Douglas Hedley, som doktorerade under Werner Beierwaltes i München på 90-talet och nu är professor i religionsfilosofi i Cambridge och director för The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, beskriver i sin artikel ‘Werner Beierwaltes and the Yearning for Transcendence’ från 2022 Beierwaltes’ förhållande till Heidegger på ett slående sätt motsvarar den mer intuitiva uppfattning jag själv alltid haft om den sistnämnde. Beierwaltes’ kritik gäller just det huvudsakliga som gjort det litet svårt för mig att se honom som en av de mest relevanta tänkarna, samtidigt som Hedley också betonar en viss affinitet med moment som utan tvekan är värdefulla.
“Heidegger’s densely poetic and obscure summoning of a return to Being rather than beings, and indeed, the endeavour to think ‘the difference between Being and beings’ was of particular significance for Beierwaltes as a crypto-Neoplatonic endeavour”, inleder han, omedelbart signalerande Beierwaltes’ distinkta och mindre vanliga ingång. Och han utvecklar detta: “Beierwaltes was acutely aware of the genius of Heidegger and there was an elective affinity. It was the opposite of the enthusiasm of the French poststructuralists for the end of metaphysics. It was in conscious opposition to the procrustean ‘End of Metaphysics’ narrative and in a sense because of the persistence of aspects of Eckhart or Schelling in Heidegger’s thought that Heidegger remained a presence for Beierwaltes. The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics served only to reinforce the need for metaphysics.”
Det var p.g.a. detta som det inte var den tidige Heidegger utan “the later critic of Plato that drew his fire: the philosopher who introduced the concept of the ‘onto-theological’ and held that metaphysics, on account of its onto-theological character, i.e., that it allegedly has always thought of being as ‘something’ and this ‘something’ as God, has never been able to think BEING. As a result, it succumbed to ‘forgetfulness of being’.”
Det här är väl det mest centrala, och vad som primärt slår platonskt orienterade läsare av Heidegger som problematiskt. “Beierwaltes subjects this thesis to withering and trenchant critique. As long as Heidegger himself, Beierwaltes notes, is unable to shed more light upon what BEING is, one must consider the possibility that Neoplatonism and thinkers in its wake, such as Meister Eckhart or Cusa, were able to free themselves from the ‘forgetfulness of being’ through their concept of the ‘beyond being’. Plotinus refers to the One explicitly as not ‘something’ in any categorical sense of a thing, just as BEING, as Heidegger insists, cannot be ‘something’. Or indeed are we supposed to consider the unum and the non aliud or idem, which, for Eckhart and Cusanus, is the designation of God, as ‘something’?”
Hedley fortsätter på ett sätt som börjar föra tankarna i riktning mot den “lägre romantiken” – det som är ett av mina generella problem med den s.k. “konservativa revolutionen” i Tyskland som Heidegger ibland räknas som en del av: “The critique of Heidegger in Beierwaltes is often a radical and remorseless onslaught upon Heidegger’s capacity to eclipse brilliant Attic light with Black Forest tenebrosity!” Man erinrar sig här Voegelins kritik (se förslagsvis min översättning av Vetenskap, politik och gnosticism, 92-4), och givetvis Heideggers politik.
Vidare: “Beierwaltes investigates Heidegger’s return to the pre-Socratics with a ruthless exposure of Heidegger’s philological limitations, often attributable to his use of Wilhelm Pape’s Griechisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch; sometimes critiquing Heidegger’s quasi-Romantic fantasies about archaic Greek thought, or simply his procrustean tendency to project his own ideas and obsessions into his favoured texts.”
Men “[w]hile sensitive to the ethical ambivalence of Heidegger’s desire to overcome technical rationality” var Beierwaltes också “affected by the desire of the Schwarzwald sage to awaken the sense of wonder as the very engine of philosophy”, eftersom “the attunement to the logos, as the speech of Being, and the awareness of the ineffable source of meaning, was a deep aspect of the philosophical program of Beierwaltes”. Såtillvida delade Beierwaltes, “despite the profound misgivings and criticisms” en “kindred vision of philosophy to that of Heidegger, one opposed to the varieties of positivism, existentialism or sociological-marxisant [Hedley torde mena “marxisant sociology”] that were ubiquitous in German academia in the latter part of the last century.”
Artikeln innehåller också mycket annat av vikt rörande Beierwaltes, och Hedley är även i övrigt en viktig kännare av den platonska traditionen, naturligt nog med visst fokus på Cambridge-platonisterna som han ser som en länk mellan den florentinska renässansplatonismen och den platonska förnyelsen i romantiken och den tyska idealismen.
Jan Olof Bengtsson 
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