Transcendence as Indistinction in Eckhart and Heidegger

Bradley Onishi

doi:10.3390/rel8040056

Abstract

I examine what I call Eckhart’s doctrine of indistinction as a precursor to Heidegger’s approach to the worldhood of the world. Taking cues from textual evidence in various sections of Heidegger’s texts and lecture courses, I demonstrate that Heidegger’s ontology is at least partially inherited from Eckhart’s henology. As a result, there is an analogous logic of indistinction operative in Eckhart’s understanding of the relationship between God and creation, and the inseparability of Dasein and the world in Heidegger’s phenomenology. I conclude by suggesting that Heidegger’s reading of Eckhart is a microcosm of the relationship between continental philosophy and religion, because it demonstrates that turning one’s eyes to the logics of a different cosmology, anthropology, or ontology, may permit the eyes to see more fully what is at play in one’s own approach to the human, the world, and the relationship between them. In other words, the secular often illuminates theological blind spots, just as the theological has the power to transform, enlarge, or supplement the secular view of the consciously secular thinker, without converting philosophy to theology or vice versa.

Highlights

Diverging from a long list of theological predecessors, including his fellow Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart understands creatures as pure nothing
I conclude by suggesting that Heidegger’s reading of Eckhart is a microcosm of the relationship between continental philosophy and religion, because it demonstrates that turning one’s eyes to the logics of a different cosmology, anthropology, or ontology, may permit the eyes to see more fully what is at play in one’s own approach to the human, the world, and the relationship between them
After finishing his dissertation on Duns Scotus in 1916, Heidegger developed his truly distinct philosophical voice by diverging from Neo-Kantian epistemology and ontology through a search for the transcendent ground of experience, as the Harvard historian Peter Gordon summarizes: “It is this theme above all—the rejection of ontological pluralism and the assertion of an ontological unity deeper than any particular object domains—that most reveals the early Heidegger’s departure from the methodological consensus of Neo-Kantianism.” (Gordon 2010, p. 63) During the years after his doctoral work (1917–1919), Heidegger recorded a number of notes on medieval mysticism, some of which were intended to be used in a course on the same topic in 1919

Summary

Introduction

Diverging from a long list of theological predecessors, including his fellow Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart understands creatures as pure nothing. The final cause of creatures is to-be as beings God enables their existence by perpetually conferring existence upon them—by giving birth to their possibility in each instant. Eckhart does not understand existence on the basis of a final telos toward which all things move Instead, his ontology posits the perpetual birth of the possibility of creatures through the immediate givenness of God. In a manner that echoes of Eckhart’s henology, through his sweeping analysis of time and temporality, Heidegger posits that in relation to Being, Dasein is nothing in-itself. For Heidegger, temporality enables the birth of the possibility of Dasein’s possibilities, its world. According to Heidegger, temporality is the “original outside-itself itself” that gives birth to Dasein’s world as its condition and constitution. There is an analogous logic of indistinction operative in Eckhart’s understanding of the relationship between God and creation, and the inseparability of Dasein and the world in Heidegger’s phenomenology

Meister Eckhart’s Doctrine of Indistinction

A Worldly Mystic

Indistinction as Transcendence

Conclusions