Denken ist Danken

One of the important themes that emerges from Lundin's book (mentioned in the previous post) is the centrality of gratitude in thought. Heidegger, he says, "was fond of the seventeenth-century Pietist phrase Denken ist Danken, 'to think is to thank.'" Lundin expounds the point a few pages later: "Through our participation in communities of language, we receive our very ability to comprehend anything at all. . . . without the gift of language - and without the traditions of practice, interpretation, and belief that are embedded in language - the isolated self would be at a loss as to how to comprehend, let along respond to, its world."

Three notes on this point: First, Lundin is here and elsewhere drawing on the "postmodern" work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Second, MacIntyre, and Lundin following him, recognize that language is not the prison house than many, mainly French, theorists believe it to be. Language constrains and limits, but it is a vehicle for thought and expression - and it is this precisely because it constrains and limits. The postmodernist view that language is a prison rests on a romantic conception of freedom; but if freedom must observe limits if it is to be freedom to dance or to speak intelligibly. Language is a "limit" on expression only if we believe that expression should be wholly unbounded, autonomous, free - only if we believe that we should have the freedom to make up our language as we go along.

Third, modern philosophy arises from a rejection of tradition. Modern philosophy is a tradition of the rejection of traditions, or as Gadamer put it, a prejudice against prejudices. Seen from the perspective of Heidegger's Pietist slogan, modern philosophy arises from a refusal to receive. Descartes sitting in his German room in front of his fire trying to escape every thought he has ever received from outside his own head - that is modernity's founding act of ingratitude. In this respect, postmodernism (at least in some forms) is an intensification of modernity, an even more radical ingratitude toward the inheritance we have received. And much of modern and postmodern thought and culture have been an exploration and enactment of ingratitude - Freud's Oedipal complex, Harold Bloom's literary Freudianism, the various revolutionary ideologies and movements that have drenched the past centuries in blood, etc.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 07:07 AM

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