The conflict as to the interpretation of Being cannot be allayed, because it has not yet been enkindled. And in the end this is not the kind of conflict one can [just] ‘bluster into’; it is of the kind which cannot get enkindled unless preparations are made for it.
— Martin Heidegger
Those lines are from the penultimate paragraph of Being and Time. Let’s help prepare for the coming fire by adding more to the pile that awaits enkindling.
* * *
Theology is sometimes said to be the Queen of the Sciences. Well, if theology is a science at all, there’s no special reason she should not claim such sovereignty, and she may well be the legitimate contender for the empty throne, should it need to be filled. But even if she Queens it over all the other sciences, that would still leave theology to be just one science among all the sciences. In contrast, philosophy is no science at all, and therefore no Queen of them all. Yet, though she is no royalty among scientific plebs, philosophy is Mother to them all, since the sciences themselves — science as such and as a whole — springs from philosophy as from the womb.
Like all mothers — and all fathers, too — philosophy sometimes messes up in her attempts to do the best she can by her children, which means the best she can for them. After all, every real mother loves her child, and seeks, in her heart of hearts, only what’s best for the child. And philosophy is, or at least can be, a very real, loving mother indeed! But even the best mothers, with the very best intentions toward their children, can end up missing the mark of their own intentions and hurting their children rather than helping them. That can even take the form of failing to see and appreciate just who her children really are. Mom can sometimes give her children bad advice, sometimes even force them to conform to that advice, convinced as she is that in her heart mother knows best. And she is right: mothers in their hearts do know best.
The problem, however, is that Mom sometimes doesn’t know her own heart. Then her love goes bad. It gets corrupted. It can even end up doing such damage to the children she loves in her heart that she may as well have hated them all along instead. But even when that does happen, it can still even sometimes also happen that the mother all inadvertently — that is, despite her own betrayal of herself in losing track of her heart — ends up loving her children well after all, by giving them the golden, never to be repeated opportunity really to mother their own real mother in return for all the mothering she has lavished upon them without ever counting the cost over many years.
Another thing altogether is how fathers can be “real mothers,” too, but in a different, degenerate sense of that expression. Fathers become such obscene mothers precisely when they forget themselves and their own hearts, which are very different from the hearts of mothers, as different as are the act involved in fathering a child and the act involved in bearing one in a mother’s womb. As old Socrates knew, only sterile fathers should risk trying to act like mothers, just as even after their own child-bearing days are gone real mothers in the non-pejorative sense become midwives, each after her own fashion. For a father to be a real father, however, and not to degenerate into a “real mother” of a father, he must always keep clearly in mind the difference between fathers and mothers, and not confuse the two.
* * *
Without having to pass any final judgment on the matter, we might well profit from asking how good at mothering the sciences old Descartes proved himself to be. Descartes’ fatherly heart was certainly into that task, as willing fathers often readily are. Of that no one has any right to doubt (pace Descartes). But Descartes may not have known his own fatherly heart, for all that. Did Descartes succeed in mothering the sciences well when he said what he did, aiming to fulfill his own heart’s best intentions? Or did he betray himself and his own-most best intentions?
If we ourselves seek to act at the bidding of Mother philosophy’s own heart, we need to keep on asking ourselves that question as we go on to listen, now, to what Descartes said, to and for the sciences as such and as a whole, and speaking on behalf of philosophy: He said that the sciences were there for the sake of “establishing man’s [his fatherly word for it] dominion and control over nature,” and recommended to the sciences that, to fulfill that purpose, which he took to be their own, they adopt his “method,” the way of relating to the world, and maintaining the stance toward the world, in which, as he articulated it, in a perhaps all too typically fatherly premature ejaculation, one would “accept as true only what cannot conceivably be doubted.”
Well, we must ask if that arrow hit its mark — or, to continue to mix metaphors, if that sperm found its way to the egg it was blindly seeking.
Gaea and Uranus (Earth and Sky), parents of the gods
NOTE: The material in both this post and the preceding one was actually written in 2012, as a two-part piece for the Heidegger seminar I was teaching at the time.