Heidegger and the Death of God: Between Plato and Nietzsche

by Duane Armitage

This book presents a reading of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy as an effort to strike a middle position between the philosophies of Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche.  Duane Armitage interprets the history of Western philosophy as comprising a struggle over the meaning of “being,” and argues that this struggle is ultimately between materialism and idealism, and, in the end, between atheism and theism. This work therefore concerns the question of the meaning of the so called “death of God” in the context of contemporary Continental Philosophy.  

Genres: Philosophy

129 pages, Hardcover

Published September 20, 2017

Reviews

[Lia]

It took me almost a year to get through this pamphlet. It started off cheeky, and I was enthusiastic about the prospect, but the rest of the text turns out not as boisterous as I projected.

I kept returning to the book intermittently, and kept struggling to make sense (!) of it.

I’ve been grappling with SZ again, currently working through Heidegger’s twisted idea of “truth”, it’s so dreadfully impenetrable I decided to “procrastinate” by returning to this “fun” book, and to my surprise, every chapter “makes sense” (relative to the Rektor’s Heideggergegacker anyway.)

I was told what this book promised to achieve from the outset, I thought I understood most of the individual chapters, I still felt blindsided when I got to the conclusion

“ As Nietzsche argues, if one preserves the “truth” of reason, or simply “being” itself, in any manner and register, then theism must follow. And since I think it is simply impossible to discard these truths—reason and intelligibility, as well as truth and being—without ultimately falling into unintelligibility, meaninglessness, and nihilism, I see theistic metaphysics as the most consistent philosophical position, and this, I argue, is by Nietzsche’s own logic.
...

In a contra-contrarian manner then, I wish to advocate a position for classical Platonic theism insofar as such a position offers, it seems, the only “rational” alternative to irrationality and unintelligibility. As Nietzsche argues, if one preserves the “truth” of reason, or simply “being” itself, in any manner and register, then theism must follow.”

I’m not sure if I actually understood how we got to here (at least not without a liberal amount of absurd and, well, reductionist inferences...)

“my attack on Nietzsche resulted in an argument in favor of not only Platonism, but Cartesianism as well... with regard to the question of the parameters set by reason itself with regard to self-referentiality that Cartesianism, or at least a fundamental axiom of Cartesianism, must remain a live option for any philosophical position opposed to reductive materialism.”

Bold provocation there! I’m hoping to hunt down commentaries — it’s been a year now, there has to be reactions to this!

In the mean time, I do promise to be a little more reticent about kicking Descartes ...