{"id":12159,"date":"2020-10-01T13:59:03","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T17:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=12159"},"modified":"2020-10-01T13:59:03","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T17:59:03","slug":"ian-alexander-moore-eckhart-heidegger-and-the-imperative-of-releasement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2020\/10\/01\/ian-alexander-moore-eckhart-heidegger-and-the-imperative-of-releasement","title":{"rendered":"Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement<\/em>. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019; 350 pages. ISBN: 978-1438476513.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Matt Clemons, Stony Brook University<\/em>.<\/p>\n

On several occasions, Martin Heidegger fondly refers to Meister Eckhart as the \u201cold master of life and letters,\u201d expressing his high regard for the Middle High German philosopher and mystic. The affinities between Eckhart and Heidegger are perhaps most discernible in Heidegger\u2019s later thought, especially with the centrality of the notion of Gelassenheit<\/em>, for which Heidegger acknowledges his indebtedness to Eckhart. Thus, those who have investigated the relationship between the two have focused primarily on this period of Heidegger\u2019s thought, meaning that any comprehensive exploration of the influence of Eckhart on Heidegger has been missing. In his Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement<\/em>, Ian Alexander Moore takes up this task, considering the way in which Heidegger\u2019s own reflections on Eckhart and Eckhartian themes inform and inspire his thought.<\/p>\n

The work\u2019s philosophical point of departure is the Parmenidean dictum that affirms the sameness of thinking and being. As Moore clarifies, \u201cin order properly to understand being, one must engage in the proper activity<\/em> of thinking,\u201d or, again \u201cI must do<\/em> something before I can understand.\u201d (xiv) He refers to this precondition as \u201cthe Imperative\u201d or, following Reiner Sch\u00fcrmann, as the \u201cpractical apriori.\u201d The essence of the activity that one must engage in to understand being, which is thinking broadly conceived, turns out to be the same as<\/em> the essence of being itself. As Moore puts it, \u201cto think being at its most basic level, I must act in terms of the very way in which being is to be thought.\u201d (37) Going further, he argues that, because thinking as the essential activity of the human being is the very essence of the human being, the essence of the human being and the essence of being are, in a sense, the same. We might recast Parmenides\u2019s declaration, then, as \u201cthe human being, the one who thinks, and being are the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moore\u2019s task in the book is \u201cto explore how this imperative functions in Eckhart\u2019s philosophy, and to show how Martin Heidegger creatively appropriated it at several stages of his career.\u201d (37) The central thesis is twofold in accordance with this task. First, Moore argues that for Meister Eckhart, the \u201cGodhead\u201d and the \u201cspark of the soul,\u201d (62) which stand in for being and the human being respectively, are not merely unified moments of beatific vision, but are always already one and the same. Just as the essence of the Godhead can be glossed, \u201cas abegescheidenheit <\/em>(Middle High German for detachment<\/em>) or, more properly […] with the term gel\u00e2zenheit<\/em> (Middle High German for releasement),\u201d so can the soul and its essential activity. (62) Moreover, in order for the soul to wake up to its identity with the Godhead, the soul must do this essential activity. It must become released. Moore locates this imperative to \u201cbe released\u201d in the practical apriori in Eckhart\u2019s thought. Thus, in Eckhart, we find both the sameness of thinking (the spark of the soul) and being (the Godhead) and the practical apriori that must be undertaken to understand this insight. Second, Moore argues that this same structure is operative in Heidegger\u2019s thinking throughout his career. For Heidegger, in order to understand, one must do<\/em> something, and this doing<\/em> turns out to be the very same essence as the human being (and, being). Indeed, according to Moore, \u201cHeidegger\u2019s greatest debt to Eckhart lies in the dependence of thinking on a sort of activity.\u201d (92)<\/p>\n

Parts Two and Three of the book contain the majority of the exegetical work, Part Two focusing on Eckhart and Part Three on Heidegger. Chapter Two, the first in Part Two, is a stand-alone consideration of Eckhart\u2019s vacillation between two positions, namely that, on the one hand, God is thinking, and on the other, that God is being. The possible charge of ontotheology at the end of the chapter, which brings the Heideggerian problem into relief, sets up the transition into Chapter Three, in which Moore\u2019s thesis as it pertains to Eckhart begins to manifest. Taking up a handful of Eckhart\u2019s German Sermons, Moore argues for the understanding of: 1) the spark of the soul; 2) the Godhead; and 3) the essence of the practical apriori as gel\u00e2zenheit<\/em>\/abegescheidenheit<\/em>. In summary,<\/p>\n

If, to know the truth, we must be the truth, and if the truth is God\u2019s detachment, we must be detached. What we have here is thus the formal structure of the identity between thinking (as the broad, essential activity of the human being) and being (as the way of being of both the Godhead and the ground of the soul). (76)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At play in this chapter is much of Eckhart\u2019s religious anthropology, i.e., the differences between the created \u201cme,\u201d the exemplar that I am as it is in the Son, and the spark of the soul in which I am identical to the Godhead without differentiation, and theology, i.e., God as Creator and Trinity in relation to Creation, and God as Godhead without differentiation. We are also introduced to the problem of willing as it relates to gel\u00e2zenheit<\/em>, a discussion which will play a major role in Moore\u2019s consideration of Heidegger.<\/p>\n

In fact, one of the major challenges Moore faces in Part Three, in which he argues for the influence of Eckhart on Heidegger\u2019s entire corpus, is the difficulty in the latter\u2019s language of resoluteness, will, and violence in the 1920s and 30s, which is far afield from Eckhart\u2019s gel\u00e2zenheit<\/em>. The unique contribution of Moore\u2019s analysis is the way in which he argues for a consistent formal similarity, if not always with regard to content, between all of Heidegger\u2019s work and Eckhart\u2019s identification of the spark of the soul and the Godhead and the practical apriori of gel\u00e2zenheit<\/em>. For this purpose, Moore focuses on the period just after the publication of Being and Time <\/em>up to the completion of the first of Heidegger\u2019s Country Path Conversations<\/em> in 1945. In Chapter Five, Moore deals with two texts from the late 20\u2019s: Einleitung in die Philosophie<\/em> and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics<\/em>.<\/p>\n

With regard to the first text, Moore defends a middle-voice understanding of not only the transcendence of Dasein<\/em>, characterized as a letting-be that grounds the possibility of any relation to beings and of Vorhandenheit<\/em> in general, but also of the task of philosophy, as the letting-be necessary to understand the letting-be of Dasein\u2019s<\/em> transcendence. With regard to the second text, Moore focuses on the ambiguity surrounding action and Gelassenheit<\/em> in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics<\/em>, arguing on the one hand that the apparent vacillation, even contradiction, can again be understood in terms of the middle-voice, and on the other, that there is still a notion of Gelassenheit<\/em> that precedes activity. Moore argues that although these texts may seem ambiguous with regard to Gelassenheit<\/em>, the content of the structure in Heidegger is the same as in Eckhart.<\/p>\n

Chapter Six deals with Heidegger\u2019s work in the 1930s, when the \u201cradical dissimilarities in content\u201d are most visible, and \u201cthe few glimmers of Gelassenheit<\/em>\u2026barely peek through.\u201d (112) Moore marks the change as follows: \u201cRather than as letting-be, the essence of being and of the human being is interpreted in terms of willfulness, struggle, and violence.\u201d (112) However, this change is \u201cby no means [a change] in form<\/em>.\u201d (112) According to Moore, \u201cWe will find both a practical apriori that will reveal being and the human being to be the same as that activity.\u201d (112)<\/p>\n

Insofar as Heidegger maintains that the human being, whose essence is violence, must commit violence in order to understand that the essence of being is violence, Moore\u2019s thesis holds. There is still an affinity between the human being and being; the practical apriori is operative. But insofar as the ethical and axiological framework of the ontological investigation radically shifts, we might wonder to what extent the formal similarity is meaningful. It might be meaningful, as Moore argues in the Conclusion, insofar as we can argue that Heidegger\u2019s thought in the 30\u2019s (and, taking the Schwarze Hefte <\/em>into consideration, afterwards as well) need not have gone in the direction of voluntarism and violence. Instead, had Heidegger stayed true to the insights appropriated and developed from Eckhart, he might have realized the ethical consequences that Gelassenheit<\/em> entails. In Chapter 7, Moore states that, as the power of National Socialism waned, \u201cHeidegger comes to see that willful violence and violent willfulness, far from providing access to the truth of being, are precisely what obstructs it.\u201d (123) Rather than violence, what is called for is meditative thinking, which is characterized by letting-be, or Gelassenheit<\/em>. Thus, we come full-circle to Eckhart:<\/p>\n

For both Eckhart and Heidegger, we must exercise restraint in the face of that which cannot be represented. We must allow the concealment of the Godhead and of the open-region to be, even as well allow that, at bottom, we essentially belong to them. Yet we cannot come to realize this without a practical apriori. For Heidegger, we have to let go of the will and let ourselves wait for the essence of thinking and being to show itself, which turns out to be Gelassenheit<\/em> and only shows itself in Gelassenheit<\/em>. For Eckhart, we have to be gel\u00e2zen<\/em> in order to understand that letting-be characterizes the oneness of the Godhead and the ground of the soul. In both cases, the imperative of releasement is primary. (138)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As this bears on the question of violence in Heidegger\u2019s writings in the 1930s, there is still room for concern, insofar as the only critique of violent thinking that Gelassenheit<\/em> affords is that the former is calculative, and so representational, rather than meditative. I think, for instance, of Heidegger\u2019s grossly misguided likening of the extermination camps to the mechanized mass food industry. It might be, however, that a more robust notion of Gelassenheit<\/em>, as it is furnished by Moore through Eckhart in Chapter 3, can be of service here.<\/p>\n

Having summarized the exegetical work of Parts Two and Three, I now turn back to Part One, which to my mind represents one of the significant accomplishments present in all parts of the book, namely its scholarly acumen. Moore demonstrates the impressively thorough, careful, and creative research conducted in the formation of the book. In Part One, to determine \u201cwhen and where Heidegger cites or refers to Eckhart,\u201d (3) Moore exhaustively considers not only Heidegger\u2019s published works, but also references in unpublished manuscripts, in letters, in the copies of relevant literature in Heidegger\u2019s library, and in archival material, much of which has not, to my knowledge, been treated in any other English-speaking work. Moore shows a familiarity not only with the relevant contemporary German and French scholarship on both Eckhart and Heidegger, but also with the figures and milieu that were contemporaneous with Heidegger. As regards his thesis, Part One has the effect of furnishing the material evidence that Heidegger was in fact consulting and reading Eckhart throughout his life. Many of the problems dealt with in Parts Two and Three\u2014for instance, the apparent contradiction between Eckhart\u2019s designation of God as thinking and God as being\u2014are foreshadowed in Part One through Heidegger\u2019s references to them. Part One also introduces and references the material included in the appendices, which in themselves are an accomplishment in scholarship. In Appendix One, Moore reproduces Heidegger\u2019s own notes and references to Eckhart in the original German. This includes Heidegger\u2019s enthusiastic review of his student K\u00e4te Oltmanns\u2019s dissertation on Eckhart, which she defended in 1934. Appendix Two is a translation of Oltmanns\u2019s presentation, given in Heidegger\u2019s class on Schelling, which was the catalyst to her dissertation work. Finally, Appendix Three contains the first English translation of an essay by Nishitani Keiji\u2014also a student of Heidegger\u2014on Zarathustra and Eckhart. For scholars of Heidegger and Eckhart, Moore\u2019s Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement<\/em> contributes not only a unique and well-supported argument for Eckhart\u2019s influence on Heidegger\u2019s entire corpus, but also an abundance of material essential for future endeavours on the same topic.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019; 350 pages. ISBN: 978-1438476513. Reviewed by Matt Clemons, Stony Brook University. On several occasions, Martin Heidegger fondly refers to Meister Eckhart as the \u201cold master of life and letters,\u201d expressing his high regard for the Middle High […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10,282],"class_list":["post-12159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-heidegger","tag-mysticism","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 14:33:36","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12160,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12159\/revisions\/12160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}