Self-less Action: Reiner Schürmann and Meister Eckhart

Reiner Schürmann’s late meditations on anarchy, in his engagements with Heidegger as well as Broken Hegemonies, unfold out of an unexpected ancestry—his early studies on Meister Eckhart. The fruits of such work date from the early 1970s, particularly the luminous Maître Eckhart et la joie errante (Schürmann 1972.1), but also a number of essays attesting the continuity, centrality, and consequentiality of this line of inquiry. In Schürmann’s reading of the Rhenish Master, the present essay especially highlights the question concerning ethics, the status of praxis or, more precisely, the semantic torsion impressed upon the language of action. It also underscores Schürmann’s emphasis on the genuinely philosophical significance of Eckhart’s sermons and of mysticism as such, refusing to confine the theme of “knowing nothing” to the mystical experience and the theological elaborations thereof, as though this could be kept safely separated from the exercise of thinking.