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Table of Contents
Abbreviations vii
Preface xi
16. Notes for a Work on the ‘Phenomenology of Religious Life’ (1916-19) 309
Theodore Kisiel
BW. 1993. Basic Writings (ed. David Farrell Krell) (revised and expanded edition). New
York: HarperCollins.
BZ. 1989. The Concept of Time. Begriff der Zeit (tr. William McNeill) (German-English
edition). Oxford: Blackwell.
CT. 1992. The Concept of Time / Der Begriff der Zeit (tr. William McNeill) (German-
English edition). Oxford: Blackwell.
ID. 1957. Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen: Günther Neske. English: 1960. Essays in
Metaphysics: Identity and Difference (tr. Kurt F. Leidecker). New York:
Philosophical Library Inc.
GA1. 1978. Frühe Schriften. 1912-16 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin
Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 1). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
GA5. 1977. Holzwege. 1935-46 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin
Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 5). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English:
2002. Off The Beaten Track. 1935-46 (ed. and tr. Julian Young and Kenneth
Haynes). Cambridge University Press.
GA6.1 1996. Nietzsche I. 1936-39 (ed. Brigette Schillbach) (Martin Heidegger
Gesamtausgabe 6, Teil 1). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English:
1979. Nietzsche I: The Will to Power as Art (tr. David F. Krell). New York:
Harper & Row.
GA6.2. 1984. Nietzsche II (ed. Brigette Schillbach) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe
6, Teil 2) Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1984. Nietzsche.
Vol. II. The Eternal Return of the Same (tr. David Farrell Krell). New York:
Harper & Row.
GA9. 1996. Wegmarken (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger
Gesamtausgabe 9). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1998.
Pathmarks (ed. William McNeill). Cambridge University Press.
GA10. 1997. Der Satz vom Grund. 1955-56 (ed. Peter Jaeger) (Martin Heidegger
Gesamtausgabe 10). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1991.
The Principle of Reason (tr. Reginald Lilly). Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
GA12. 1950-59. Unterwegs zur Sprache. 1912-59 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 12). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio
Klostermann. English: 1971. On the Way to Language (tr. Peter D. Herz).
New York: Harper & Row.
GA13. 1985. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. 1910-36 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 13). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio
Klostermann.
GA15. 1986. Seminare. 1951-73 (ed. Curd Ochwadt) (Martin Heidegger
Gesamtausgabe 15). Frankfurt a.M.:Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2003.
Four Seminars (tr. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul). Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
GA16. 2000. Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. 1910-1976 (ed.
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 16).
Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
GA17. 1994. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. 1923-24 (ed. Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 17). Frankfurt
a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
Abbreviations of Heidegger’s Works
GA19. 1992. Platon: Sophistes. 1924/25 (ed. Ingeborg Schüßler) (Martin Heidegger
Gesamtausgabe 19). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1997.
Plato’s Sophist (tr. Richard Rojcewicz). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press.
GA20. 1992. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. 1925 (ed. Peter Jaeger)
(Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 20). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
English: 1992. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (tr. Theodore
Kisiel). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
GA24. 1997. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. 1927 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 24). Frankfurt a.M.:
Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1982. Basic Problems of Phenomenology (tr.
Albert Hofstadter). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
GA26. 1990. Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. 1928
(ed. Klaus Held) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 26). Frankfurt a.M.:
Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1984. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic
(tr. Michael Heim). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
GA40. 1983. Einführung in die Metaphysik. 1935 (ed. Petra Jaeger) (Martin Heidegger
Gesamtausgabe 40). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2000. An
Introduction to Metaphysics (tr. Ralph Manheim). New Haven: Yale
University Press.
GA56/57. 1999. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. 1919 (ed. Bernd Heimbüchel)
(Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 56/57). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio
Klostermann. English: 2000. Towards the Definition of Philosophy (tr. Ted
Sadler). New York and London: Continuum.
GA58. 1992. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. 1919-20 (ed. Hans-Helmuth
Gander) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 58). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio
Klostermann.
GA60. 1995. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. 1917-21 (ed. Claudius Strube)
(Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 60). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
English: 2004. The Phenomenology of Religious Life (tr. Matthias Fritsche
and Jennifer Anna Gosetti). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
GA61. 1994. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die
phänomenologische Forschung. 1921-22 (ed. Walter Bröcker und Käte
Bröcker-Oltmanns) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 61). Frankfurt a.M.:
Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2001. Phenomenological Interpretations of
Aristotle. Initiation into Phenomenological Research (tr. Richard Rojcewicz).
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
GA63. 1995. Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität. 1923 (ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns)
(Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 63). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
English: 1999. Ontology and the Hermeneutics of Facticity (tr. John van
Buren). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
GA65. 1994. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). 1936-1938 (ed. Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 65). Frankfurt
a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1999. Contributions to Philosophy
(From Enowning) (tr. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly). Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana University Press.
Abbreviations of Heidegger’s Works
Other Abbreviations
Conf. Augustine, Confessiones
Cont. acad. Augustine, Contra academicos
De civ. Dei. Augustine, De civitate Dei
De div. quaest. Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus
De mag. Augustine, De magistro
De ordine. Augustine, De ordine
De praed. sanct. Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum
De. Trin. Augustine, De Trinitate
En. in. Psalm. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos
Epist. Augustine, Epistulae
N.E. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Serm. Augustine, Sermones
ST. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Tract. Jon. Augustine, In Johannis evangelium tractatus
Preface
only more emphatically covers up the mystery of being and prepares the
ground for technology (GA40: 8-9). Between the pro and the con were
those who saw in Heidegger’s Destruktion of onto-theology the
unveiling of the genuine God, the one who cannot be named in the
language of metaphysics.5
In the background of these disputes were second-hand reports
of Heidegger’s early engagement with Christian theology, especially
radical Protestant theology, in the years before the 1927 publication of
Being and Time. Otto Pöggeler claimed that Heidegger had shown an
early sympathy for the iconoclasm of the early Luther, who emphatically
denied reason the possibility of knowing God without a grace-enabled
experience of revelation (Pöggeler 1990). Bultmann’s theology, which
applied existential phenomenological principles to the New Testament,
while purporting to be historically more accurate, was not as capricious
as it looked; Bultmann was reclaiming for Christianity what was
originally its own (Gadamer 1994: 29-43).
Until recently, Bultmann’s claim lacked textual evidence. With
the publication of the early Freiburg Lectures we now know that the
young Heidegger extracted formal phenomenological structures implicit
in early Christian literature, particularly in Paul and Augustine, as well
as in the medieval mystics.6 The texts published under the title
Phenomenology of Religious Life (volume 60 of the collected works)
include two lecture courses Heidegger gave at the University of Freiburg
in the academic year 1920/1921, reconstructed on the basis of student
notes: ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’, and ‘Augustine
and Neo-Platonism’. Appended to the two lectures is the contents of a
folder holding scattered notes Heidegger took on the theme of mysticism
between 1917 and 1919, collected under the misleading title, ‘The
Foundations of Medieval Mysticism: Notes Toward a Cancelled Lecture
Course, 1919..7 It is widely agreed that the early Heidegger’s Dasein
analytic invokes certain Christian themes;8 the religion lectures reveal
to us the extent of Heidegger’s appropriation of Christian concepts.
Heidegger’s turbulent passage from the neo-Scholasticism in
which he was reared to the radical Protestantism with which he came to
identify himself – before abandoning Christianity altogether in the 30s
– determines the method and content of the religion lectures.9 These are
resolutely philosophical, formally atheistic interpretations of theological
texts. Yet Heidegger’s “violent” readings yield interesting results for
theology. He discovers theoretical implications of Paul and Augustine
Preface xiii
that had long been buried under Scholastic interpretations. Paul’s notion
of Christian life as a never-ending “coming to be” (Gewordensein) is
shown to be the heart of the Pauline proclamation. Augustine’s notions
of the blessed life (vita beata), and the temptation (tentatio) and care
(cura) which plague human existence are identified as moments of
breakthrough to the historical self. Methodologically Heidegger shows
that phenomenology is not to be confined to a transcendental Cartesian-
style analysis of the contents of the phenomenologist’s consciousness;
it has as its Sache the great historical texts which constitute Western
understanding, not only philosophical texts but also theological and
religious literature. Because of the historicity of consciousness,
phenomenology is inevitably engaging this historical material: there are
no “pure” concepts. Hermeneutical phenomenology makes explicit the
historical fore-determinations of consciousness implicitly operative in
every ‘a priori’ inspection of ‘transcendental subjectivity’.
Throughout the early Freiburg lectures Heidegger makes
revealing references to Luther.10 In the years immediately following his
Habilitationsschrift, Die Kategorien-und Bedeutungslehre des Duns
Scotus (GA1: 189-401) Heidegger immersed himself in the study of
Protestant theology. Luther’s objection to Scholasticism as the theologia
gloriae, an intrusion of Greek metaphysics into Christianity and a
substitution of a philosophical principle, to which human reason is
assumed to have constant and unhindered access, for the crucified God
who can only be known in revelation, awakened Heidegger from his
dogmatic slumber.11 Heidegger built upon Luther’s theologia crucis an
understanding of “the necessary atheism of philosophy” (PIA: 246;
GA61: 196–97). He turned the theological limitations of philosophy into
a strength: philosophy, bereft of a natural consciousness of God, is in a
privileged position to let the factic speak on its own terms.
The papers solicited for this volume are written by North
American and European scholars who have been actively working on the
young Heidegger in the last two decades. The volume is intended to both
illuminate the text of GA60 and introduce the literature on the topic.
The text of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life is
exceptionally difficult. Heidegger is still looking for his way into
phenomenology. He is experimenting with methods, terminology and
subject matter in novel ways that are often impenetrable without
reference to the historical setting of the lectures. A subsidiary purpose
of the volume is to bridge the gap between ‘continental philosophy’ in
xiv Preface
Religion’, as the key to understanding not only the religion lectures but
the whole of the early Heidegger. The formal indication is meant to
leave the phenomenon unmolested by pre-decided conceptual frames
and help the investigator resist the tendency, all-too-common in
phenomenology, to cut the phenomena to the measure of a theoretical
schema.
The third and final section of the volume, ‘Reading Heidegger
on Paul, Augustine, and Christian Mysticism’, is composed of
interpretations of GA60. A central theme running through these chapters
is the surprising way that Paul, Augustine, and Christian mysticism
emerge as forerunners of existential phenomenology. Jaromir Brejdak,
Graeme Nicholson, and Gerhard Ruff offer careful and complementary
expositions of Heidegger’s short and dense reading of Paul’s letters. For
Brejdak an analogy exists between Paul’s theologia crucis, the
impossibility of reasoning about the crucified, and Heidegger’s notion
of facticity, which becomes in Brejdak’s reading a philosophia crucis,
a crucifixion of theory on the cross of the factic. Nicholson looks at how
Paul’s concept of eschaton, the end which is not a telos but a rupture,
emerges as a seed of Heidegger’s concept of “temporality”. Ruff
speculates on the significance of the Paul lectures for the future of
phenomenology. The next chapter, by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei,
negotiates the resonances between the idea of “world” in the early
Heidegger’s reading of Paul and the notion of “earth” in the later ‘Origin
of the Work of Art’. Daniel Dahltstrom and Constantino Esposito
examine Heidegger’s rich and suggestive reading of Augustine’s
Confessions Book X (on memory), finding in it numerous hints of the
path to Being and Time, as well as insight into the nature of Augustine’s
breakthrough to the self-world. Theodore Kisiel’s re-construction of the
so-called ‘Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism’ reveals
some of the textual issues surrounding this bundle of fragments in the
Heidegger archive. Kisiel points out that only a few of these notes
belong to the cancelled lecture course on medieval mysticism: the rest
originate in other aborted research projects into the life-world of
Christian mysticism. Kisiel supplements the notes published in GA60
with unpublished pieces which he copied directly from the file in the
Marbach Archiv, thus offering us a vital supplement to GA60. Sylvain
Camilleri’s second article in this volume is a developed commentary on
the notes, drawing on little known nineteenth-century Protestant
theologians who shaped the young Heidegger’s approach to Christianity.
Preface xvii
11
On the history of Heidegger’s relationship to Luther see Van Buren (1994). For a
philosophical critique of the relationship see McGrath (2005).
12
For a development of this critique see McGrath (2008).
References
Holger Zaborowski
This poem shows how Heidegger’s faith was shattered by the experience
of meaninglessness and God’s absence. But this poem also shows
Heidegger’s “solution”. Heidegger does not take refuge in a radical
critique of Christianity nor in a simple affirmation of the neo-Scholastic
wordlview. He trusts in the “angel grace” and thus in his immediate
relation to a transcendent being. Interestingly enough, apart from the
title, there is no Christological reference in the poem.
In ‘Consolation’, a poem published in 1915, angels also play the
role of comforters in a world of death, crisis, and failure:
But even the love of God no longer flares up in him, let alone the
certainty of divine presence. The scene is cold and hopeless:
It snows.
Not only Heidegger’s early poems, but also his early essays and the
early lectures he delivered in Meßkirch are important indications of his
theological development. Many of his early essays and articles were
published in the Roman Catholic newspaper Heuberger Volksblatt.17
These texts are characterized by a rigorous criticism of the cultural
decline of the modern world. Heidegger addresses in particular the
human being who “never put his foot onto an erroneous path and did not
let himself be blinded by the fallacious shine of the modern mind”
(GA16: 8).18 Heidegger targets modern individualism in which he claims
most other problems are rooted: “The shrill contradictions of our age –
on the one hand the obstinate reality-fanaticism of the naturalist and
socialist organization of life, on the other the new realm of ideas and
philosophy of immanence with its construction of values for existence
– are the end results of a boundless autonomism” (GA16: 7). Heidegger
turns against this “boundless autonomism” by opposing to it the
A “Genuinely Religiously Orientated Personality” 9
held the narrow Catholic standpoint and that he would follow his own
free and personal search for the truth (Denker 2002b: 42).30 Although
Heidegger, as we have seen, once held an anti-modernistic position, he
did not exactly lie in his letter to Rickert. For there is evidence of a
criticism of neo-Scholasticism as early as 1915. In his 1915 curriculum
vitae, Heidegger writes that the philosophical lectures that were
prescribed for theology students did not satisfy him, so he studied neo-
Scholastic textbooks himself. But even the reading of these texts failed
to satisfy. They gave him a certain formal logical training, but
philosophically left him dry. He found more in the apologetic works of
Hermann Schell.31 With Schell, Heidegger not only names a theologian
who was influenced by Brentano (like Edmund Husserl and himself),
but also a key figure of the Catholic renewal in the beginning of the
twentieth century whose dogmatics and apologetics had been put on the
index of forbidden books.32 Heidegger had also already given public
expression to his criticism of neo-Scholastic textbook philosophy. In his
review of the second edition of Joseph Gredt’s influential Elementa
philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae, Heidegger attacks the
understanding of the sciences and of philosophy presupposed by Gredt.
He argues that one cannot but make critical remarks from a scientific
standpoint, for philosophy is not a sum of theorems, but an unwavering
striving for truth (GA16: 29).
A further sign that Heidegger increasingly turned away from the
system of Catholicism is his interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s
philosophy. Kant, Catholic philosophers and theologians agreed in the
beginning of the 20th century, was indeed the philosopher of modern
subjectivism who abandoned any claim of objectivity of knowledge and
the whole area of supersensual transcendental truth. So Kant’s
philosophy appeared deeply erroneous and was strictly condemned
(Hertling 1891: 97f). In the beginning of his intellectual career,
Heidegger shared the dismissive Catholic interpretation of Kant.33 But
he gradually warmed to Kant’s thought. So we find rather eulogistic
remarks on Kant, particularly on the person of Immanuel Kant, in a
review of a selection of Kant’s letters, published in 1913. Heidegger
argues that a “high ethical power” is revealed in Kant’s self-discipline.
Heidegger, however, immediately relativizes his praise in saying that
one must also not overlook the weaknesses of Kant’s character (GA1:
45). It is noteworthy that Heidegger’s comments on Kant become less
ambiguous and increasingly more positive as he matures. In his review
A “Genuinely Religiously Orientated Personality” 13
1
For Heidegger’s reference to this text see GA16 (558-561, 561).
2
All translations from the German are my own unless otherwise indicated. For other
references to his origins and to the importance of one’s origins for one’s way of life see
GA13 (1-3, 3), and Heidegger (2003a: 40). For the significance of Heidegger’s origins
see also Harries (1996: 41-64).
3
For Heidegger’s relation to his hometown Meßkirch see Denker (2000), (2001a),
(2002a), (2004b), (2005).
4
For a similar interpretation see Casper (2001: 20).
5
For Heidegger’s interpretation of Luther see also PSL; Pöggeler (2004); Riedel (2003);
McGrath (2004).
6
For a more detailed essay on Heidegger’s religious and theological background see
Zaborowski (2004).
7
See LEK (68). For Heidegger’s “vocation” to be a philosopher see Denker (2004b);
also Fritz Heidegger (1969: 60).
8
Casper (2001: 12).
9
For general research in Heidegger’s early thought (including a comprehensive
bibliography) see Denker (2004a).
10
Ott (1992: 45-119); Safranski (2000: 15-88).
11
See Denker (2003); Schaber (2002); Schaber (2003); Ott (1990: 442f.); Ott (1992:
350f). Ott speaks of a ‘Beuron profile’ and ‘Beuron syndrome of the early Heidegger’.
12
See Casper (1980: 534-541); Sheehan (1977); Sheehan (1988); Casper (2001); Denker
(2001b); Denker (2004b); Zaborowski (2004); Schaber (2004).
13
See Lehmann (1963/64); Lehmann (1966/67); Schaeffler (1978): 3-34; Pöggeler
(1983: 77-89).
14
In this context, one should also mention Heidegger’s early reading of Friedrich
Hölderlin. See Heidegger (2000: 132f). For Hedegger’s later view of the problematic
Nietzsche interpretations of these years see GA6.1 (222).
15
This is also true of the poem ‘Abendgang auf der Reichenau’ (GA13: 7), first
published in 1917. For the relation of this poem to the work of Meister Eckhardt see
Pöggeler (2004: 193).
16
For Hugo Ott’s interpretation of ‘Gethsemane Hours’, ‘On Still Paths’, and ‘July
Night’, see Ott (1992: 71f). For other interpretations of these poems see also Thomä
(1990: 32-35); Grotz (2003: 92).
17
For the ideological orientation of the Heuberger Volksblatt and the “newspaper war”
between the Heuberger Volksblattes and the liberal and Old Catholic Oberbadische
Grenzbote see Vonberg (2003: 153-187).
18
English translation by John Protevi (Heidegger 1991: 490-493).
19
Heuberger Volksblatt, 14, n. 33, 20th March 1912 in Denker (2005).
20
Heuberger Volksblatt, 15, n. 31, 14th March 1913, in Denker (2005).
21
Heuberger Volksblatt, 15, n. 101, 29th August 1913 in Denker (2005). For Heidegger’s
‘interest’ in “thinking horses” see also Denker (2002b: 39).
22
For this early interest in the natural sciences see Martin Heidegger, ‘Lebenslauf (Zur
Habilitation 1915)’, in GA16 (37-39, at 37).
23
For the time of Kulturkampf in Meßkirch see Weber (2003: 189-202). For a brief
description of the tolerant atmosphere in their parental home see Fritz Heidegger (1969:
61). For a contemporary description and analysis of the situation of Meßkirch during the
Kulturkampf see Gröber (1912).
A “Genuinely Religiously Orientated Personality” 15
24
See Ernst Laslowski’s letter to Heidegger from January 20, 1913, in Denker (2004a:
36). Heidegger’s future significance as an apologetic philosopher and Laslowski’s
concern for Heidegger’s career is a recurrent motif in Laslowski’s letters to Heidegger.
See also Heidegger’s letter from December 6, 1913 in (Denker 2004a: 38-40).
25
For his view of apologetics see Heidegger (1991: 496-501).
26
For a similar view see Klimke (1911: 162).
27
See also Heinrich Rickert, ‘Gutachten über die Habilitationsschrift des Herrn Dr.
Heidegger’, in Denker (2002b: 95f). For early reviews of Heidegger’s
Habilitationsschrift see Denker (2004a: 79-91).
28
See Ott (1992: 106-119).
29
For an assessment of the religious dimension of Heidegger’s personality see also
Löwith (1986: 42-45).
30
This corresponds to what Heidegger writes in his 1922 curriculum vitae. Heidegger’s
reading of early Christian sources was also important for the development of this
position. See GA16 (43).
31
Heidegger, ‘Lebenslauf (Zur Habilitation 1915)’ (GA16:37-39).
32
On Hermann Schell’s life and thought see Berning (1964), (1978); Hausberger (1999).
There is still further research to be done on Schell’s influence on Heidegger.
33
See for example Heidegger’s ‘Das Realitätsproblem in der modernen Philosophie’
(GA1: 1-15, particularly 2f).
34
See Sentroul (1911).
References
Berning, Vincent. 1978. Gott, Geist und Welt. Hermann Schell als
Philosoph und Theologe. Einführung in die spekulativen
Grundlinien seines Werkes (Abhandlungen zur Philosophie,
Psychologie, Soziologie der Religion und Ökumenik 37).
München, Paderborn, and Wien: Schoeningh.
– 1964. Das Denken Hermann Schells. Die philosophische Systematik
seiner Theologie genetisch entfaltet (Beiträge zur neueren
Geschichte der katholischen Theologie 8). Essen: Ludgerus.
Casper, Bernhard. 2001. ‘Das theologisch-scholastische Umfeld und
der anti-idolische Grundzug des Denkens des jungen
Heidegger’ in Esposito, Constantino, and Pasquale Porro (eds)
Heidegger und das mittelalterliche Denken. Turnhout and Bari:
Brepols. Quaestio (1): 11-22.
– 1980. ‘Martin Heidegger und die theologische Fakultät Freiburg 1909-
1923’ in Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv (100): 534-541.
Denker, Alfred and Elisabeth Büchin (eds). 2005. Martin Heidegger
und seine Heimat. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
16 Zaborowski
Alfred Denker
Martin Heidegger
The different manuscripts and student notes of lecture courses that are
published in volume 60 of the collected edition of Heidegger’s works,
the Gesamtausgabe, document five decisive years of Heidegger’s
philosophical development in general, and of his work in the field of the
phenomenology of religion in particular. Later we will take a closer look
at these papers and see how Heidegger’s struggle with religion surfaces
repeatedly. After a brief sketch of his early years, we will discuss key
elements in Heidegger’s life and intellectual development until 1922.
This first part should give us some idea as to what kind of evidence of
his struggle we should look for in the text of GA60. In the second part
of the paper, we will take a closer look at some of this evidence.
Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in the south
German town of Meßkirch.1 His father was a cooper, and the sexton of
Saint Martin’s church, where Heidegger occasionally served as an altar
boy. His mother was born and raised on a farm in nearby Göggingen,
where Heidegger spent most of his holidays as a boy. His devout Roman
Catholic parents were neither poor nor rich. When he was 14 years old,
Heidegger left Meßkirch to continue his education at the Gymnasium in
Constance. For boys from modest families, the financial support of
Roman Catholic endowments was necessary to allow them to finish their
high school educations. In return they were expected to study theology,
and later become priests. While visiting the Gymnasium, Heidegger
lived from 1903 until 1906 at the Konradihaus, the seminary where
Conrad Gröber was rector. Gröber, a father-figure to Heidegger and the
22 Denker
My husband no longer has his Catholic faith, and I have not found mine. At
our wedding his faith was already undermined by doubts. Nevertheless, I
insisted on a Catholic marriage, and hoped to find faith with his help. We read,
discussed, thought, and prayed a lot together, but the result is that we both
now think chiefly in a Protestant way; that is to say, we believe in a personal
Traces of Heidegger’s Religious Struggle 25
God without any fixed dogmatic ties, and we pray to Him in the spirit of
Christ, but without Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy.6
notes for the planned course on mysticism. In fact, there are references
in Ochner’s letter to Heidegger’s talk on Schleiermacher’s ‘Second
Speech’ On Religion. In my Historical Dictionary of Heidegger’s
Philosophy, I dated the published fragments more precisely:12
1917
‘On Schleiermacher’s Second Address “On the Essence of Religion”’
(GA60: 319-322).
‘The Religious a priori’ (GA60: 312-315).
‘Irrationality in Meister Eckhart’ (GA60: 315-318).
‘Religious Phenomena’ (GA60: 312).
‘Phenomenology of Religious Experience and of Religion’ (GA60:
322-324).
1918
‘On the Sermones Bernardi in canticum canticorum (Serm III)’ (GA60:
334-336).
‘Zu: Theresia von Jesu. Die Seelenburg’ (GA60: 336-337).
‘The Absolute’ (GA60: 324-327).
‘The Holy (Preparations for the review of Rudolph Otto, Das Heilige
[The Holy], 1917)’ (GA60: 332-334).
‘Faith’ (GA60: 329).
‘Hegel’s Original, Earliest Position on Religion – and Consequences’
(GA60: 328).
‘On Schleiermacher, “The Christian Faith” [Der christliche Glaube] –
and Phenomenology of Religion in General’ (GA60: 330-332).
‘Problems’ (GA60: 328).
1919
‘The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism’ (GA60:
303-306).
‘Mysticism in the Middle Ages’ (GA60: 306-307).
‘Mysticism (Directives)’ (GA60: 308).
‘Construction (Starting Points)’ (GA60: 309).
‘Faith and Knowledge’ (GA60: 310).
‘Irrationalism’ (GA60: 311).
‘Historical Pre-givenness [Vorgegebenheit] and the Finding of Essence’
(GA60: 311-312).
‘Piety–Faith’ (GA60: 329-330).
30 Denker
15
Constructive philosophy of religion formed an integral part of neo-Kantian philosophy
in the early twentieth century; Heidegger refers to Otto, Troeltsch, and Fries.
References
Buren, John van (ed.). 2002. Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to
Being and Time and Beyond. Albany, N.Y.: State University of
New York Press.
Denker, Alfred. 2004a. ‘Heideggers Lebens- und Denkweg 1909-1919’
in Denker (2004b): 97-122.
– With Hans-Helmuth Gander and Holger Zaborowski (eds). 2004b.
Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens (Heidegger-
Jahrbuch 1). Freiburg: Herder.
– (ed.). 2002. Martin Heidegger and Heinrich Rickert, Briefe
1912-1933. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
– 2000. Historical Dictionary of Heidegger’s Philosophy. Lanham:
Scarecrow Press.
Heidegger, Martin, and Elisabeth Blochmann. 1989. Briefwechsel 1918-
1969 (ed. Joachim W. Storck). Marbach a.N.: Deutsche
Schillergesellschaft.
Jaspers, Karl. 1995. Philosophische Autobiographie. München/Zürich:
Piper Verlag GmbH.
Ochwadt, Curd and Erwin Tecklenborg (eds). 1981. Das Maß des
Verborgenen. Heinrich Ochsner zum Gedächtnis. Hannover:
Charis-Verlag.
Ott, Hugo. 1988. Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie.
Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag.
Schabert, Johannes. 2004. ‘Martin Heideggers “Herkunft” im Spiegel
der Theologie- und Kirchengeschichte des 19. und beginnenden
20. Jahrhunderts’, in Denker (2004b): 159-184.
Sheehan, Thomas. 1988. ‘Heideggers Lehrjahre’, in John Sallis,
Giuseppina Moneta and Jacques Taminiaux (eds) The
Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Religion, Theology and Philosophy
on the Way to Being and Time:
Heidegger, Dilthey and Early Christianity
István M. Fehér
faith, and theology and of how these are related to philosophy and
hermeneutics.
Against the background of his distancing himself from neo-
Scholasticism and of his assimilation of decisive motives of life-
philosophy and historicism, inclusive of his overall attack against the
theoretical (GA56/57: 59), Heidegger no longer views theology in terms
of an objective theoretical science destined to provide a conceptual
elaboration for religion by occasionally borrowing its conceptuality
from philosophy. Theology is not a scientifically neutral and a-historical
theory of Christianity; what has been developed and come to be known
as theology during the centuries is a reified mixture of dead formulae of
the most heterogeneous origin, alienated from what it once belonged to
and incapable of containing in itself and conveying living religiosity.
The comportment it originates from is theoretical, rather than religious.
Theoretical comportment, in its turn, goes back to the Greeks. Primal
Christianity was thus fused with and indeed distorted by the
conceptuality of Greek philosophy, and that is how what we know in
terms of theology today had come into being (GA59: 91). Thereby
Heidegger seems to subscribe to and join in with the then widespread
thesis concerning the fateful hellenization of Christianity, suggested,
e.g., by Adolf von Harnack and maintained decisively by Franz
Overbeck.48 What is needed is a theology liberated from the conceptual
schemes of Greek philosophy (GA59: 91). Therefore, Heidegger urges
in his course on the Phenomenology of Religion “to sharply distinguish
the problem of theology from that of religion”.49 What it comes down to
is – much along the lines of Dilthey’s linking of Erleben and Ausdruck
– to find a proper logos, a conceptuality adequate to, and conforming to,
the “object”, that is, genuine religious experience and faith as a living
enactment.
We find an important follow-up observation in Being and Time.
Theology, Heidegger claims, “is slowly beginning to understand once
more Luther’s insight, that the ‘foundation’ on which its system of
dogma rests has not arisen from an inquiry in which faith is primary, and
that conceptually this ‘foundation’ not only is inadequate for the
problematic of theology, but conceals and distorts it” (SZ: 10).50 In his
lecture ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, held in the same year of the
publication of Being and Time, Heidegger interprets theology, much in
the same vein, as the “science of faith”, where faith is conceived of in
terms of a specific way of being of Dasein (GA9: 52) encompassing, as
Religion, Theology and Philosophy on the way to Being and Time 55
it were, the whole domain, or horizon, within which alone, the specific
“objects” of faith, for example, God, can appear (GA9: 55).51 Faith is
thus prior to God, and it would be a serious mistake or a vulgarization
to define theology, naively, as the “science of God”, or the “speculative
knowledge of God” (GA9: 59) – wherein God would be an object of the
respective science in the same way as the animals are the objects of
zoology. Theology originates from faith (GA9: 55), has its roots in faith,
and, in general, makes sense only for faith (GA9: 61), i.e, the believer.
In this sense, faith anticipates and founds theology (GA9: 60). The
sufficient motives of theology, as well as its justification, may lie only
in faith itself (GA9: 54, 55), and they lie in faith’s attempt at a
conceptual interpretation of itself (begriffliche Auslegung [GA9: 54],
begriffliche Selbstinterpretation der gläubigen Existenz [GA9: 56]). The
believing comportment (Gläubigkeit) can never originate from theology,
but only through faith itself (GA9: 56). Now, the task of theology is to
find a conceptuality adequate to faith, the believing comportment and
existence, and to contribute to developing and strengthening this attitude
(GA9: 60) – a formulation which confirms and justifies to a great extent
Gadamer’s interpretive recollection of Heidegger’s contribution to the
discussion on theology in the postwar years.52
The relation between faith and theology, within the
encompassing phenomenon of religion, bears conspicuous similarities
to, and may be seen as a development or a radicalization of, Dilthey’s
linking Erlebnis with Ausdruck or with Heidegger’s subsequent
characterization of the relation between understanding and interpretation
in Being and Time (§32) (GA9: 55, 61). This may be summed up as
follows: only what is understood can be interpreted; understanding
constitutes the fundament and the starting point of every interpretation.
In this sense, faith is the fundament of theology, and the latter is but a
conceptual articulation of the former, erecting itself upon and remaining
forever grounded in it. Theological knowledge must arise from faith and
return to it.
The way theology relates itself to faith exhibits structural
analogies to the way philosophy relates itself to facticity. Both theology
and philosophy offer a conceptual elaboration of something previously
enacted or lived (a sort of having-been), and, in doing so, are at the same
time meant to refer back to and reinforce what they grow out of – faith
or factical life. Given this strict correlation, it is no wonder that we find
in Heidegger’s texts similarities between his characterization of
56 Fehér
to Husserl, and precisely in the sense in which Spiegelberg reconstructs Husserl’s claim.
14
The term unphänomenologisch crops up already in 1923 in a remark stating that it is
unphenomenological to hold mathematics to be an ideal of scientificity. See GA63 (72).
15
See Sheehan (1983: 294): “Husserl tended to see man in the natural attitude, e.g., the
empirical ego, simply in connection with psycho-physical and neurological processes,
hence as a thing-entity of nature. In that regard, Heidegger considered the ‘natural
attitude’ in Husserl not to be natural enough”.
16
This historical background is referred to by Heidegger several times in his early
lectures. See GA58 (1f.; 25f., 162); GA59 (12f., 15, 97); GA61 (117, 174, 189); GA63
(64, 69); GA9 (14): “So ist denn die Problematik der gegenwärtigen Philosophie
vorwiegend um das ‘Leben’ als das ‘Urphänomen’ zentriert”.
17
Cf. GA63 (42): “Die eigentliche Tendenz Dilthey ist nicht die, als die sie hier [sc. by
Spranger] angegeben ist”. See also GA61 (7); GA17 (301, 320); GA64 (7f.); SZ (46f.);
GA9 (13-14): “Die Lebensphilosophie, vor allem eine solche von der Höhenstufe
Diltheys […] muß auf ihre positiven Tendenzen befragt werden, daraufhin, ob in ihr
nicht doch […] eine radikale Tendenz des Philosophierens vorwagt. Im Absehen darauf
bewegt ich diese Kritik” [italics in original]. See also Heidegger’s retrospective remark
in GA66 (412).
18
For Heidegger’s stress on the historical see GA9 (31, 32f., 36, 38); GA56/57 (85, 88f.,
117, 206); GA61 (1, 76, 111, 159, 163); GA63 (83, 107); GA60 (31f. and passim).
Heidegger frequently spoke of Dilthey’s appreciation of Husserl. See, e.g., GA56/57
(165); GA20 (30); this may have led him to think that what he was called to do was to
unite the impulses of both thinkers.
19
That philosophy has life as its subject matter appears clearly in a passage of SZ also,
where Heidegger suggests that the expression “philosophy of life” amounts to nothing
more than “botany of plants” – really a pleonasm – and that in a genuine “philosophy
of life” “there lies an unexpressed tendency towards an understanding of Dasein”, that
is, existential analytic (SZ: 46). See also GA64 (40). For an anticipation of this see GA9
(14f.).
20
See Heidegger’s use of the term Begriffssurrogat in GA9: 10.
21
Cf. GA61 (82): “Kommt es nicht zur aneignenden Aufhebung der positiven Tendenzen
der modernen Lebensphilosophie”; GA61 (117): “Damit ist eine innerhalb der
Lebensphilosophie unausdrücklich lebendige Tendenz ergriffen”; GA9 (4, 13-14): “Die
Lebensphilosophie, vor allem eine solche von der Höhenstufe Diltheys […] muß auf
ihre positiven Tendenzen befragt werden, daraufhin, ob in ihr nicht doch, wenn auch ihr
selbst verdeckt und mit traditionell aufgerafften, statt ursprünglich geschöpften
Ausdrucksmitteln, eine radikale Tendenz des Philosophierens vorwagt. Im Absehen
darauf bewegt ich diese Kritik”; GA58 (3): “Was heißt: ‘Leben in Begriffe fassen’ […]
‘in Worte bringen’, wo doch die Worte als volle Ausdrücke zugeschnitten sein sollen
auf unsere Umwelt, auf den Raum”; GA9 (231-2): “Es ist ein in der gegenwärtigen
Philosophie viel vertretener Standpunkt, daß das faktische Leben dem Begriff gänzlich
unzugänglich sei. Aber das ist nur die Kehrseite des Rationalismus dieser Philosophie”;
GA59 (154): “Die Lebensphilosophie ist für uns eine notwendige Station auf dem Wege
der Philosophie, im Gegensatz zur leer formalen Transzendentalphilosophie”; GA60
(50): “Der Begriff des Lebens ist ein vieldeutiger und von diesem ganz allgemeinen,
formalen Gesichtspunkt aus hätte eine Kritik der heutigen Lebensphilosophie einen
Sinn. Nur wenn es gelingt, diesen Begriff ursprünglich positiv zu fassen, ist eine Kritik
berechtigt, in einem anderen Sinn aber nicht, sonst verkennt sie die eigentlichen Motive
Religion, Theology and Philosophy on the way to Being and Time 59
der Lebensphilosophie”; GA63 (69): “Die Tendenz der Lebensphilosophie muß aber
doch im positiven Sinne genommen werden als Durchbruch einer radikaleren Tendenz
des Philosophierens, obgleich die Grundlage ungenügend ist”; GA63 (108): “Die
Polemik gegen die Lebensphilosophie […] verfehlt alles, sieht den Gegenstand Lebens
überhaupt nicht ursprünglich […] Deshalb ist die Polemik gegen Begriffslosigkeit rein
negativ”. Heidegger has Rickert in mind.
22
Cf. GA63 (45): “Was heißt irrational? Das bestimmt sich doch nur an einer Idee von
Rationalität. Woraus erwächst deren Bestimmung?”. This view of Heidegger’s was to
be held through four decades up to the sixties. See SD (79). For a fuller discussion of
Heidegger’s treatment of rationalism and irrationalism see Fehér (1991: 43-70).
23
Cf. GA56/57 (59): “Diese Vorrherrschaft des Theoretischen muß gebrochen werden”.
See also GA56/57 (87, 89, 97). See also GA59 (142): “Beherrschtheit [des heutigen
Lebens] durch das Theoretische”. By centering his destructive strategy around an overall
confrontation with the theoretical Heidegger takes up once again, and gives a thorough
elaboration to, another basic impulse of contemporary philosophy, as represented
primarily by Emil Lask. What Lask called the “intellectualistic prejudice” gives
preference to “thinking” in gaining access to the non-sensible; “faith” is understood in
a negative sense mainly owing to the intellectualistic distinction between “knowledge”
and “faith”. The “theoretization of a-theoretical comportment” also further affects all
those distinctions we usually make between, e.g., “theoretical and practical”, “logical
and intuitive”, “theoretical and aesthetic”, and “scientific and religious” knowledge. See
Lask (1923, vol. 2: 204ff., 208; vol. 3: 235). Heidegger did not fail acknowledge that
Lask was “one of the most powerful [stärksten] philosophical personalities of the time”,
adding how much he owed to him. See GA56/57 (180). For more details see Fehér (1992:
373-405).
24
“Kategorie ist interpretierend und ist nur interpretierend, und zwar das faktische
Leben, angeeignet in existenzieller Bekümmerung” (GA61: 86).
25
See explicitly GA17 (294): “Wir sehen die Welt immer in einem als”; further PIA
(241, 264). See also GA20 (75, 190, 416); SZ (169, 383).
26
See GA64 (32): “Das primäre Erkennen […] ist Auslegung”; Cf. SZ (147).
27
Heidegger was reported by contemporaries to have developed a “phenomenology of
life” in his post war lecture courses. Hajime Tanabe, presumably the first to write on
Heidegger abroad, gave an account of his encounter with Heidegger in Germany in 1924
under the title: ‘A New Turn in Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Life’.
See Pöggeler (1982: 57; 1983b: 155).
28
On Mitgehen, see GA58 (23, 158, 162, 185, 255, 262); GA29/30 (296f.). The
proximity to life (Lebensnähe) was also an urge of the age which Heidegger has taken
up and reacted upon; see GA63 (64). It may be of some importance to note that the
semi-religious tone that occasionally permeates this lecture course may be partly due to
the fact that precisely in that semester (WS 1919/20) Heidegger had also announced, and
been preparing to deliver, a course on the Philosophical Foundations of Mediaeval
Mysticism. Although he had been working hard on it, due to lack of time he could not
get ready with the preparation, therefore in a letter to the faculty dated August 30, 1919,
he asked for permission to cancel it and to transform instead his course on Selected
Problems of Pure Phenomenology from a weekly one-hour into a two-hour course. See
GA60 (348); GA58 (265). It is plausible to assume that at least part of the material
Heidegger worked through and destined for the Mysticism course, infiltrated into the
phenomenology course. Indeed, the occasional semi-religious character that this course
60 Fehér
displays is not just vaguely religious; the course has a definite tendency toward
mysticism, as Heidegger understood it at the time, in terms of immediate religious
enactment and in opposition to the rigid conceptual schemes of Scholasticism. The tone
of this religiosity is submission, humble devotion. On humilitas, see also GA60 (309);
on Hingabe see GA60 (322). As such the tone is fairly different from the distress and
fight that permeates the phenomenology of religion course one year later. For a
characteristic occurrence of Mitgehen in the Phenomenology of Religion course, see
GA60 (72): “Die Explikation geht immer mit der religiösen Erfahrung mit und treibt
sie”.
29
With an eye to Heidegger’s appropriation and transformation of Husserl’s
phenomenology, his concentration on religion may schematically be put as proceeding
along the following itinerary: phenomenology of transcendental consciousness à
phenomenology of life à phenomenology of religious life.
30
This was, again, a widespread tendency of the time. “Glaube ist nicht Lehre, sondern
Leben, die erlebte Tat-sache, der ‘Geburt Gottes’ in der Seele” (Natorp 1918: 87). On this
point see Fehér (2000: 200-223).
31
He also notes that something such as a “‘metaphysics of death’ lies outside the domain
of an existential analysis of death” (SZ: 248).
32
See GA60 (82): “Urchristliche Religiosität ist in der faktischen Lebenserfahrung.
Nachsatz: Sie ist eigentlich solche selbst”. The same point is made in an even more
accentuated manner in GA60 (131): “Christliche Religiosität ist in der faktischen
Lebenserfahrung, ist sie eigentlich selbst”.
33
Heidegger makes the point that Christianity is a historical paradigm for centering life
for the first time around the self-world. This accent on individuality, i.e., the
individually centred character of life, will lead up to Dasein’s Jemeinigkeit in Being and
Time, while the term Selbstwelt disappears.
34
See “Gottvergessenheit” at GA9 (53).
35
See GA60 (95): “absolute Umwendung”; “Hinwendung zu Gott und eine Wegwendung
von den Götzenbildern”; GA9 (53): “Glaube = Wiedergeburt”. See also GA9 (63).
36
See GA60 (94): “Das Wissen über das eigene Gewordensein stellt der Explikation eine
ganz besondere Aufgabe. Hieraus wird sich der Sinn einer Faktizität bestimmen, die von
einem bestimmten Wissen begleitet ist. Wir reißen die Faktizität und das Wissen
auseinander, aber sie ist ganz urspünglich miterfahren […] Das Gewordensein ist nun
nicht ein beliebiges Vorkommnis im Leben, sondern es wird ständig miterfahren und
zwar so, daß ihr jetziges Sein Gewordensein ist. Ihr Gewordensein ist ihr jetziges Sein”.
See also GA60 (145): “Faktizität, zu der ja das ‘Wissen’ gehört”; GA60 (93): “Wissen
von ihrem Gewordensein”.
37
See GA60 (120): “Das christliche Leben ist nicht geradelinig, sondern ist gebrochen:
Alle umweltlichen Bezüge müssen hindurchgehen durch den Vollzugszusammenhang
des Gewordenseins”.
38
See GA9 (63): “In der gläubigen Existenz das überwundene vorchristliche Dasein
existenzial-ontologisch mitbeschlossen bleibt”.
39
Dilthey fell victim to the traditional question, how is history of science as science
possible. See also GA17 (302).
40
The term “das Historische” will be replaced in Being and Time by “das
Geschichtliche”, or Geschichtlichkeit”. For later, see the distinction between
“geschichtliche und historische Wahrheit” in GA39 (144f.), viz., that between
“historische Betrachtung” and “geschichtliche Besinnung” in GA45 (34f., 49f., 88f.)
Religion, Theology and Philosophy on the way to Being and Time 61
Further see also GA45 (11f., 40, 201); GA65 (32f., 151f. 359, 421f., 493f.). See
especially GA65 (153): “Die Historie […] ist ein ständiges Ausweichen vor der
Geschichte”.
41
See SZ (375): “The locus of the problem of history […] is not to be sought in
historiology as the science of history”.
42
See GA61 (76): “Die Faktizität des Lebens […] ist in sich selbst historisch”; (159):
“Das Historische im Sinn der Faktizität liegt”.
43
See GA60 (65): “Was ist in der faktischen Lebenserfahrung ursprünglich die
Zeitlichkeit? […] unser Weg geht vom faktischen Leben aus, von dem aus der Sinn von
Zeit gewonnen wird. Damit ist das Problem des Historischen gekennzeichnet”. See also
GA60 (80): “Die faktische Lebenserfahrung ist historisch. Die christliche Religiosität
lebt die Zeitlichkeit als solche”.
44
He finishes his sentence: “But not Christianity and metaphysics (the latter, to be sure,
in a new sense)”. This addition is surely not insignificant, for it shows Heidegger’s
continuing to be in the proximity, although “in a new sense”, to Christianity and
metaphysics. The letter was first published in Casper (1980: 541); see Denker (2004:
67ff). I have adopted John D. Caputo’s translation in Caputo (1982: 56ff). To say that
the “system of Catholicism” has become “problematic and unacceptable” is to say that
the theological-philosophical foundation which underlies faith – the fundament, the
groundwork, upon which faith rests – has become obsolete and hollow, requiring, as it
does, being renewed and refreshed. To fulfil this task is in no way contrary to Christian
faith. For more detailed interpretation of this letter, see Fehér (1995: 189-228).
45
See GA60 (313): “Liegt es a priori in der Struktur des Systems, das selbst nicht einer
organischen Kulturtat entwachsen ist, daß der zu erlebende Wertgehalt der Religion als
solcher, ihre inhaltliche Sinnsphäre erst durch ein verwickeltes unorganisches,
theoretisch völlig ungeklärtes, dogmatisches Gehege von Sätzen und Beweisgängen
hindurch muß, um schließlich als kirchenrechtliche Satzung mit Polizeigewalt das
Subjekt zu überwältigen und dunkel zu belasten und zu erdrücken”.
46
See the same claim in Dilthey’s main work (1990: 138f,, 253f.). For the term Faktizität
in Dilthey, see Dilthey (1990: 141). The term Lebensanschauung (life-view) in the
above quotation is clearly of Schleiermacherian origin.
47
The only change is that Heidegger italicizes “history” and this, of course, gives to the
identification of history and religion more prominence. It may be of use to quote the full
sentence of Schleiermacher: “Geschichte im eigentlichsten Sinn ist der höchste
Gegenstand der Religion, mit ihr hebt sie an und endigt mit ihr – denn Weissagung ist
in ihren Augen auch Geschichte und beides gar nicht voneinander zu unterscheiden –
und alle wahre Geschichte hat überall zuerst einen religiösen Zweck gehabt und ist von
religiösen Ideen aus gegangen”. Schleiermacher (1920: 63).
48
See Harnack (1983: 20): “Das Dogma ist in seiner Conception und in seinem Ausbau
ein Werk des griechischen Geistes auf dem Boden des Evangeliums”. Heidegger refers
to Harnack in GA60 (72), claiming it is precisely the seemingly secondary problem of
“expression”, of “religious explication”, that is of decisive importance, for the
“explication” goes hand in hand with the religious experience. This is much in line with
Gadamer’s interpretation that theology has, for Heidegger, primarily to do with finding
the adequate “word, ” i.e., conceptuality, to express faith. Heidegger’s own subsequent
formulation of what dogma is shows Harnack’s obvious influence. See GA60 (112):
“Das Dogma als abgelöster Lehrgehalt in objektiv-erkenntnismäßiger Abhebung kann
niemals leitend für die christliche Religiosität gewesen sein, sondern umgekehrt, die
62 Fehér
Genesis des Dogmas ist nur verständlich aus dem Vollzug der christlichen
Lebenserfahrung”. See also Dilthey (1990: 25): “So war die Entwicklung dieses
Gehaltes im Dogma zugleich seine Veräußerlichung”; (274): “Hat sich die Entwicklung
der Formeln, welche die religiöse Erfahrung in einer Verknüpfung von Vorstellungen
abgrenzen und gegen andere Formeln innerhalb derselben Religion wie gegen andere
Religionen rechtfertigen sollten, nicht folgerecht aus der im Christentum gegebenen
Selbstgewißheit innerer Erfahrung vollzogen”. The thesis of the unhappy connection of
Christianity with Greek philosophy was far from unknown to the previous generation
of liberal theology, e.g., to Ritschl.
49
See GA60 (310): “Scharf zu trennen: das Problem der Theologie und das der
Religiosität”. And he adds significantly: “Die Theologie hat bis jetzt keine originäre
theoretische Grundhaltung der Ursprünglichkeit des Gegenstandes entsprechend
gefunden”.
50
Cf. GA20 (6).
51
For a detailed reconstruction of this lecture, see Kockelmans (1984: 85-108).
52
Cf. Gethmann-Siefert (1974: 36): “Religion requires a way of treatment adequate to its
logos”.
53
See GA60 (336): “Die Analyse, d.h. die Hermeneutik, arbeitet im historischen Ich […]
In allem ist die spezifische Sinnbestimmtheit herauszuhören”.
54
Cf. GA60 (8, 124).
References
Franco Volpi
disputing and dissolving them of every content and value, and led to the
most dismal nihilism. In this sense, Heidegger is the thinker who, better
than others, interpreted the role of thought in the crisis of philosophy in
the face of the issues raised in the “post-Hegel” and “post-Nietzsche”
periods. Heidegger confronted the problems of the “post-Hegel” era not
only by confronting the dialectical thought of the Absolute and its
claims to attain the whole, but also by developing, as an alternative to
it – out of an awareness of its impracticability and the exigency of
preserving some of its gains all the same – a thinking of Being which
assumed, as its point of departure, the finitude of existence in its
unavoidable facticity. As for Nietzsche, the Twentieth Century filled his
visions and prophecies with real life and pains, and it is not by chance
that his name has been raised on the banners of all kinds of anti-
dialectical thought. But he so tenaciously and furiously criticized
metaphysical certainties that he sapped the foundations, not only of
dialectics, but of every formulation of meaning. Nietzsche diagnosed the
crisis of the traditional values of God, truth, good and evil, contributing
with his diagnosis to their decline. The Nietzschian consideration of this
crisis is not a neutral description, but an acceleration of the process
which it describes. In answering the questions of the “post-Hegel”
period, Heidegger succeeded in also examining these questions from the
“post-Nietzsche” point of view, confronting problems that still
characterize and trouble the self-representation of our time.
churches: let the disciple come back to the prophet and the believer to
the redeemer – soWeber concluded – but this is the age of science and
reason, which are inevitably detached from the values of religious
salvation.
Now, the only virtue possible in a world of disenchantment is,
in fact, the rational sobriety which withstands the assimilation of any
content and is as lucid as long as it remains empty: the power of the
rational consists in dissolving everything substantial. The virtue of a
worldly asceticism lies in its value as an explicative paradigm for the
cultural self-representation of the disenchanted world; it legitimates the
renunciation of every transcendental value (in spite of its recognition of
creatureliness) because it presupposes worldliness as the only dimension
in which the success or the failure of existence is measured.3
4. Theology
To be sure, there are books today entitled: What is man? But the title merely
stands in letters on the cover. There is no questioning. Not only because
people have been so busy writing books that they have forgotten how to
question, but because the writers already posses an answer and what is more
an answer that forbids questioning. If a man believes the propositions of
Catholic dogma, that is his individual concern; we shall not discuss it here.
But how can we be expected to take a man seriously who writes ‘What is
man?’ on the cover of his book although he does not inquire, because he is
unwilling and unable to inquire. And when the Frankfurter Zeitung, among
others, praises such a book, which question merely on its cover, as ‘an
extraordinary, magnificent and courageous work’, even the blindest among us
know where we stand (GA40: 151).10
But after the war, and in the final phase of his thought,
Heidegger re-opened his dialogue with theology on a larger scale, to the
point that, recalling his theological education, he affirmed that “without
this theological background I should never have come upon the path of
thinking. But the origin always comes to meet us from the future” (GA12:
91). Nevertheless, he has not abandoned the clear demarcation between
philosophy and theology. We can cite as examples two statements made
at the beginning of the 1950s, one during a discussion with students in
Zurich, the other during a colloquium at the Evangelical Academy in
Hofgeismar.
In the first statement, made in the conciliatory tone of one who
wants to have a dialogue, Heidegger clearly separates Being (Sein),
which is the “thing of thought” (die Sache des Denkens), and God, who
is the object of theology. To the question of whether it is licit to identify
Being (Sein) with God, he answers:
5. Mysticism
attention for the difference between the plane of the merely ontic, to
which the divine principle is relegated when it is designated with the
term “God”, and the plane of ontological awareness, in virtue of which
Eckhart refers first to the mode of being of God, and only then to God
itself, using precisely the term Gottheit, deitas. Heidegger writes:
on the contrary, to show how the conditions for the mystical experience
are given in it.
Third, whereas Heidegger is interested in deconstructing every
metaphysical element and remaining in thought, mysticism, particularly
in its speculative variety, remains bound to metaphysical categories and
concepts, mostly originating from neo-Platonism, such as the hierarchy
of Being, the fundamental opposition between the creatureliness of the
being (Seiende), and the absoluteness of God, and the idea that the
divine transcendence can be grasped and, so to speak, touched in a pure
presence.
If one wants, nevertheless, to make a comparison between
Heidegger’s thought and mysticism, it is perhaps possible to say, using
an expression coined by Fritz Mauthner, that Heidegger was a “mystic
without God”. But this is a slogan, not a solution.
6. Gnosis
As many other works in German philosophy, from Eckhart onwards, Sein und
Zeit presents the form of a gnostic novel (here is the profound sense of the
“historicity” of existence in Heidegger); but in him the novel is deprived, on
the one hand, of its origin and, on the other hand, of the final episode. This
confers to the romanticized life described there its dramatic feature, as if a
member of the audience arrived too late to the theatre and left too early, grasps
only the tragic anguish of the characters; then, he watches a tragedy without
origin or solution and which, nevertheless, is known as such only by the
philosopher. Let us remember the outline of the gnostic novel, numbering the
episodes:
1) From the primordial abyss, hypostases emerge. They remain
attached to their origin and are oriented towards it;
2) One of them wants to become independent, and here is the
mistake and the sin;
3) Subsequently, and because of such a fall, the creation of the world
happens and then the creation of time, to which the declined being is closely
connected; it forgets its origin; it clings to the world because of the curiosity
(the polypragmosyne, which seems to correspond well to Heidegger’s Sorge);
84 Volpi
position: “What’s going on here? People hear talk about ‘humanism’, of ‘logic’, of
‘values’, of ‘world’, and ‘God’. They hear something about opposition to these. They
recognize and accept these things as positive. But with hearsay – in a way that is not
exactly deliberative – they immediately assume that this is “negative” in the sense of
destructive […] With the assistance of logic and ratio often invoked, people come to
believe that whatever is not positive is negative and thus that it seeks to degrade reason
and therefore deserves to be branded as depravity. We are so wiled with ‘logic’ that
anything that disturbs the habitual somnolence of prevailing opinion is automatically
registered as a despicable contradiction. We pitch everything that does not stay close to
the familiar and beloved positive into the previously excavated pit of pure negation,
which negates everything, ends in nothing, and so consummates nihilism. Following this
logical course we let everything expire in a nihilism we invented for ourselves with the
aid of logic. But does the ‘against’ which a thinking advances against ordinary opinion
necessarily point toward pure negation and the negative?” (GA9: 264).
6
For a general introduction to the problem, see Robinson (1963); Noller (1967);
Gethmann-Siefert (1974); Coriando (1998). From the perspective of Protestant theology,
see Jäger (1978). From the perspective of Catholic theology, see Schaeffler (1978). For
a philosophical introduction to the problem, see Ruggenini (1997). For an in-depth
bibliography, see Volpi (2005).
7
The lecture was held in Tübingen on March 9, 1927, and repeated in Marburg on
February 14, 1928. It was published for the first time in Archives de Philosophie 32
(1969): 355-415. The lecture was republished as a booklet with the significant
dedication ‘To Rudolf Bultmann, with happy memories of the Marburg years 1923-
1928’ in 1970, and finally in GA9: 45-78.
8
Heidegger cites Overbeck’s famous essay ‘On the Christianity of Theology’, together
with the first of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations.
9
See Haecker (1933).
10
The judgments expressed by Heidegger in these years on the works of his Catholic
disciples, such as Johannes B. Lotz and Gustav Siewerth, imply that someone who is
bound to a faith cannot develop philosophical interrogation in a really radical way, free
from presuppositions. Cf. Ott (1988: 255-267).
11
See, for example, Krebs (1921).
12
Löwith remembers: “He [Heidegger] gave me The Imitation by Thomas à Kempis as
a Christmas present in 1920. Even in 1925, he saw spiritual substance in theology alone,
in Barth and Gogarten”. Löwith (1986: 29/30-31).
13
See particularly Caputo (1977); Pöggeler (1982: 65-92); Moretto (1987: 147-178). For
a general introduction, see Vannini (1999).
14
One of Heidegger’s rare references to the Valentinian Gnosis can be found in GA63
(25).
15
Clement of Alexandria, Excerpta ex Theodoto, 78, 2.
16
As a first introduction, see Sloterdijk (1991).
17
Cf. Voegelin (1952), and Voegelin (1959). Cf. Sebba (1981: 190-241).
18
Cf. Faber (1984).
19
Hans Jonas graduated in 1928 from Marburg, where Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann
had acted as supervisors on a dissertation which Jonas presented on Augustin und das
paulinische Freiheitsproblem. Eine philosophische Studie zum pelagianischen Streit
(Jonas 1965).
20
Some significant opinions of the work are collected in Rudolph (1975). Cf. Culianu
(1985).
88 Volpi
21
Cf. Jonas (1960: 155-171), republished with the title ‘Gnosis, Existentialismus und
Nihilismus’, in Jonas (1963: 3-25).
22
Among those who have developed these considerations, see Taubes (1954: 155-172);
and Baum (1997).
23
The letter is published in Opitz (1981: 460-462). Voegelin also views Husserlian
phenomenology as a modern form of gnosis. Also in the correspondence with Alfred
Schütz, he acknowledges that The Crisis of the European Sciences is “the most
important epistemological achievement of our times”, and yet, even as it follows an
epistemological direction, it remains “a preface to philosophy, but it is not a radical
philosophical enterprise yet” (from a letter dated September 17, 1943). Voegelin
criticizes in particular the Husserlian reconstruction of history, which he sees as based
on a premise that, according to him, is “a case of Averroistic speculation”, presupposing
the existence of a world-soul. The individual soul is a part of the world-soul, but, in the
end, it cannot grasp either “the objectivity of the philosophical knowledge of the world”
or “the fundamental subjectivity of the ego”. Husserl’s thought, continues Voegelin, is
“a philosophy of progress” the proclamation of which overflows with “messianic
elements” that make phenomenologists the “last sect”. In a letter dated 31 May 1957,
he wonders: “Why has Husserl stubbornly maintained this mistake? Why has he
continuously relapsed into this with his new attempts at construction?” The “theme of
construction” seemed to him to be the following: “The annihilatio mundi and its re-
creation in the solitude of the philosopher and, in the best of cases, in the meditation of
the sect community. But this is precisely gnosis”.
24
“Denn das Fragen ist die Frömmigkeit des Denkens” (“Therefore questioning is the
piety of thinking”) – Heidegger’s conclusion to his famous lecture in Munich
(November 18, 1953), ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (GA7: 40). The much-
debated passage of Unterwegs zur Sprache (now in GA12: 169) in which Heidegger
puts listening before questioning does not, in my opinion, constitute a retraction of this
pronouncement. It is rather a necessary addition to it.
References
liberal theology itself: if, indeed, the Christian faith requires an absolute
foundation which historical knowledge is not capable of providing, what
purpose might historical methods then serve for theological reflection?
The answer to this question places in relief the key
presupposition common to liberal theologians, while also highlighting
an affinity they shared with certain contemporary philosophical
orientations during the decades prior to the First World War: the Baden
school of neo-Kantianism of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert,
and also – in spite of his disagreement with neo-Kantian-inspired
epistemology – Wilhelm Dilthey. This presupposition is revealed in
their common conviction that the diversity of values and standards that
emerge over the course of human development express an inner
continuity and cohesion (Zusammenhang) underlying human history,
which confer meaning on the particular moments of cultural and
national development, even if the deeper sources of this cohesion remain
obscure. Where Dilthey, in keeping with an epistemology anchored in
the human sciences, shied away from any attempt to attribute an
absolute foundation to this source, Windelband and Rickert, in
conformity with the Kantian inspiration of their orientation, postulated
its ultimately transcendent origin. This accounts for the particular
importance of the neo-Kantian philosophy for liberal theology, since the
theologians were able to argue on this basis that the plurality of religious
norms of truth, rather than expressing a limited validity entirely relative
to the periods in which they emerged, pointed toward an absolute
foundation. This absolute basis might be postulated even if it could
never be made fully apparent.
This presupposition inspired Harnack’s firmest theological
convictions, according to which the Christian religion signifies “eternal
life within time, under the eyes of God and by the power of God”
(Harnack 1977: 16). It also supported his assumption concerning the
permanence of Christianity, since the search for its essence reveals a
continuity in the Gospel’s reception that “runs throughout like a red
thread in the cloth [which] at times [...] reappears and manifests the
links which retain it” (Harnack 1977: 174). If, for Troeltsch, the essence
of Christianity was more obscure than for Harnack, there could be no
question in his eyes of denying its source in the ultimate cohesion of
history (Zusammenhang der Geschichte) as an objective process
(Troeltsch 1902: 52-3). Troeltsch subsequently submitted this
conviction to increasing doubt, accentuated through his historical
research, and corroborated by the investigations of the secularization of
98 Barash
In the course of this history certain distinctive domains of being have come
into view and served as the primary guides for subsequent problems: the ego
cogito of Descartes, the subject, the ‘I’, reason, spirit, person. But these all
remain uninterrogated as to their being and its structure, in accordance with
the thoroughgoing way in which the question of being has been neglected. It
is rather the case that the categorical content of the traditional ontology has
been carried over to these entities with corresponding formulations and purely
negative restrictions, or else dialectic has been called in for the purpose of
interpreting the substantiality of the subject ontologically (SZ: 22).
Theology and the Historicity of Faith 105
Each time, from the Cartesian cogito to the Kantian ‘I think’, up until
the modern attempt in the human sciences to locate an objective
cohesion in the historicity of life, of spirit, or of culture, the finite
meaning of Dasein “each time my own” (je meines) was excluded by
systems of conceptualization which tacitly effaced any implication of
finitude. And, at the very heart of his analyses, it is this traditional
forgetting of the finite foundation of Dasein’s temporal and historical
existence that Heidegger proposed to bring to the fore.
In emphasizing the fundamental role of finitude in Sein und Zeit,
Heidegger’s celebrated argument aimed to exhibit the manner in which
Dasein’s mode of temporal and historical existence, and therefore its
possibilities of comprehending the past, depend upon the way in which
it chooses to be. The choice of a finite mode of being makes possible a
given way of approaching the past – and of situating finite existence in
the context of culture and world history. According to Heidegger’s
well-known conception, authentic choice seeks to unveil, in light of
finitude, originary possibilities implicit in the past, which a petrified
tradition has most often set aside. And tradition, in invoking eternal
truth, incarnates inauthenticity: it maintains the belief in Dasein’s
participation in an undying continuity, and thereby masks the radically
provisory character of any meaning which may emerge before Dasein’s
mortal eyes. In the final analysis, the “cohesion of history”
(Zusammenhang der Geschichte), far from emanating from what
tradition considered to be a self-sustaining realm of cultural or national
continuity, finds its ultimate source nowhere else than in a continuity
interwoven in the perspective of finite existence.
Heidegger’s articulation of a more elaborate philosophical
argument in Sein und Zeit than that presented in his earlier course
lectures thus brought into question a whole range of intellectual
expressions of the forgetting of Dasein’s finitude, which the age-old
speculative affirmation of eternal, absolute truths had steadfastly
maintained. And, as Heidegger asserted in Sein und Zeit, the authority
of traditional theology served as a formidable bulwark to sustain this
age-old assumption:
But the contention that there are ‘eternal truths’, and the confusion of Dasein’s
phenomenally grounded ‘ideality’ with an idealized absolute subject, belong
to those residues of Christian theology within the philosophical problematic
which have not as yet been radically eliminated (SZ: 229).
106 Barash
We can only make matters finally move when we work forward from the most
extreme positions: you from the theological side – positive and ontic –
whereby ontological themes by no means disappear but, while remaining
unthematic, are only in this regard punctuated by a question mark; me from the
philosophical side – ontological and critical – whereby the ontic, in the sense
of the positivity of Christianity, is left unthematic and followed by a question
mark. To toss around in the intermediary zone without a solid basis on which
to stand, here or there, in dealing with concrete and comprehensive
knowledge, leads – if anywhere at all – to confusion.9
The being of man is constituted by logos, reason, the eternal and the absolute.
An idealist theology believes itself to speak simultaneously of God and man
because it is accustomed, in conformity with ancient and classical traditions,
to think God and the absolute together. In reality, it only speaks of man
(Bultmann 1933c: 118).
3
This notion, which is evoked in Heidegger’s lectures on Augustine, for example in
GA60 (281-82), is elucidated above all in the course given by Heidegger the preceding
term, ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’ (GA60: 97-105).
4
In a letter addressed to Karl Löwith, dated 19 August 1921, Heidegger described
himself as “factically a Christian theologian” (Heidegger 1990: 28-29). In the 1921-22
lecture course ‘Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles’, Heidegger asserted
that philosophy can only be atheistic (GA61: 197). However, philosophy can only be
resolutely atheistic to the extent that it remains open to the question of God.
5
In his course on Augustine, Heidegger observed that one cannot simply extract
neo-Platonic ideas from the Augustinian edifice in order to obtain a purely Christian
message. He added (unfortunately without developing his analysis) that neo-Platonism
is interwoven into the fundamental structure of Christianity (GA60: 281).
6
Heidegger criticized contemporary historical theorists of history, above all Windelband,
Rickert, and Troeltsch, for what he took to be residual Platonism in their thought; see
in this regard, GA60 (38-49).
7
Cf. GA61 (73-78).
8
Cf. GA61 (80); GA58 (61-64); GA59 (19-23).
9
“Wir bringen die Sachen nur von der Stelle, wenn wir von den extremsten Positionen
her endlich arbeiten. Sie von der theolog[ischen] Seite – positiv – ontisch [,] wobei das
Ontologische gar nicht verschwindet, aber unthematisch u[nd] nur jeweils mit
Fragezeichen versehen abgehandelt wird – ich von der philosoph[ischen] Seite –
ontologisch-kritisch –, wobei das Ontische im Sinne der Positivität des Christlichen
unthematisch bleibt u[nd] seine Fragezeichen hat. Im Zwischenfeld sich
herumtummeln[,] ohne dort – noch hier fest zu stehen u[nd] konkrete, umfassende
Kentnisse zu haben, bringt, wenn überhaupt etwas – lediglich Verwirrung” (Bultmann
2009: 23). In another letter written in the same year, Heidegger writes: “Meine Arbeit
hat weder weltanschauliche noch gar theologische Absichten. Wohl aber liegen Ansätze
u[nd] Absichten in ihr auf einer ontologischen Grundlegung der chr[i]stl[ichen]
Theologie als Wissenschaft” (“My work finds its purpose neither in the area of a
world-view or even of theology. But there are starting points and aims in it toward an
ontological foundation of Christian theology as a science”) (Bultmann 2009: 48).
10
Cf. Barth (1971: 118); Noller (1967). If, following the period of Sein und Zeit,
Heidegger explicitly took a certain distance from dialectical theology, in a letter
addressed to Karl Löwith two years prior to the publication of this work, he nonetheless
had still affirmed his nuanced support of it: “What still shows some ‘life’ is the
Barth-Gogarten movement, which is represented in a prudent and independent way by
Bultmann – and since I am always subject to being counted among theologians, I permit
myself also to accompany this movement, although during a recent debate I expressed
my skepticism in a sufficiently clear manner” (Heidegger 1925).
11
Heidegger considered this problem in a footnote in Being and Time, where he writes:
“That the traditional concept of eternity, grasped in the sense of the abiding now (nunc
stans), is produced by an everyday comprehension of time and is circumscribed by the
orientation toward an ‘abiding’ presence, requires no detailed commentary. If the
eternity of God can be philosophically ‘constructed’, then this could only be understood
as a more primary and ‘infinite’ temporality” (SZ: 427n). However, these comments
hardly attenuate the ambiguity of Being and Time with regard to Christianity, since
Heidegger could also write: “Inauthentic temporality of fallen-everyday Dasein must,
as such distraction from finitude [Wegsehen von der Endlichkeit], mistake authentic
futurity and with it temporality as such. And when indeed everyday understanding of
112 Barash
References
Sylvain Camilleri
fact surpassed. The question is: toward what? Or, more precisely,
toward whom?
Toward Schleiermacher, who allowed Troeltsch to glimpse the
stakes of an actualization and extension of the Kantian heritage.
Schleiermacher showed how it is possible to incorporate this heritage
into a theological framework and bring it to fruition, all the while
preserving its own nature and philosophical potential. To Troeltsch,
Schleiermacher first represented the link between Kant and Ritschl. But
he of course had his own role in the intellectual development of
Troeltsch. Among all the representatives of German Idealism, Troeltsch
effectively considered him as the most capable to develop the Kantian
program and to offer a strong philosophical response to the demands of
modern thought (Troeltsch 1913c: 480). He was undoubtedly impressed
by the finess that Schleiermacher displayed in linking the idea of a
religious a priori to a historical theology. Schleiermacher’s
dismantlement of the primacy of the theologico-theoretical pushed
Troeltsch to discriminate between spheres more elaborately than had
done his teacher. Schleiermacher had separated religion and piety (two
synonymous terms) from metaphysics and morality. It was now
necessary to strictly separate history and religion in order to rethink and
rejuvenate their relationship. On this point, Schleiermacher had not been
radical enough. Troeltsch’s evaluation of Schleiermacher is in many
ways similar to Heidegger’s. Both simultaneously found good and bad
parts of the Rede as well as the Glaubenslehre, and they would have
perhaps not refused to sign a joint-declaration stipulating exactly these
points. But all things considered, how could it be otherwise when we
know that they were both reading and admiring the same literature on
Schleiermacher, in particular the biography by Dilthey, but also the
works of Hermann Süskind (Christentum und Geschichte bei
Schleiermacher, 1911) and Georg Wehrung (Die geschichts-
philosophische Standpunkt Schleiermachers, 1907)? All of this indicates
that the vital point of contention between Heidegger and Troeltsch is
situated elsewhere than in their respective receptions of Schleiermacher.
The fourth central figure of this first series established by
Heidegger is Rudolf Hermann Lotze. Lotze is a philosopher who, like
Ritschl in theology, attached himself to Kant. The question regarding the
extent to which the two thinkers influenced one another had not been
well elaborated. It is probably because Ritschl, in his Die christliche
Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (1870), spoke of Lotze
as his philosophical mentor (they had taught together for 16 years at
122 Camilleri
Troeltsch’s path. It goes without saying that behind his analysis hides a
will to critique or destruct.
We may go no further here, but we may nevertheless point out
that we have reached the end of the task of the historico-critical
presentation and the beginning of the task of a systematico-comparitive
analysis. Once completed, this analysis will allow us to clearly delimit:
(1) the role that Troeltsch played in the Denkweg of the young
Heidegger and, more globally; (2) the impact of Protestant theology on
his phenomenology of religion.
least, Julius Kaftan, the sworn enermy of Troeltsch, then charged with the course on
Dogmatik (Apologetik). Heidegger could neither have attended all these courses nor met
all of these men, but he was conscious of passing through a Berlin still aglow with
philosophy and theology. All of this information may be found in the Verzeichnis der
Vorlesungen, Sommer-Semester 1918, Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu
Berlin.
7
Cf. Troeltsch (1997): 279-281; republished in Denker (2004a): 75-76.
8
See for example Günther (1914), not to mention studies in specialized journals too
numerous to count.
9
From 1864, when Ritschl was named to the University of Göttingen, – Lotze had been
there since 1844, having succeeed Herbart –, to 1880, when Lotze accepted the Ruf of
the University of Berlin (upon suggestions from both Zeller and von Helmholtz), just
one year before his death.
10
See Dilthey’s ‘Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie’ (1894)
and ‘Beiträge zum Studium der Individualität’ (1895/1896), both of which are
republished in Dilthey (1924).
11
This letter is mentioned in Apfelbacher (1978: 211).
12
See the letter from Troeltsch to Rickert dated 22 November 1915, in Graf (1991: 113).
Our italics.
13
Cf. Troeltsch (1919c); republished in Troeltsch (1913c: 677-684).
14
On the debate between Troeltsch and Herrmann, see the thoroughly absorbing work
of Sockness (1998).
15
On this point, cf. Herrmann (1876); republished in Herrmann, (1966: 1-80).
References
Jean Greisch
The extraordinary in his life plays no role for him. Only when he is weak,
when he withstands the anguish of his life, can he enter into a close connection
with God. This fundamental requirement of having-God is the opposite of all
false mysticism. Not mystical absorption and special exertion, rather
withstanding the weakness of life is decisive. Life for Paul is not a mere flow
of events; it is only insofar as he has it. His life hangs between God and his
vocation (GA60: 100).
Christian life is not straightforward, but is rather broken up: all surrounding-
world relations must pass through the complex of enactment of having-
become, so that this complex is then co-present, but the relations themselves,
and that to which they refer, are in no way touched. Who can grasp it, should
grasp it (GA60: 120).
References
Andrzej Wierciñski
And who would want to conceal that on the whole of my previously travelled
path the argument with Christianity continued silently, an argument, which is
not and was never an abstract problem, but a question about the appropriation
of one’s origins – the parents’s house, the homeland and the youth – and the
painful separation from it all. Only he who is as deeply rooted in a truly lived
catholic world can imagine something of the necessity of my interrogations,
which to this day affect my way like underground earthquakes (GA66: 415).
This time the Seminar is especially instructive for me, due to the participation
of our new philosopher, Heidegger, a student of Husserl. He comes from
Catholicism, but is entirely Protestant. This he demonstrated recently during
a debate after one of Hermelink’s lectures on Luther and the Middle Ages. He
Heidegger’s Atheology 153
Dear Professor,
The past two years, in which I have sought to clarify my basic philosophical
position, putting aside every special academic assignment in order to do so,
have led me to conclusions for which, had I been constrained by extra-
philosophical allegiances, I could not have guaranteed the necessary
independence of conviction and doctrine. Epistemological insights applied to
the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism
problematic and unacceptable for me – but not Christianity per se or
metaphysics, the latter albeit in a new sense.
I believe I have felt too keenly – more so, perhaps, than its official historians
– what values are enshrined in medieval Catholicism, and we are still a long
way removed from any true assessment or interpretation. I think that my
phenomenological studies in religion, which will draw heavily on the Middle
Ages, will do more than any argument to demonstrate that in modifying my
fundamental position I have not allowed myself to sacrifice objectivity of
judgment, or the high regard in which I hold the Catholic tradition, to the
peevish and intemperate diatribes of an apostate.
That being so, I shall continue to seek out the company of Catholic scholars
who are aware of problems and capable of empathizing with different points
of view.
It therefore means a very great deal to me – and I want to thank you most
warmly for this – that I do not have to forsake the precious gift of your
friendship. My wife (who has informed you correctly) and myself are anxious
to maintain our very special relationship with you. It is hard to live the life of
a philosopher; the inner truthfulness towards oneself and those for whom one
is supposed to be a teacher demands sacrifices and struggles that the academic
toiler can never know.
I believe that I have an inner calling for philosophy, and that by answering the
call through research and teaching I am doing everything in my power to
Heidegger’s Atheology 155
further the spiritual life of man – that and only that – thereby justifying my life
and work in the sight of God. Your deeply grateful friend, Martin Heidegger.
My wife sends her warmest regards (Ott 1988: 106-107).
Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth already has the
answer to the question ‘why is there anything at all and not rather nothing?’
before even asking the question, insofar as everything that is not itself God, is
created through him. God himself ‘is’ as the uncreated creator … Anyone who
stands in the soil of such faith … can only act ‘as if’… but on the other hand
that faith, if it does not remain constantly in the possibility of unfaith, is no
faith, but only a convenience and a set-up to hold fast to a commonly accepted
doctrine. That is neither faith nor questioning, but an indifference which can
busy itself with everything, perhaps with a great show of interest even with
faith as in much the same way they do with questioning (GA40: 8-9).
Striving for God does not mean reaching Him. To take God seriously
means to be called from out of the divine essence:
Heidegger’s Atheology 159
especially if it does not take into account the facticity of human being, is pure
nonsense (PIA in S: 121, 193-4)?
What we have said about security in faith as one position in regard to the truth
does not imply that the biblical ‘In the beginning God created heaven and
earth’ is an answer to our question. Quite aside from whether these words from
the Bible are true or false for faith, they can supply no answer to our question
because they are in no way related to it. Indeed, they cannot even be brought
into relation with our question. From the standpoint of faith our question is
‘foolishness’. Philosophy is this very foolishness. A ‘Christian philosophy’ is
a round square and a misunderstanding (GA40: 9; Polt 1999: 130-134).
The thinking that thinks from the question concerning the truth of Being
questions more primordially than metaphysics can. Only from the truth of
Being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the
holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence
of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify. Or
should we not first be able to hear and understand all these words carefully if
we are to be permitted as men, that is, as eksistent creatures, to experience a
relation of God to man? How can man at the present stage of world history ask
at all seriously and rigorously whether the god nears or withdraws, when he
has above all neglected to think into the dimension in which alone that
question can be asked? But this is the dimension of the holy, which indeed
remains closed as a dimension if the open region of Being is not lighted and
in its lighting is near man. Perhaps what is distinctive about this world-epoch
consists in the closure of the dimension of the hale [des Heilen]. Perhaps that
is the sole malignancy [Unheil] (GA9: 352).
But with this reference the thinking that points toward the truth of Being as
what is to be thought has in no way decided in favor of theism. It can be
theistic as little as atheistic. Not, however, because of an indifferent attitude,
but out of respect for the boundaries that have been set for thinking as such,
indeed set by what gives itself to thinking as what is to be thought, by the truth
of Being. Insofar as thinking limits itself to its task it directs man at the present
moment of the world’s destiny into the primordial dimension of his historical
abode. When thinking of this kind speaks the truth of Being it has entrusted
itself to what is more essential than all values and all types of beings. Thinking
does not overcome metaphysics by climbing still higher, surmounting it,
transcending it somehow or other; thinking overcomes metaphysics by
climbing back down into the nearness of the nearest (GA9: 352).
The thinker cannot call God by His name. With respect to God, thinking
reaches its limits. With that the question of God remains a question, yet
the answer is clearly determined by the unpassable limit. The
contemplation of the Holy is an essential prerequisite for Heidegger for
elaborating the question of God and the relationship between the Holy,
Being and God. Heidegger’s question of God is situated in his
seinsgeschichtlichem thinking. The concept of the Holy is for Heidegger
a central-category for his phenomenology of religion.
Heidegger’s a-theological philosophy is a philosophy that does
not philosophize about faith. The negation of the possibility of Christian
Heidegger’s Atheology 163
The last god has its most unique uniqueness and stands outside those
calculating determinations meant by titles such as “mono-theism”, “pan-
theism”, and “a-theism”. “Monotheism” and all types of “theism” exist only
since Judaeo-Christian “apologetics”, which has metaphysics as its intellectual
presupposition. With the death of this god, all theisms collapse. The multitude
of gods cannot be quantified but rather is subjected to the inner richness of the
grounds and abgrounds in the site for the moment of the shining and
sheltering-concealing of the hint of the last god. The last god is not the end but
the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history. For its sake
history up to now should not terminate but rather must be brought to its end.
We must bring about the transfiguration of its essential and basic positions in
crossing and in preparedness. Preparation for the appearing of the last god is
the utmost venture of the truth of being, by virtue of which alone man
succeeds in restoring beings (GA65: 411).19
Shall I name the High One then? No god loves what is unseemly;
To grasp him, our joy is scarcely large enough.
Heidegger’s Atheology 165
The thinker says being. The poet names the holy. And yet the manner in which
– thought from out of the essence of being – poetizing, thanking, and thinking
are directed toward one another and are at this same time different, must be
left open here. Presumably thanking and poetizing each in their own way
spring from originary thinking, which they need, without themselves being
able to be a thinking (GA9: 312).
Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state
of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human
reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available
to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the
appearance of a god, or for the absence of the god in [our] decline, insofar as
in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline (cited in Sheehan 1981:
57).
for God, comes to radiate only when Being itself beforehand and after
extensive preparation has been illuminated and is experienced in its truth.
Only thus does the overcoming of homelessness begin from Being, a
homelessness in which not only man but the essence of man stumbles
aimlessly about. Homelessness so understood consists in the abandonment of
Being by beings. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of Being. Because
of it the truth of Being remains unthought. The oblivion of Being makes itself
known indirectly through the fact that man always observes and handles only
beings. Even so, because man cannot avoid having some notion of Being, it
is explained merely as what is “most general” and therefore as something that
encompasses beings, or as a creation of the infinite being, or as the product of
a finite subject. At the same time “Being” has long stood for “beings” and,
inversely, the latter for the former, the two of them caught in a curious and still
unravelled confusion. As the destiny that sends truth, Being remains concealed
(GA9: 338-9).
Paths
Paths,
Paths of thought, going by themselves,
vanishing. When they turn again,
what do they show us?
Paths, going by themselves,
formerly open, suddenly closed,
later on. Once pointing out the way,
never attained, destined to renunciation --
slackening the pace
from out of the harmony of trustworthy fate.
And again the need
for a lingering darkness
within the waiting light (Heidegger 1976b: 287).
listens. Responding is always risky, but the mere fear of going astray can
not stop us from practising our responsibility. The path to Being is the
path to aletheia, unconcealment. Poetry allows truth to happen (GA5:
1-74). “The lingering darkness” is the existential context of the lyrical
subject, who is waiting for the light. This darkness can be perceived as
the absence of God, who is light (1 Jn 1:5).24 The lyric subject can only
listen to this self-revealing and disclosing path. In its attentiveness it can
recognize the nature of its true vocation: to think what calls for thinking.
In the inter-play between listening and responding the essence of human
being in its relationship to Being is disclosed. The voice of conscience,
the call (Ruf), “has the character of an appeal (Anruf) to Dasein by
calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self” (SZ: 269). This
call, which is a mode of discourse, breaks through the noise of the
inauthentic self’s chatter and recalls Dasein to the self whose voice
Dasein has failed to hear because of its “listening away” to the they (das
Man). “That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is
the conscience” (SZ: 315-316).
Heidegger’s reverence for “the Holy” determines his religious
duty: clearing “the clearing of Being”. In his poetic meditation
Heidegger overcomes the traditional sense of homelessness as a lost
relationship with God. He admits, “I came out of theology, and that I
harbor an old love for it and that I have a certain understanding of it. If
I were yet to write a theology – to which I sometimes feel inclined –
then the word ‘being’ would not be allowed to occur in it” (cited in
Hemming 2002: 292).
Heidegger never pursued writing a theology, yet he remained
interested in the idea of divinity.25 Particularly in an apophatic style in
his Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger calls God neither a Being
nor a non-Being, but a unique and indescribable divinity who needs
Being in order to be God. In the language of Meister Eckhart and Jacob
Böhme, Heidegger postulates emptying human hearts and minds and
awaiting to be filled with a God understood as an ecstatic event.26
Heidegger’s thinking of God does not fit into the traditional discourse
of the confessional Christian faith nor into the Western tradition of
metaphysical speculation. While theology and philosophy belong to
different domains with distinctively different kinds of discourse,
Heidegger preserves the possibility of thinking religion, which thinks
meditatively rather than calculatively. The religion thought by thinking
is a religion determined by the radically indeterminate and
undeterminable. Metaphysics has ended, since it has exhausted its
Heidegger’s Atheology 169
7
See Ruff (1997: 14): “Der in der Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger immer wieder mit
grossem Elan nachgegangenen Frage nach den ‘katholischen’ Wurzeln oder der
Verwendbarkeit seines Denkens im Rahmen fundamentaltheologischer Überlegungen
der ein oder anderen Konfession soll hier kein eigener Raum gegeben werden. Am Ende
eines Jahrhunderts, das nicht nur umfangreiche Einsichten in die Entwicklung der
christlichen Konfessionen vermittelt hat, sondern diese selbst erheblich zu wandeln
vermochte und sich zugleich der Vielfalt christlicher Lebensformen in den
unterschiedlichen Kulturen immer bewusster wird, sind Attribute wie ‘katholisch’ oder
‘protestantisch’ in solchem Umfang einer kritischen Neuaneignung ausgesetzt, dass sie
vorläufig wenig zur Bezeichnung phänomenologischen Denkens beitragen können”.
8
For a development of the notion of temporality in the Freiburg lectures on Paul and
Augustine see Ardovino (1998), especially 195-198.
9
Here Heidegger refers to a passage from Kierkegaard. See Kierkegaard (1975: 669-
672). On Heidegger and Luther see van Buren (1994: 159-74); McGrath (2006: 151-
184). McGrath regards Heidegger’s Lutheran assumptions as a “hidden theological
agenda” that determines the Daseinanalytik of Being and Time.
10
For a summary of the literature on the problem prior to 1972 see Gethmann-Siefert
(1974). For the development in later discussions see Jung (1990); Jung (1999). See also
Jung (2000).
11
See Figal (2001: 210): “Viewed from this perspective, with his theology of the last
god, Heidegger has not grasped a possibility that would have lent itself from an earlier
work and that at the same time could be understood as a correction of the earlier
conception. This correction would show the ‘understanding of being’ (Seinsverständnis)
that occurs in religious experience and theological conceptualization, and it would point
to the religious dimension of the ‘understanding of being’ (GA9: 63) instead of claiming
that with this theology of the last god a ‘purely rationally conceivable content’ is
brought to bear. But in principle there is no impediment to reading the philosophical
theology in Contributions in this sense. When one orients oneself less according to the
historical ‘situation’ of the book than according to the structures revealed in it,
Heidegger’s investigation may be understood as a clarification of the ‘between’ of god
and humans, and this is a contribution to the hermeneutic task that, according to Plato’s
‘Symposium’, philosophy has to accomplish according to the demon that enlivens it: to
mediate between gods and humans”.
12
See also O’Meara (1986: 205-226); and O’Meara’s commentary on Heidegger in his
new book O’Meara (2002).
13
Brejdak interprets Heidegger’s preoccupation with St. Paul as a meeting point between
philosophy and theology. For a short commentary on The Concept of Time see Brejdak
(1996: 124-127).
14
See also Seop Shim (1990).
15
See Casper (1968/69: 315-331); Casper (1980: 534-541).
16
According to Gadamer, an understanding of Heidegger as an atheistic thinker can be
based only on a superficial appropriation of his work (Gadamer 1987: 308-319).
Gadamer emphasizes that not with the help of theology, but in renouncing theology and
onto-theology Heidegger was seeking for the new language for the religious dimension.
He found real support in Nietzsche and Hölderlin. See also Helting (1999).
17
The variety of interpretations of Heidegger’s atheism would require a separate study.
In his recent book, Hemming reads Heidegger’s pious atheism as a vibrant pedagogy.
He fails to address other interpretations that include the Wirkungsgeschichte of the
problem. See Hemming (2002). For an alternative reading see Jüngel (1977: 37-45).
Heidegger’s Atheology 171
18
Cf. Hemming (2002: 290): “To say nothing, that God might speak. To say nothing,
that no objects, no thing, nothing intervenes between God and me, God and the soul
(understanding soul here in no supersensory, but an entirely immaterial, sense). Every
entry into this silence collapses, into words, into the speaking, the babbling that being
is. This silence is therefore one to which I must return again and again. What I describe
are not techniques of saying something, or even nothing, of God, but a way, a path,
which, God-given, is a being underway to God. To come to myself means I both
discover my separation from God, and I become open to who the God is. To come to
myself requires that I exceed myself: to come to myself means to seek union with God,
to abandon the self I have become for the sake of what else I might divinely myself
become. To come to my-self and seek union with God demands, at every step along the
path, that I say nothing of God. This could be taken within Heidegger’s atheism: indeed,
this would be a holy atheism”. Cf. Thurnher (1998: 183-197).
19
See also Gall (1987: 70); Figal (1994: 89-107); Pöggeler (1994); Paola-Ludovica
Coriando (1998c); Gadamer (2001).
20
Cf. Sikka (1997: 269).
21
In the letter to Karl Löwith, August 19, 1921, Heidegger writes: “I work concretely
and factically out of my ‘I am’, out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu,
life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which
I live … To this facticity of mine belongs what I would in brief call the fact that I am a
‘Christian theologian’. This involves a particular radical personal concern, a particular
radical scientificity, a strict objectivity in the facticity; in it is to be found the historical
consciousness, the consciousness of ‘intellectual and cultural history’. And I am all this
in the life-context of the university” (Papenfuss 1990: 29). See Kisiel (1993: 78); Kisiel
(2002: 1-35).
22
Cf. Gadamer (1987: 315).
23
Cited in Heidegger (1967: 241).
24
Cf. Jn 1:1-5, 3:17-21; 1 Jn 1:1-10.
25
John Caputo has consistently argued that while we must respect Heidegger’s claim that
he is not writing an onto-theology, we must nevertheless demythologize Heidegger. See
Caputo (2000: 85-100).
26
According to Heidegger’s biographer, Safranski, Contributions to Philosophy were
written during the late 1930s when Heidegger became disillusioned with the Nazi Party.
Heidegger asked his brother to publish it only after his death. Creating a new language
to address the relationship between the human and the divine, Heidegger let himself be
inspired by poetry, believing that poets know more about Being than philosophers.
Nevertheless, Heidegger was afraid that his critics would dismiss the book as pure
mythology. For the elaboration of similarities and differences in addressing the question
of God by Eckhart and Heidegger see Helting (1997: 66-78).
27
A few days before his death, Heidegger composed a motto for his collected edition:
“Ways, not works”. He chose ‘collected edition’ over ‘collected works’
(Gesamtausgabe versus Gesammelte Werke) explaining: “The collected edition should
indicate various ways: it is underway in the field of paths of the self-transforming asking
of the many-sided question of Being […] The point is to awaken the confrontation about
the question concerning the topic of thinking […] and not to communicate the opinion
of the author, and not to characterize the standpoint of the writer, and not to fit it into
the series of other historically determinable philosophical standpoints. Of course, such
a thing is always possible, especially in the information age, but for preparing the
questioning access to the topic of thinking, it is completely useless” (GA1: 437-438).
172 Wierciñski
References
S. J. McGrath
The reason I speak to them in parables is that seeing they do not perceive, and
hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.
1.
originally express their sense, the primordial words arising from the
original expressedness of life.
In the 1922 text written at Paul Natorp’s request,
‘Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle (Indication
of the Hermeneutic Situation)’, the so-called Natorp Bericht (PIA),
Heidegger writes:
The how of its [philosophy’s] research is the interpretation of the sense of this
being with respect to its basic categorial structures, i.e., the modes in which
factical life temporalizes itself, unfolds itself, and speaks with itself
(êáôçãïñåÃí) in such temporalizing (PIA: 246/121).
It is also a matter of fact that our simplest perceptions and constitutive states
are already expressed, even more, are interpreted in a certain way. What is
primary and original here? It is not so much that we see the objects and things
but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely we do not say
what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter
(GA20: 75/56).
Insight into existence itself can be gained only through that kind of actualizing
in which facticity is rendered questionable, i.e., through a concrete destruction
of facticity at some particular time with respect to the motives of its
movement, its directions, and what is available to it (PIA: 245/120).
away from the factical enactment-sense of the term, to which the formal
indicator gestures. The deflection, however, does not lead to another
affirmation; rather the factical meaning of the term is deferred to an
existential act of fulfilment which can only happen beyond theoretical
discourse. Certain phenomena cannot be directly spoken of but must be
lived or understood existentially. To speak of them at all entails using
an expression with a provisional and derivative sense of significance, an
intention necessary in the first moment but necessarily deflected in the
second. In the third moment, the term is relocated in a realm of
primordial experience, which is deferred to as the ground from which
the derivative sense first emerged. As in medieval negative theology (for
instance Aquinas’s), FI is not a license to say anything whatsoever: FI
is dependent upon a rigorous adherence to the rules of the theoretical
discourse that is being transcended.11 Heidegger leaves his reader in
crisis, forced to abandon the safety of the theoretical structure which
brought them that far if they are to progress further into the subject-
matter. The revision of meaning built into Aquinas’s act of naming the
divine, the way in which the claim doubles back unto itself and takes
back with one hand what it offered with the other (‘God is good’/‘God
is not good’), is also distinctive of FI.12
Let us give an example. When Heidegger says, Dasein is a
“being-in-the-world”, he first of all affirms something of Dasein. One
is tempted to say he uses a metaphor: Dasein is ‘contained’ by its world
as a body is ‘contained’ by a room. But FI is more precise than a
metaphor. Unlike a metaphor, FI is characterized not by a juxtaposition
of content but by a withholding of content. Heidegger’s second move is
to deflect us from understanding the ‘in’ in spatial terms, the
understanding which in fact initially animates the claim, which, like all
claims are proximately determined by ordinary sense (SZ § 12). The
third move is not to provide an alternative concept of ‘in’ which can be
theoretically grasped but to defer the meaning of the term to an
existential context. The primordial sense of ‘in’ is derived from the fore-
theoretical experience of the care-structure of Dasein; it is the ground of
all other senses of ‘in’, including the spatial sense. We defer to the
primordial sense of existence, postponing our understanding of the term
“being-in-the-world” until the ineluctably singular (Jemeinig) enactment
of sense becomes possible. The FI “being-in-the-world” summons the
thinker to a performance of thought that would engage the phenomenon
of in-ness in a more original way, a way that cannot be directly
expressed. The deflection and deferral of the affirmed meaning
Formal Indication, Irony, and the Risk of Saying Nothing 187
b
(1) ‘Being-in’ (affirmed) 8
`
(2) spatial ‘in’
(derivative sense—deflected)
2.
What the formally indicative meaning bears within itself is the way of viewing
the phenomena. It must be understood in a methodological sense how the
formal indicator, although it guides the consideration, brings no predetermined
opinion into the problem […] The formal predication is not bound to any
192 McGrath
propria, that is, with the consciousness that its content belongs to this
and only this individual” (GA1: 364). Proper names do not define but
point.
Heidegger’s early interest in indexical language motivated his
study of medieval mysticism, to which he turned in the years
immediately following the publication of the Habilitationsschrift.
Heidegger discerns a mode of indirect communication in the mystic’s
effort to communicate the incommunicable unio mystica.20 The mystic
wishes to share her experience of God with others, primarily to guide
them in the mystical life. Yet it was a central tenet of medieval theology
from Augustine, through Maimonides, to Eckhart, that God is
unnameable and undefinable. As absolute being, free of all
determination, transcending every genus and species, God is without
names.21
The medieval mystic’s experience of God does not consist in
sensations and visions (although these may accompany it); there is no
object here that could be either generalized or formalised. The unio
mystica is a fusion of the will with the divine at a level of experience so
interior and private that any effort to theorize it is in some sense a
distortion. Therefore, the mystic uses language, not to define, but to
elicit a change of view in those who have ears to hear. He seeks to
express that which is closest to his life. From a theoretical perspective,
the effort is doomed to fail. However, the what content of the mystical
treatise is secondary to the way of understanding, the how, indicated by
the text. The mystical treatise withholds both content and relational-
senses, frustrating the intellect’s craving for information, and driving the
neophyte into enactment.22 The mystic wishes to experience, in a mode
of experiencing beyond objectification, the how of God’s goodness. She
achieves this by becoming herself free of attachment and distraction, as
simple as the absolute being (simplicitas Dei), in whom there is no
distinction.23 FI is an analogous via negativa. It, too, connotes by
withdrawing rather than applying predicates. The negative way is
required in medieval theology because of the trans-categorical and
infinite nature of the subject-matter. It is equally necessary to the
hermeneutics of facticity, not only because of the non-definable and
historical nature of life, but also because of the tendency of language to
objectify.24
FI emerges in Heidegger’s early phenomenology as a promise
– perhaps unfulfilled and unfulfillable – that philosophical thinking can
overcome the abstractions of the theoretical attitude and return to the
196 McGrath
3.
everyone already ‘knows’ too much about it.26 Christianity has been
fully assimilated into the system of speculative idealism, neutralized into
a theoretical content, an “objective truth”. As such, it no longer has the
power to incite faith or offence; it is, therefore, no longer the Gospel.
Climacus sets about making the understanding of Christianity difficult
again. In an analogous sense FI does not inform the recipient of features
of his life to which he has hitherto not adverted. Rather, FI disburdens
the recipient of traditional concepts, which disallow Existenz in all its
factical richness to come to thought.
The meaning of FI does not lie behind the expression but in
front of it. It does not await detective work on the part of the recipient,
who must divine the speaker’s/ writer’s intention, but a performative act
which applies the expression to life and thereby brings new meaning
into existence.27 The recipient understands himself in front of the
expression, not by projecting his beliefs onto the expression, but by
allowing the expression to enlarge the horizon of his self-understanding.
FI deflects the natural tendency of thinking to exchange the abstract for
the factical, the essential for the existential, and restores language to its
fore-theoretical context. Heidegger must use FI in his analysis of Dasein
because the singularity (Jemeinigkeit) of the being that we are is never
theoretically thematised, it is only disclosed in living. I only ‘know’ the
factic in living the factic (GA63: 5). The task for the hermeneutician of
facticity is to find a way of using language that allows the fore-
theoretical intelligibility of historical life, what Heidegger calls “primal
understanding”, to show itself. We will not abstract from our historical
existence, quite the reverse. We must reach for a language that expresses
the factic or better, a language that is so intimately bound up with the
factic that it brings it to appearance through the mediation of a sign.
Where Husserl struggles to arrive at a language transparent enough to
serve as a lexicon of universals for his community of phenomenologists,
who formalise common human experiences, while Heidegger frustrates
the anticipation of common meaning and thrusts his hearers back upon
themselves, demanding that they apply the expressions to their lives and
thus enact their meanings in singular, unprecedented, and ultimately un-
shareable ways. Husserl invites the thinker to abstract from the
haecceity of existence and participate in a communion of meaning,
Heidegger forbids any such self-abstraction, driving the thinker back
into the factical. In Husserl, the phenomenological analysis downplays
difference and highlights sameness in order to unite the community of
researchers; in Heidegger, the phenomenological analysis, while not
Formal Indication, Irony, and the Risk of Saying Nothing 199
4.
Speaking in order not to say anything or to say something other than what one
thinks, speaking in such a way as to intrigue, disconcert, question, or have
someone or something else speak […] means speaking ironically. Irony, in
particular Socratic irony, consists of not saying anything, declaring that one
doesn’t have any knowledge of something, but doing that in order to
interrogate, to have someone or something […] speak or think. Eironeia
dissimulates, it is the act of questioning by feigning ignorance, by pretending
(Derrida 1995: 76).
learned reader missed that the didactic tone is a pretense, a joke: the text
is saying something entirely non-didactic in a didactic way. Philosophy
is preaching the Gospel, but under the pretext of exploring the logical
limits of Platonism.28
It is in light of the intrinsic emptiness of FI that we should
interpret the dramatic interruption of Heidegger’s only developed
methodological treatment of FI, the few pages in the 1920 religion
lecture. A residue of this embarrassment has survived the student
transcription and editorial work. Heidegger concludes the first half of
the lecture course, his discussion of methodology, with a bitter remark
to his students, pointing out how little information or product
philosophy has to offer its paying customers, the students:
14
“Categorial intuition” was Husserl’s discovery that the Kantian disjunction between
intuited contents of consciousness (sense data) and spontaneously generated formal
structures (the categories) has no warrant in pure experience. The subjectivism that
assumes that categories, ideas, and expressions are imposed on the given by a
synthesizing consciousness is phenomenologically unjustified. We have no intuition of
raw data. Rather we intuit pre-categorially structured data, which elicits a category. The
categories are not filters that we place upon the data of sensation; they do not constitute
the ‘hard wiring’ of subjectivity. Rather, categories are derivations from a fore-
theoretical structure integral to the given. See Husserl (1970, vol. 2: § 40-48). For
Heidegger’s interpretation of the significance of categorial intuition see GA20 (63-99).
15
Husserl’s “essentially occasional expressions” are the indexicals spoken of in analytic
philosophy, for example, in the work of Richard Montague and David Kaplan.
16
Husserl’s example is “there is cake” (Husserl 1970, vol. 2: § 27).
17
See GA60 (61): “Die Bestimmung biegt sofort ab von der Sachhaltigkeit des
Gegestands”.
18
See GA60 (58-9): “Ich sehe nicht die Wasbetimmtheit aus dem Gegenstand heraus,
sondern ich sehe ihm seine Bestimmtheit gewissermassen ‘an’. Ich muss vom Wasgehalt
wegsehen und nur darauf sehen, dass der Gegenstand ein gegebener, einstellungsmässig
erfasster ist. So entspringt die Formalisierund aus dem Bezugssinn des reinen
Einstellungsbezugs selbst, nicht etwa aus dem ‘wasgehalt ueberhaupt’”.
19
“The formal indication is intended primarily as an advance indication of the relational
sense of the phenomenon, in a negative sense at the same time as a warning! A
phenomenon must be pre-given in such a way that its relational sense is held in
suspense. One must guard against assuming that its relational sense is originally
theoretical. This is a position that opposes the sciences in the extreme. There is no
insertion into a content-domain, rather the opposite: the formal indication is a warding
off, a preliminary protection, so that the enactment character remains free. The necessity
of this precaution lies in the decadent tendency of factical life experience, which forces
us into the objective, from which we must nevertheless draw the phenomena” (GA60:
64).
20
Some record of these studies appear in GA60 under the title ‘Philosophical
Foundations of Medieval Mysticism’ (GA60: 301-337). For the complete file of
Heidegger’s ‘medieval mysticism’ notes, see Kisiel’s contribution to this volume.
21
Aquinas will distinguish analogous names from metaphors, arguing that we can be
certain that some names, such as ‘goodness’, ‘truth’, ‘wisdom’, are less inappropriate
to God than others, even if the ways of signifying these names (the modi significandi)
remain obscure to us. For the created intellect, all ways of signifying are finite, bound
to the experience of creatures. While we know what goodness is in a creature, we cannot
in this life know what it could be in the Creator. Yet we know, because of the analogy
of being (analogia entis), that such names are predicable of God. The res significata is
certain, the modus significandi unknown (ST 1a, q. 13). Hence the theologian can judge
‘that God is good’ without knowing what this claim exactly means. We know what it
means for a meal to be ‘good’, or a friend to be ‘good’, but we do not know what it
means for God to be ‘good’. Hence the highest theological knowledge is achieved by
remotion, removing predicates from the divine.
22
In The Book of Privy Counseling, an anonymous 14th century English monk advises
his disciple to empty his mind of thought and yet, somehow, in this empty state, stretch
his will toward God: “See that nothing remains in your conscious mind save a naked
intent stretching out toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God
Formal Indication, Irony, and the Risk of Saying Nothing 203
(what he is like in himself or in his works) and keep only the simple awareness that he
is as he is […] This awareness, stripped of ideas and deliberately bound and anchored
in faith, shall leave your thought and affection in emptiness except for a naked thought
and blind feeling of your own being […] Go no further, but rest in this naked, stark,
elemental awareness that you are as you are” (Johnston 1973: 149-51).
23
For Eckhart, only the soul who practices detachment (Abgeschiedenheit), who quiets
the appetites, and withdraws the will from the world, experiences God. She becomes like
a pool of still water, which can now reflect the gaze of the One who created her and
holds her forever in His gaze (Eckhart 1986: 289).
24
Cf. Kisiel (2002c: 178): “Deriving expressive concepts from the concrete formations
of life must first proceed by way of negations. For factic life tends to give itself in a
peculiar deformation, that of objectification, which must be cancelled in order to move
from ordering concepts to expressive concepts, from the objectifying pitfalls of intuition
to dynamic yields of pure understanding”.
25
From Heidegger’s review of Karl Jasper’s Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, we
know that Kierkegaard had a major influence on Heidegger’s understanding of formally
indicative method. See GA9 (36): “It must indeed be pointed out that it is not often in
philosophy or theology […] such a height of rigorous consciousness of method has been
achieved”. Beyond this review Heidegger has left us only scattered references to
Kierkegaard.
26
“Because everyone knows the Christian truth, it has gradually become such a triviality
that a primitive impression of it is acquired with difficulty. When this is the case, the art
of being able to communicate eventually becomes the art of being able to take away or
to trick something away from someone […] When a man is very knowledgeable but his
knowledge is meaningless or virtually meaningless to him, does sensible communication
consist in giving him more to know, even if he loudly proclaims that this is what he
needs, or does it consist, instead, in taking something away from him?” (Kierkegaard
1985: xxi).
27
I have borrowed the notion of a meaning that stands ‘in front’ of an expression from
Paul Ricoeur. See Ricoeur (1981).
28
“The report [the review of the Fragments] is didactic, purely and simply didactic;
consequently the reader will receive the impression that the pamphlet is also didactic.
As I see it, this is the most mistaken impression one can have of it. The contrast of form,
the teasing resistance of the imaginary construction to the content, the inventive audacity
(which even invents Christianity), the only attempt made to go further (that is, further
than the so-called speculative constructing), the indefatigable activity of irony, the
parody of speculative thought in the entire plan, the satire in making efforts as if
something ganz Auszerordentliches und zwar Neues were to come of them, whereas
what always emerges is old-fashioned orthodoxy in its rightful severity – of all this the
reader finds no hint in the report” (Kierkegaard 1985: xx-xxi).
204 McGrath
References
Jaromir Brejdak
entire life will be full of you’] – all relations of life, the whole of
facticity becomes permeated by you, enacted in such a way that all
enactment is enacted before you” (GA60: 249). The experience of God
is always endangered by temptation and oblivion. Resentment is a form
of oblivion.
The Heideggerian hierarchy “truth of being/the
Holy/divinity/Gods” (‘Brief über den Humanismus’) does not deny the
importance of experience, but shows the primordial from the perspective
of general genealogy, that which is first, not for us, but in itself. The full
experience of the self (Eigentlichkeit) – so-called authenticity – is a
necessary condition for God’s presence. Forgetting God means
forgetting oneself. The authentic experience of the self is threatened,
and when authentic selfhood (Selbstheit), which is the bursting origin of
life, is forgotten, then God is also forgotten. In the tenth book of the
Confessions Augustine discusses forgetting – oblivio. Its opposite is
memoria. Going further, we can say that the death of God is the death
of authentic Dasein. Therefore the phenomenology of religion is the
fundamental phenomenology of Dasein. In ‘Grundprobleme der
Phänomenologie’ (1919-1920), Heidegger writes: “We must return to a
specific phenomenology of the self. We ask here about last possibilities
of intimacy (Vertrautheit) with oneself (‘vocation’, ‘destiny’
[Schicksal], ‘grace’)” (GA58: 258).
The experience of a living encounter with God is a fundamental
phenomenon for religion. This experience is the primordial irruption of
grace. Its origin lies in experience, but the experience is not its
beginning. Heidegger corrected the interpretation of the phenomenon by
enlarging it in the light of enactment and freeing it from the theoretical
attitude of Husserl’s analyses. Heidegger, whose methodological
consciousness was honed by Husserl, but directed by Kierkegaard,
highlights the maieutical character of phenomenology, which
concentrates on the How of experience and distances itself from the
content-sense (Gehaltssinn). The experience of the self, which is the
motive of true Christianity, remains the main motive of Heidegger’s
early philosophy. The source of intense experience of the self is
Augustine’s Confessions and the oldest letters of St. Paul.
In Sein und Zeit Heidegger inquires whether or not a certain
ontical notion of proper existence, a factual ideal of Dasein, is a root for
the ontological interpretation undertaken with regard to the existence of
Dasein (SZ: 310). He confirms it without further consideration for
ontical examples. Max Scheler misunderstands the factual ideal, because
Philosophia Crucis 211
The life of a man is nothing but a way towards God. I try to attain this goal
without a foundation of theological proofs and methods, namely to reach God
without God. I had to remove God from my scientific existence in order to
pave the way towards God for the people who … do not have the certainty of
faith through the Church. I know that this intention would be dangerous for
myself if I were not a deeply pious man who believes in Christ … precisely my
phenomenology, and only it, is the philosophy which the Church needs
because it is united with Thomism and continues the Thomistic philosophy
(Gerlach 1994: 106).
Thomism and phenomenology pursue the same goal, the search for an
intellectual access to God. But then phenomenology, which was rising
against historicism, was methodologically closer to history than Husserl
was ready to admit. For a phenomenologist does not simply become a
Thomist without sacrificing himself; he must pave a new way always
from his concrete historical situation, from his most intimate contact
with his own experience, in order to make this way accessible for other
people.
It was with exactly this most difficult task, the task of probing
a strictly scientific way towards God, that Husserl entrusted his young
assistant, Martin Heidegger. Yet for Heidegger, it was clear that for the
phenomenologist, “philosophy is atheistic in principle” (PIA: 246). God
is only given in original religious experience. “Crede, ut intelligas: live
your self – and first on this ground of experience, on your last and
fullest self-experience, the insight (Erkennen) builds up” (GA58: 20).
Drawing from the original religious occurrence (Erlebnis),
phenomenology has to master three levels of experience: the
spontaneous comprehension of the appearing phenomenon (ideation),
the suitable formalization of this ideation, and the transfer of the
formalized phenomenon into a logical web of language (the
generalization).
Let us sum up the method of Sein und Zeit in the light of these
moments. Heidegger asks about the sense of being at the beginning of
his investigations. The sense, the toward-which (Woraufhin) of the
primary project means a horizontality (Horizontalität) where the human
Dasein can encounter the world. Hence this question can only be asked
on the basis of the analysis of Dasein. Therefore this question is not
possible without first announcing a formal hermeneutics of facticity.
Because the Dasein was disclosed as enactment, it will be
experienced in its own particular enactment only in an understanding
(Nachvollzug) and that means ‘filled’ with its own content. Heidegger
found the rudiments of this method of a formally indicative
hermeneutics in the unique structure of the Pauline proclamation. In
order to grasp Dasein in its wholeness, one must participate in the
understanding of individual ways of being from everydayness up to the
214 Brejdak
3. Philosophia Crucis
The open resolution as the proper self-enactment proves that the ways
of givenness (Gegebenheit) of the authentic self – anxiety, conscience,
death – have a common denominator: transcendence, nothingness. The
open resolution reveals the corner stone of the self as nothingness. But
do we not have to say something contrary, that nothingness reveals us
as a radical openness, that is, as the open resolution? The philosophia
crucis is an occurrence whose beginning is the expected death and
whose other side is birth. A philosophy which wants to think the end-
things must become a philosophy of the cross in a twofold sense,
methodological and existential. Its method should be “ways, not works”.
It must lead to a hermeneutics of facticity, as Paul had demonstrated it.
The self-enactment must not perish under an accumulation of content,
Philosophia Crucis 217
References
Graeme Nicholson
invites them to share in his torments and his joys. Heidegger’s own text
is certainly not apocalyptic in tone, but he wants to learn something
about time from Paul’s apocalypticism.
Paul’s existence is lived in relation to Christ. Heidegger’s
philosophical interpretation of that experience leads him to focus on
something that is usually overlooked in a devotional or theological
reading of Paul. In Paul’s own vocation as a prophet and apostle, he
must live through all his relationships within some definite form of
temporality: his life makes itself temporal in one definite way. This is
a re-direction of attention to the ontological conditions of experience,
attention to something that Heidegger called, at this period, the formal,
the how of life. And in the case of Paul, this re-direction was justified,
according to Heidegger, because time and temporality were evoked in
the religious life: “Christian religiosity lives temporality as such”
(GA60: 80). In itself, a philosophical study of Paul that highlights
temporality need not occlude Paul’s central relationships to Christ and
to God, the Father, and Heidegger does not ignore them here.
Nevertheless, with the passing years, as Heidegger continued his work
on the theme of human temporality in general, the themes of the
apostle’s religion receded more and more into the background. Being
and Time’s thought, though indebted to Paul, cannot be called Christian
in any conventional sense.
Phenomenology as Heidegger presents it is a kind of philosophy
that is able to understand what is singular or individual, not approaching
it through universal concepts – for instance, a type of the “religious”.
The lengthy methodological sections of the lecture (Sections 17 to 23)
show how we can understand a single life, or a single community
(GA60: sections 17-23). The maxim of interpretation is that, since our
early Christians accomplished an understanding of their lives, we can
attempt an analogous comprehending accomplishment. Paul’s own
understanding of his life, and the Thessalonians’s understanding of their
lives, are not achieved through general ideas and concepts but through
lived experience, the very conduct of life, which Heidegger calls an
enacting or accomplishing-understanding (Vollziehen, Vollzug) of life
through the daily practice of faith and works. Witness and proclamation
belong within that religious enactment. Although it is text that we must
study, the text itself is not the object of our understanding, but, through
the text, what Heidegger calls the early Christian experience of life
(Lebenserfahrung). This is not an empiricist notion of experience, as if
the lives of the early Christians were in some way objects of their
The End of Time 221
of the future with the past and the present, and the role of facticity
within the grounds of the possibility of knowledge. There is also here a
close anticipation of being-towards-death. Does Heidegger’s treatment
of Paul’s view of history also anticipate the view of history presented in
Being and Time and some of Heidegger’s later works? Let us look at
Heidegger’s comments on specific texts.
1 Thess. 4:16-17: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of
command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s
trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds
together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with
the Lord for ever”. Life lived in the present age, for Paul and his
congregation, is life after the death and resurrection of Christ. And this
age is governed by the promise of his coming again in glory (parousia).
Paul expects the parousia in his own life-time, a point that already raises
a number of problems. For instance, some members have already died
since Paul’s visit, and more will likely do so soon enough. What will
happen to them at the coming of Christ? The citation above is Paul’s
answer to that question. Heidegger comments on what is novel here:
“The expression ðáñïõóßá has in its conceptual history a sense we do
not intend here; the expression changes its entire conceptual structure,
not only its sense, in the progress of its history. Christian life
experience, different in kind, is evident in ths conceptual transformation.
In classical Greek ðáñïõóßá means arrival (presence); in the Old
Testament (for instance in the Septuaginta ) ‘the arrival of the Lord on
the Day of Judgement’; in late Judaism ‘the arrival of the Messiah as
representative of God’. For the Christian, however, ðáñïõóßá means ‘the
appearing again of the already appeared Messiah’, which, to begin with,
does not lie in the literal expression. With that, however, the entire
structure of the concept is at once changed” (GA60: 102).
Since the one who is to come has already come, the future
parousia is related back to the earlier event. Now it is known who will
come. There is likewise a bond between the earlier event and the second
coming, for the true meaning of the first event will be made manifest in
the second one. And so the existence of Paul and his congregation lies
stretched out between the first and the second coming. The proclamation
of the resurrection initiates the new Christian life, but this life is also
stretched out towards the parousia in awaiting.
This referring of the future backwards and the forward reach of
the past into the future is our first foreshadowing of the mature account
The End of Time 223
know it. It is because they do not need his answer. As we shall see, Paul
tells them that they already know the answer.
To imagine that Paul wishes to supply information, answer
questions or forecast the future would be to mistake the whole point of
his letter-writing. Heidegger stresses that Paul writes his letters as part
of his proclamation (Verkündigung) and that, just as their contents
cannot be understood by a method of distantiation and objectification (a
purely historical method), neither can the character and “form” of
writing be understood according to philological analysis, as if, for
instance, the “epistle” were one genre within the range of possible types
of world-literature (GA60: 81). To grasp the letter as proclamation is to
hear it speaking as an inward accomplishment of Paul himself, and of
his life-experience. “The content proclaimed, and its material and
conceptual character, is then to be analysed from out of the basic
phenomenon of proclamation” (GA60: 81). For that reason, Heidegger
says, in order to accomplish the letter inwardly, “we … see the situation
such that we write the letter along with Paul. We perform the letter-
writing, or its dictation, with him” (GA60: 87). That means to
recapitulate within ourselves Paul’s way of belonging with the
Thessalonians.
The congregation came into being when they received the word
that Paul brought to them. At that point he entered their lives and
became numbered among them as they set out to serve God. Paul knows
that they still preserve the memory both of their former pagan life and
of their conversion. Their new status is constituted by conversion, by
their “having-become” a congregation (Gewordensein). And Heidegger
underlines this point with repetition: “Having-become is not, in life, any
incident you like. Rather, it is incessantly co-experienced, and indeed
such that their Being [Sein] now is their having-become
[Gewordensein]” (GA60: 94). Still, they exist now only in the work of
serving God and awaiting Christ, so that their being is never restful, but
urgently extended, with an openness to a fulfilment.
Here we see a further anticipation of Heidegger’s mature
treatment of human temporality. In Being and Time the present is
constituted by the interplay of pastness (here, having-become) and
forward extendedness (what is later called Vorlaufen, translated as
“anticipation” [SZ: 326-329]). We will call this the ecstatic constitution
of the present. The present is opened up to the future, just as the past is.
This future is a retrieval of the past. In Paul’s letter, the future of the
The End of Time 225
the lived experience of the “now” and can be regarded simply as the
meaning of this “now”. This is in accord with the role of the “relation-
sense” (Bezugssinn) in constituting the “content-sense” (Gehaltssinn)
(GA60: 62).
This entire lecture-course is pervaded by a phenomenological
critique of our inherited views concerning knowledge. Heidegger’s own
method of study – the understanding that achieves inward
accomplishment – is contrasted repeatedly with the philosophy and
social science that subsume the particular beneath the universal
(classifying, for example, Paul’s proclamation as one species of
“religion”). The elaboration of apocalyptic into “eschatology” within
systematic theology has also lost hold of the phenomenon. But this
destruction or critique reaches as well into the life and understanding of
the originals: Paul himself appears as a proto-phenomenologist,
imploring the Thessalonians to stop asking inappropriate questions, stop
supposing that the parousia is essentially some future event whose date
we would like to know. This knowing arises only out of the total
situation of the Christian experience of life. Paul’s own life, lived
through in facticity, is to be the emblem of the life experience of his
congregation.
All this appears in modified form in Being and Time. The
principle of facticity is central to the constitution of the being of Dasein,
and, through its special reference to pastness, is an element in the
constitution of temporality. A second point that anticipates Being and
Time is the phenomenological destruction or critique of the views about
knowledge that are commonplace in modern philosophy (SZ: 68-69).
Furthermore, both in these lectures and in Being and Time, the account
of the temporality of human existence is intimately tied up with that
phenomenological critique of epistemology. In the lectures, Heidegger
is bringing out a form of temporality that is fused with the stretching and
reaching-out that belong to the experience of life. This is something
quite different from any representation of a sequence of now-points, in
which a future event can be pinpointed according to its “when”. Paul is
working to free the Thessalonians from commonplace ideas about time.
The future parousia is implicit in the Thessalonians’s own outward
stretch of faith, their inward accomplishment. In Being and Time, the
principal burden of the second division is the doctrine of an existential
temporality in which futural ecstasis and past ecstasis are constitutive
of the present. This temporality is explicitly distinguished from the
The End of Time 227
the Lord’, that is, ‘day of the ðáñïõóßá’. This then is the kind and mode
of Paul’s answer. Through this (“let us keep awake”) we see: the
question of the “When” leads back to my comportment. How the
ðáñïõóßá stands in my life, that refers back to the enactment of life
itself” (GA60: 104).
The essential issue raised in these remarks is the relationship of
the coming parousia to the present life of the Thessalonians. How does
Heidegger understand these counsels of Paul? He is emphasizing the
forward tie of this congregation to the great coming event, and likewise
the backward tie of that event to them. If the future is tied back to them,
it is made dependent on them. But in this context it is not as if a human
posture or behaviour (e.g., faith) were made into a sufficient cause or
condition for that which is to come about in the future. After all, the
parousia is ordained by God. What is the relationship, then, that the
Thessalonians have to the future? First, there is that which is ordained
and is to be. And yet this event radiates backwards into the present: it
solicits faith from the present congregation, and makes itself dependent
upon them. The Thessalonians are needed in the agenda of God. The
content-meaning of the parousia is connected to them in such a way that
the meaning of it is equally a Bezugssinn, highlighted because a
relational sense, a meaning that claims the believers and is completed
only through the relationship that they have to it. Thus Paul’s criticism
of the lazy Thessalonians is not only that they believe the coming event
to have already occurred, but more than that, that it has nothing
particularly to do with them. They mistake it for an entirely pre-
determined drama, thereby cutting themselves out of the story.
Why would this idea serve to augment the anxiety of the
believers, to the point that it threatened to turn into despair? This needs
some further explanation. If the consequences of my own weakness
were that I should be annihilated and lost, my decisions would certainly
be made in fear and trembling. But if it were my fate in history to be
required for the purposes of God, or indeed even for the goals of history,
the gravity would be infinitely augmented. Thus we can understand the
words of encouragement and challenge which follow upon that account:
“So then, let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be
sober” (1 Thess. 5:6).
There looms before us here a huge and dangerous curve in the
argument. I will point to it, but it is one that I cannot negotiate in this
paper: the curve is the transition from the problem of human temporality
The End of Time 231
to that of history. The tale told in Paul’s letters did not have to do
mainly with the solitary individual in confrontation with death. It had to
do with the end of the world, the end of the age (aiôn, olam), that is, the
end of history, the end of time. Paul’s perspective is that of a macro-
history for which the antecedent events were not only the coming of
Christ, but also the creation of the world. In the treatment of temporality
that we have looked at so far, Heidegger turns to the subject of death,
but, in contrast to Paul’s perspective, this is a micro-history, the death
of a single human being. Could Heidegger proceed in some way from
the temporality of existence to a comparable macro-history? I believe
that it was his intention to do so, for another thesis of Being and Time
is that it is through human temporality that we are able to comprehend
time itself. There are several dimensions to such a comprehension.
Heidegger must consider everyday pragmatic phenomena such as the use
of clocks and calendars; he must deal with language and the signifiers
of time that it encodes, e.g., the tenses of verbs, and he must examine the
role of time in physics. He seeks to show that human history is a
superstructure that can be comprehended from human temporality.
These investigations of time were intended to lead us deeper into the
question of being. Certainly he could never bring his treatment of either
theme to any completion, but in his later work I do detect a recurrent
theme of the end of history and the end of time, encapsulated in the
mysterious idea that he called Ereignis. Because of some of the ocular
overtones of that word, I would hazard to suggest that one of its
meanings is Apocalypse.
1
William Blattner argues that there cannot be any explanation of the ecstatic structure
of temporality other than the psychological one that I am speaking of here. See Blattner
(1996).
2
Paul himself never uses the term “Anti-Christ”. In the New Testament, the term is used
only in the Johannine letters.
Reference
Gerhard Ruff
The empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along is the
understanding intuition, the hermeneutical intuition, the originary
phenomenological back-and-forth formation of the recepts and precepts from
which all theoretical objectification, indeed every transcendent positing, fall[s]
out. Universality of word meaning primarily indicates something originary:
worldliness of experienced experiencing (GA56/57: 117).
could ever explain the self if the latter did not express itself. Heidegger
develops a tripartite meaning of explication according to his tripartite
understanding of “world”. Content-sense (Gehaltssinn) provides the
material meaning of something in the surrounding-world (Umwelt);
relational-sense (Bezugssinn) refers to the interdependent meanings
active in with-world [active within the communal world] [(Mitwelt)];
while performative-sense (Vollzugssinn) references the inner word
(verbum internum) of meaning as it is enacted in factical historical life
(GA60: 63).1 A hermeneutics that focuses solely on content-sense is
merely an aesthetic technique. Hermeneutical thinking in a
phenomenological sense must be attentive to all three modes of the basic
phenomenon, and thus break through the text into the vital explication
of the inner possibilities of the self.
The 1920-21 Religion lecture represents the culmination of
Heidegger’s innovations in phenomenological methodology. His
examination of Christian life is entirely motivated by his search for a
new way of thinking the question of history. We should keep in mind
that Heidegger never attempts a phenomenology of intercultural
religious phenomena. Religion, to him, means his own religious
facticity, the only one he has been given to explain: Christianity. The
first part of the lecture surveys traditional approaches to religious
phenomena and culminates in Heidegger’s central methodological
concept: formal indication. Only a properly formal description will lead
to a hermeneutical understanding. Phenomenology should be an original
consideration of the “formal” itself, according to content, relation, and
performance. Heidegger insists on philosophy as an “Einstellung”, an
attitude, comportment, or way of approach. The first challenge for
phenomenological research, therefore, is to find the adequate
“Einstellung”, “an advance understanding for an original way of
access” (GA60: 67). Heidegger begins with the earliest historical
personage associated with Christianity who gave witness to his life in
letters from his own hand: Paul. Much has been written about the
influence of Protestant theology, and Luther in particular, on
Heidegger’s early thought. Heidegger himself claims that there is a link
between Protestantism and Paul. But an original access to historical
consciousness is not a confessional matter, from Heidegger’s point of
view; rather, it has to be taken up from factical life. Heidegger is
attempting a performative phenomenology, one that overcomes
methodological considerations by means of hermeneutics. The
Present History 237
References
factical life experience will be a matter, not for philosophy in its usual
methods, but for phenomenological investigation in particular. While
Heidegger does not maintain the language of “self”, continuity between
this and the later position is suggested by a common structure of
relational meaning.
How is factical life experience foundational for the notion of
“world”? Just as factical life experience cannot be regarded as an object
of scientific inquiry, world is not the object of the experiencing self
within factical life. Heidegger aims to indicate a far richer and more
nuanced nexus of relations within factical life toward world which, as
in his later poetic theory, will not be reducible to cognition. For “life
experience is more than mere experience which takes cognizance of. It
designates the whole active and passive pose of the human being toward
the world”. Returning to the notion that factical life is essentially
expressed in the inseparability between experiencing self and the
content of experience, Heidegger now defines “world” as “what is lived
as experience” (das Erlebte). It is decidedly not an object but “that in
which one can live (one cannot live in an object)”. The world is not an
object of cognition, and thus philosophy, understood originally, is not
going to be a study of world-views, or of the world as cognized (GA60:
10). Heidegger will formulate again in the 1923 ‘Ontologie’ lecture-
course that world is the “wherefrom, out of which, and on the basis of
which factical life is lived” (GA63: 86). If world is to be understood, it
cannot be reified according to the demands of ordinary philosophical
cognition; rather, it can only be formally articulated in its structures,
characterizing that toward which the active and passive poses are taken,
keeping in mind the essential inseparability of what is experienced from
experiencing. World is centred in a “how” of Being (GA63: 86). In these
early writings world already manifests aspects which will be taken up
in the poetic theory. For world, as treated above, appears in ‘Der
Ursprung der Kunstwerkes’ in first involving concern, as in these early
writings; then in terms of the further articulation of a native sphere
(Wesensraum) of belonging; as having an event-character; and a verbal
quality of clearing, of bringing into illumination, which is also related
to the uncanniness or distress of the human being as one who
participates in this clearing. The first pair of aspects of world will be
discussed in this subsection; the second pair in the next. The first of
these aspects, concern, is formulated in ‘Introduction to the
Phenomenology of Religion’ in terms of these active and passive poses
The Poetics of World 249
Not only in Sein und Zeit but earlier, for instance in the ‘Ontologie’
lecture-course, the natural substrate of things seems to be displaced in
favor of concernful dealing. In order to evade the scientific-
epistemological reduction of the thing to the status of object, Heidegger
emphasizes its relational significance to human concerns. In this sense,
any “life” that can be attributed to non-human beings – their organic
basis – is overlooked in the formulation of life as a tendency toward
worldliness.12 To account for world as disclosive tension implies the
necessity of addressing that which resists disclosure. Yet while it is
doubtful whether Heidegger’s concept of “life”, with its countering
tendencies, adequately accounts for the latter, there is certainly the
template here of the structure of unconcealment that will later emerge
as the tension between world and earth. While in ‘Der Ursprung der
Kunstwerkes’, as discussed in the first section of this essay, world is
presented as in tension with earth, only in the much later notion of the
fourfold, albeit with its attendant mysticism, does Heidegger begin to
formulate this concernful significance as relation to the non-worldly,
earthly, origins of beings in a way which also cultivates a reverence for
the holy, in the Hölderlinian sense of the word. Whether authentic
temporality as Heidegger argues was lived by the early Christians could
be at all compatible with such is probably beside the point, since one
would not also look to a Hölderlinian model of kairological time to find
real solutions to the technological crisis his poetry is said to have
foreshadowed at the deepest ontological level, although one might be
inspired by its sense of urgency.
While the poetics of world in Heidegger’s later thought thus
profits from the development of the concept of earth, Heidegger leaves
behind some rich insights that might have been useful for his later
thinking. These include not only the idea of the formal indication, which
would give some methodological clarity to readers of his meditations
upon poetic language, but more substantially, but also the notion of a
“self-world” in its authentic relation to the how of factical life
experience. In Heidegger’s poetics of world, the notion of poetic
dwelling, and in general his readings of what he very hesitatingly refers
to as poetic experience, any real account of the self of poetic language
is lacking, given the vigour of Heidegger’s aim to overcome the
metaphysics of subjectivity. While the emphasis on self-world and even
on the self’s experience is severely diminished in the later Heidegger,
it is possible that the notion of poetic dwelling as enactmental
260 Gosetti-Ferencei
References
Bernstein, Jay M. 1992. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant
to Derrida and Adorno. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press.
Corngold, Stanley. 1994. The Fate of the Self: German Writers and
French Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1994. ‘Martin Heidegger’s One Path’ in Kisiel
(1994): 19-34.
Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. 2004. Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the
Subject of Poetic Language. New York: Fordham University
Press.
262 Gosetti-Ferencei
Daniel Dahlstrom
in his lectures. The notion of life as a trial “everyday […] without any
interruption” (cotidie […] sine cessatione) is, he asserts, “the basic
sense of experience of the self as historical” (GA60: 263; Conf. 10. 37).
Heidegger accordingly cites with particular approval Augustine’s
observation that “a human being does not know himself unless he finds
out about himself in temptation”.3
Heidegger thus focuses on a non-theoretical way of knowing
yielded by historical experience – not just any historical experience, to
be sure, but the sort that Augustine himself calls temptation. In the
experience of temptation sans répit, we experience ourselves making
and remaking choices. In this way the problem of temptation provides
the context of enacting my experience of myself. Heidegger accordingly
infers that “we come to the basic sense of the experience of the self as
an historical experience” by approaching it from the standpoint of the
problem of this trial (GA60: 280). Cognizant that his own glosses might
suggest an objective characterization, he insists that it is of decisive
importance to approach the problem from the outset in accordance with
this basic sense of historical experience as a trial – something that, in his
opinion, Augustine did not always manage to do (GA60: 230f).
But why does life take the form of a relentless trial? For
Augustine the key to an answer lies in his relationship to God, the Ipsa
Veritas to whom he is making this confession. Aiming to confess only
what he knows of himself, he notes that he is at least certain that he
loves God and that when he seeks God, he seeks a blessed life, even
though it remains unclear how it found its way into his memory. At issue
is how, without “having” had a blessed life, we have sufficient
acquaintance with it to seek it (Conf. 10. 20). Augustine then
immediately and repeatedly identifies this blessed life with a “joy about
truth” (gaudium de veritate). The identification is important because it
helps explain why this truth is, nevertheless, not enjoyed. “The authentic
truth is not loved” because people become immersed in surrogate loves
that are themselves mistakenly construed as the truth, as “providing
fulfilment for the concern for truth” (GA60: 199f).4
“Hoc quod amant velint esse veritatem” [what they love they want to be the
truth] – what is loved at the moment, a loving into which one grows through
tradition, fashion, convenience, the anxiety of disquiet, the anxiety of suddenly
standing in vacuity; precisely this becomes the “truth” itself, in and with this
process of falling. The truth and its meaning are taken even into this
modification – that is, one does not only retreat from the vacuity, but even
more, and primarily, from the “movement” toward it (GA60: 200).
266 Dahlstrom
world’s wonders” and the realistic “theologian of the cross who says
how things are” (GA60: 282).
Heidegger traces this impediment to the tradition that Augustine
inherits. Yet he also guards against equating the Augustinian approach
with the Greek. While stressing that this aesthetic feature is “the
specifically Greek conception” at work in medieval theology and
cultural history, he sharply distinguishes Augustine’s sense of this
fruitio, rooted as it is in the peculiarly Christian conception of factual
life, from the Plotininan notion that culminates in an intuition. Here we
find a common refrain of Heidegger’s reading of Augustine’s
Confessions: a respect for its distinctively Christian, existential
character, not identifiable with anything in the classical Greek
philosophical tradition, and yet criticism for the way Augustine allows
himself to be co-opted by Greek thought (GA60: 261, 279, 298).11
Indeed, shortly after warning against conflating Augustine’s sense of
fruitio with the Plotinian sense, Heidegger flags the danger of erring on
the other side: “One cannot simply dismiss the Platonic in Augustine;
and it is a misunderstanding to believe that in going back to Augustine,
one can gain the authentically Christian” (GA60: 281).
Signaling this Greek influence and, like aesthetics, evidencing
a fundamental kinship with theorizing, is the axiological character that
repeatedly intrudes on Augustine’s Confessions. That a specific order
of things underlies Augustine’s account of the phenomenon of
temptation is evident from a passage cited by Heidegger:
Know the order, seek the peace. You under God, the flesh under you. What is
more suitable? What is more lovely? That you are under the greater and the
lesser is under you. You serve Him who made you so that what was made on
account of you may serve you (in Psalm. 143. 6).
Thus, we belong to God, the more valuable, but the flesh, the less
valuable, belongs to us. After commenting that what matters here is not
only the relation to God, but the way in which the order unfolds,
Heidegger observes:
The absolute love of God and oneself in believing is, as Heidegger puts
it, “authentic existence”. However, the absoluteness of this manner of
being is not to be reduced to universal, law-governed being, but is
instead “the individual’s radical, concrete, historical being”. Heidegger
then adds that “orientation to the axiologized summum bonum and so
forth makes the entire comportment to a quasi-aestheticism in yet
another sense: not only as attitude, but as delectatio” (GA60: 260; 278f).
Once again Heidegger links axiologizing with the distance and
interruption demanded not only of an attitude, a Husserlian stoppage of
play, as it were, that is the hallmark of theorizing, but also with a certain
kind of delight taken in things, the sort of delight typical of the aesthete.
These ways of behaving are not directed at the self as such, though each
implicates a distinctive way of being oneself and a distinctive sort of
shared world or intersubjectivity. In both temptations the self is swept
up, i.e., into dealing with things (Umgehen: a practical dimension with
an aesthetic proclivity) and into looking around (Sichumsehen: a
theoretical dimension). In both temptations the self is “lived by the
world” and, indeed, most intensely if the self thinks that it is living
authentically. In a state of curiosity, one is neither immersed in the
world as when one lusts, nor self-possessed; in fact, as Heidegger puts
it, the self in curiosity “is at bottom ‘not here’ [nicht ‘da ist’]” (GA60:
228). By contrast, in pride, the primary focus is one’s self and one’s
self-importance. The finis delectationis is one’s own significance
(Eigenbedeutsamkeit), but it is a significance that depends on the
opinions of others. Or at least it is a significance that depends on what
one thinks other’s opinions should be, when the love of praise is
explicitly suppressed yet sufficiently internalized that one takes credit
for what is God’s doing (sibi placentas […] de bonis tuis quasi suis).
Thus, while others serve as objects in facilitating our desires to immerse
ourselves lustfully or curiously in the world, they do not fade into the
objective landscape when it comes to pride, the validation of one’s self
in intersubjective contexts. The desire to be feared and loved can
express “a certain inner vehemence of existence”, but more often it is
motivated by “cowardly weakness and insecurity”, by a need to lean on
others and be allowed to accompany them, a “prophylactic against
confrontation” (GA60: 229). “In yielding to this temptation”, Heidegger
continues, “the self gets lost […] in a manner completely its own”. 16
Heidegger’s gloss on Augustine’s account of pride emphasizes
pride’s dependence on a shared world and, as a result, the false
preeminence attached by pride to the self-world. One pivotal
phenomenon revealed in the confession of this temptation, and later
occupying a prominent position in existential analysis, is human
discursiveness. Heidegger links Augustine’s account of pride as a desire
to be feared and loved with his observation that “our daily furnace is the
human tongue”, a play on Proverbs 27: 21: “As gold is probed in the
furnace, so a human being is probed in the mouth of praise” (Conf. 10.
37). In other words, the real test of the temptation of pride comes
through the ways that we concretely and daily talk to one another. It is
certainly worth pondering what relevance, if any, this connection
between pride and discursiveness has for Heidegger’s analysis of talk
276 Dahlstrom
in the praise that he receives from others than in the God-given gifts for
which he is praised.
Toward the end of Book 10 Augustine speaks of “the most
dangerous temptation”, stemming from love of praise (temptatio
periculosissima ab amore laudis). The danger is excessive due to the
insidious potency of pride, its ever-present capacity to pervert even the
noblest pursuit. The pursuit and attainment of a certain goodness are a
duty, but also praiseworthy, and, as a result, the danger always presents
itself of delighting in the praise rather than the good that is praised. As
Augustine notes, we can even find ourselves taking pride in condemning
pride (a sure sign that we do not really condemn it), so insidious and
perverse is this temptation (Conf. 10. 38). Indeed, it is, in Heidegger’s
words, that which is genuinely “satanical” about this temptation: “In the
ultimate and most decisive and purest concern for oneself lurks the
possibility of the most abysmal plunge and the genuine loss of oneself”
(GA60: 240). Further exacerbating the call for continentia when it
comes to pride is the difficulty of determining whether we genuinely
possess the self-restraint called for. In the case of lust or curiosity, how
continent I am becomes apparent “when I lack these things either
willfully or when they are absent. For then I ask myself how much more
or less difficult [molestum] it is for me not to have them” (Conf. 10. 37).
But since praise accompanies good works in one way or another, there
is no way to experience the absence of praise (even if praise of one’s
self), short of abandoning a good life itself.
Augustine’s self-analysis in this regard includes an admission
that praise increases the joy that he has in any good that he possesses.
He offers love of neighbor (iustitia), i.e., rejoicing in his neighbor’s
competence, as a possible excuse. Yet he remains unsure since he could
be rejoicing merely in his neighbor’s agreement with him, and since
qualities that he finds pleasing are even more pleasing to him if they
please others as well. Moreover, if his neighbor’s praise is supposed to
move him because of the good that it reveals about his neighbor, why,
he asks, is he less moved when someone else is unjustly censured than
when he is? Speaking for Augustine at the conclusion of this tortured
self-analysis, Heidegger writes: “I am no longer certain about myself
and fall prey to the intersubjective world [verfalle der Mitwelt]” (GA60:
236). He characterizes Augustine’s search for an excuse as an attempt
to escape responsibility for “falling”.
278 Dahlstrom
5. Conclusion
solus ipse, of Dasein being utterly thrown back upon itself is meant to
capture the necessity of this solitude and the facticity of being-here
revealed in it.
for Augustine, in God’s grace and the prospect of a beata vita. The truth
for Heidegger is not something fully present and integral, but instead
something saturated by the fallenness of factical existence and the
absence of completeness and authenticity. Whereas Divine Truth gives
us the continentia in temptation, existential truth is the temptation itself,
and the resoluteness required to grasp this existential truth is grounded
in a radical self-possession.
1
Not coincidentally, that same attitude supposes, together with this ordered context, a
chronology in which time functions as a specific object (an age) and a region for
determining different matters (GA60: 168, 246f). In what amounts to a criticism of the
alleged replacement of a bracketed natural attitude with the phenomenological attitude,
Heidegger links a theory to an attitude (Einstellung) throughout the lectures. “To what
extent is a human downfall (Abfall) construed objectively, corroboratively, normatively
(by way of theorizing, in an attitude)? To what extent is it factually, in terms of oneself,
existentielly, by way of the act itself” (GA60: 259)? Heidegger introduces existentials
as explications of a sense originating in existence and, as such, as hermeneutic
categories in contrast to categories that classify in keeping with an attitude
(einstellungshafte Ordnungskategorien). See GA60 (232).
2
The very title of the lectures (‘Augustine and Neo-Platonism’) belies, Heidegger
acknowledges, his efforts to differentiate his reading from interpretations that would
situate and explain Augustine in terms of an objective historical order. The title
suggests, not only the question of the neo-Platonic influence on Augustine, but also a
version of the problem of the relationship between Hellenism and Christianity.
Heidegger explains that the title merely signals a point of departure, and that the aim is
to work through this context to establish “certain decisive phenomena that decisively
determined themselves in the situation historically consummated at that time and that
in this determination still ‘carry’ us” (GA60: 171). Similarly, he observes at a later point
that the interpretation is not theological but phenomenological and, indeed, historically
phenomenological, not scientifically theoretical (GA60: 210). Yet Heidegger says little
to clarify or justify these qualifications and it is fairly easy to read the two qualifications
as inconsistent, e.g., where the historical interpretation implies the theological (the
factical illumination or revelation), or where the bracketing of the theological for the
sake of the phenomenological necessarily introduces the distance of a theoretical
attitude.
3
See Serm. (2. 3. 3):“ Nescit se homo, nisi in tentatione discat se”; Tract. Jo. (46. 10): “In
tentatione apparet, qualis sit homo”.
4
See Conf. (10. 23): “Beata quippe vita est gaudium de veritate. Hoc est enim gaudium
de te, qui veritas es, deus, illuminatio mea, salus faciei meae, deus meus”.
5
Heidegger places Abfall in apposition to Verfall. See GA60 (272). See also GA60 (211
n. 2).
6
Heidegger places molestia in direct apposition to facticity. See GA60 (210).
7
On Heidegger’s reading, Augustine is drawing a contrast between authenticity and
inauthenticity, framed by the opposition, not so much of the one and the many, as of the
centred and de-centred. An obvious semblance of this contrast and its particular framing
resurfaces in Being and Time as Heidegger distinguishes an authentic self from a self
Truth and Temptation 283
lost to the crowd (SZ: 273). But there is an equally patent expression of its neo-Platonic
resonance in Heidegger’s remark: “Alles ‘Entspringen’ im ontologischen Felde ist
Degeneration” (SZ: 334). Moreover, in Being and Time resoluteness (Entschlossenheit)
appears to take the place of continentia. “Resoluteness means letting-oneself-be-called-
up from the state of being lost to the crowd” (SZ: 299; see, too, SZ: 296, 272f.; 296-
301). However, to the extent that the analysis of resoluteness in Being and Time appears
to exclude any relation to God and any role for grace, we are left to contemplate its
capacity to replace or appropriate the significance of continence in the Augustinian
scheme of things.
8
“The experience of God in Augustine’s sense is not to be found in an isolated act or in
a certain moment of such an act, but in an experiential complex of the historical facticity
of one’s own life. This facticity is what is authentically original” (GA60: 294).
9
One can sympathize with Dreyfus’s attempt to clarify Heidegger’s “confusion” by
distinguishing “falling” from “fleeing” (or a structural from a psychological account of
fallenness). Yet the analysis of temptation suggests that these alternatives ought not be
construed as forming a disjunctive dilemma. We are naturally disposed to flee anxiety,
and this flight is of a piece with our fallen state. That is to say, first, that we are not only
prone by our very make-up to undertake practices that deflect us from the anxiousness
of our existence but also, at any point, to find ourselves already “falling” into them;
second, that while we may indeed decide to flee anxiety, the flight is something that
need not take the form of a deliberate decision; and, third, the extent to which we can
manage to decide to do something about anxiety, resolutely or not, is limited and
tenuous. So, too, a resolute individual, far from removing the possibility of anxiety or
the flight from it, supposes them both, as long as he or she lives. See Dreyfus (1991:
226, 336).
10
Heidegger notes the link between the constancy of expectation (Erwartung) and the
“dominating direction of the delectatio on which everything depends” (GA60: 275).
11
Heidegger glosses Augustine’s De musica as stemming from “the neo-Platonic
aesthetics” (GA60: 286). See, too, the reference to the “Greek-Christian” character of
“Augustinian anthropology”(SZ: 199 n. 1).
12
According to Becker’s transcript (GA60: 281), the problem is deciding the extent to
which the basic orientation “in a specific axiological system” is the result of Augustine’s
own experience, and the extent to which it is determined by his historical situation.
13
See also GA60 (292, 259f, 281, 291f). Heidegger notes that the love meant here is not
sensual love (amor), but dilectio, referring to something higher.
14
See Collingwood (1958: 85).
15
On possible connections between curiosity and theorizing, see Dahlstrom (2001: 351-
355).
16
It bears noting that Augustine does not equate the desire to be feared and loved with
the temptation of pride. There is a way of fearing chastely and loving maximally, each
directed at the summum bonum, but the care to do so is waylaid by pride, the care to
please others (GA60: 235). Heidegger’s discussion of genuine love anticipates his
account of authentic Mitsein (GA60: 292). See, also, his gloss on timor castus (GA60:
293-297; SZ: 190 n. 1).
17
Heidegger’s call for a life-affirming, loving stance militates against the charge that his
existential analysis is overdetermined by a gnostic-Pietist interiority that paves the way
for the Seiendesvergessenheit, the ontic obtuseness and lack of existentiell criteria that
might seem to plague that analysis.
284 Dahlstrom
18
Heidegger in fact characterizes objects of curiosity as vorhanden. See (GA60: 225).
19
See in Psalm. 7. 5. 10: “Finis enim curae delectatio est”. See GA60 (224, 232-234).
20
The trial that preoccupies care is, moreover, a permanent tension between authentic
and inauthentic ways of existing, that is to say, ways of living in which someone does
or does not come to herself (GA60: 236f). These formulations are echoed in the opening
paragraphs of Heidegger’s treatment of fallenness in Being and Time, as he observes that
“being-here has always already first fallen away from itself as authentic potential-to-be-
itself and fallen prey to the ‘world’. The fallenness to the ‘world’ means the absorption
in being-with-one-another, insofar as this is conducted by palaver, curiosity, and
ambiguity” (SZ: 175).
21
See also SZ (254f).
References
Costantino Esposito
contexts and determinations – e.g., beata vita [the happy life] – shatters the
framework and the structure of the usual concept (GA60: 182).
Now, oblivio is relational, a fact which we have not yet considered: not having
present to oneself – something which had been present to oneself and which
should be present now – as presently not having something at one’s disposal
– as the absence of memoria. Located in the relational sense, this being absent
is grasped – and, indeed, enactmentally – as non-presence in the
aforementioned sense of the not-being-praesto [present] – but for this, the
being-absent has to be itself seen. The antinomy stems from this: if memoria
is present – representation to myself – then oblivio cannot be present, and vice
versa. If the latter is present, then I cannot represent something to myself; in
terms of content, it itself is not present (GA60: 188).
But even if we admit that only the image of the representation were present,
it must still itself be present for me to get the image. But how can that be,
since precisely the forgetting, according to its sense, extinguishes that which
was to become available as notatum [known]? “Et tamen […] ipsam
oblivionem [the having-forgotten] meminisse me certus sum, qua id quod
meminerimus [what we want to represent to ourselves] obruitur”. And yet […]
I am certain that I remember forgetfulness itself [the having-forgotten], by
which what we remember [what we want to represent to ourselves] is
concealed (GA60: 189).
moves toward some place, or the one in whom the search takes place; but the
enactment of the search itself is something of the self (GA60: 192).
And yet what do I search for when I search for God? “For when I seek
you, my God, I seek the happy life. I will seek you that my soul may
live” (GA60: 193) (Cum enim te, Deum meum, quaero, vitam beatam
quaero. Quaeram te, ut vivat anima mea) (Conf.: 10. 20. 29). Searching
for God means searching for life, and searching for life means having a
Bekümmerung um Leben, a “concern for life” or “unrest in living”, the
unrest that is living (GA60: 193). So, if searching for God implies the
way in which life has already had Him – in being sought – then how
does one “have” beata vita, in what way has the “I” already had this
life? If the “I” did not already have it (beata vita) in some way, then it
could not even desire it. “The happy life we have in our knowledge, and
so we love it, and yet we desire to attain it so that we may be happy”
(GA60: 194) (Vitam vero beatam habemus in notitia ideoque amamus
et tamen adhuc adipisci eam volumus, ut beati simus) (Conf. 10. 21. 30).
Indeed, we would not desire something so ardently if we did not know
it with certainty (Quod nisi certa notitia nossemus, non tam certa
voluntate vellemus) (Conf.: 10. 21. 31).
The notitia in question here is not merely sensible [aware or
sensuous], nor is it merely intellectual; rather, it has to do in some way
(fortasse ita) with the experience of delight (gaudium) (Expertus sum in
animo meo, quando laetatus sum, et adhaesit eius notitia memoriae
meae) (Conf. 10. 21. 30). It is through experiencing a joy in my soul that
my cognition of it is impressed in my memory.
Here Heidegger reveals a significant shift in the dynamic of
experiencing, since in this case experience would no longer be identified
with a specific content (what is experienced at a certain point in time),
but rather with the self that becomes expertus, and, more precisely, with
the self that experiences delight. The shift would come about in the
experience itself of delight, which is no longer to be taken as a content,
but as a mode, the “how” of enacting the life of the “I”. The question
“What is delight?” is enacted in the question of how it is had by the self.
And it is precisely in this “situation of enactment” (Vollzugssituation)
that “authentic existence” (eigentliche Existenz) manifests itself as a
“radical reference to the self, authentic facticity” (GA60: 195, 196).
Thus, having the beata vita as self-enactment is for everyone,
without exception, at least not wanting to be deceived, and, more
292 Esposito
radically, the delight or pleasure that truth brings: Beata quippe vita est
gaudium de veritate. Hoc est enim gaudium de te, qui veritas es (Conf.
10. 23. 33).6
Heidegger here emphasizes that truth (and the light with which
it illuminates the self) is not to be taken in a “metaphysical” (i.e. Greek)
sense, but in an “existential” sense. Rather than indicating a reified
property, or attribute, truth constitutes a life tendency or direction, as
Augustine testifies in describing that “direction of falling” or “decline”
– almost an existential gravitational force, as Heidegger would suggest
in his course on Aristotle the following semester – which consists in
hating truth (God) in the name of what one falsely believes to be true:
Itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant.
Amant eam lucentem, oderunt eam redarguentem (Conf. 10. 23. 34).7
Heidegger comments: “they hate it when it presses them forcefully.
When it concerns them themselves, and when it shakes them up and
questions their own facticity and existence” (GA60: 200). And yet even
in this misguided position what is loved is still the truth: “even in this
closing-himself-off against the truth, he loves the truth more than error”
(GA60: 201).
Where the “I” has found a truth, there it has found God. Yet it
is not possible to find God outside memory, extra memoriam, even
though He is not a psychic thing, but the Lord of Memory (Dominus
Deus animi), who remains immutable (incommutabilis) in contrast to the
mutability of states and acts of the soul or mind (Conf. 10. 24. 35,
25.36). God does not dwell in the memory in the sense of an
object-content, but in the sense of the self-enactment of the self: “Where
did I find You, in order to know You, if not in You far above myself”
(Ubi ergo te inveni, ut discerem te, nisi in te supra me) (Conf. 10. 26.
37)? Heidegger comments: “The question where I find God has turned
into a discussion of the conditions of experiencing God, and that comes
to a head in the problem of what I am myself – such that, in the end, the
same question still stands, but in a different form of enactment” (GA60:
204).
When Augustine writes, Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua
et tam nova, Heidegger translates it as follows: “late did I get to the
level of factical life where I put myself in the position to love You”
(Conf. 10. 27. 38; GA60: 204). In this last quotation we may glean a
kind of secret ambivalence (if not a latent, though increasingly evident,
aporia) in Heidegger’s interpretation of Augustine. On the one hand,
Memory and Temptation 293
the other senses as well: Dicimus autem non solum: vide quid luceat,
quod soli oculi sentire possunt, sed etiam: vide quid sonet, vide quid
oleat, vide quid sapiat, vide quantum durum sit (Conf. 10. 35. 54).
Heidegger extends this description and radicalizes it as the objectifying
tendency which accompanies and determines all factical experience.
This line of thought would be taken up again in Being and Time in the
analysis of the falling of being-there, considered in its everydayness, in
which, together with phenomena such as idle talk and ambiguity,
curiosity is a decisive factor.
Curiosity “concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand
what is seen […] but just in order to see” (SZ: 172). Here, too,
Heidegger refers to Book 10 of the Confessions in order to draw from
Augustine’s description of the concupiscence of sight the paradoxical
phenomenon of a seeing in which not only does one not really
understand what one sees in one’s surrounding world (precisely because
one only wants to “see” it), but one is freed from oneself as
being-in-the-world, that is, as being-near the entity that one encounters
in the world and that is (pre)comprehended as “ready-to-hand”
(zuhanden).
We have a final, definitive confirmation of Heidegger’s
interpretative direction in 1921, in his commentary on the third form of
temptation, ambitio saeculi, worldly ambition. Augustine describes this
form in speaking of those who are complacent (qui placent sibi de se)
and thus displease you greatly (multum tibi displicent), since they
consider: (1) what is not good as if it were good (de non bonis quasi
bonis); (2) God’s goods as if they were their own (de bonis tuis quasi
suis); (3) the goods received from God as if received because of
personal merit (sicut de tuis, sed tamquam ex meritis suis); (4) the goods
received by the grace of God as if they were not to be enjoyed by all, but
jealously guarded for themselves (sicut ex tua gratia, non tamen
socialiter gaudentes, sed aliis invidentes eam) (Conf. 10. 39. 64).
Heidegger (re)translates this extreme phenomenon of tentatio,
this worldly ambition, as a mode of enacting the experience
(Erfahrungsvollzug) of being-there. Indeed, the bonum is not to be taken
as an “endowment” (Ausstattung) of the self, something that one
possesses and has to hand, as if it were an objectively present worldly
good, but as existence itself: “Self – as this singular self which I myself
am, and not according to the general What of objective properties as
Memory and Temptation 299
such an object, but the How of ‘am’” (“das Wie des ‘bin’”) (GA60:
238).
In worldly temptation the “self-world”(eigene Selbstwelt) looms
before the self. What represents for Augustine a dramatic
incomprehension of one’s own being, as the loss of being-given and
being-received in complacency, is paradoxically, for Heidegger, the
phenomenologically neutral moment in which the most radical
self-understanding of “I am”, in its stark reference to itself, becomes
possible.8 Ambitio saeculi is thus no longer taken as incompleteness, but
as the full manifestation, indeed the realization, of the self. In
commenting on the second possibility of this temptation – that is,
considering the goods received from God as one’s own, as always
having belonged to and been due to oneself – Heidegger’s profile of
being-there emerges, almost like a watermark: no longer as creation or
generation (hence, relational), but as pure self-reference, absolute
finitude:
“Verum etiam de bonis tuis quasi suis” […] even if genuine insight into the
character of the good exists, and if a genuine good belongs to the self (“being
good”: authentic existing!) – which, as such, can only be from God – it is, to
oneself, taken as self-appropriated, as having been given to the self by itself
(Dasein – existence), having elevated oneself to this position and this level of
existence (GA60: 238-9).
That our possibility of interpretation has its limits, for the problem of confiteri
arises from the consciousness of one’s own sin. The tendency toward vita
beata [the happy life] – not in re [in actuality] but in spe [in hope] – emerges
only from out of the remissio peccatorum [remission of sin], the reconciliation
with God. But we have to leave aside here these phenomena because they are
very difficult and require conditions of understanding that cannot be achieved
in this context. However, in our consideration, which is of the order of
understanding, we will gain what is basic for the access to those phenomena
of sin, grace, etc (GA60: 283).9
However, the consciousness of sin – and the manner in which God is present
in it – stands, in Augustine, in a peculiar interrelation to Neo-Platonism. (For
this reason, his conception of sin cannot […] guide the phenomenological
explication of the “genuine” phenomenon.) (GA60: 283-4)
The most important consequence and, at the same time, condition of this
program is epitomized in the question of grace. That which began as
grace, in the fully historical sense, is identified as physis, though not as
302 Esposito
What must happen as the event [of appropriation] is that which opens being
to us and takes us back to within being, and in this way leads us back to
ourselves and leads us to stand before [the] work and sacrifice. But the
greatest event is always the beginning, that is, the beginning of the last God.
The beginning is what is hidden, the not-yet-profaned and not-yet-utilised
origin, which in withdrawing already draws on the greatest breadth and thus
guards in itself the supreme mastery. This inviolate power, which contains
within itself the soul’s richest possibilities (of the will to event emotionally
accorded in its knowledge) is the only salvation and the only verification […]
Inceptual thought has the appearance of a total distance and futility.
Nevertheless, if we really want to think in terms of usefulness, what is more
useful than salvation in being (GA65: 57-8)?
The salvation of Being and entity is thus not so much a saving from
nihilism as of nihilism itself, as Heidegger would write in his reply to
Ernst Jünger in 1955, stating that “The essence of nihilism is not
Memory and Temptation 305
9
A similar situation presented itself in the lecture course of 1920-21 with regard to the
proto-Christian experience of time, as found in the Pauline concept of kairòs concerning
the second coming of Christ (Thess. 5:2-3): “The Christian is conscious that this
facticity cannot be won out of his own strength, but rather originates from God – the
phenomenon of the effects of grace”(GA60: 121). Yet, on the other hand, in order to
follow to the full the Pauline enactment of life, one must put aside the “object of the
proclamation […] Jesus himself as Messiah” (GA60: 116).
10
Cf. GA61 (197); GA9 (66).
11
On Augustine’s discovery of and relation to the “neo-Platonic philosophers”, see
especially the passage in Augustine (Conf. 7. 9. 13f.). It is significant, in my opinion,
that Heidegger does not take this passage into account as relevant to his discussion of
Augustine and neo-Platonism.
12
Cf. PIA (250-251).
13
In this respect the theme of memory as taken up again by Heidegger in his 1952 lecture
course entitled ‘What is Called Thinking?’, and the Augustinian theme covertly present
in it, would merit especial attention: “Initially Gedächtnis does not mean the capacity
to remember. Gedächtnis indicates the whole soul in the sense of a constant inner
gathering near that which is directed essentially to every feeling. Gedächtnis originally
says the same thing as An-dacht: the ceaseless, gathered remaining near […] and not
only near what is past but in the same way near what is present and what is to come”
(GA7: 92). On the basis of this, “thinking” originally also meant “thanking”, given the
semantic link between Denken, Gedächtnis and Dank. And since thanking does not
concern something that comes from us but something that is given to us, for Heidegger
it originally means “gratitude towards oneself” (Sichverdanken) since in one’s own
“self” – and so ultimately in thought as “memory” – “that which is to-be-thought” is
preserved (GA7: 93-94). However, the “to-be-thought” is not to be taken as a reality or
a content that is preserved, but instead coincides with the act itself of preserving, what
Heidegger calls Verwahrnis (GA7: 97). But we shall return to this on another occasion.
References
Theodore Kisiel
The above title is a proposed correction of the title given to the notes
published as a final appendix to Volume 60 of Heidegger’s
Gesamtausgabe. The co-editor of GA60, Claudius Strube, informs us
that this generic title bestowed on the collection of courses was in fact
borrowed from the coverfold sheet that bundled the notes which he then
presents in the appendix under the thoroughly misleading and erroneous
cover title, ‘Working Papers and Notes for a Cancelled Lecture Course’,
to which he then affixes the erroneous dates “1918-19”, while observing
that some works (and so presumably working notes) on medieval
mysticism had already been announced by Heidegger in the 1916
Conclusion to the Scotus Dissertation (GA60: 345, 348ff, 301).1
The cancelled course was announced for WS 1919-20 under the
title, ‘Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism’ – over three
years after the very first notes on “Eckhartian mysticism” were probably
written (GA1: 402n). If one examines the forty-five pages of twenty-five
handwritten notes (see Appendix 1) that are bundled together under the
cover title, ‘Phenomenology of Religious Consciousness/Life’ (where
“Consciousness” in the title is crossed out and replaced by “Life”), one
discovers that only about ten manuscript pages of notes in the fine and
miniscule penmanship of 1919 in fact constitute preparations for the
cancelled course on medieval mysticism (GA60: 303-312). The vast
majority of the notes are in the coarse and large handwriting that dates
back to Heidegger’s earliest student years circa 1910 and continues
through the war years until mid-April 1919 (the change in handwriting
is perceptible in the early weeks of the course-manuscript for SS 1919).
Evidence of Heidegger’s “preliminary work on a phenomenology of
religious consciousness” (Heidegger, letter to Blochmann 1 May 1919
[Heidegger 1989]) in point of fact can be traced back to the 1915
Introduction to the Scotus Dissertation.2 In order to establish the
thoroughly non-psychologistic character of medieval scholasticism’s
310 Kisiel
Note 11: Four full sheets ‘Das religiöse Apriori’ (GA60: 312-315).
1917.
Note 12: Five full sheets. ‘Irrationalität bei Meister Eckhart’ (GA60:
315-318). 1917.
Notes for a Work on the ‘Phenomenology of Religious Life’ 313
Note 13: Four full sheets. ‘2. Rede. Über das Wesen der
Religion’(GA60: 319-322). Talk delivered 1 August 1917.
Note 14: Two full sheets. ‘Ursinn der Geistigkeit in ihrer zentralen
Lebendigkeit: vgl. Meister Eckhart (Pfeiffer)’. Not published.
Handwriting similar to ‘2. Rede’ and ‘WS 1915/16’. Thus
presumed to have been written in 1916.
Note 16: Four full sheets. ‘Das Absolute’ (GA60: 324-327). “VI. 1918”
= June 1918.
Note 22: Two sheets, two-and-a-half sides full. ‘Zu Schleiermacher, Der
christliche Glaube und Religions-phänomenologie
überhaupt’(GA60: 330-332). 1918.
Note 24: One double-sided sheet in blue ink and pencil. ‘Zu den
Sermones Bernardi in cantorum canticorum’ (GA60: 334- 336,
line 2). “6. IX. und 10. IX. 1918, an der Front” = 6 and 10
September 1918, at the front.
Note 25: One single-sided sheet in black ink. ‘Das Phänomen der
(inneren) Sammlung …’, untitled (GA60: 336, line 3 to end of
337, under the title ‘Heilige Theresia, Seelenburg’). 1918.
Notes 24 and 25, two distinct notes in the DLA archive file,
were run together without a break in GA60.
For men have doubted whether the power to live … is due to air or fire [etc.,
according to the pertinent ontological accounts – M.H.] … On the other hand,
who would doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows
and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why
he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wishes
to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not
know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to consent rashly (De trin. 10.
10. n. 14).8
For the mind knows nothing as well as that which is present to itself, and
nothing is more present to the mind than it is to itself (De trin. 14. 5. n. 7).9
For we are and know that we are, and we love to be and to know this being.
And in this trinity of being, knowledge, and love, there is not a shadow of
illusion to disturb us. For we do not reach these inner realities with our bodily
senses as we do everyday external realities, for example, as we arrive at colors
by seeing, sounds by hearing, odors by smelling, flavours by tasting, hard and
soft textures by touching …; But it is without any mediating illusion of image,
fancy, or hallucination that I am certain that I am, that I know that I am, and
that I love to be and to know this (De civ. Dei. 11. 26).10
They say many true things about creation yet do not seek the Truth, the
Artificer of creation, with piety, and therefore do not discover Him (Conf. 5.
5 ; vgl. De civ. Dei. 9. 20; über die Demut [humilitas] vgl. Epist. 118. 3).11
And when they love a happy life, which is none other than joy in the truth,
then they also love the truth. And they would have no love for it unless there
were some knowledge of it in their memory (Conf. 10. 23).12
Notes for a Work on the ‘Phenomenology of Religious Life’ 315
When the human mind, however, knows itself and loves itself, it does not
know something immutable; each individual man, attentive to what is going
on within himself, speaks in one way when he expresses his own mind, but
defines the human mind in a different way in special and general knowledge.
Therefore, when anyone speaks to me about his own mind, as to whether he
understands this or that or does not, or whether he wishes this or that or does
not, I believe what he says; but when he speaks the truth about the human
mind either specially or generally, I acknowledge and approve it. It is therefore
obvious that what a person sees in himself is one thing, for another does not
see this but believes what the speaker tells him; but what he sees of truth itself
is another thing, for another can behold the same thing; the former may change
with time, while the latter remains steadfast in its unchangeable eternity (De
trin. 9. 9; vgl. Conf.10. 16).13
No matter how you argued, you were never able to repudiate the value of the
senses to the extent that could convince us that nothing appears to be. Indeed,
you have never in any way ventured to try to do so. But you have done your
very best to convince us that reality is other than it appears to be (Cont. acad.
3. 24).14
[On dialectic] This science teaches both how to teach and how to learn. In it,
reason itself reveals its own nature, its desires, its powers. It knows what
knowledge is, and by itself, it not only wishes to make men learned, but also
can make them so (De ordine. 2. 38).15
In turning from the world to God, truth is grasped by the intellect and inner
mind, which ever abides and is always the same, which never presents a false
image from which it cannot be distinguished (De div. quaest. 83. 9).16
But when it is a question of things that we behold with the mind, namely with
our intellect and reason, we give verbal expression to realities which we
directly perceive as present in that inner light of truth by which the inner man,
as he is called, is enlightened and made happy (De mag. 40).17
… and to believe itself is nothing other than to think with assent (De praed.
sanct. 5).18
And so that trinity arises from memory, inner vision, and the will that unites
both. And when these three are drawn together (coguntur) into unity, then
from this co-action (coactu) itself they are called thought (cogitatio) (De trin.
11. 6).19
The famous crede ut intelligas [believe in order that you may understand] says
first of all that the full range of experience must be present for analysis if it is
to be exhaustive. The distinctive element of the content of this Christian
experience lies above all in humility, which is grounded in the sincerity of the
conscience that guides and direct us (Epist. 118. 3; De civ. Dei. 2. 7).
316 Kisiel
“Living experience” as the sphere of life as such is however not expanded and
regarded fundamentally by way of an absolute primal science of experience,
but rather proceeds to transcendences regarded as a formal ontological
lawfulness – an eidetic – which somehow possesses the absolute givenness in-
itself common to the absolute sphere of lived experience; a transcendent
absolute theoretical science: world of ideas in God (Heidegger).21
Everywhere we find revealed faith interwoven with religious life, where God
is given as will, person to person, in the most intimate experiences of the will
(Dilthey 1973: 256/Dilthey 1988: 232).26
Externalizations (TK, cf. Dilthey [1973: 258/1988: 232]): Roman spirit: the
formal and legal;
Greek spirit: cosmological conceptual-world.
Both tragic distortions.
From there a new objective metaphysics; counterpart to the ancient (cf.
‘Augustine – Knowledge and Faith’ (Heidegger).28
318 Kisiel
German sentences (305, line 21ff.) that immediately follow the omitted
paragraph, with Heidegger’s emphases and one correction
(“mögliches”):
Verstehen religiöser Erlebnisse, Zugang zu ihren Ausdrucksformen. Wie
drückt sich ein religiöses Erlebnis aus? ‘Gebet’ als Ausdruck (und mögliches
Ausgangsphänomen für Rück- und Eingang).32
Notes for a Work on the ‘Phenomenology of Religious Life’ 319
Cf. Meister Eckhart: “Since no one can give form to God, so likewise can one
give no form to the soul (Pfeiffer 1857: 394, 10f.)”.33
But cf. “the true visionaries of God” and the twenty-four signs by which they
become known (Pfeiffer 1857: 476, 29f.): [Sign 1] If you do not have the right
love, all other gifts are of little or no help to you at all (Pfeiffer 1857: 476, 40).
[Sign 13] They do not become deceived by some false light nor by the sight
of creatures: they let all things stand on their own (Pfeiffer 1857: 477, 28).
[Sign 17] They have few words and much life (Pfeiffer 1857: 477, 36.).34
For God’s birth in the soul, it is, among other things, necessary “that the spirit
elevate reason and sees, since seeing is the most delightful and most noble
work, which the soul can achieve” (Pfeiffer 1857: 479, 4f.). “God’s birth in
the soul is nothing else than a unique divine contact in a unique heavenly way,
where God entices the spirit out of the storms of creaturely unrest into His still
unity, so that God may communicate Himself in His divine quality” (Pfeiffer
1857: 479, 10f.). “The Father thus conveys His word to the soul and the soul,
again in the word, conveys itself to the Father. Let us nurture this eternal play
in God, so help us God”(Pfeiffer 1857: 479, 25f.).35
At what place and in what power is the Eternal Word born? (Pfeiffer 1857:
480, 19f.) This question is the topic of many beautiful words by the great
teachers and saints: 1. In the reason – for it is most like God. 2. In the will –
for it is the free power of the soul. 3. In the spark of the soul, for it is most
immediately God. 4. In the concealment of the heart, for this is God at his
most mysterious. 5. In the most intimate essence of the soul – where all the
powers of the soul are first born in a divine taste, [which manifests] each
power in its essence (Pfeiffer 1857: 480, 29):
– reason as the highest power by which the soul engages in the divine Good.
– free will as a power that savours the divine good known to you by reason.
– divine spark as the light of divine equality, which at all times bends toward
God (Pfeiffer 1857: 480, 32).
– concealment of the heart as a concentration of all divine gifts in the
innermost essence of the soul, like a bottomless spring of all divine goods
(Pfeiffer 1857: 480, 34f.).36
Does the spirit know that God is at work within it? (Pfeiffer 1857: 480, 39f.).
– There are signs “with sensuous features” that are found in humans (Pfeiffer
1857: 481, 2).
– In the birthing process, “the spirit is estranged from all the marks of
creatures and now stands in a pure vision of the first truth”. (Pfeiffer 1857:
481, 6f).37
320 Kisiel
Note 18: omitted reverse side: ‘Taking note of the literature’ (Zu
beachten die Literatur)
Jülicher, [Adolf]. Der religiöse Wert der Reformation. Marburg: Elwert, 1913.
Norden, [Eduard]. Agnostos Theos. [Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte
religiöser Rede. Leipzig und Berlin: Teubner, 1913.]
Weinel, [Heinrich]. Biblische Theologie [des Neuen Testaments. Die Religion
Jesu und des Urchristentums. Tübingen: Mohr, 1913]. (on God and
the mysticism of Jesus).
Bousset, [Wilhelm]. Kyrios Christos. [Geschichte des Christusglaubens von
den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913]. Hauptprobleme der Gnosis.
Pohlenz, [Max]. Vom Zorne Gottes. [Eine Studie über den Einfluss der
griechischen Philosophie auf das alte Christentum. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1909].
Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des AT und NT [herausgegeben von
W. Bousset und H. Gunkel].
Weiß, [Johannes B.]. Das Urchristentum. [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1913].
Ephes. 1, 18: ðåöùôéóìÝíïõò ôï×ò Ïöèáëìï×ò ôò êáñäßáò ßìäí (“Eyes of the
heart” to know the hope of your calling. “May he enlighten the eyes of your
heart, so that you may know what is the hope of your calling”).38
Paul’s piety: êïéíùíßá with Christ – cf. Deißmann [Deissmann 1911], 84f.
Deißmann, Die neutestamentliche Formel “in Christo Jesu”. Marburg:
[Elwert], 1892. Schettler, [Adolph]. Die paulinische Formel “Durch
Christus”. Tübingen: [Mohr] 1907. Reitzenstein, [Richard]. Die
hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. Leipzig und Berlin: Teubner, 1910.
the very heart of the intentional relation and mystical unity between man
and God (Kisiel 1993: 83f).
Note 18 (reverse side) provides a further bibliography that
supplements the young Heidegger’s reading list in 1916-1919 with
books in theology, history of Christianity, and mysticism.42
Note 21, entitled ‘The Giving [or Gift] Character of the
Phenomenon of Faith’, in fact takes us back to early Christianity and
records, among other things, the young Heidegger’s fascination with
Gustav Adolf Deissmann’s work on Pauline mysticism. The key to
Paul’s piety is his communion with the living Christ, described by him
in the mystical formula, “Christ in me, I in Christ”. The question here
– what does it mean to be “in” – “recalls later developments in
Heidegger’s ‘grammontology’, which carefully elaborates upon
prepositional phrases like “Being-in”, and is quick to point to the
double-genitive operative in phrases like the “thinking of be-ing”.
Deissmann does the same by asking what sort of intentional relation is
involved in Paul’s Christ-mysticism, and answers by invoking the
pneumatic Christ “in the Holy Spirit”, how this Spirit works “through
Christ”, thus how the “faith of Jesus Christ” transcends the distinction
of genitive subjective and objective toward a unique “genitivus
mysticus”. In this note, Heidegger resolves to study the entire dynamics
and structure of “Christ-faith” and to compare the piety of “Christ-
mysticism” in all its forms with that of Greek mysticism (as it was
examined by his Freiburg teacher, Richard Reitzenstein) (Kisiel 1993:
88). By 1919, the forms of Christ-mysticism include not only Paul’s and
Eckhart’s, but also those of Bernard of Clairvaux’s experience, Theresa
of Avila’s Interior Castle (= stat!) and the piety of the prince of the
modern German protestant theologians, Friedrich Schleiermacher.
1
Cf. GA60, 345, 348f., 301. Cf. GA1 (344, n., 352). The tripartite subtitle of GA60, 1.
Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion. 2. Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus.
3. Die philosophischen Grundlagen der mittelalterlicher Mystik, suggests the reason for
the error of attributing the notes of 1916-1919 to a lecture course, albeit a cancelled
course: it creates the illusion of yet another course added to the roster of courses
published in the Gesamtausgabe!
2
Cf. GA60 (348).
3
See Kisiel (1993: 525-7), for Heidegger’s reading list at the time.
4
This file of twenty-five handwritten notes can be ordered at Marbach under the DLA
access number 75.7045, A2. Box with (1) WS 1919/20, (2) SS 1920, and (3)
‘Phänomenologie und Theologie’ (am 8.7.27 vor der evang. Studentenschaft in
Tübingen); 75.7045/4: religionsphänomenolog.. Notizen 1916-1919.
324 Kisiel
5
Heidegger’s notes, composed in 1919, of course cites from the first (1883) edition of
the Einleitung. I have supplied the pagination from the 1922 edition (Dilthey 1973). All
of Heidegger’s citations are from the first two chapters of Book Two, Section 3,
‘Christentum, Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik’ (Dilthey 1973: 250-5) and
“Augustinus” (Dilthey 1973: 255-267). English translations are from Dilthey (1988).
For a detailed account of the influence of these two chapters on the young Heidegger
that goes beyond the passages excerpted in his two notes see Kisiel (2009).
6
The editor of GA60 mistakenly only reports twenty-two pages of notes while making
his selections for publication from both groups (GA60: 348). He also reports that he
worked from a typed transcript of the notes made by Fritz Heidegger, Martin’s younger
brother, which to this day is not to be found in Marbach. But recently, a collection of
Fritz Heidegger’s typescripts in the possession of Barbara Fiand, who photocopied them
in Meßkirch from Fritz’s carbon copies, has been deposited in the Archive of the Loyola
University Library in Chicago. The first archival entry of forty listings in this collection
is a thirty-five page typescript bearing the title, ‘Augustinus Erkenntnis und Glaube’,
ergo the same title as the top note of the collection of notes on the ‘Phenomenology of
Religious Consciousness/Life’ (which was then omitted from the publication of notes).
7
Cf. Kisiel (1993: 72, 519 n. 6).
8
“Utrum enim aeris sit vis vivendi … – an ignis – [bezüglich der seinsmächtigen
Erklärung – M.H.] dubitaverunt homines … Vivere se tamen et neminisse et intelligere,
et velle, et cogitare et scire, et judicare quis dubitet? Quandoquidem etiam si dubitat,
vivit; si dubitat unde dubitet, meminit; si dubitat, dubitare se intelligit; si dubitat, certus
esse vult; si dubitat, cogitat; si dubitat, scit se nescire; si dubitat, iudicat non se temere
consentire oportere”.
9
“Nihil enim tam novit mens, quam id quod sibi praesto est; nec menti magis quidquam
praesto est, quam ipsa sibi”.
10
“Nam et sumus, et nos esse movimus, et id esse ad nosse diligimus. In hic autem
tribus, quae dixi, nolla nos falsitas verisimilis turbat. Non enim ea, sicut illa quae foris
sunt, ullo sensu corporis tangimus, velut colores videndo, sono audiendo …; sed sine
ulla phantasiarum vel phantasmatum imaginatione ludificatoria, mihi esse me, idque
nosse et amare certissimum est”.
11
“Et multa vera de creatura dicunt et veritatem, creaturae artificem, non pie quaerunt
et ideo non inveniunt, aut si inveniunt”. Footnoted in Dilthey (1973: 261, n. 1).
12
“Et cum amant beatam vitam, quod non est aliud quam de veritate gaudium, utique
amant etiam veritatem. Nec amarent, nisi esset aliqua notitia ejus in memoria eorum”.
13
“Aliterque unusquisque homo loquendo enuntiat mentem suam quid in se ipso agatur
attendens; aliter autem humanum mentem speciali aut generali cognitione definit. Itaque
cum mihi de sua propria loquitur, utrum intellegat hoc aut illud an non intellegat, et
utrum velit an nolit hoc aut illud, credo; cum vero de humana specialiter aut generaliter
verum dicit, agnosco et approbo. Unde manifestum est aliud unumquemque videre in
se quod sibi alius dicendi credat, non tamen videat; aliud autem in ipsa veritate quod
alius quoque possit intueri, quorum alterum mutari per tempora, alterum incommutabili
aeternitate consistere”.
14
“Nunquam rationes vestrae ita vim sensuum refellere potuerunt, ut convinceretis nobis
nihil videri, nec omnino ausi estis aliquando ista temptare, sed posse aliud esse ac
videtur vehementer persuadere incubuistis”.
Notes for a Work on the ‘Phenomenology of Religious Life’ 325
15
“Dialectica – ‘Haec docet docere, haec docet discere; in haec se ipsa ratio demonstrat
atque aperit, quae sit, quid velit, quid valeat. Scit scire, sola scientes facere non solum
vult sed etiam potest’.
16
“[ … quae] semper manet et eiusdem modi est, quae non habet imaginem falsi a qua
discerni non possit, tota alacritate converti”.
17
“Cum vero de hic agitur, quae mente conspicimus, id est intellectu atque ratione, ea
quidem loquimur, quae praesentia contuemur in illa interiore luce veritatis, qua ipse, qui
dicitur homo interior, illustratur et fruitur”.
18
“… et ipsum credere, nihil aliud est, quam cum assensione cogitare”.
19
“Atque ita fit illa trinitas ex memoria et interna visione et quae utrumque copulat
voluntate, quae tria cum in unum coguntur ab ipso coactu cogitatio dicitur”. Cited in
Dilthey (1973: 264, n. 2). For this etymological play on cogitation as re-collection, cf.
Conf. (10. 11. 18).
20
“Das berühmte crede ut intelligas besagt zunächst, daß die volle Erfahrung für die
Analysis da sein muß, soll diese erschöpfend sein. Das Unterscheidende des Inhalts
dieser christlichen Erfahrung liegt vor allem in der Demut, welche in dem Ernst des
richtenden Gewissens begründet ist (Epist. 118. 3; De civ. Dei. 2. 7). Die
Selbstbesinnung des Augustinus, wie sie in diesen Grundzügen sich von jedem früheren
verwandten wissenschaftlichen Versuch unterscheidet, unterwirft zunächst das Wissen
selber der Analysis; eine der drei Hauptfragen war die nach dem Grunde der Gewißheit
für das Denken. Und dennoch geht eine erkenntnistheoretische Grundlegung auch
dieser Selbstbesinnung nicht hervor. Die christliche Wissenschaft, welche von diesem
Ausgangspunkte aus entworfen wird, löst ihre Aufgabe nicht in angemessener Weise.
Warum das nicht geschah? In den Jahren, in welchen der Gedanke einer solchen
Grundlegung den Augustinus beschäftigte, verharrten seine Gedanken noch in der ihm
von den Neuplatonikern gegebenen Richtung: später, als auch das für ihn abgetan war,
wurden die objektiven Gewalten der katholischen Kirche und des katholischen Dogma
zu übermächtig in seinem Bewußtsein, auch nahmen die Interessen der großen
kirchlichen und dogmatischen Kämpfe Tag für Tag ihn in Anspruch; als entscheidend
wird sich uns aber die in seiner Natur selbst liegende Grenze ergeben. So entspringt aus
seiner Selbstbesinnung zunächst vermittels des platonisierenden Begriffs der veritates
aeternae wieder Metaphysik”.
21
“‘Die lebendige Erfahrung’ wird nun nicht als die Lebenssphäre als solche ausgeweitet
und prinzipiell gesehen, im Sinne der absoluten Erlebnisursprungswissenschaft, sondern
geht auf Transzendenzen im Sinne der formalen ontologischen Gesetzlichkeiten – ein
Eidetisches – das mit der absoluten Erlebnissphäre die an sich absolute Gegebenheit
irgendwie gemeinsam hat; eine transzendente absolute theoretische Gegenständlichkeit:
Welt der Ideen in Gott”.
22
“Gott zugleich summum bonum (De civ. Dei. 19. 3-4) [noted by Dilthey (1973: 264,
n. 4)]; in seiner Metaphysik ist schon der Kampf zwischen theoretischem Verhalten und
praktischem Verhalten angelegt” (Heidegger). – “Und weiter als Augustinus hat kein
mittelalterlicher Mensch gesehen. So bildete sich anstatt einer erkenntnistheoretisch
begründeten Darstellung der religiösen Erfahrung und ihres Ausdruckes in
Vorstellungen eine objective Systematik” (Dilthey 1973: 267).
23
“Hätte gleich damals dieser Glaube der Gemeinden eine ihm ganz entsprechende
Wissenschaft entwickelt: so hätte diese in einer auf die innere Erfahrung
zurückgehenden Grundlegung bestehen müssen. Aber dieser innere Zusammenhang,
welcher in Bezug auf die Begründung der Wissenschaft zwischen dem Christentum und
326 Kisiel
einer von der inneren Erfahrung ausgehenden Erkenntnis besteht, hat im Mittelalter eine
entsprechende Grundlegung der Wissenschaft nicht hervorgebracht. Dies war in der
Übermacht der antiken Kultur begründet, innerhalb deren das Christentum nur langsam
sich geltend zu machen begann. Als dann wirkte von innen in derselben Richtung das
Verhältnis der religiösen Erfahrung zu dem Vorstellen. Findet doch auch das innigste
religiöse Seelenleben nur in einem Vorstellungszusammenhang seinen Ausdruck.
Schleiermacher sagt einmal: ‘Die Entwicklung des Christentums im Abendlande hat
eine große Masse des objektiven Bewußtseins zum Rückhalt; genauer genommen
können wir aber diese Masse des objektiven Bewußtseins nur als ein
Verständigungsmittel ansehen’”.
24
“Reich Gottes” – “Brüderlichkeit [der Menschen: 252]” – “Christengemeinde” –
“Aufopferung” – “innere Freiheit durch den Glauben” – “Ergreifen Gottes in der
geschichtlichen Lebendigkeit Christi”. Cf. Dilthey (1973: 252-4).
25
“Paulus: Grunderfahrung – ‘Das vollkommene sittliche Leben war der
Chrstengemeinde nicht in der Formel eines Sittengesetzes oder höchsten Gutes
gedankenmäßig darstellbar; als ein unergründlich Lebendiges wurde es von ihr in dem
Leben Christi und in dem Ringen des eigenen Willens erfahren; so trat es nicht zu
anderen Sätzen in Beziehung, sondern zu anderen Gestalten des sittlich-religiösen
Lebens, die vor ihm bestanden und unter denen es nun erschien. Und dies historische
Bewußtsein fand ein festes äußeres Gerüst in dem genealogischen Zusammenhang der
Geschichte der Menschheit, welcher innerhalb des Judentums geschaffen worden war”.
26
“In das religiöse Leben, welchem in den inneren Erfahrungen des Willens Gott als
Wille, Person zu Person, gegeben ist, finden wir überall den Offenbarungsglauben
verwoben”.
27
“Es ist das tragische Schicksal des Christentums gewesen, die heiligsten Erfahrungen
des Menschenherzens aus der Stille des Einzellebens heraus und unter die Triebkräfte
der weltgeschichtlichen Massenbewegungen einzuführen, hierdurch aber einen
Mechanismus des Sittlichen und eine hierarchische Heuchelei hervorzurufen; auf dem
theoretischen Gebiet verfiel es einem nicht minder schwer auf seiner weiteren
Entwicklung lastenden Geschick. Wenn es den Gehalt seiner Erfahrung zu klarem
Bewußtsein bringen wollte, mußte es ihn in den Vorstellungszusammenhang der
Außenwelt aufnehmen, welchem derselbe nach den Beziehungen von Raum, Zeit,
Substanz und Kausalität eingeordnet wurde. So war die Entwicklung dieses Gehalts im
Dogma zugleich seiner Veräußerlichung”.
28
“Veräußerlichungen: Römischer Geist: die Formeln und der Rechtscharakter;
Griechischer Geist: kosmologische Begriffswelt. Beides tragische Verunstaltungen.
Daraus eine neue objective Metaphysik; Gegenbild zur antiken! (vgl. Augustinus –
Erkenntnis und Glaube)”.
29
“To be worked out more concretely and at the same time to illustrate the phenomenon
of religious experience”.
30
Bornhausen (1910). The article is a reply to Rudof Otto’s article in three parts. See
Otto (1909). Thanks to Sylvain Camilleri for providing these century-old references.
31
“Critical demarcation from contemporary philosophies of religion/(1) neo-Kantian:
Troeltsch (the doctrine of the apriori – logic of the concept in religion)/(2) neo-Friesian:
Otto (the Holy, cf. Bornhausen, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche30)/(3) Hegelian
(Hegel works out of historical cases – however at the same time the construction of the
historical unclear – empovershed ontology – basic mistake of the contemporary
Hegelians, who, lacking inner familiarity with the cases, simply operate in empty
Notes for a Work on the ‘Phenomenology of Religious Life’ 327
41
This course of WS 1919-20 (GA58) freely applies the insights of Notes 1 and 2 on the
history of the “Greek-Christian interpretation of life” without identifying its source in
Dilthey. For a more detailed account of Augustine’s place in Heidegger’s history, see
Kisiel (2006).
42
For the most complete reading list, see Kisiel (1993: 525-7).
References
Sylvain Camilleri
first use the term Lebenswelt in the notes, this would suggest that his
early research on religion as sketched there is decisive for the
subsequent development of his phenomenology, particularly for his
phenomenology of (secular) life and of Aristotle, which flank,
respectively, his phenomenology of Paul and Augustine. In light of this,
the guiding intention in what follows is twofold: to show how Heidegger
seeks to lay bare the structure of the religious life-world, and how the
religious life-world itself helps Heidegger to draft his nascent
phenomenology of religion.
could also be an interpretation of Eckhart, who writes that “If you do not
have the right love, all other gifts are of little or no help to you at all”.21
So the giving-character of faith converges with the gift-character of
love. If this appeal to Eckhart is justified, then the key to this problem
may perhaps also lie in Eckhart’s fundamental notion of an “immediacy
of religious experience” and an “uncontained vivacity of devotion
[Hingabe] to the holy, godly” (GA60: 315, 318). Because it inheres in
the process of theo-genesis, Eckhart’s alleged irrationality proves not to
be a “counter-projection or limit” for phenomenological analysis
(GA60: 333). When this irrationality is considered “in its originariness
and proper constitution”, the common orientation of mystics and
phenomenology comes into view, one that enables a breakthrough into
the originary religious experience of the divine (GA60: 333).
The question of Hingabe is deeply connected with Luther’s
problem of faith. Medieval mystics somehow prepared the way for
Luther’s understanding of fides (GA60: 309). It is significant that
Heidegger quotes Johannes Ficker in this context: “Mysticism gave
Luther ‘a world of inner experience and also showed him the methodical
way to gain it and to increase it’” (GA60: 309).22 Luther is bearer of a
specific conception of faith as fiducia or trust, as stated by Johannes
Ficker and acknowledged by Heidegger (GA60: 309).23 Heidegger draws
a key distinction here:
Protestant faith and Catholic faith are fundamentally different. Noetically and
noematically distinct experiences. In Luther an original form of religiosity –
one also not found in the mystics – emerges. The “holding to be true” of
Catholic faith is founded entirely otherwise than the fiducia of the Reformers
(GA60: 310).
“oscillating between the soul and absolute spirit”, “the oscillation of the
genuine life-world” (GA60: 331, 336).
“basic tendency of life” is toward “more life” (GA60: 336), where this
tendency leads to a dispersion that gives rise to the richness of religious
life and its world.30 Since operative grace is given in faith at the very
beginning of religious life and co-operative grace secures its subsequent
effects in the world, Heidegger thinks it possible to elucidate the
“different concepts of grace” in medieval and Lutheran theology,
including “the entire ‘relationship’ of grace and freedom, nature and
grace; and the meaning of the phrase, gratia supponit naturam [grace
preserves nature]; the doctrine of the iustificatio and the conception of
the sacrament” (GA60: 310).
From a more systematic perspective, it is no coincidence that the
discussion of the problem of grace in the notes leads back to medieval
mysticism and follows on the exposition of Lutheran faith as fiducia. In
the history of religiosity, the medieval mystics and Luther provided a
very specific and extraordinary synthesis of the problem. Apart from
their differences, they insisted on the becoming of the religious
experience of grace. There is a certain continuity between the
medievals’s gratia operans and Luther’s sola gratia sanctifians. Both
seek the transfiguration of religious existence in a certain relation to the
world. It is no coincidence that iustificatio defines deification in
Eckhartian mysticism on the one hand and the unio cum Christo in
Luther’s theology of the cross. Particularly noteworthy here is the
shared approach of these great figures, namely their extremely
exploratory attitude toward the religious life-world, and their (somehow
already phenomenological) vision of the possibilities of experience this
world offers through its various phenomena.31
From the primal “textural” phenomenon of grace, it is possible
to take up other phenomena that make up the religious life-world,
contributing greatly to its facticity. Among these, the eminently mystical
phenomenon of silence plays a central role. It provides the basis of a
phenomenology of inner-outer liturgy. Heidegger points to the
“problem” of “silence as religious phenomenon” (GA60: 312). Later in
the notes and presumably in reference to Theresa of Avila, he identifies
the inner frame in which “mystical silence” and “keeping silence” take
place: “the phenomenon of [inner] concentration” (GA60: 336). Silence
results not only from a cessation of vocalization but, more precisely,
from ceasing to make any request or complaint in order to attend to the
true mystical call for union with God. Silence plunges personal
existence into a unique highly religious “loneliness” (GA60: 336). Once
The Theological Architecture of the Religious Life-World 339
in this state, the mystic gains access to the “forms and shapes of
practical guidance and realization” of religious experience, the most
fundamental of which is asceticism (GA60: 304). In his ‘Grundprobleme
der Phänomenologie’ of 1919-1920, Heidegger will indicate the
importance of this notion for early Christianity (GA58: 61).32 From the
notion of asceticism, it becomes possible to gain phenomenological
access to “the phenomenon of the constituting process of the presence
of God” through “concentration, meditation, prayer of quiet” (GA60:
336). The inner prayer of quiet is the first “level of prayer”, but there are
others. It is very significant that, in asking himself “How does a
religious experience express itself?” and considering how one
“understands religious experiences” from out of their “forms of
expression”, Heidegger points to prayer as one of these typical
expressions, which are “starting points for return and entry” into
religious experience (GA60: 305). Thus for him prayer is involved in the
constitution of religious objecthood (Gegenständlichkeit) and especially
of the highest object of the phenomenology of religion, God himself
(GA60: 307, 324). Yet the phenomenology of religious life is also
attentive to liturgical postures and attitudes, where prayer is considered
as a specific comportment toward God (GA60: 307). This leads us back
to the note entitled ‘Religious Phenomena’, in which Heidegger points
to religious postures such as “keeping silent”, as well as “worship” and
“admiration and astonishment” (GA60: 312). Heidegger’s brief
phenomenology of liturgy proves to be crucial insofar as it enables the
articulation of “a possible multiplicity of constitutional types” inherent
in the religious life-world and the “essential connection” that seems to
exist among them (GA60: 307).
Throughout the foregoing survey, the aim has been to highlight aspects
of the notes which indicate the presence of a theo-logical hermeneutics
in the proto-phenomenology of religion Heidegger elaborated between
1916 and 1919. But why a theo-logical hermeneutics? Even if Heidegger
still characterizes himself as a “Christian theologian” in 1921 in a letter
to Karl Löwith, what could have motivated his use of a theological
hermeneutics in the context of a phenomenological investigation, albeit
in the form of a phenomenology of religion?
340 Camilleri
that Kisiel has documented by showing that there were not less than
eleven works of members of the “history of religion” school counted
among Heidegger’s readings in 1916-1919 – and given the deeply
exegetical character of the 1920-1921 ‘Introduction to the
Phenomenology of Religion’, an exploration of Heidegger’s unthought
debt to Gunkel and his school would seem to promise many new insights
into the formation of Heidegger’s thought.51
In this light, the intimate connection between Heidegger’s early
phenomenology of religion and a theo-logical hermeneutics becomes
clear. This is not to say that phenomenology must yield to religious life,
but only that his confrontation with religion/early Christianity and
contemporary theology led Heidegger to push the limits of
phenomenology and to redefine its analytical framework. The notes
often give the impression that a theo-logical hermeneutics is required to
articulate both phenomenology and religion. This association between
the phenomenology of religion and theo-logical hermeneutics in
Heidegger is further attested in his guiding intention: to move ever
closer to the facticity proper to Christian religiosity and find the path to
a “primordial Christian theology” (GA59: 91). This suggests that one
would do well to consider more seriously whether Heidegger’s
phenomenology of religious life is simultaneously a religious
phenomenology of life that finds its expression in a certain theo-logical
hermeneutics.52
1
The most recent is McGrath (2004: 243-258). See also McGrath (2006), chapter four,
‘Duns Scotus’. The first author to address this topic was Theodore Kisiel(1993: 26-38).
2
‘Die philosophischen Grundlagen der mittelalterlichen Mystik’ (GA60: 303-337);
henceforth referred to as ‘notes’. The translation will be modified wherever it is deemed
necessary.
3
Heidegger will later use the phrase “Catholic life-world” in his famous letter of January
9, 1919, to Engelbert Krebs. The letter is reprinted in Denker (2004: 67-68).
4
See Husserl (1952). This concept appears in a minor way in GA56/57 (e.g., 5), and
more overtly and significantly in GA58 (54, 59-60, 69, 76, 250, 261).
5
See also in GA59 (21): “Schleiermacher was the first to view [everything] from the
standpoint of a vital historical consciousness” (Schleiermacher sah zum erstenmal aus
einem lebendigen historischen Bewusstsein heraus).
6
In the notes, Heidegger does not yet draw the distinction between das Historische and
das Geschichtliche.
7
The exact formulation was not taken up in the published GA56/57.
8
See also GA60 (325), where Heidegger applies a quotation from Adolf Reinach to
religious experience: “Perception of reality [Wirklichkeitsnehmung] ‘lies immanently
contained in the meaning of experience itself’”. See Reinach (1989: 610).
9
See also Kisiel (1993: 77, 28).
344 Camilleri
10
That Heidegger deplores Kant’s influence on the young Hegel’s consideration of the
meaning of Jesus suggests he is much closer to Johannes Weiß’s and Albert
Schweitzer’s efforts to reinscribe Jesus into an eschatological context. Weiß
(1914/1917) is on Heidegger’s reading list for 1917-1919; see Kisiel (1993: 527).
Schweitzer was inspired by Weiß, and Heidegger refers to the importance of
Schweitzer’s “critical work” in his Vita of 1922 (GA16: 41).
11
See Bultmann’s account in a letter to Gogarten dated December 22, 1923, in Bultmann
(2002: 56): “Heidegger is also familiar with modern theology, and he is an admirer of
Hermann”.
12
See Hermann (1908).
13
Beruf and Berufung.
14
Here, it is important to note Heidegger’s reference to an ‘Other’ who originates the
call. See GA60 (332).
15
See Johannes Ficker’s formulation regarding Luther: “eine Welt der innere
Erfahrungen” (GA60: 309); Schleiermacher’s formulation quoted by Heidegger:
“innerste Heiligthum des Lebens” (GA60: 321); “the innermost and the whole of the
castle” (Heidegger’s formulation) with reference to Theresa (GA60: 337).
16
Cited by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Gadamer (1987: 315).
17
See Dilthey (1922: 317). See Heidegger’s criticism of the first traces of dogmatization
in ‘Frühzeit des Christentums’ (GA60: 314) and, just before that, his attack on Plato’s
and Aristotle’s “metaphysics of Being”. In this regard, we should also mention the
influence on Heidegger of Franz Overbeck; see Overbeck (1873). Cf. Schaber (2004:
175-180).
18
Heidegger’s rejection of the definition of faith as “holding to be true” is an implicit
critique of Vincent of Lerins (d. 450?), whose definition of faith as für-wahr-halten in
his Commonitorium inspired the Catholic conception of faith Heidegger describes in
GA60 (310).
19
See GA60 (336), where Heidegger, speaking of St. Theresa of Avila’s description of
the soul as the Wohnung Gottes, recalls Eckhart’s notion of stat.
20
Heidegger found in the neo-Kantian Emil Lask an important philosophical treatment
of Hingabe. Lask exerted a considerable influence on Heidegger’s understanding the
problem of form and Urform in Eckhart’s mysticism. See GA60 (311, 315), as well as
Lask (1993).
21
See Pfeiffer (1857: 475-478). The quotation is from Tract 7, ‘Die zeichen eines
wârhaften grundes’ (‘The Signs of a True Ground’).
22
On Luther’s response to Eckhart’s idea of “seclusion”, see GA60 (308). Heidegger
makes a note to himself, after quoting Troeltsch’s definition of faith: “NB: faith in
Luther” (GA60: 329).
23
See also GA60 (310).
24
On the meaning of Luther’s theology of the cross for the young Heidegger, see
Sommer (2005: 17-62).
25
See Luther (1962: 360, lines 5-6): “Faith creates divinity, not in person, but in us”.
26
Kisiel is entirely correct to emphasize the influence of neo-Kantian terminology on
Heidegger’s treatment of Schleiermacher. See Kisiel (1993: 90).
27
The notes are unique in this regard. As Kisiel remarks, in the 1920-1921 lectures on
religion Heidegger argues that grace cannot be treated philosophically. See Kisiel (1993:
198).
The Theological Architecture of the Religious Life-World 345
28
Heidegger speaks of “die Gnadencharachter allen Lebens” in his letter to Elisabeth
Blochmann from May 1, 1919 (Heidegger 1989: 14).
29
See also Pohlenz (1909). This book is on Heidegger’s reading list (Kisiel 1993: 526).
30
Inauthentic dispersions divide the core of religious life by splitting it into teleologies
to which it does not belong, such as aesthetics, epistemology, and perhaps even ethics.
See Heidegger’s letter to Elisabeth Husserl of April 24, 1919 (Kisiel 1993: 112).
31
This is why Heidegger can say of St. Theresa: “Thus, for instance, St. Theresa sees, as
a mystic, phenomenologically” (GA60: 336). See Heidegger’s gloss on “Exploratio” in
his 1921 notes on Augustine (GA60: 266-267).
32
Here Heidegger refers to “der Reich-Gottes-Gedanke, Paulus” and to Ritschl.
33
“Understanding such phenomena in the first place out of the historical – this and its
facticity in phenomenological primordial understanding” (GA60: 303).
34
See GA59 (21-22).
35
In this regard, I totally agree with Johannes Schaber’s statement, “If one reads
Heidegger’s entire path of life and thought in the context of his youth and the history
of theology and the Church in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then the door
is opened onto a new, vast field of Heidegger interpretation”. See Schaber (2004: 184).
36
Hermann Gunkel’s German translation reads: “Bei ruhigem [schêbâ] Warten wird
Euch Heil, in stillem Vertrauen besteht Eure Kraft” (In calm [shêbâ] waiting you will
find salvation; your strength consists in quiet trust) (GA60: 329).
37
See Özen (1996: 146-206).
38
See Heidegger’s Vita of 1922 (GA16: 41). Heidegger’s indebtedness to the
Religionsgeschichtliche Schule is further confirmed by Kisiel’s archival work in Genesis
and in this volume.
39
In the notes, ‘The Religious Apriori’ (GA60: 312-315). See also GA60 (329), and
‘Troeltsch’s Philosophy of Religion’ in the ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of
Religion’ (GA60: 19-30).
40
For an overview, see Gunkel (1904a).
41
The series Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des AT und NT is still published
by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Göttingen); it includes works not only by Bousset and
Gunkel, but also by Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas. See Kisiel (1993: 525-527).
42
To be fair, Heidegger also recognizes the importance of texts, such that he can speak
of a “phenomenology of ‘original documents’ [Urkunde]”. But his aim is to gain an
originary relationship to these documents in order to extract from them what is essential
rather than artificial; see GA60 (319), and GA59 (43). Heidegger probably inherited this
interest in Urkunde from classic textual hermeneutics – especially Schleiermacher and
Dilthey, who interweave texts and experience – and liberal theology in a general sense,
including that of Adolf Harnack and Troeltsch and his fellow members of the “history
of religions” school.
43
See GA60 (304, 309, 310, 322, 323, 333). On “life-world” (Lebenswelt), see GA60
(328, 336).
44
Thus, contrary to Kisiel’s interpretation (Kisiel 1993: 523), Heidegger’s use of
“situation” does not derive from Jaspers’s terminology. On Gunkel’s use of the term
“situation”, see Bovon (1975: 80). For the use of “situation” in the notes, see GA60
(305, 307, 310, 331).
45
There is a true proximity between Gunkel and Heidegger in their views on the
individual person. Gunkel gives priority to individual Scriptural figures, while
Heidegger’s notes are clearly focused on the singular-personal religious experience of
346 Camilleri
a subject. For Heidegger’s use of the term “subject”, see GA60 (303, 304, 313, 314,
316, 317, 318, 324); for his use of the term “person”, see GA60 (304, 309, 313, 323,
330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 336).
46
See Gunkel (1904b: 1109). On the inseparability of the historical and the event in
Heidegger, see GA56/57 (216)
47
See Gunkel (1913: 11-20).
48
Heidegger uses this expression in a letter to Elizabeth Husserl of April 24, 1919,
quoted in Kisiel (1993: 112).
49
See GA60 (314, 315, 323).
50
While Albert Eichhorn was the school’s founder, Gunkel was its leading figure.
51
See Gunkel (1904b: 1109).
52
See ‘A Religious Phenomenology?’ in Kisiel (1993: 112-115). I dedicate this essay to
my parents. My thanks to Marc Boss and Quentin Braddock for their valuable comments
on this essay, and to Ruud Welten, Pierre Adler and last but not least Marcus Brainard
for their help.
References
Dermot Moran
Heidegger felt the need to break open the sedimented and encrusted
conceptual frameworks of religion to return to something more original,
primary (ursprünglich, originär): life as it is lived where its outlook and
categories are grasped not conceptually but by being enacted, carried
through, and historically lived (GA60: 245-246). It is a crucial feature
of Heidegger’s engagement with these existential categories that he
believes that somehow we have them in advance, in a Vorhabe or
Vorgriff that needs to be carefully unpacked by a hermeneutic
phenomenology such as he will outline in his 1919 Kriegnotsemester
lectures.
It is also a noteworthy feature of this period of Heidegger’s
intellectual formation that the activity of removing the metaphysical
edifice encrusted on religious experience is referred to as “destruction”
(GA60: 311).7 Interestingly, the model appears to be the manner in
which Luther approached Paul. In his 1920 lecture course Heidegger
articulates the notion of “phenomenological Destruktion” (GA59: 35)
or “phenomenological-critical destruction” (GA59: 30), which should
be thought of as not so much “demolition” (Zertrümmern) but rather as
“de-structuring”, Abbau (GA59: 35). In his Phenomenology of Religious
352 Moran
Remarks scattered through his early writings attest that Heidegger was
deeply interested in this idea of the phenomenological description of
religious life experience and had been making serious efforts to come to
grips with selected writings of the Christian tradition, including the
writings of Paul, Augustine, Eckhart and Luther, as well as the works of
Kierkegaard. Even in his more formal academic exercises he was
indicating the need to study life. Thus, already in his Habilitation
(1915), Heidegger had claimed that philosophy had to concern itself
with “the value of life (Lebenswert)”. Furthermore, he maintained that
the formal study of Scholastic thought needed to be balanced by a
phenomenological exploration of religious experience:
on), although not necessarily solely from the standpoint of the believer.12
He is reluctant to call these existential categories concepts in that this
would be to overconceptualise what are essentially lived
differentiations, and indeed he opposes the kind of theological
interpretation that wants to set up these notions as concepts. He wants
rather to see them as “complexes of meaning” (Sinnzusammenhängen)
(GA60: 134). Furthermore, in analysing religion (as earlier in his
discussion of Scholasticism), Heidegger wants to avoid any suggestion
of a distinction between ‘rationalism’ and ‘irrationalism’ (presumably
in opposition to those who wanted to assign religious phenomena to the
domain of the irrational). Religion has its own kind of meaning, its own
way of laying out its life-apprehension.
Although Heidegger is aware of Rudolf Otto’s analysis of
religion as centred on the idea of the “holy” or the “numinous”, in fact,
for Heidegger, the key to an understanding of religion in general and the
Christian religion in particular is not so much the numinous as what he
calls “the historical” (das Historsiche) (GA60: 323). The “core
phenomeon” (Kernphänomen) (GA60: 31) or “founding sense-element”
(GA60: 323) of religion is “the historical” (GA60: 31)13: “Factical life
emerges out of a genesis and becomes in an entirely special way
historical (enacted)” (GA60: 141). The religious way of being in the
world is as a kind of historical consciousness. Unfortunately, in his
1920-21 religion course, Heidegger is not particularly forthcoming about
what precisely he means by “the historical”. For Heidegger, history is
not something that can simply be made an object of study. Rather, we
are cast in history, we live it: “History hits us, and we are history itself”
(Die Geschichte trifft uns, und wir sind sie selbst) (GA60: 173). Factical
life and the experience of the historical add up to being the same thing:
the manner in which human beings are concerned, worried or
preoccupied by time and by the temporal aspects of their lives. In later
lecture courses Heidegger will be more explicit about the manner that
Dasein occupies history and is highly critical of inauthentic ways of
understanding the process of history.
Heidegger is deeply aware that philosophy does not relate to its
history in the manner in which other disciplines do; and he is similarly
aware that the experience of the historical in religion is completely
different from the history of the evolution of dogmatic concepts. Central
to the Christian experience is eschatology and eschatology cannot be
construed simply in terms of ordinary experiences of history and
Choosing a Hero 355
Hegel from the beginning failed categorially to grasp life – existence – process
and the like. That is, he didn’t see that the traditional stock of categories from
the logic of things and the world is fundamentally insufficient, and that we
Choosing a Hero 361
must question more radically, not only about becoming and motion, happening
and history – but about being itself.25
During his lecturing career at Freiburg, and while he was struggling with
the legacy of neo-Kantianism and his own interest in life-philosophy,
Heidegger always maintained that phenomenology (in some radical
version) represented the only possible mode of approach that could let
the phenomena appear. However he was also becoming more and more
concerned that Husserl’s phenomenological approach was too
intellectualistic, and struggled to articulate his own radicalised vision of
phenomenology as a kind of self-reflexive enacting of life itself. In his
Freiburg lectures, his assessment of the then current state of
phenomenology was often quite negative and his tone scathing. In fact,
it is only after Heidegger went to Marburg that his tone calmed down
and became more appreciative of Husserl’s contribution (e.g., in his
1925 Marburg course on ‘History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena’
[GA20]).
In 1923 in his ‘Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity’
(GA63) lecture course, for instance, Heidegger complains of the dismal
state of phenomenology as it had been practised in Göttingen
(presumably he was drawing on gossip as he never attended Husserl’s
seminars in Göttingen): “Göttingen 1913: For a whole semester
Husserl’s students argued about how a mailbox looks. Using this kind
of treatment, one moves on to talk about religious experiences as well.
If that is philosophy, then I too am all for dialectic” (GA63: 110).
Similarly, he accuses phenomenology of having becoming too soft and
trendy:
summariness, to the level of the philosophical noise of the day, to the level of
a public scandal of philosophy […] The George circle, Keyserling,
anthroposophy, Steiner, etc. – everything absorbs phenomenology. How far
it has gone is shown by a recent book, Phenomenology of Mysticism, which
appeared with an authorized publisher and with the most official sponsorship
(GA63: 73-74).
Enough now of absurd theories. No conceivable theory can make us err with
respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive
intuition is a legitimizing source [Rechtsquelle] of cognition, that everything
originarily (so to speak in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’
is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within
the limits in which it is presented there (Husserl, 1976: 43).
In being defined with the terms ‘our own’, ‘appropriation’, ‘appropriated’, the
concept of facticity – Dasein which is in each case our own – initially contains
nothing of the ideas of ‘ego’, person, ego-pole, center of acts. Even the
concept of self is, when employed here, not to be taken as something having
its origin in an ‘ego’ (GA63: 29)!
that somehow protects the self in its anxiety. As he will put it in Being
and Time, it is “resoluteness” that brings Dasein back from falling
through some kind of peculiarly personal retrieval of what is still futural
for oneself (SZ: 328). Somehow gaining a new sense of temporality is
what lifts one from inauthentic falling. This authentic sense of the future
is what Heidegger calls “anticipation”. This anticipation is not just
oriented to the future but involves a new way of seizing the present in
the “moment of vision” or “blink of an eye” (Augenblick) (SZ: 338).
This is an explicitly Pauline notion. Yet, what one decides and resolves
about is always something that is in some sense inherited, passed on by
tradition, repeated. As Heidegger will always underscore: “The
assumption of the tradition is not necessarily traditionalism and the
adoption of prejudices. The genuine repetition of a traditional question
lets its external character as a tradition fade away and pulls back from
the prejudices” (GA20: 187).
Repetition as a genuine way of living is something Heidegger
had found in Kierkegaard’s study, Repetition, where it is parsed as a
dedication of one’s life to someone else.30 Heidegger does credit
Kierkgaard with analysing in a penetrating manner the “moment of
vision” as an existential situation, but criticises his conception of time
as being the ordinary one which gives prominence to the “now” (SZ:
338, n. iii). But his own sense of experience of lived temporality wants
to emphasise the possibility of a genuine recovery of tradition through
a seizing of the time and a patterning of one’s life on that of another
(Paul on Jesus, for instance).
Although he says very little about it in any of his works,
Heidegger grasps the essence of Christianity as a “choosing of a hero”,
a deliberate decision to make one’s life a kind of repetition of an
original authentic life. Repetition is a genuine way of seizing hold of a
possibility for life; repetition involves the handing down of tradition
(SZ: 385). The life of Jesus is for Christians the paradigm of how life
should be lived, with authentic futurity and with anxiety. But Heidegger
is more interested in the way Paul is the first one to live in this mode of
patterning a life. Paul is the one who has ‘chosen a hero’ (it is
noteworthy that Paul never met Jesus so he is choosing a kind of life for
himself, taking on the mantle of a genuine tradition, patterning himself
after a life that he has only as an inspiration).
Most of the time, and following Kierkegaard’s view that there
is also an inauthentic form of repetition, humans choose das Man as
372 Moran
their model or hero (SZ: 371), but it is also possible to choose anyone
as a hero. Indeed, choosing a hero is an essential possibility of Dasein:
This is a dense claim, one that resonates of St. Paul and Kierkegaard,
and which also will be taken up in the Sartrean conception of
authenticity. For Heidegger, it is connected with a specific manner of
completing, carrying through, or “enacting” a life. But it must be a life
that can be repeated. In other words, to retrieve or repeat the original
moments of Greek philosophy is to make a venture into the future. The
life which is brought to enactment (Vollzug) is a life where the essence
of the historicity of life is faced and somehow, in the facing, is
transformed, is faced towards the future. Finally, for Heidegger, this
involves a kind of resolute facing one’s destiny which is at the same
time an authentic way of belonging to one’s time, one’s “generation”:
“Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up
the full authentic historizing (eigentliche Geschehen) of Dasein” (SZ:
384-385).
History had been the inner meaning of the Christian life, as we
saw from the early lecture courses. Heidegger furthermore agrees with
St. Augustine in recognising that Christianity makes history a vital
matter. It is no longer an eternal cycle of recurrence but rather a vector
going in only one direction. The Christian has to grasp the inner
meaning of the historical and turn it around in authentic “historical
happening” (Geschehen). Christianity somehow recognises the fullness
of time in the midst of the uncertainty of actual lifetime and, at the same
time, asserts the pressing need to seize the time. In all these discussions
in the early Heidegger, the Christian characterisation of the life
experience turns out to be exemplary; it offers nothing less than a
phenomenological “formal indication” of the vital temporality of life,
free of imposed and distorting philosophical concepts. What Heidegger
takes into Being and Time from these early lectures is the framework of
essential descriptions of living: the structures of everydayness, falling,
concern, and so on. In his analysis of Christian experience, Heidegger
spends more time on the inauthentic experience of time than on the
Choosing a Hero 373
authentic. His remarks on authentic life are brief, and in fact for
Heidegger, as he believes for Paul, it is a matter of decision and seizing
of the moment guided by one’s concept of a hero. That Heidegger would
later choose to follow Hitler as his ‘hero’ is a matter for further and
deeper reflection.
1
See the entry in Schuhmann (1977: 231). For the significance of Husserl’s achievement
in gaining funding for a paid assistantship, see Ott (1993: 115-16).
2
For example, Heidegger criticises Dilthey for misconstruing Augustine’s significance
by seeing it as a validation of inner life as later developed by Kant (GA60: 164).
3
See Kisiel (1993: 150).
4
Heidegger’s letter to Krebs is reproduced in Ott (1993: 106-107).
5
See Heidegger (1989: 16).
6
See GA60: 324f.
7
Destruktion, even Zerstörung.
8
Heidegger’s first use of the term “destruction” is in GA58 (139). John van Buren has
pointed out that Heidegger’s model for the method of phenomenological destruktion is
Luther’s attack on Aristotle and Scholasticism. See Van Buren (1994: 167). However,
Van Buren overstates the case when he claims, “The young Heidegger saw himself at
this time as a kind of philosophical Luther of Western metaphysics” (Van Buren, 1994:
167). In fact, Heidegger’s tone in his lecture courses is still one of coming to terms with
the meaning of the various competing philosophical methods (neo-Kantian,
phenomenological, hermeneutic, etc) that were current in contemporary Germany. It is
true, however, that Heidegger arrived in Marburg with a reputation as an expert on
Luther. See also Crowe (2006).
9
Dilthey too had written on the nature of early Christianity and had specifically treated
of Augustine in his Introduction to the Human Sciences, which Heidegger had studied
carefully. See Dilthey (1988).
10
See for example GA60 (131).
11
Heidegger was not alone in wanting to free religion from its philosophical
superstructure. Ernst Troeltsch was doing something similar, as of course was Rudolf
Bultmann.
12
In this sense, Heidegger is advocating the phenomenological approach to religion akin
to what was developed somewhat later in the thirties by Mircea Eliade. Both Heidegger
and later Eliade were deeply influenced by Rudolf Otto’s seminal Das Heilige: Über das
Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (Otto, 1950).
13
See also GA60 (323).
14
Some verbs can be used transitively or intransitively, e.g., ‘to grow’. Plants can simply
grow in the garden (intransitive), or else the farmer can grow a crop (transitive). ‘To
live’ is also in this sense both transitive and intransitive; one lives in a house for
instance (intransitive) or one can ‘live a long life’ or ‘even live a lie’ (transitive) or,
Heidegger’s example, ‘to live one’s mission’. See GA61 (82) where Heidegger makes
this distinction between transitive and intransitive senses of ‘to live’.
15
See, for instance, Eliade (1954).
16
See CT.
17
See Heidegger (1993: 91-116, especially 108).
374 Moran
18
In the words of the Protestant theologian Heinrich Buhr who was present at
Heidegger’s speech to student representatives at a meeting in 1933 in Todtnauberg, see
Ott (1993: 227).
19
Interestingly in Being and Time, Heidegger will characterise this kind of living before
God as caught up in ‘anthropology’.
20
In his ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger emphasises that Verfallen does not signify the
theological fall of humanity but rather an essential relation of human being to Being, see
BW (212).
21
See, for instance, Heidegger’s review of Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews (GA9:
13) as well as SZ (249, n. vi).
22
Heidegger mentions Max Scheler’s 1919 essay, ‘Versuch einer Philosophie des
Lebens’.
23
See Rickert(1920).
24
See Heidegger (1992: 358-93, especially 361).
25
Heidegger in Biemel (2003: 62).
26
It is somewhat unfair to characterize Gerda Walther as a populariser; in truth she was
a deeply intelligent and respected student of Husserl during the Great War when his
audience were primarily women students, e.g., Edith Stein (most of the men had been
drafted into the war effort), and foreigners like the Canadian Winthrop Bell and the Pole
Roman Ingarden. This period is precisely at the time when Heidegger was becoming
active in Husserl’s circle and indeed Walther describes Heidegger in her memoir of that
era. See Walther (1960).
27
See GA60 (159).
28
See Husserl (1976: 26).
29
See GA60 (314).
30
See Kierkegaard (1983). For a comprehensive study of repetition in Kierkegaard, see
Eriksen (2000).
References