Heidegger in the Light of Tradition

Abstract

The thesis provides a comparative analysis of the work of Heidegger and Guénon on the subject of tradition. Although often ignored in scholarly research of Heidegger, it forms an essential component of his understanding of the nature of thinking, which he understands as a listening or hearkening to this tradition. In his thinking, history is understood on the basis of a fundamental occurrence, its destiny, and its completion in modernity. To hearken to the tradition, thus, means to listen to the occurrence that its thinkers express. In a reading of Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason, the thesis attempts to unearth what this occurrence precisely is, and how Leibniz’ principium rationis expresses it, according to Heidegger. Due to the close connection between the themes ‘tradition’ and ‘history’, Guénon’s understanding of the history of modernity is also considered. In essence, many points that each author has discovered converge in significant ways, especially as regards the completion of modernity in the predominance of a calculative mindset. It is suggested that this allows us to complete Guénon’s rather brief descriptions with Heidegger’s more penetrating analyses. Finally, a reading of Derrida’s Of Spirit allows me to interrogate Heidegger’s neglect of the Christian tradition and to ask whether this marks a certain incompleteness in Heidegger’s oeuvre. In an early text entitled The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger proposed as the task of the philosophy of religion to investigate religion in a religious way, which point of view I call an ‘internal’ one, as opposed to the extrinsic point of view that Heidegger expressly opposes in this text. It is suggested that Guénon’s metaphysics represents a generalized internal point of view, and that, in this way, Heidegger can be said to be moving in the direction of a Traditionalist metaphysics. To what extent this can be said of the later Heidegger as well will also be duly considered.