CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Prashan Ranasinghe Apocalypse and Homecoming: Heidegger’s Being, Christianity and a Reversed Eschatology
Drawing upon (recent) efforts to locate the inextricable link between Heidegger’s philosophy and Christianity, especially eschatology (e.g., Wolfe 2013; Macquarrie 1994; Löwith 1949), my project examines the eschatological dimensions of Heidegger’s work as apocalyptic. This, however, is not an apocalypse as it is traditionally associated in terms of doom, but one of homecoming.
I examine the way this homecoming can be understood as a “reverse eschatology” (or, in somewhat similar lines, “inverse theology”) by drawing upon Heidegger’s oeuvre to show how his journey, which began in theology (focussed on a coming messiah) shifts into a philosophy that has (and ought to have) no place for theology (the two being distinctly different) to culminating in the position that philosophy itself is untenable and essentially implodes upon itself. The void that is left, I probe as a reversed eschatology, an eschatology not of a coming messiah but of doom and decline (of silence), one as the fate of humanity. This is the apocalyptic moment that Heidegger’s scholarship, through his reading of Christianity and the pre-Socratics, among others, leads him to, but its doom is, in fact, an opening of the limits, even perils, of philosophy. As such, my contention, in going back to some of these philosophical inquiries, is to explore the development of these alternative eschatologies that shed light upon the current understandings of doom and gloom.