Egil A Wyller, your writings soar too high for me – almost beyond reach. Haven’t you tormented enough philosophy students with your Christian worldview? After a long life in the service of philosophy, you are now publishing your doctrine of unity ( henology ), set out across 20 volumes. This week sees the publication of your 17th volume in the ‘Henological Series’, entitled Unity and Being, Heidegger versus Henology. That piques my interest.
But who are you, Wyller? When confronted as an outsider, are you being arrogant when you simply reply that Søren Kierkegaard was also one, and only understood in the century that followed? And nothing less than that your Henological Series, in ‘a lifelong endeavour in the service of thought and faith … spans over three thousand years of our intellectual history’ – first with the Athens of thought, and then in unity with the Jerusalem of faith? Am I to believe that your 20-volume Henology is comprehensible or experiential, and not merely a bombastic: ‘The aim of Henology is, quite simply, a new millennium.’
You say that your aim is a Socratic ‘insightful ignorance’, and your standpoint is found in the principles ‘I love, therefore You are’ and ‘I am loved, therefore I am’ – eros and the Christian experience of faith, respectively. Here, most people are in agreement with you, Wyller – for who does not desire insight and love? But is your path now passable for us?
Is the 17th volume of ‘Henology’ the key to your life’s journey? Along the way, you show us not the works of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, but his ‘paths’, as he himself calls them. You may have turned your back on what is perhaps the most important philosopher of the century through your studies of Heidegger thirty years ago. You abandoned his philosophy back then, yet you are republishing the texts in this week’s edition. Are we to find our way to you through these texts, via him?
For many, this would be like attempting to defy gravity along the way.
Although you discovered Heidegger in Germany in the 1950s, you had already encountered Plato back home in Stavanger. Heidegger’s philosophy of Being – his intense focus on what it means to exist as a human being – had already been relegated to second place. For, according to Plato, the Good/One stands ‘above’ Being. And if we are to believe you today – even though we do not believe as you do – then, according to you, Platonists are apparently capable of possessing ‘experiences of the beyond’ and a ‘vision of transcendence’, and such things find no place in the ‘Aristotelian-Heideggerian model of immanence’. We who do not take the leap into the beyond or into your unity have, like Heidegger, ‘a lack of ability to bring’ our ‘fundamental religious relationship’ to light through language.
You wanted to move ‘beyond Heidegger’ early on, but whilst in Germany you were initially sourly advised to really ‘get to grips with him’.
During your stay, your reservations melted away like salmon oil. But later you were ‘drawn out of the spell of his thought’, whereupon you eventually found yourself in faith and unity. From this sphere of yours, Heidegger became merely a thinker on ‘the aberrations of our own centuries’. In your all-knowing eyes, he became nothing more than the button-maker; the Heideggerian floodwaters could only ‘wash the foundations clean’. On the way down from this religious ‘hyperbola … a sort of path towards infinity’, a path up and down, like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Heidegger becomes, in your world of thought, merely one who shows us the moon’s glimmer – its light, as it were, comes from the sun. Your personal encounters with Heidegger describe him, according to Wyller, as a good listener.
Yet Martin Heidegger made a phenomenal effort to secularise Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy; he understood the depth of Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’. So what made Egil A. Wyller from Stavanger insist on the opposite direction?
And yet. Egil A. Wyller’s interpretations of Heidegger are profound. Not unlike #Kierkegaard’s three stages, he too categorises Heidegger into three – the break, the crisis, and the realisation. In Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time, the search begins for a more authentic existence: a way of life far removed from the superficial aesthetics of everyday life, a condition termed ‘being-towards-death’. The crisis, as the next stage, is the recognition of meaninglessness where reason – or technical rationality – cannot ground life in itself. The choice must therefore be to plunge into a depth of 70,000 fathoms, to witness nihilism play out, to take this crisis to heart, and then, having saved oneself through this Dante’s Inferno, to emerge on the other side, in the third stage, in realisation. Here, metaphysics has played out its role; here, the controlling technical rationality no longer exists; here, the one who recognises achieves ‘letting being be’. By ‘letting everything go!’, by being able to find sufficient inner peace, one should be able to see the essential nature of our modern society.
A number of interpretations of Heidegger have been fruitful. Emmanuel Levinas put forward, in ethical terms, a ‘being-after-death’, a philosophy of the Other. But if Wyller believes that one must almost stretch oneself, almost lift off the ground and find one’s God, see the sun itself, before descending once more to the realm of humanity – so be it.
The rest of us, who still live amidst the present-day imprints of being, in a globalised world characterised by human practices rooted in the pursuit of profit and efficiency, still experience the pull of gravity. Even if, in this ‘crisis’, we do not take the leap fully into faith, there are still forms of language that make it more or less comprehensible to see ourselves and the technological being from which modernity’s button-pushers are fashioned.
Heidegger’s interpretation of the modern is that technological practice conceals the fact that we humans are co-creators of reality – instead, we are caught up in the instrumental rationality of practice, in industrious tasks. We lose the ability to see the arbitrariness upon which reality is founded; we lose sight of its continuous creation, and remain ensnared in the ‘safe’ web of rules – whether as a Christian, a bureaucrat or a capitalist. A Christian like Wyller learns Bible verses by heart in the morning and mulls them over throughout the day – just as the bureaucrat follows the rules of the game and the capitalist lets his game run its course.
In today’s high tech risk society, salvation lies close at hand. For if technology is pushed to its absolute limits, its true nature is ultimately revealed. Modernity, technology and industrialism mark the culmination of the traditional philosophy stretching from Plato to Nietzsche – a tradition of seeking to master the world.
In the 1950s, Heidegger was highly sceptical of the nature of technology. But now, 50 years on, it is possible that salvation lies precisely in its very nature. This is the path forward; it must be lived through. Only when society, in all its unifying historical practice, has played out or lived through its own logic; only when technical rationality becomes so clear that it almost destroys itself before our very eyes through its own realisation; only then will we be liberated. If this were to be the case—that we all live in a world of ‘total labour’, in the efficient pull of the business world, where profit and technical efficiency are the goal of all things—then such a potentially globalised situation nevertheless reveals technology operating in its utmost nihilism, where being itself becomes unthinkable, reduced to nothing. When this danger arises, salvation is also at hand – being loses all its metaphysical determinations: as God, Nature, ground, subject, substance or will.
This moment lies before us. When all these technical objects blend imperceptibly into our surroundings – when the mobile phone and the PC become like a pair of spectacles, part of our self-understanding – technology gradually becomes transparent and creative. These ‘machines’ no longer resemble the machines of industrialism from the era of cultural criticism. Now, technology is becoming language itself – with new media and communication technology, new speech-recognition technology, associative hypertext-like information processing, and virtual audiovisual products. When this happens, we shall once again have reached the insight of the Greeks, that art and technology share the same root in Techne.
For with the next century right before us, we shall experience technology as opportunity rather than control. Technology is, rather, on its way towards language – ‘Unterwegs zur Sprache.’
In the optimism I am expressing here, new digital technology is approaching art’s way of revealing reality. In keeping with the nature of art, Heidegger has, throughout his life, focused on how human beings are co-creators of their own existence – and thus on retaining and receiving the capacity to create. Being needs us just as much as we need to exist as beings; language needs us just as much as we need language; and reality is only real as long as we act within it. If one is to speak of anything approaching divinity, it is a way of being that is open to others’ forms of expression rather than controlling; here, the caress of the hand replaces the hand’s grip and the concept of thought; we let being be, let the works of art take effect, and are co-creators of a clearing amongst humankind. Rather than a heavenly fantasy world, a place of refuge here and now, on the road, along the way.
Last month, the Swedish philosophers Sven Olov Wallenstein and Daniel Birnbaum published the book Heidegger’s Way – an up-to-date and insightful study by this outstanding duo of authors on continental philosophy in the Nordic region.
But which path are you showing us, Wyller? It is said of you that you once hid some tools in your rucksack, selflessly repairing small footbridges out in the countryside. The loving nature of your heology made itself felt here. In the Spiegel interview (1969) reproduced in your book, Heidegger replies that the task of modern thought is too great to be conceived by people living today. With humble insight, he says that ‘we may perhaps endeavour to build narrow and not particularly long footbridges for the transition’.
– What caused you to lose your way?
