Marjorie Grene, Heidegger

Bowes and Bowes, 1957, 128 pgs.

Summary: A brief and devastating critique of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and existentialism in general. Heidegger somehow managed to be an unrepentant Nazi and the philosopher of post-modernity. His early training was as a Catholic and his dissertation was on the medieval scholastic Duns Scotus.

Dr. Grene thoroughly and competently shows in what sense he asks and answers some important perennial questions about human existence or existential experience, and how he fails completely to do anything significant in ontology. His greatest contribution seems to be located in taking Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism and attempting to make it an atheist system.

Heidegger defines the human experience as: “facticity; being-always-already-in –a-world; existentiality: being always in advance of itself in essential relation to its own possibilities; forfeitures: distraction by the insistent claims of everyday moods and everyday interests and everyday companions, are the essential aspects of human being. But the three aspects are not separable. They form, as we have seen, one unified structure. It is to this single, indissoluble nature that Heidegger gives the name Sorge, cura, concern or care” (26).

This existence is not an authentic existence as it is currently framed; the only way that it can become a good-faith existence is if the human being in the contemplation of death recognizes himself as alone and responsible for his current condition. In this solitude, he is faced with his relationship and responsibility to Being and must recognize his absolute freedom.

The above summary paragraph is basic existentialism.  And I am summarizing a summary—Heidegger is much more interesting with lots of pedantic protests of authenticity and full of dashes and transliterated German. The problem as Grene notes: “It is a doubly self-centered philosophy: a philosophy of the individual centered in his own responsibility to become himself, of man in his own unique relation to his own Being. It is a philosophy in which the concept of the person is all-important, yet it can give us no account of any reaching out from person to another. It is a philosophy which birth and life and death are all important; yet it admits no kinship between man and any of the other things that are born live and die” (58). All of nature, humans and the cosmos, are merely a tool for the individual to discover himself and his relationship to Being.

The issue is not merely one of the egoism of the system, but the scheme only functions within a simplistic understanding of the human experience: “by singling out the act alone by which a man faces his own freedom, the existentialist isolates part of the total situation which cannot be so isolated. It is true that it is ‘I’ who have always-already-chosen the values by which I live. But I have chosen, not created them; if they were not some sense there to be chosen, if something did not compel to choose them, they would not be values at all. . .Every act involves at the least some references to values which, beyond itself, make a claim on the agent and perhaps, at least indirectly, bind him to other agents or to those affected by his acts” (54).

Once Heidegger has established his foundation for analyzing the human experience, he then turns to Being-in-itself or being as it is. And at this point he gets what should be described as silly or incoherent, but so many people take it seriously, we must trudge on. The authentic person is the person who has overcome the “enframing” of Being which was foisted on the West by Aristotle. Heidegger’s proof of this is simply, and he openly admits, reading back his own conclusions into history (cf. 105). When the authentic man overturns the “enframing” he can then “shepherd being” (110) through the mystical process of writing poetry and reconnecting to our pre-Socratic state.

A closing quote from Ms. Grene: “And it may be that Heidegger, in turning away from [Kirerkegaard’s concern about] finitude, is turning again to religion of a sort. . . And always he is a petulant and over-anxious self-apologist: concerned to tell us that this high, unintelligible search is all he has ever undertaken—that what he did achieve he never intended or achieved at all. Were it not for his arrogance , it would be a tragic story; the tragedy of an artist who has destroyed his own work (125).”

Benefits/Detriments:

An assessment of Heidegger is important because he is one of the foundational thinkers behind “post-modernity.” Heidegger has influenced biblical theology and hermeneutics through Bultmann and the proponents of the emerging church.  Dr. Grene’s assessment of his work is particularly important to Christians, because she, as a secular philosopher, accurately portrays Heidegger as a teacher of evil and sophistic or bad philosopher.

Heidegger is only helpful as a catalysis for better philosophers. His efforts to get behind Socrates terminate in returning to pre-Socratic Greek religion and the poets “inspiration.”  On a practical level there is little difference between traditional Greek religion and Hinduism. Heidegger is as much an apologist of a westernized Zen Buddhism as he is a legitimate philosopher.

Existentialism as taught by Heidegger is a handful of critical and interesting thoughts on the human experience combined with some nonsensical observations on Being and a corrosive attitude against both philosophy and Christianity—perhaps even against language and reason. He has a missionary zeal for the incoherence of traditional religion (Greek/Hindu) as “enframed” by poetry. He is not the friend of good science, good philosophy, or Christianity.  Dr. Grene comes to these conclusions as a philosopher with no religious loyalties.

Grene’s critique is accessible to the thoughtful reader with some background in philosophy. I would suggest it for college pastors working with artistic and philosophically minded students and undergraduates with an interest in philosophy.

The greatest weakness of this work is that it deals very little with Heidegger thoughts on language or hermeneutics which tends to be the portion of his work which is most readily absorbed by Christians. The foundation of his hermeneutic is exposed, but not the later rhetoric and development.