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something else for Heidegger
‘There is something else for Heidegger; he is no solopsist.’ I wrote this in my previous blog.
I wrote also that Massimo Scaligero moved on to declare that the something else, as it relates to being, is the Logos.
And yet, all the while, when reading Scaligero’s The Logos and the New Mysteries, I felt that something was lacking. There has to be a starting point, an originating principle
Some words by Simone Weil (pictured) come to mind:
The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, scepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. (Gravity and Grace.)
Love as the originating principle, it cannot be explained; something I tried to express in Child of Encounter.
Love is the only starting point of such mysteries of body and soul. It is a dizzying reflectiveness without reference points. I am not referring to love in the agape giving sense; I mean unrelieved sickness and nausea, Eros, sexuality, destructive lust. To be stuck in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid is to be enveloped in assurance and certainty. And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery.
I think about those chance encounters. They left deep and lasting scars on all my life. I would never have predicted that. How did this happen? I am asking a metaphysical question here. I am asking about causality. I am in the presence of a mystery, a reality rooted far beyond the domain of the problematical and the day-to-day challenges of just getting by. And this is no fanciful reminiscence, for in the chance encounter’s awakening of consciousness, with its ‘implications for eternity’, we cut right to the heart of religious mystery. For what is Love? Love is God.
Does this mean that for being to be we must be in Love? in God? Well yes, is the answer, now and at every moment.
…he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)
It seems that the something else with which we started out is God.
© John Dunn.
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