HEYTHROP JOURNAL最新文献

This essay is an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s notion of the ‘step back’ (Schritt zurück) in his 1957 lecture, ‘The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics’ (OCM). I argue that Heidegger’s methodology of the ‘step back’ in OCM is a disclosure (αλήθεια) opposed to a concealment (Ληθη) of philosophical thinking that enables a three-fold seeing: (1) seeing how the matter of Western philosophy has always been a search for the grounding of beings in a Supreme Being; (2) seeing that the criterion for interrogating the history of philosophy is entering the force of earlier thinking through what has not been thought; and (3) seeing the essential nature of metaphysics that shows what has not been thought—the conflation of ontology with theology. It is this conflation of ontology with theology that transforms the Judeo-Christian God into the ‘god of philosophy’ before whom no one can ‘play music and dance’. Beyond Heidegger, the ‘god of philosophy’ is reflected in the theory of natural slavery in the political theology of the antebellum American south. Heidegger’s ‘step back’, then, which exposes such a false ‘god’ of oppression, opens the way for theological, political, and moral reform, and is thus a ‘step forward’.

This paper innovatively connects the Eucharist, which is usually considered to be in the domain of theology, with the concept of personality-growth—the idea that a person’s personality can get better—which is usually considered to be in the domain of experimental psychology. I make this innovative connection by drawing on a scientific survey of studies on personality-growth in experimental psychology to examine the experience of shared mental time travel that occurs in the Eucharist. Mental time travel is the cognitive ability of mentally travelling back in time in episodic memory and mentally travelling forward in time in episodic future-directed imagination. Episodic memory is memory of past events; similarly, episodic future-directed imagination involves imagining future events. Episodic memory is in contrast with semantic memory, which is memory of facts.

The argument in this paper is in two stages. First, I argue that episodic thinking contributes to personality-growth. That is, self-projecting (to re-live past events and to pre-live future ones in mental time travel) aids personality-growth. Second, I advance an isomorphic argument to the first, I argue that shared projection in liturgical anamnesis of the Eucharist aids psychospiritual growth. This work is grounded in contemporary experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of memory.

In recent scholarship, the dominant reading of Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence has been as a thought experiment. This paper responds to this in two ways. First, this paper relocates eternal recurrence in the context of Nietzsche’s abiding concern with the ‘preaching of death’, a powerful, life-negating weapon of the ascetic priest. Second, it presents it as a reality Nietzsche believed himself to have encountered through a ‘mystical’ experience. Zarathustra functions as Nietzsche’s ‘proof’ of this experience. ‘The heaviest weight’ section is equivalent to the priest’s examen; an introspective and challenging exercise which applies a ‘graced perspective’ to one’s life. This is a cosmological reading of eternal recurrence, however, it re-classifies Nietzsche’s scientific ‘proofs’ for the doctrine as exercises of fides quaerens intellectum. Whilst this interpretation makes Nietzsche’s doctrine more esoteric, it is textually grounded, and strongly accords with Nietzsche’s mature project of overcoming the priest’s historic influence.