Abstract

Only a thought-ful approach to this No-thing can bring all human concern for things in their thingness home to itself; can think upon, and thus beyond, the thinking of our age . Heidegger's thought, therefore, does not pit itself against the calculative thought of metaphysics. An "against" would stand within the realm of that which it opposes. Heidegger, rather, thinks Being's self-sending in metaphysics. Thus he penetrates to the foundation of metaphysics, freeing thought towards a holistic experience of Being, towards the Holy. This, in essence, is what makes his thought reverential. It is preparatory: a releasement into the freedom that knows the pain of homesickness and waiting, of darkness and surrender to the mystery embodied in human existence, the locus of Being. It is thanking, re-collection, a thinking of the heart: "a constant concentrated abiding with something" in creative presence . It is encounter with the self, where the thinker is held in wholeness, gathered into one by Being. It is devotion, home-coming. It is reverence. ;Heidegger's thinking is reverential precisely in its explicit exposure to "dread"; in its "yes" to inwardness; in its singleminded attentiveness to the silent voice of Being calling the thinker to "the wonder of all wonder: that beings are," and thus beckoning him beyond himself to find himself as authentically ex-sistent, as free, as immanent-transcendence. Heidegger is concerned with the No-thing as Being: that which "grants meaning to and conserves the meaning of everything finite," and in its inescapability is eminently self-justified. ;In Chapter I reverence reveals itself as an "awe-filled disposition before that which is worthy of honor"; as the articulation of an initial disposition of wonder; as wonder rising beyond its primordial openness and embracing the mystery explicitly. Reverential thinking is described as intentional exposure, as surrender to the overpowering i.e., to the mystery which eludes categorization, calculation, and the control essential to a metaphysics which in modern times has subjugated itself totally to the demands of the Will to Power. Reverential thinking is an acceptance of darkness, a fundamental acknowledgment of the finitude inherent in beings. It is the courageous, dread-filled encounter with the No-thingness of everthing that is, there to find not alienation and nihilism, but rather the self, all beings, the world, as authentically meaningful. The reverential thinker is attuned to his self as the Da-illuminated-by-the-whole-of-Being. In this attunement he is present before the Holy: that which holds all things together in the light of the primordial whole and is most eminently worthy of honor. ;A philosophy whose primary involvement is with mystery, however, clearly marks itself off from contemporary philosophical investigations characterized since Plato, but particularly from Descartes on, by a concern for clarity, for truth as certainty. Heidegger's return to the roots is, therefore, not a historical elucidation of the thinking of his predecessors. He does not dwell on what they thought as such, except in as much as it gives access to the un-thought underlying their thought ; to the abyss, as it were, the ground out of which clarity arises, the darkness permeating the light. ;Heidegger's thought is marked by a single minded quest for a foundational approach to and understanding of Being. He is committed to a return to the roots of occidental thinking , there to encounter Being as it lights up in oblivion i.e., reveals itself as mystery. Mystery is here understood in its Heideggerian context of the dissimulation inherent in revelation due to its essential finitude; as the primordially creative conflict of unconcealing-concealment.