a point about Heidegger and medieval thought

To wind down the night I’ve been reading Jean-Paul Coujou’s interesting introduction to his French translation of Suárez’s first three Disputations (Disputes métaphysiques. Vrin, 1998). Those three alone run to 325 pages in the French, so it was a massive work on Suárez’s part. I envy Leibniz for having read it repeatedly like a novel in his youth. (As stated in the interview on Ennis’s blog, most of my own encounters with Scholasticism were mediated through Leibniz, my favorite philosopher of all time.)

Anyway… Coujou cites a point from one Alain de Libéra with which I agree. Libéra, in a 1989 book entitled La philosophie médiévale (PUF) apparently observes that Heidegger’s claim that medieval philosophy came from the encounter between Aristotle and the Bible misses one very important part of medieval philosophy– Islam!

As a consequence, Heidegger badly underrates the role of Neo-Platonism in medieval thought. There’s obviously plenty of Neo-Platonism in medieval Christian thought as well, but once you get into Islamic thought it just pounds you over the head and can’t be missed. They even thought Aristotle was a sort of Neo-Platonist, given that a Neo-Platonic treatise was mislabelled in the Muslim world as Aristotle’s Theology. My AUC colleague Catarina Belo is currently translating that work into Portuguese.

If you’re raised on Heidegger, it’s easy to be brainwashed into thinking that his judgments about the history of philosophy are infallible. They’re not. He was a very learned person, but his history of being, in my opinion, is unusually one-dimensional. I even prefer Deleuze as a historian of philosophy, despite some of his pretty crazy distortions, for the sole reason that Deleuze doesn’t try to pour a single sauce over the entire history of philosophy as Heidegger does. At least Deleuze tries to find something individually particular to each philosopher.

[ADDENDUM: Coujou also cites Courtine’s claim that by separating metaphysics from theology, Suárez even escapes the onto-theological character of metaphysics. That seems to go too far… you don’t actually need God for onto-theology in Heidegger. Any sort of total presence will do, even atoms.]