gary e. davis
Heidegger was so beyond Meister Eckhart (contrary to a recent Heidegger scholar).
A scholar might believe otherwise, thereby dwelling with Meister Eckhart in order to articulate primordiality relative to Eckhart (which a Heidegger scholar recently does).
But, generally speaking, to be influenced by someone is not, as such, to base one’s understanding of the other on their own understanding, though usually it’s that.
More importantly is to find in them the inception or originality—even the unexpressed potential—which they may have not realized.
In any case, the finding may be what is held back from another’s expression because communication sought to make sense relative to the perceived audience, not necessarily to represent the whole of one’s experience. Thinking is with the other (relative to the other), not re-presentation of one’s primordiality (i.e., Self-possessed confession).
So, Heidegger being influenced by Eckhart should be read relative to Heidegger’s thinking,
not relative to one’s own reading of Eckhart. To say that Heidegger “essentially misread him”
(i.e., misread Eckhart, according to the unnamed scholar above) is like a translator of Heidegger writing that Heidegger didn’t understand “the” Greek of Sophocles for Introduction to Metaphysics.
Focusing on Eckhart departs from Heidegger’s thinking regressively. Heidegger’s Inception—his inceiving from that-which-regions—has nothing to do with “negative theology,” which historically culminated in the ultimate absurdity of German Idealism (concealing Our evolutionarity, I would argue: concealing Our ultimate indeterminateness, to which We may progressively give design).
Indeed, theological thinking—and onto-theological philosophy—is what nihilistically led to the Holocaust (via technocratized, pathological messsianism).
Heidegger’s narrated path about releasement into the regioning of that which regions is not a “conception of” releasement (the scholar believes). It’s narrated appropriation after enowning Inception. The narrative path—“Conversation on a Country Path”—is an appropriation of the regioning Inception for a general audience.
Within Itself, releasement finds Inception. That which regions Inceives. Releasement is preliminary. It’s the opening which allows for Inception.
To call it “mystical” is pragmatic. It’s a mystery to reception, but to the released sensibility, back from Inception, it’s narrated event of appropriation.
“I am that, I am.” Reiner Schürmann noted that “Meister Eckhart belongs to an ancient and secret tradition that concerns the secret birth of awakened consciousness. Awakening is the ‘fire’ mentioned by Jesus when he counsels Nicodemus on the inner path.”
That fire is pre-Christian, yet post-Christian. It is the burning bush. It is the alchemical crucible, languaging of Rilke’s Orpheus, the muse constellating. It is that from which and within which origination arrives.
In Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking, a derivative view of technological dangers is thereby afforded, and pathed (narrated) in a memorial address (appearing earlier in that book), tacitly in light of constellational enframing, that allegory “on a country path,” “neigboring” what belongs in with its region.
It’s all—as derivative address and as allegorized regioning—part of overcoming Western destining of epochal tragedy, anticipating “another beginning” to be made by “ones to come.”