Untitled

Abstract

Twentieth century philosophical discourse has been much concerned with the problem of myth. Ernst Cassirer, Karl Jaspers, and Paul Ricoeur are only the most notable philosophers who have attempted to discuss philosophically the mythsincluding the properly religious myths-of different peoples. Interestingly, though, Heidegger, perhaps the twentieth century's most seminal thinker, had little to say about myth, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, virtually no scholarly attention has been paid to the few places in his work where he does, directly or indirectly, address this issue. The task of this paper is to shed some light on Heidegger's understanding of myth and, further, to suggest a distinctively Heideggerian perspective on the appropriation of the mythology which is at the foundation of a religious tradition. In the essay, "Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)," Heidegger approaches the problem of mythical language indirectly, yet his position appears to emerge quite clearly. 1 In the general discussion, he meditates on the Being-process as the Logos, "the Laying that gathers." His position is that the original meaning of the Greek word legein is "to lay and gather"or "to gatheringly let-lie-forth." By the name Logos, then, the Greeks named Being as the primordial legein which gatheringly lets-lie-forth all beings (including human beings). At one point in the essay, he pauses to consider and comment on another and, in his view, related Heraclitean fragment: "The One, which alone is wise, does not want and yet does want to be called by the name Zeus." (Diels-Kranz, B 32) 2 [184] He begins by giving a highly novel interpretation of what the Greeks meant by the expression Hen-Panta, the One and the Many. According to Heidegger, Hen-Panta names Being as the Logos as the primordial laying-that-gathers. "Hen-Panta is not what the Logos pronounces," he states, "rather, Hen-Panta suggests the way in which