Heidegger's Notion of Care

However, we cannot begin to understand Heidegger's dense argumentation, his invention of new technical language in German that he believes captures ancient philosophical and theological concerns, and his mesmerizing lecture style, unless we see how he mimics the writing styles of the early Greeks.

Heidegger believed that the early Greek language and the modern German have unique powers to elucidate philosophical problems. With Nietzsche, he accepted the special access through poetry and the arts to higher ideas. Certainly the greatest work on Greek thinking in the nineteenth century was being done by German thinkers.

As shown by Eliza Butler in her prescient 1935 book The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, the fascination of Germans with Greece is a long tradition of being anti-Roman that began with the art historian Johann Joachim WInckelmann in the mid-eighteenth century and continued through Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich Schiller to Friedrich Hólderlin, who was a great personal inspiration to Heidegger.

We also cannot begin to understand Heidegger without recognizing his position in a long line of "onto-theological" thinkers who puzzled over the question of the existence of a "supreme being". From Christian theologians like Augustine and Anselm, to Georg W. F. Hegel, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, and Hólderlin, the two philosophers and a poet who were young students together at the Túbingen Stift (an Evangelical-Lutheran seminary in Württemberg and Heidegger's own alma mater), there is a common thread of equating God and existence with the philosophical, even metaphysical, question of Being and beings

They all worked on logical, ontological, or cosmological proofs of God'e existence, and although Heidegger elides and evades the pure religious aspects, it is "always already" in the background of his thinking. And his underlying, if sublimated, religion accounts for the phenomenal success of his writings in academic institutions that are just one collar away from being in the priesthood. This includes a large fraction of today's academics who consider themselves metaphysicians.

Now the information philosopher and metaphysicist is very comfortable discussing God, having discovered the cosmic creation process that must have been used by a God or gods to create the universe, should they exist. No professed theologian should ignore what modern science now tells us about the creation of non-living and living things.

Although Heidegger made it famous, the term onto-theology was coined by Immanuel Kant to describe reasoning theoretically to the existence of God, with no evidence from experience, based entirely on the concept of God. Kant defined cosmo-theology as deducing an original being from experience, from the empirical evidence of God in nature. These two transcendental forms of theology Kant distinguished from natural theology, in which an author of the world is discovered in the constitution of the world, demonstrating a natural or a moral order, respectively physico-theology or moral theology.

It is in some ways ironic that Heidegger thought the presocratics were the right place to look for the origins of the search for God in thinking about the pure concept of Being.

Although metaphysics properly begins with Aristotle's search for the underlying "first principles" of reality, he looked to the claims of the presocratics as possible answers to deep questions such as "what is there?" and what are the causes behind everything.

Most of their presocratic claims were speculations about the physical nature of the cosmos and its origins. In some ways, the presocratics might be viewed as the earliest natural scientists, with their strong interest in physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, meteorology, and even psychology. Where earlier thinkers had given mythological or religious explanations of natural phenomena, attributing them to named gods, the first thinkers in the Ionian school were called physiologoi by Aristotle, because they offered accounts (logoi) for nature (phusis).

If we describe the great triad of traditional/modern/postmodern as mythos/logos/nomos, we can say that the presocratics abandoned the traditional myths (mythos) in favor of modern reasoning (logos) about natural phenomena.

By contrast, Socrates/Plato changed the subject to ethical issues. The sophists argued that ethical problems are relative to the cultural values of a given community. They cannot be decided by reason. Science can discover how the world is (facts), but not how it ought to be (values). Values depend on the conventions and norms of a society, a question of nomos. Protagoras studied the norms of a community before writing their constitution for them. Protagoras was a postmodern thinker, probably the first. We make modern and postmodern a philosphical stance, not a temporal period.

It took Aristotle to return to cosmological, theological, and metaphysical issues first raised by the presocratic philosophers and the great epic writers like Homer and Hesiod. And in his great works on ethics, Aristotle sought universal principles. He was a modern thinker, who thought we can reason to values.

But Heidegger argues that the presocratic insights into Being have been forgotten, concealed, or abandoned by Aristotle. Heidegger, who is notoriously anti-science and anti-technology, ironically begins his onto-theological search for Being with the first thinkers to look for a scientific understanding of natural phenomena rather than a mythical-theological one.