This past week I traveled with a friend to southern Tennessee for a bit of camping in the woods. We spent hours backpacking through the forest trails, eventually going through rocks and rough terrain and even snow.
In the midst of all this mess, we lost our way. Though we remained on the trails, we must have taken a wrong turn in the confusion of the snow, probably at the crossing of a rope bridge over some rapids, and so we kept hiking many more miles than planned that day. Twilight soon took over the afternoon, and then twilight soon gave way to the night. Alone, far away from anyone else, covered in a darkness only fought by a full moon half-clouded by foggy mist, we were lost.
This was my first time on a long backpacking trip such as this, one crossing so many miles of forest, so I was inwardly terrified. My friend, a seasoned hiker, could most likely see my fear beneath an attempted facade of calm and patience. The only peace I could muster came from looking up at the sky, past the tall pine trees, towards the only light giving us any direction. This was more comforting during the afternoon, when the sun shone through the clouds; much less so at night, when it seemed even the sun had abandoned us and left only the weak flicker of the moon.
The afternoon light of the setting sun brought this maxim of Heidegger’s to the fore of my mind during our hike:
“Man is a clearing in the forest of being.”
As man, I stood in a clearing, a trail full of pathmarks (Wegmarken) cut by those gone before me, in the midst of this dark forest of untamed wilderness. There was light, but only a light that came to me and my friend, one that mattered only to us as we looked up in hope of some guidance. The earth around was indifferent to us. But it was also in-different, in that it was where we were, it was no different than our own selves underneath the cover of the canopy and the shining of the sun. The sun cared little what received its light, who used it for what. But it gave us this light nonetheless. This light was our light, taken by us as our own, united with us as equipment in a search for a path to somewhere safe.
But the indifference of the earth kept us from reaching our goal: nature was untamed, uncaring—certainly no map or guide! We could not possibly manipulate any part of this place to bring us closer to camp. All being around us hid the way as the evening overtook the afternoon. And within this forest of hiddenness stood only two beings who cared anything at all for something like the truth.
The truth—this distinguished us from the rest of creation. Only the truth, a search for a place of rest, concerned us. Yes, the beasts and the birds had their own concerns for food or shelter, but they went about them naturally, uncaringly, without worry or anxiety about losing themselves in this wild. They belonged here, so truth mattered little for them. But as men, my friend and I were the only beings in that forest for whom truth was an issue.
Most find Heidegger as one wholly concerned with being, but they forget that even he lost his notion of being by the end of his life. Only truth, in the Greek form of aletheia, the act of unconcealment, remained throughout his work. This form of truth is no mere correspondence of sentences with actions as thought by the modern world, but rather the existence of truth itself, the uncovering of truth hidden within beings by the act of naming, by bringing this truth out into a clearing, into the light. And man, for Heidegger, is himself truth, the being who uncovers beings from their hiddenness, the one who gives names to beings and exists with them, the one who truly learns to exist in any way at all—simply because we must learn existence, we ourselves must uncover and unconceal the truth for ourselves.
But what also happens in this act of unconcealment? For Heidegger saw a darker truth. In our truth, our uncovering of existence, we find that the only truth that we can find and reach out for, is that which is given by ourselves. The birds of the air and the beasts of the ground cannot give it to us, nor can the light from the sun or the rain from the clouds. Alone in a quest for our truth, we find meaninglessness in all else; and finally we discover our lonely selves just as meaningless, perhaps even more so, more concealed from true existence, than all others. We discover that we are lost in the forest amongst an earth that cares nothing for our troubles. Unlike the act of crawling out of a cave, wherein one gradually progresses from darkness to light, we instead stand in the middle of a forest, alone, only guided by fading paths given to us by those long gone, straining our eyes to find the light covered by the trees. We know the truth of that light and its almost-divine guidance, but we cannot reach it, cannot climb up to it. So in the end, the only benefit the light gives to us is the tragic truth of our own lost state.
Our own lost state—the only truth I knew when lost in the forest, the only thing clear to me at that time. The only clearing in that vast forest of being.
Heidegger began his career with an optimistic tone. Confident in his ability to overturn the modern materialist philosophies of the West that had wreaked so much havoc in WWI, he thought we could press on and forge new paths in civilization, ones that led to authentic existence with people and the world around us. This optimism is probably what swept him into the wake of Nazism. But after a time, he found that the ones who had promised such renewal were the ones who gassed millions of people in technological feats of mass murder.
This uncovering of the truth wounded Heidegger, both him and his reputation, for the rest of his life. With his world shattered in disgrace amongst philosophers, he became such a small man that he could not even bring himself to apologize for even the slightest cooperation with this atrocity. The closest form of an apology he gave was a return to work, an attempt to turn (die Kehre) his philosophy into something more authentic, less based in man’s subjectivity, something different than that given in his magnum opus, Being and Time, in 1927.
Most find the later Heidegger’s work a failure: obscure, devoid of philosophical language, “kitsch” in the very worst sense, as put by his contemporary, Hans Jonas. What repulses most of all is his apparent nihilism buried in obscurity, ranging from ridding himself of the famous vocabulary for which he was responsible, literally crossing ‘being’ off the page, and to even declaring the end of philosophy. If the earlier Heidegger declared man to be the truth, the later Heidegger emphasized the second, opposite piece of his famous declaration: man is un-truth. Heidegger saw man as lost in the forest, as he himself was.
Far from seeing the later Heidegger as a failure, the Christian sees him as the height of philosophy. Though ambiguously a Christian himself, Heidegger thought philosophy an inherently atheistic enterprise—not as a fault of either Christianity or philosophy, but rather to give a proper methodological distinction between the two that would only, in his mind, benefit both. Throughout his career Heidegger refused to invoke God in his work, leaving that instead for the theologians or mystics.
That is, until a late interview, when Heidegger famously declared that “only a god can save us.” The old and weary Heidegger, reaching the end of his philosophy, found that man could not bring himself out of this hell. Instead, he and the rest of man needed a savior.
Lost in that forest, man cannot do any more than see his own inability to escape.
My friend and I eventually found the way to camp, albeit a wrong one, and we continued our trip and eventually made our way back home. But our return was not one of escape from the wilderness, as it was met by the terrorist attacks in Brussels, the further polarization of our society, the loss of dear friends. We simply left one wilderness for another, one perhaps even more dangerous and horrible than the one we had departed. In the words of C.S. Lewis, difficulty
“creates no new absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human culture has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” (Learning in War Time)
This was true in his context of WWII, it was true in my getting lost in the forest, and it is even more true today in the wake of the Brussels attacks.
Fallenness is the only end of a man in this world, for though he climbs up to reach the light, like Sisyphus he returns back down to the abyss each day. Man cannot save himself—this is the Divine No proclaimed to each man in this world (Barth).
Heidegger found this truth by the end of his life, and his latter work is a perfect expression of the Divine No. His life is in fact one journey of a man carrying his cross of ‘Being’ up to Calvary, without hope of rescuing himself from a fate of crucifixion. Now dead and gone, Heidegger can do nothing to save himself from the abyss of time.
And yet…
Near the end of his life, the old and tired Heidegger supposedly told the young budding theologian, Eberhard Jüngel, this phrase:
“God—now, that is much worth thinking about, but here language fails.”
After a lifetime of trying to describe everything with the power of language, Heidegger accepted defeat, the Divine No inherent in his own work. Without even his own philosophy to guide him, Heidegger, in his own way, accepted that “only a God can save us”—not language or man or any philosophy of being.
Language fails because salvation does not come through thinking, but through the action of redemption. Man fails because he is alone and can do nothing free himself from his chains. But what could save man, except that which comes to him in his forest, as a man, to rescue him?
Only a God can save us—one who became man, true Man, and participated with him in the Divine No, losing His life to the evils of sin at Calvary. And only this God who met His end on a cross can rescue us from the forest in which we are trapped. For this Man did not remain on the cross, but rather rose from the dead after three days. Here, any and all language fails, but He does not.
And now this God invites us all to be a part of Him in a life of salvation and renewal of all things. And in fact the events of the life, death, burial and resurrection have already given a foretaste of the knowledge that God has renewed all things, all people, and He has reconciled the world to Himself in love, justice, and grace.
“Only a god can save us.”
A God already has.
His name is Jesus of Nazareth, and He is the Christ. Will you know Him?
Through A Stained Glass Darkly 