Excertos de The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (Suny Series in Theology and Continental Thought)
The original turn in the history of philosophy, from pre-Socratic thought to the philosophy of Socrates and of all later Western thinkers, can be understood as a turn from piety to idolatry. In a certain sense, then, Cicero was correct to characterize this turn as one that “called philosophy down from the heavens and relegated it to the cities of men and women.”
Cicero is usually taken to mean that Socrates inaugurated the tradition of humanism in philosophy, the focus on the human subject as what is most worthy of thinking. In contradistinction, the pre-Socratic philosophers were cosmologists; they concerned themselves with the universe as a whole, with the gods, with the ultimate things, “the things in the air and the things below the earth.” Socrates supposedly held it was foolish to inquire into such arcane and superhuman matters and limited himself instead to the properly human things; his questions did not concern the gods and the cosmos but precisely men and women and cities. Thus his questions were ethical and political: what is virtue, what is friendship, what is the ideal polity?
The Ciceronian characterization, understood along these lines, would have to be rejected as superficial, even altogether erroneous. As for Socrates, he by no means brought philosophy down to earth, if this means that the human world becomes the exclusive subject matter of philosophy. Socrates did not limit his attention to human, moral matters. On the contrary, even when the ostensible topic of his conversation is some moral issue, Socrates’ aim is always to open up the divine realm, the realm of the Ideas. That is, he is concerned with bringing philosophy, or the human gaze, up to heaven; more specifically, he is occupied with the relation between the things of the earth and the things of heaven. To put it in philosophical terms, his concern is to open up the distinction between Being and beings. That is his constant theme, and the ostensible moral topic of discussion is, primarily, only the occasion for the more fundamental metaphysical inquiry. As for all later thinkers, Cicero’s characterization seems even less applicable. The entire tradition of metaphysics, from Aristotle down to our own times, concerns itself precisely with the things of heaven, with Being itself, and even calls this concern “first philosophy” in contrast to the secondary philosophical interest in men and women and cities.
Understood in another sense, however, Cicero’s characterization is perfectly correct. From Socrates on, philosophy is indeed withdrawn from the gods and relegated, completely and utterly, to men and women, with the result that the human being becomes the exclusive subject of philosophy. This statement holds, and it expresses the Socratic turn, but only if “subject” here means agent, doer, and not topic, not subject matter. Socrates makes philosophy a purely human accomplishment and Being a passive object. In other words, for the Socratic tradition philosophy is the philosophy “of” Being, or “of” the gods, only in the sense of the genitivus obiectivus-, in philosophy Being merely lies there as an object, awaiting human inquiry. This is indeed a turn, since the pre-Socratic view is the pious one that humans, in carrying out philosophy, in disclosing what it means to be, play a deferential role. The proper human role in philosophy is then something like this: not to wrest a disclosure of the gods but to abet and appropriate the gods’ own self-disclosure. While we might be able to see the piety in this pre-Socratic attitude, it will strike us much more forcefully as enigmatic. The turn taken by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was the removing of the enigma. The turn taken by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, two and half millennia later, reverses the original one and restores the enigma-as well as the piety.
Consider the Socratic versus the pre-Socratic notion of truth. For the Socratic tradition, truth is an unproblematic, though no doubt arduous, human affair. Truth is the product of the human research which wrests information from the things. For the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, on the contrary, truth is a goddess, one that leads the thinker by the hand. As Heidegger emphasizes, Parmenides does not speak of a goddess of truth, a divine patron of truth, but of truth itself as a goddess:
If, however, Parmenides calls the goddess “truth,” then here truth itself is being experienced as a goddess. This might seem strange to us. For in the first place we would consider it extremely odd for thinkers to relate their thinking to the word of a divine being. It is distinctive of the thinkers who later, i.e., from the time of Plato on, are called “philosophers” that their own meditation is the source of their thoughts. Thinkers are indeed decidedly called “thinkers” because, as is said, they think “out of” themselves. . . . Thinkers answer questions they themselves have raised. Thinkers do not proclaim “revelations” from a god. They do not report the inspirations of a goddess. They state their own insights. What then are we to make of a goddess in the “didactic poem” of Parmenides, which brings to words the thoughts of a thinking whose purity and rigor have never recurred since? (P, 7/5)
That is the sense in which Socrates brought philosophy down to the men and women in the city: he made their own meditation the source of their thoughts. Philosophy becomes a human affair, not in that it becomes primarily ethics and politics, but in the sense that it arises exclusively out of the spontaneity of the human faculty of thinking. Humans are the protagonists in the search for truth, they take the initiative, they exercise the spontaneity, they think “out of” themselves, and Being is the passive object. For Parmenides, and the pre-Socratics generally, on the other hand, philosophy is a response to a claim made upon the thinker by something beyond, by a god or goddess, by Being. The pre-Socratic philosopher does not take up the topic of the gods; on the contrary, the gods take up the philosopher.
This last statement indeed strikes us as extremely odd, not to say nonsensical, since we recognize no claim coming from beyond and nothing more autonomous than our own subjectivity. Therein lies the idolatry. The post-Socratic view is the narrow, parochial view that humans as such are above all else, are sovereign in their search for knowledge, subject to nothing more eminent. This is an idolizing of humanity, a kind of human chauvinism, our epoch’s most basic and pervasive form of chauvinism. It is humanism properly so-called, and the unrelenting domination of modern technology, which is entirely motivated by it, attests to its pervasiveness.