The Thinking Catholic
Athens to Glasgow: Heidegger on Thinking
The reasons for a Catholic not to read the German philosopher Heidegger (1889-1976) are pretty obvious. Unless your life circumstances are such as to allow you a great deal of leisure, you will already have enough problems getting to grips with the depths of Catholicism to have much time or energy available to spend on a non (and even perhaps anti) Catholic philosopher. Moreover, Heidegger is extremely difficult to read and understand, and many have concluded that his obscurity conceals little of value. Finally, Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party and elements of Nazism are claimed to be deeply embedded in his thought. Â If you are going to invest time in intellectual exploration, why not pick a safer bet?
My answer to this rejection of Heidegger is going to be, roughly, that he helps you think more deeply. ‘What is thinking?’ is an excellent question and one that Heidegger asks explicitly in a course of lectures given in 1951-2. (One reason for reading Heidegger is that he raises excellent questions.) ‘Why should Catholics think and what should they think about?’ is also an excellent question even if Heidegger’s own life and thought suggests that he rejects Catholicism precisely on the grounds that it prevents thinking. Let’s start with this then. The common sense, secularised caricature of Catholicism is that it prevents thinking in at least two ways: first, by exercise of authority, it prioritises obedience and settled dogma especially for the laity over a lively and individual pursuit of truth; and second, to the extent it does offer tools for thinking, it has tended traditionally to offer ready-made systems such as Scholasticism which, while giving the illusion of thinking, instead get in the way of real thinking. (Both these criticisms have been internalised within the Church especially since Vatican II. Another reason for reading Heidegger: his direct influence -or at least what wider intellectual movements he reflects- have been at the root of many of the most important cultural changes in modernity.) This brings us to what I regard as the heart of Heidegger’s work: the attempt to recover reality (what he would call Being) from a covering up by systems of language and impoverished thought.  In his later work, Heidegger emphasises the restorative power of poetry and indeed generally seems in his often obscure language to be trying to create a philosophy which is poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his poem, God’s Grandeur, writes:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Hopkins’ concern that commerce and generations of human activity have obscured reality is one shared by Heidegger. In his essay, ‘The question concerning technology’ (1954), the way that modernity forces us to think about reality simply as a resource for production (as Heidegger terms it, a ‘standing-reserve’) and thus obscures that dearest freshness becomes an important theme. And yet Heidegger goes beyond a simple romantic rejection of technology and identifies it as one way we begin to get a deeper grasp of reality:
It is precisely in enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the ostensibly sole way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence – it is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongness of man within granting may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the essence of technology.
Thus the essential unfolding of technology harbours in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power.
I don’t claim to be able to explain every nuance of this, and one of my reasons in quoting this passage at length is to give a sense of what obscurity will meet you if you do decide to tackle Heidegger. But I hope bits do start to ‘come to light’ given what I have already said. There is a danger in technology that we just start to forget to see the world in the various ways we might engage with it (‘the danger of the surrender of his free essence’), replacing that with seeing it simply as a resource for profit. But without that temptation and the way that modernity has turned everything in our environment into pre-packaged answers (‘enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the ostensibly sole way of revealing’) we wouldn’t be presented with an opportunity to go deeper: only with the rise of an all-enveloping technology in modernity can we be forced to start to think properly about what precisely reality and our use of it is like (the ‘unfolding of technology harbours in itself…the possible rise of the saving power’). The obscurity of Heidegger’s language, like poetry, forces us beyond the clichés that make up what Heidegger calls the ‘chatter’ of modern life (another source of concealing reality). And yet, like poetry, there are resonant terms (‘the saving power’) which are striking and yet not quite understandable. Particularly resonant for theists no doubt, and particularly troubling for secularists to be reminded that, despite their enframing and chatter, the world still ‘will shine out like shining from shook foil’ (Hopkins again) even if we might struggle to put those resonant phrases into precise words.
If I had to summarise why I think Heidegger is worthwhile engaging with it would be in the way he identifies a danger (the concealment of reality) and offers paths in which that danger can be identified and fought. I gave three reasons for Catholics not reading Heidegger at the beginning of this article and have addressed the first two:  Heidegger is an extremely important thinker who offers help in addressing key problems in modernity. While some of his linguistic obscurity is avoidable, his overall strategy in reminding us of the importance of poetic language in exceeding what can be said transparently is, at the least, worth taking seriously. But what of the final point: that Heidegger’s thought is irredeemably tainted by his commitment to Nazism? That there was, at least for a time, a commitment to Nazism is undeniable. Other than complete rejection of Heidegger and his work, there have been various reactions to this. But one approach I’d emphasise is to note that Heidegger and his thought undoubtedly embodied many traits that were common to European and particularly German culture emerging from the nineteenth century, and that these were the precisely the traits that provided the soil and in part the content of Nazism: Nazism did not emerge from nowhere and did not disappear into nowhere. For example, both Heidegger and Nazism clearly embody elements of Romanticism and folkist movements. Given that these were important elements in Nazism and that we know the results of Nazism in mass destruction and death, does this mean that Romanticism and folkism are necessarily entirely pernicious? Does that mean that anyone who remains influenced by such ideas is necessarily a Nazi? I can’t answer those questions, but simply raise them as points that really ought to be thought about more deeply. If there are worthwhile elements to Romanticism and folkism, then Heidegger is worth examining as a prime source of serious thinking about them. If there are no worthwhile elements in them, then Heidegger is still worth examining as a prime source of serious thinking about them because they must be understood before they are rejected. In any case, in a Scotland politically dominated by a nationalism which seems to reject traditional Romantic and folk influences in favour of a civic nationalism, while at the same time arguably relying on their covered-up influence, Heidegger may be a particularly important thinker to be grappled with.
By Stephen Watt
References and further reading:
An extract from the 1951-2 lectures on thinking can be found in David Farrell Krell (ed.) (1993) Basic Writings Martin Heidegger, London, Routledge, which I’d strongly recommend as the best introduction to actually reading Heidegger’s own works. It also contains the essay, ‘The question concerning technology’.
 Online sources for approaching Heidegger include:
Internet Encyclopedia article on Heidegger: https://iep.utm.edu/heidegge/
The review of Professor Judith Wolfe’s Heidegger and Theology https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/heidegger-and-theology/  provides helpful hints for examining Heidegger important influence in modern theology further.
The upcoming Saints days are as follows:
St Walthen/Waltheof | 1160AD | Abbot of Melrose Abbey
3rd August
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​St Berchan/Barochan | 6th Century
August 4th
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St Angus | 6th Century
August 9thÂ
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St Blaan of Bute | 6th Century
August 9thÂ