The Fourfold of the "Godding": Primordiality in Heidegger, Hölderlin and Dzogchen: An ontology of Goetic Hermeneutics

Abstract

My thesis explores the primordial dimension of Heidegger’s work on the question of being (Seinsfrage) in Contributions to Philosophy and his related writings. This leads to a hermeneutic exploration of the nascent paganism in his being—historical (seinsgechichtlich) phenomenology, which signifies a moment of turning toward the fundamental phenomenon of the “godding” (Gotterung) of the gods and the “last god” in Heidegger’s later philosophy. Heidegger’s highlight of the Greek understanding of daimomion in his wartime lectures on Parmenides provide an uncanny (unheimlich) focus that brings together the philosophical power of the abyss (Abgrund) in being (Sein or Seyn) that restrains the metaphysics of light introduced by Plato into Western conception of being. This gathering (legein) goes beyond the unifying joining of being and nothingness in the being—historical appropriation of historicised time—space (Zeit—Raum) that is called Ereignis. The result is a phenomenological Destruktion, already promised by Heidegger with the audacity of a philosophical program in Being and Time, that does away with metaphysical dualism but with the price of casting Dwain, the human holism in the understanding of being, as a kind or race (Geschlecht) that goes under in the history of being (Seinsgeschichte) in curse and decomposition. This is Heidegger’s postwar reading of the destining (Gar/92%) of humanity to the universal distress (Not) of the abandonment of being (Seinsverlassenheit) in his philosophical interpretation of Trakl’s poetry. It forms a deep contrast to his protracted engagement with the pagan poiesis of Holderlin, which provides an opening in Dawn’s relation to the truth of being (aletheia) that attunes humanity to the possibilities of the fourfold (Geviert) of gods and mortals, sky and earth. The fourfold also happens to be the key motif in contemporary neo—paganism. Given that daimons were experienced by the Greeks to be the clearing of being (Lichtung des Seins), which lightens as well as conceals, their return to the fundamental human experience of aletheia through Heidegger’s later philosophy forms a full hermeneutic circle in Dam'n’s openness to being. This at the same time is a reclaiming of Goetia that has been demonised over the “onto— theological” centuries in the West, and which is hinted at in Heidegger’s Parmenides lectures with his characteristic rhetoric of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) that first reared its head in Being and Time.