John Dunn

Heidegger in front of his hut in the Black Forest

No solipsist

A re-examination of my archived essay Heidegger - passive or active? in the light of reading Massimo Scaligero’s The Logos and the New Mysteries.

Martin Heidegger’s beautiful metaphor for the mind's passive facilitation of being's emergence is the clearing in the wood, the sunlit space across which being passes from the surrounding darkness of the trees. The resultant emergence of being is described by Heidegger as Aletheia, the Greek word for the state of not being hidden, unhiddenness or, to put it positively, the state of being.

Being open to the emergence of being is closely bound up with Heidegger's notion of living authentically.

There is something else for Heidegger; he is no solopsist.

What he does deny however is a world of pre-constructed Platonic forms, which the mind must negotiate in a constrained manner.

The something else is not mind-constructed, it exists independently of mind. However, it can have no being without the mind of man.

There is a kind of false being i.e. mind-constructed and an authentic being that the mind allows to emerge.

On the one hand, Scaligero defines the false being that we see around us as reflected thought, i.e. thought originating in the mind that solidifies, only to be reflected back to us as a mind-independent reality.

On the other hand, authentic being for Scaligero is the living thought that emerges in the mind before it becomes solidified and reflected back.

That living thought is not mind-constructed, rather it emerges in the mind from another source. For Scaligero, this is the light of the Logos entering the world.

In both Heidegger and Scaligero, there is no question of the mind creating reality; it is rather a question of facilitating the emergence of reality.

This might be embellished, as Scaligero did, by declaring that this is the Logos entering the individual.

So that’s authentic being as the Logos, which makes the acceptance of false being idolatrous.

© John Dunn.