Heidegger and Kabbalah (EPUB) von Elliot R. Wolfson

1. Heidegger and Kabbalah is a unique analysis of Heidegger and kabbalah, a Jewish mystical text. Author Elliot Wolfson presents an alternate way of understanding the history of Western philosophy and argues that Jewish esoteric traditions influenced Heidegger, particularly through the work of Schelling.

2. This book offers a new way of looking at some of the most important concepts in Heidegger's thought, including hermeneutics, temporality, language, and nothingness and being. The juxtaposition of Heidegger and Jewish mysticism comes at a time when Heidegger's antisemitism is being exposed in his Black Notebooks.

3. Wolfson is a senior scholar who is well-recognized as an interpreter of Heidegger and Jewish mysticism. This an all-encompassing book from a philosophical risk-taker.

Introduction: Belonging Together of the Foreign

1. Hermeneutic Circularity: Tradition as Genuine Repetition of Futural Past

2. Inceptual Thinking and Nonsystematic Atonality

3. Heidegger's Seyn/Nichts and Kabbalistic Ein Sof

4. imum, Lichtung, and Bestowing Refusal

5. Autogenesis, Nihilating Leap, and Otherness of the Not-Other

6. Temporalizing and Granting Timespace

7. Disclosive Language: Poisis and Apophatic Occlusion of Occlusion

8. Ethnolinguistic Enrootedness and Invocation of Historical Destiny

Bibliography

Index

While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger's indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger's thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson's comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson's entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions.

Elliot R. Wolfson is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of many books including, most recently,Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania andThe Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other.