The Logos

“The wise is one only. It is willing and unwilling to be called by the name Zeus.”-Heraclitus of Ephesus, 535-c. 475 BCE”

“Every essential form of spiritual life is marked by ambiguity.”- Heidegger

As mentioned earlier, there are two distinct periods in Heidegger’s philosophical work. After WWII, he shifted his philosophical lexicon from the phenomenological analysis of Dasein (Human openness) in his work, Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit, 1927) to “being itself.” Heidegger announced in 1953 that Being and Time would not be completed, but the same themes continued to be discussed in his work using a different vocabulary and style. This change from the extremely systematic and logically structured writing of Being and Time to the less systematic and more diverse literary writing began about 1931 to 1940 and is called, “the turn” (die Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought. Some say that Heidegger’s style became more obscure, but one could interpret his later writing as illuminations of the abstract phenomenological method and ideas in Being and Time, and a demonstration of a new way of thinking not dominated by an ideological obsession for control.

After about 1931 Heidegger moved on to another style of writing that still dealt with the same questions as in phenomenological stage of Being and Time (1927). The later Heidegger is best summarized by his book,”Introduction to Metaphysics,” (published in Germany in 1953) of a revised lecture course he gave in the summer of 1935 at the University of Freiburg.

This later Heidegger begins with the same question of Being (“Why is there something rather than nothing?”), but goes much further in examining the linguistic structure of the question itself, “the purpose of the question of Being,” and in great detail traces the etymology of words since “...for over a thousand years the works of the Greek and Latin grammarians served as school books in the Western world”(An Introduction to Metaphysics, by M. Heidegger, Doubleday/Anchor 1961, p.48). Why is he focusing on language at such a microscopic level?

Heidegger is trying to explain why the question of Being is so difficult to understand--or even attempt to answer. Heidegger’s greater point throughout his studies is this: paradigms of Language (grammar) over time become paradigms of Life (action). A language grammar based on the delimiting distinction between noun and verb gives language an object bias resulting in a loss of experience. Heidegger is attempting to recover that lost experience--including spiritual experience. However, for now the object has supreme priority:

”...language too [sic] is an essent [object], which like the essents can be made accessible and delimited in a definite way....The determination of the essence of language, the very inquiry into it, are regulated at all times by the prevailing preconception about the essence of being and the about essence itself. But essence and being express themselves in language”(Ibid., p.44).

Heidegger starts his critique of modern positivism by critiquing language itself which obscures the question of Being:

”We have undertaken a study of the word 'being' in order to penetrate the fact under discussion and so to assign it its proper place. We do not mean to accept this act blindly, was we accept the fact that there are dogs and cats. We intend to form an opinion of the fact itself. And this we intend to do even at the risk that this intention may give an impression of stubbornness, and be set down as a forlorn unworldliness which takes the irrelevant and unreal for reality and entangles itself in the dissection of mere words. We wish to illuminate the fact. The result of our efforts is the observation that in the process of its development language forms “infinitives,” e.g. “sein,” and that in the course of time language has produced a blunted, indefinite meaning of this word” (Ibid., p.63).

The inflection, or “declining” of the infinitive is a characteristic of language, but the consequences of such extreme abstractions follow the decline of modern civilization into nihilism because this fundamental question of Being is forgotten, obscured by ‘beings.” Both humans and nature are superfluous entities and objects. “Being” is only understood as a thing, or entity, or even as “Supreme Being,” but a mere material entity regardless. Nihilism and solipsism are the two greatest dangers of our advanced industrial society.

The paradigm concept has been very useful in understanding the meaning bestowing ability and circularity of ideological conceptual systems. The paradigm can also be helpful in understanding the ancient Greek and Hebrew concept of Logos. Heidegger researched the historical and etymological origins of the word Logos while addressing, “the riddle of Being.”

Heidegger attempts to create a new language free of old metaphysical conflicts (Cartesian realist-idealist dichotomy that puts an “objective” subject as the judge of all truth), but still retaining familiar existential categories (being-in-the-world). Heidegger’s purpose is to put Being--not humans--at the center of philosophizing. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger did not embrace the Cartesian ideal of epistemological “objectivity” that represents the standard of truth, yet only exists as an ideal for a hypothetical disinterested epistemological subject. In Heidegger’s view this Cartesian method of establishing all truth exacerbated the classical philosophical conflict between realism versus idealism--and the forgetting of the question of Being.

The Logos is the most beautiful concept in all of philosophy. One must use historical, philosophical, cultural, and Christian biblical resources in understanding the Greek concept of “Logos” and how early Christianity adopted this concept. “Logos” is a key concept to understanding Heidegger’s theology.

Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, is recognized in Western philosophy as the originator of the doctrine of the Logos. Logos (Greek λόγος, ου, ὁ logos) means "word," or "reason. Philosophers have used the term logos in various ways through history, but the two terms “word” and “reason” are closely related in Hebrew religious thought. "Word" is meant as creating meaning more than just a dictionary definition.

A better term might be lexis. Logos and lexis (λέξις) are derived from the same verb legō (λέγω), meaning "to count, tell, say, or speak." Using language is a creative act and not just utilizing a vocabulary, but rather constructing meaning by drawing, or negating distinctions. In English "logic," is derived from logos. This deeper understanding of “word” is foreign in a hyper-empirical-materialist scientific environment. Language has a power beyond just providing synthetic propositions (factual propositions), or being logically tautologous—or just a digital font symbol. Language was believed to have the power to reveal the hidden essential structure of the divine, human beings, and the world.

A hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Hebrew language was dead even though the Old Testament is written in Hebrew. Only the religious scholars knew Hebrew, not ordinary persons. The people spoke Aramaic. The Old Testament was translated into Aramaic so ordinary people could understand it. Those translations are known as the Targums:

“The Targums were produced in a time when men were fascinated by the transcendence of God. That is to say, they were produced in a time when men could think of nothing but the distance and the difference of God. Because of that the men who made the translation which are in the Targums were very much afraid of attributing human thoughts and human feelings and human actions and reactions to God. To put it in technical language, they made every effort to avoid anthropomorphism in speaking of God....Now the Old Testament regularly speaks God in a human way; and wherever a thing like that occurred in the Old Testament the Targums substitute 'The word of God' for the name of God” (Williams Barclay's seventeen volume "The Daily Study Bible Series," 1959, The Gospel of John, Vol. 1, p. 6).

The Hebrew religious tradition understood the transcendence of the divine. It was the fear of objectifying the divine, or trivializing the concept of G-d that brought about the phrase “The word of G-d.” For Feuerbach, "All theology is anthropology." G-d is nothing else other than man: he is the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach’s critique of the theology of his day is in part the result of a literal anthropomorphic theistic monism in which the Real is a supra-personal entity, or thing.