 previous article in this issue | next article in this issue  |
Preview first page |
Document Details : Title: Zijn laat God God zijn Subtitle: Een verkenning van Meister Eckharts these esse est deus Author(s): VISSER, Gerard Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie Volume: 86 Issue: 2 Date: 2024 Pages: 229-260 DOI: 10.2143/TVF.86.2.3293672 Abstract : The first thesis from Meister Eckhart’s Opus tripartitum states: esse est deus. In his doctrine of a duplex esse rerum, Eckhart distinguishes between the being of created being and the absolute unity of divine being. The classical Aristotelian distinction of essentia and existentia, of the conceptually determined what-being and the sensorially determinable that-being, applies to created beings. But the esse in the thesis concerns an absolute and actual or real being, for which Eckhart, in several of his sermons in Middle High German, introduces the neologism isticheit. The article examines two implications of this. Isticheit, be-ness, indicates an activity of being. Following the late Heidegger, I interpret the copula est as a letting: being lets God be God. But with isticheit, I claim, Eckhart may also have wanted to answer to the 'I am that I am' from Exodus 3:14, so that we may read ist-ich-eit, be-me-ness, in it. This corresponds to the fact that Eckhart understood the deity in God as intellectus purus and identified it with the verbum, 'that never comes out'. The deity in God, of which the human soul contains a spark, is in his doctrine a pure, inner reception space. Its being is a who rather than a what and its structure is not that of a concept but of the proper name, namely empty and singular. |
|
