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Martin Heidegger wanted to create a new metaphysics once he moved aside the old in his quest to rediscover the ancient pre-Socratic Greeks. His life’s work was to show that metaphysics since Plato and Aristotle had hidden Being, a mystery for which the ancients had a sense. Having traveled with Heidegger in seminars and readings back to the 5th-8th centuries BC, I would like to put my emphasis on this. I’ve never believed we needed a new metaphysics. However, we need a fresh rediscovery of metaphysics. Call it enchantment. For example, going back to the ancients centuries before Christ has, ironically, given me a deeper appreciation for the enchanting beauty, majesty, and relevance of Sacred Scripture.
In Hesiod’s Theogony (8th century BC?), cosmology is expressed through the genealogy of the gods. Earth, sky, ocean...etc. are both anthropomorphic gods and the things themselves. Gaia (earth) gives birth to Ouranos (sky) who, together with him, gives birth to the first generation of Titans, including Cronus, the father of Zeus. Others included Oceanus (seas and water) and Prometheus (who gave men fire). The Titan Epimetheus introduced evil in the world by marrying Pandora (the first woman) who opened her jar (box was a later misinterpretation - it was a jar).
In our age, a time when calculative metaphysical thinking rules supreme through science, it is easy to dismiss these stories. After all, we now know how the universe works according to the fundamental laws of nature. But, to Heidegger’s point, perhaps we do not really understand the universe we find ourselves in simply based on science.
The fantastic accounts of the ancients (procreation of the gods giving birth to the cosmological realities of our world) do not hold up in the face of modern science. However, modern science does not hold up in the face of the ancients’ understanding of physis and the alethic appearance of nature (nature being an adequate but incomplete English translation of physis). The ancients were filled with wonder at the emergence of the universe (phusis - the verbal noun form of physis, or “becoming”), and their entertaining stories of its origins are their testimony. The universe was alive for the ancients. We are filled with science, which has a certain wonder of its own but is mostly empty space. The ancients sensed the Being of beings (entities) hidden in the cosmos, while we hope at best to find more beings somewhere “out there.” The sense of the Being of beings alive throughout the universe required gods for props, not mortal entities.
This sense of Being for the ancients led Heidegger to ask, “What is Being?” What is it from which beings (entities) emerge? What is the hidden Being from which phusis reveals entities? Heidegger was not asking about the cosmology of entities in relation to the material universe, such as the creation of the stars and planets. He was asking about the cosmology of entities in relation to Being, such as what is Being from which stars and planets emerge from Nothing. The ancients created a story, a myth to describe the phenomenon of Being. The ancients thought more enchantingly about cosmology than we scientific moderns. This is what Heidegger was after. Notice that this is not a question of the existence of God. Heidegger was not an atheist, as I discovered over the past six months of seminars. His question and the stories of the ancients are very nuanced. They are primordial to science while completely open to the possibility of God’s revelation in Genesis, which now comes across to me as the most beautiful description of creation on record. Genesis is not the pagan cosmology. Genesis captures the enchantment the ancients sensed and informs it in the freshly scented beauty and majesty of an ordered metaphysics of the Word.
There is the metaphysical issue of paganism when we open the “Pandora’s jar” of Greek mythology. We can mistakenly make sacrifices to the gods if we do not allow ourselves to be swept into the beauty and majesty of Genesis and the sacrifices to God. Paganism quickly dissolves amid Genesis, both in the alethic truth of emergence and the veritas of correspondence, like the mist disappears when confronted by the morning sun. However, setting metaphysics aside for the investigation as Heidegger insisted, reveals something deeper happening in the Greek experience prior to the age of reason in Plato and Aristotle’s Greece.
It is the “something deeper” of Aletheia and Phusis, of emergence, wonder, and astonishment, in a word - enchantment, that can draw us to retell the story of our life beginning not with Gaia but with the beauty and majesty of Genesis, with a different cosmological sequence from that of the procreation of the gods, like the tolling of a mighty church bell on a hilltop. We see freshly and with astonishment what we have already seen in our metaphysical lives, recounted in the light of alethic wonder. On the first day, on the second day, on the third day.... our story is recreated enchantingly in the Word.
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell