Monday, June 19, 2006

Dialectic meant atheism

In another footnote for lecture in 1935, in the same book of lectures on Hegel, Kojève agrees with those who consider Heidegger the consummate athiest.
But very few of [Hegel's] readers have understood that in the final analysis dialectic meant atheism. Since Hegel, atheism has never again risen to the metaphysical and ontological levels. In our times Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy. But he does not seem to have pushed it beyond the phenomenological anthropology developed in the first volume of Sein und Zeit (the only volume that has appeared). This anthropology (which is without a doubt remarkable and authentically philosophical) adds, fundamentally, nothing new to the anthropology of the Phenomenology (which, by the way, would probably never have been understood if Heidegger had not published his book): but atheism or ontological finitism are implicitly asserted in his book in a perfectly consequent fashion. This has not prevent certain readers, who are otherwise competent, from speaking of a Heideggerian theology and from finding a notion of an afterlife in his anthropology. P. 259 The Open Giorgio Agamben ¶ 5:29 PM enowning

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