Moore’s book presents both a thought-provoking argument and a wealth of material for scholars interested in exploring further the ways in which the thinking of Meister Eckhart shaped that of Heidegger.
The main argument is that Heidegger has in common with Eckhart an approach which presupposes a certain lived attitude in its readers, or what Moore, following the Dominican turned philosopher Reiner Schürmann (1941-1993), calls a “practical apriori” (xiv). If you aren’t at some level already living the attitude which Eckhart and Heidegger analyse, then you won’t be in a position to comprehend what they preach and teach, or as Meister Eckhart puts it in the famous sermon on spiritual poverty (number 52 in Quint’s critical edition) from which Moore quotes: “[I]f you are unlike this truth of which I speak, you cannot understand me” (quoted xiii). But it is not just a question of individual attitude. The world itself shares this practical apriori. The attitude we need already to have cultivated is itself the very essence of how, to use a Heideggerian turn of phrase, the world worlds. For Eckhart the “Godhead,” for Heidegger “Being,” lets things be, and we come to participate more knowingly in this letting-be to the degree that we ourselves can be let to let be. The confusion of activity and passivity is not unintentional but, rather, central to the argument: the process, as Moore insists, is “middle-voiced” (97). The term that Heidegger uses for this middle-voiced state of openness, Gelassenheit, is borrowed directly from Eckhart: gelâzenheit; or at least from the milieu of late medieval spiritual writings in the vernacular, but more on that later.
The point of an Eckhart sermon, or a lecture course by Heidegger, is then to prompt you to notice what you already unwittingly experience. In the case of Eckhart, the realization is assisted by his hyperbolic use of paradoxes and his wilfully wayward translations of familiar passages from the Vulgate: “Rather than exclusively employing reason to convince us of the truth of his claims, or even trying to persuade us into believing them, Eckhart attempts to cultivate us for the experience of gelâzenheit. As soil must be broken up in preparation for planting, so too must our habits and expectations be broken up if we are to become released” (87). One of the productive aspects of Moore’s argument is the way that, to emphasize the parallel between Eckhart and Heidegger, he particularly focuses on Heidegger’s teaching: on lecture courses from 1928/29 and 1935, and a philosophical dialogue which seems to have been the basis for Heidegger’s teaching during the displaced and interrupted summer semester of 1945 (124-125). The infamous 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics features as an exception which proves the role of the deep argumentative structure that Heidegger shares with Eckhart. In the early years of the Third Reich, violent imposition has replaced letting-be as the main form of both individual identity and the unfolding of Being. We thus find the same “practical apriori,” only now with a violence that needs to be acknowledged. Moore summarizes: “The human being comes to see himself as essentially violent by way of his very activity of violence” (117). But this violence is also part of being: “In order to let being be, [the human being] must let it be overpowering, and this means letting it overpower his creations, his customs, and his thoughts” (120). Such a letting-be acknowledges the contingency and fragility of human institutions. But, spoken by someone who was recently the Nazi rector of Freiburg university, the argument that violence is the very structure of Being is chilling. In Moore’s view, this shouldn’t blind us to Heidegger’s fundamental debt to Eckhart. We should note instead how, in the 1930s, the philosopher “failed to follow through on the Eckhartian, an-archic undercurrent in his thought” (142).
Moore’s case that Heidegger returns repeatedly to Eckhart is convincing, and the material collected in the appendices--the editions of Eckhart that Heidegger owned, the markings he made in his own copies, the places he cited which passage of Eckhart, and the reports of personal discussions with various interlocutors--all help to put the study of the two thinkers on a new footing. However, to show that Heidegger repeatedly consulted and discussed Eckhart need not make Heidegger an Eckhartian, nor Eckhart a Heideggerian. Moore confesses towards the start of his argument: “I will naturally read Eckhart in a somewhat Heideggerian vein” (37) and acknowledges towards the end that he has not focused on “divergences” between the two figures (140). The result is that we can see how Eckhart’s texts lend themselves to a Heideggerian gloss. But what does this miss? One important aspect is the differing tone. To return to the famous passage from Sermon 52 that Moore uses to establish the idea of a practical apriori: “Whoever does not understand these words, should not be troubled. For as long as someone is not themselves akin to this truth, they will not understand my words, since this is an unconcealed truth which has come directly from the heart of God.” [1] Moore reads the comment as an “imperative”: “The primary task of this book is twofold: to explore how this imperative functions in Eckhart’s philosophy and to show how Martin Heidegger creatively appropriated it at several stages of his career” (xiii). But the assumption that Eckhart is issuing orders can be questioned. He may instead be saying: if you don’t get it, so be it, it’s not the end of the world. This tolerant attitude is evident elsewhere in Eckhart. [2] It is accompanied by an attentiveness to the concerns of different audiences. As Moore noted, Eckhart uses hyperbole and other forms of rhetorical surprise to unsettle preconceptions. At the same time, he does not seem to be arguing for any single position. He can focus on questions of exchange (Sermon 1), attitudes to maidenhood and womanhood (Sermon 2), the value of the intellect (Sermon 9), the value of love (Sermon 60 or 103), the value of activity and/or contemplation (Sermon 86), and in each case one can imagine a particular audience who might have been especially intrigued by what he says: merchants, Dominican friars with a particular attachment to intellectual pursuits, female religious with a particular attachment to forms of contemplation or visionary experience. In the vernacular sermons, we find an audience-focused attention to the specificities of the situations in which he preached; we find provocations, but also a tolerance for listeners who don’t (yet) get it. The same idea might be extended to Eckhart’s Latin writings, raising questions about the audiences to which they were addressed and the debates in which they disruptively intervened.
Not all of Eckhart’s readers were happy with what they read, as we can see from the various redactions, re-writings and misprisions in the manuscripts transmitting the texts. But these cases of mis-copying can themselves enhance our sense of the spiritual milieu with which Eckhart’s preaching and writing was in dialogue. [3] Moore himself draws on one such re-writing. His case for the importance of gelâzenheit in Eckhart, despite the fact, as he admits, that the noun only appears once in the corpus (65), is bolstered by a manuscript transmitting the Eckhartian treatise “On Detachment.” In this version, the word “detachment” (abegescheidenheit) is repeatedly glossed as letting-be or “releasement” (gelâzenheit) (77-79). The manuscript in question is in the Nuremberg Stadtbibliothek, Cod. Cent. VI, 55, copied by various nuns and stemming from the Dominican convent of St Katharina c. 1440-1450. [4] The noun Moore particularly emphasizes thus belongs in the context of piety in reformed Dominican houses in the mid-fifteenth century. Eckhart texts tend to prefer verb forms derived from lâzen (65). In drawing on the noun, Heidegger is following the practices of post-Eckhartian piety more than Eckhart himself. Would Heidegger, had he also been interested in the manuscript transmission of Eckhart’s texts, have written of an anonymous Dominican nun excerpting, adapting ad re-writing Eckhartian texts, that she was “the first German...philosopher” (17) as he did of Eckhart?
Eckhart’s vernacular texts seem to be situation- and audience-specific, and their transmission provides a window onto the differing practices with which they came into contact and the degree to which the texts re-shaped or were themselves shaped by the contexts of their reception. Heidegger’s private library and his habits of underlining, themselves form part of this history of reception. Moore reproduces Heidegger’s underlining in his copy of a 1914 translation of Eckhart texts by Joseph Bernhart (168-177). The text in question is the “Talks of Instruction,” which consists in paragraphs of spiritual advice that were likely delivered to novices at the Dominican friary in Erfurt in the 1290s. One of the passages Heidegger highlights, with a red pencil which means he found it especially important (168) reads in Oliver Davies’s translation: “Examine yourself, and wherever you find yourself, then take leave of yourself. This is the best way of all.” [5] Following the Middle High German closely, Davies uses reflexive pronouns and reflexive verbs. Bernhart is not so circumspect: “Wache über dich, und wo du dein Ich [r] am Werke spürst, da laß es fahren” (171), which can be translated as “Watch over yourself, and where you feel your ego at work, let it go.” A noun has been introduced (“dein Ich”) which wasn’t in the Middle High German (“und swâ dû dich vindest”/ “wherever you find yourself”). And it is this “Ich” that Heidegger underlines in red. The Heideggerian term Gelassenheit, awkwardly translated as “releasement,” seems thus to be adopted as a response to a suite of human actions (learning habits of self-monitoring) congealed into a noun: dein Ich, your ego, your Self. With this Self established, paradoxes appear which did not especially plague Eckhart’s text: for instance, how can a Self overcome itself without always coming back to bite itself? “How can I will myself beyond the will?” (130). By contrast, Eckhart focuses on actions and habits, and explicitly suggests, later in the “Talks of Instruction” in a passage that wasn’t marked by Heidegger: “Intend only [God] and have no thought as to whether it is you or God who performs things in you.” [6] For Eckhart, the question of agency is a distraction. Attitudes and habits can be changed without disabling presuppositions about a unitary self behind them. Both Heidegger and Moore seem to have been led astray, in this case, by a translators’ contestable interpretation.
There are thus various ways in which Eckhart is not a Heideggerian. The tone is different. There seems to be an assumption that the preacher goes to meet his audience and works with their problems without system building. And there’s no need for a critique of the Self because Eckhart’s attention is on habits, actions, ways of living, which aren’t assumed to need a distinct agent ‘behind’ them. Viewed from this perspective, a number of Heidegger’s favorite themes--overcoming subject/object divisions, and the philosophy of metaphysics--emerge as products of his attachment to a particular philosophical tradition of which he wants to be the heroic transcender. But, viewed alongside Eckhart, the heroic effort to transcend, and the more aggressive (1935) or more resigned (1944/45) tones with which the effort is propounded, emerge as themselves artifacts of an attachment to a tradition to which, both in the fourteenth century context in which Eckhart wrote, and in the first half of the twentieth century, there were alternatives: heterodox mystical writers such as Eckhart, Hadewijch or Marguerite Porete in the late medieval period; the pluralism of William James or John Dewey, to name only two obvious examples, in the twentieth-century century.
Moore gives a clear-headed, insider’s account of how the world looks to a Heideggerian grappling with the appeal and challenge of Eckhart’s texts. But Eckhart, thankfully, was not a proto-Heideggerian; nor was the twentieth century solely a Heideggerian century. So even if we share Heidegger’s interest in re-imagining forms of agency in search of a “middle voice,” reading Eckhart might point us in different directions to those Heidegger envisaged, and so may perhaps release us from the paradoxes of releasement.
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Notes:
1. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, edited and translated by Oliver Davies (London: Penguin, 1994), 208-209.
2. “Then whatever kinds of devotional practice come to you, be content with those” (Selected Writings, 191). “Whoever has understood this sermon, I wish them well. Had no one been here, I would still have had to preach it to this collecting-box” (Selected Writings, 234).
3. Ben Morgan, “Rhetorical Transformations: The Meaning of Scribal Errors in Munich Manuscript Staatsbibliothek Cgm 133,” Meister-Eckhart-Jahrbuch 9 (2015): 179-194.
4. Karin Schneider, Die deutschen mittelalterlichen Handschriften: Beschreibung des Buchschmucks Heinz Zirnbauer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965), 179-183.
5. Selected Writings, 7.
6. Selected Writings, 51.