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Title: The Apocalypse of Being : The Esoteric Gnosis of Martin Heidegger by Mario Enrique Sacchi, Ralph McInerny, Gabriel Martinez ISBN: 1-890318-04-3 Publisher: Saint Augustine's Pr Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Heidegger's Esoteric Gnosis: Sein Revealed in Being.
Comment: _The Apocalypse of Being_ by Thomist philosopher Mario Enrique Sacchi is an attempt to come to terms with Martin Heidegger's thinking on being and his revilement of classical Western metaphysics and to provide a critique of that thinking in terms of Scholastic philosophy. Heidegger regarded himself as a thinker on being, and made use of the term Sein (a German word translated roughly as "the act of Being") which he believed was concealed in being. To Heidegger, the Western metaphysical tradition had forgotten about Sein and it was to this forgetting that he turned his attention, in for example his greatest work _Sein und Zeit_. According to Sacchi, this revilement of classical metaphysics and first philosophy in fact rests upon a misunderstanding of Heidegger's. Thus, much of this work is spent defending the classical tradition from the light of Thomistic philosophy against Heidegger's radical critique. Sacchi argues that Heidegger's understanding of Sein degrades reason (calling to mind Luther's remark that reason is "the devil's prostitute" - recall that Luther was an important influence on Heidegger) as a means for ascertaining truth and turns towards a revelation in the thinking of Martin Heidegger himself. Heidegger rejects metaphysics as onto-theology (echoing the critique of Kant in his _Critique of Pure Reason_); however, Heidegger's thinking itself would come to reembrace metaphysics. Sacchi argues that Heidegger attempted to revise the paganism of Parmenedes against the Christian understanding of classical metaphysics in the form of Thomism and that Heidegger's insistence that his Sein is not to be understood as God, makes his thinking fundamentally atheistic. Here, the idealist/realist divide comes into play, and Sacchi will argue that Heidegger's thinking turns invariably towards idealism (e.g. Hegelianism) as against the realism of classical metaphysics and first philosophy. Heidegger's later thinking under the influence of poetics (ranging from Rilke to Holderlin's pantheistic neopaganism) becomes increasingly convoluted, and Heidegger himself will begin to emerge as an esoteric gnostic proclaiming a special revelation and un-concealment of Sein within history. Sacchi makes some interesting parallels between Heidegger's particular formulations of language and those of apocalyptic (apocalypsis: meaning "to reveal") writers of the first and second centuries AD and BC. This book is interesting in that it provides a fascinating critique at a figure who has remained problematic for many. Sacchi maintains a Thomistic outlook and thus shows that although Heidegger's thinking must ultimately be rejected (as possibly incoherent as well) it does contain some interesting insights into the un-concealment of Sein.

Rating: 3
Summary: I was quite disappointed.
Comment: I waited at least 6 months for this book to finally become available. My anticipation was magnified by the remarkably cogent and faithfully Thomistic essays written by Mario Enrique Sacchi and posted at the Jacques Maritain Center. I still consider him to be one of a handful of the sharpest Thomists out there.

But, alas, the book fell far short of my expectations. The previous reviewer mentioned in a review of Caputo's Book on Aquinas and Heidegger that Thomists might prefer this more polemical work by Sacchi. Unfortunately, I think that the only people who will wade through this book at all are dyed-in-the-wool Thomists, which, given the capacities of the Argentine author, is a real disappointment. In fact, I now wish I had rated Caputo's book more highly, so that I would not equate the level of argumentation in the two by a common three-star rating.

This book, short as it is, could have been a lot shorter still. It seems to circle about in the same polemical tracks without showing for this any significant gain in understanding. In fact, Dr. Sacchi really missed the point on which the debate between Aquinas and Heidegger turns. Using Heidegger's terminology of the "ontological difference" between "being" and beings and the "theological difference" between the First Being (God) and beings, the two thinkers give a different priority to them. Aquinas makes the "ontological difference" subordinate to the "theological difference"; Heidegger does the opposite. So the burden of refuting Heidegger is to show that the "ontological difference" is indeed subordinated to the "theological difference". And that would require a deep investigation of the meaning of the "analogy of being" in Saint Thomas. That really does not take place, and I do not recall so much as a single productive reference to Thomas' "analogy of being". Rather, there is too much circular reasoning of the sort which says that Heidegger's mistake was that he was not a Thomist and did not understand the centrality of the act-of-being ("esse"). I think that Caputo in his own work showed decisively that repeating this word like a mantra does not really get at Heidegger's critique, because act-of-being ("esse") and essence ("essentia") would be another pair of poles in which "being" reveals itself, but in no way capture "being" exhaustively. Esse/essentia would merely be a temporally conditioned revelation of "being", but "being" itself withdraws from us.

Perhaps I will read the book again at some point to further sift his arguments. But I am far more inclined to reread Caputo at this point.

Rating: 2
Summary: Apologia pro metaphysica
Comment: Sacchi's learned and erudite critique of Heidegger amounts to a complete rejection of Heidegger's insights based on the thesis that Heidegger's system does not allow for fruitful philosophic reflection, whereas the Scholastic-Thomist system does allow for deep reflection on the science of being.

I picked up this book expecting that Sacchi would thematize both the "Apocalptic" or revelatory aspect of Heidegger's thought as well as explicating the "esoteric" and "gnostic" aspects of Heidegger's early and later works. I was sadly disappointed, for Sacchi offers neither.

Instead Sacchi offers a sustained polemic (or more properly an apologia) in favor of Scholastic methods of metaphysics and against Heidegger's seemingly illogical and confusing attempts at approaching the question of being. It seems to me that Heidegger is saying something like: if we thinking about being using the tools and methods of Scholastic thought, we are already looking for a certain kind of being; whereas if we suspend one or more of these methods perhaps another kind of being will disclose itself to us. While this might be a radically different kind of investigation, I find Heidegger's claim not to be entirely disconnected to traditional philosophy as Sacchi wants to claim.

A more troubling quibble, Sacchi repeatedly argues that Heidegger follows in a line of idealistic thinkers from Parmenides to Kant to Hegel. Heidegger himself thought his system completely escaped the realism/idealism debate (we can dispute his claim, but we would need to understand why Heidegger thinks he can claim this).

Moreover, I particularly want to object to the claim that Parmenides is an "univocist monist" (p. 27). Some contemporary Parmenidean scholars (I'm thinking in particular of P. Curd: The Legacy of Parmenides) argue that the charge of monism is without foundation. Long before our modern debates about monism, dualism and pluralism, Parmenides articulated an original and altogether logical exposition of the meaning of being. I would be very interested if Sacchi or other Thomists could articulate a Scholastic response or commentary on the extant fragments of the Eleatic as it seems that Parmenides might have a lot to offer to philosophers who are rigorously and systematically trained.

Sacchi's claim that Heidegger is an alter Parmenides (p. 35) stands in tension with Sacchi's claim that Heidegger rejects traditional logic. If Heidegger rejects logic, then he would reject Parmenides too, for Parmenides relies above all else on the principle of non-contradiction as the first law of thought and of being to unfold his entire exposition of being. If however Heidegger is to be our alter Parmenides (in the line of idealistic monism as Sacchi claims), then Heidegger cannot reject logic. This tension seems to strike at the heart of Sacchi's treatment of Heidegger as both anti-philosophical and the end of a long line of idealist thinkers.

Stanley Rosen's The Question of Being: a Reversal of Heidegger is a much more sympathetic articulation of what's wrong with Heidegger, and I recommend Rosen's book very highly.