this terminology also in Italian. Fabro appropriately suggests reserving the term "existence" for esse in actu as the actualization of the possible and reserving "being" for esse ut actus potentiae.
[15] Ibid., p. 64.
[16] Ibid., p. 64.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., pp. 64-65.