ABSTRACT
I now turn to Heidegger’s critique of Western thought in order to uncover his approach to philosophy and pedagogy. His critique involves a suspicion of the propositional framing of thinking – which is basically equivalent to he calls representational thinking – and indicates contemplative or meditative ways of thinking that give form to the spaces between the secular and the confessional. So his critiques of Western thought leave space for a recovery of religion and of thinking, after what he critically terms ‘metaphysics’ has come to an end. One important consequence of the end of metaphysics inaugurated by Heidegger could be “that the relation of philosophy with poetry is no longer conceived in antagonistic terms, or by the destruction of the boundary between metaphor and its ‘proper meaning’ ” (Vattimo 2003, 31). This speaks to the reduction of language to propositions discussed in the preceding chapter. If we reject the propositional framing of language and discourse, then we can understand all language to be metaphorical, just as all being is hermeneutical. This does not require Heidegger to reject truth as such, but truth as metaphysics enframed by the standard representational guise (what Heidegger often characterizes as the correspondence theory of truth). Where the propositional logic of language can be understood as just one among many logics, the varied languages of poetry, myth and religion are given voice. An appreciation of multiple voices is an important implication of my understanding of the post-secular, placing Heidegger’s post-metaphysical project within its range – though it might also be termed a kind of procedural secularism which is pluralist without being particularist. To be sure, Heidegger is not invoking a return to the mythical still less the mystical. But his critiques of metaphysics and the totalizing tendencies of modern technology deserve some serious attention within post-secular analyses.
