Heidegger's Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity
320
Heidegger's Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity
320Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253218292 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2006 |
| Series: | Philosophy of Religion |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Heidegger's Religious Origins
Destruction and Authenticity
By Benjamin D. Crowe
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2006 Benjamin D. CroweAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34706-0
CHAPTER 1
Heidegger's "Religion"
Without this theological origin I would have never arrived at the path of thinking. (US 96)
Whoever wants to philosophize with Aristotle without danger must first of all become a fool in Christ. (WA1 355)
My argument about the relationship between destruction and authenticity in Heidegger's early work is predicated upon a more fundamental claim regarding the general role played by religion in his thought. Throughout the remainder of this study, I will make constant reference to Heidegger's discussions of religious ideas and religious figures, as well as to his own indications of the importance of these ideas and figures for his fundamental philosophical project. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to provide what Heidegger would call a "preliminary sketch [Vorzeichnis]" of the role that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, play in his work.
The theme around which the present discussion will revolve is that of Heidegger's religious "origin [Herkunft]." In the passage quoted above, taken from a text composed in the 1950s, Heidegger explicitly highlights his own estimation of the importance of this "origin." I have two principal theses with respect to this thematic issue. First, I contend that religious life, particularly Christian religious life, exemplifies a "basic experience [Grunderfahrung]" of human life in general, which, when sufficiently "formalized" in the notion of authenticity, provides Heidegger with a starting point for his phenomenological investigations into the pre-theoretical sense of "factical life-experience," as he was wont to call his topic in the early 1920s. Second, I claim that in the early 1920s, Heidegger began to craft a conception of doing philosophy that aimed at cultivating, preserving, and staying loyal to this "basic experience." Taken together, these two theses encompass the central claim of this study, viz., that Heidegger's conception of philosophy as destruction is ultimately motivated by his concern with an authentic way of life. In chapters 3 through 8, I will fill in the details of this account. What I want to accomplish in this chapter, and in the next, is to establish the prima facie plausibility of my general approach and to provide necessary background material for a thorough understanding of Heidegger's religious "origins." Along the way, I hope to provide a more satisfying account of the religious aspects of Heidegger's work.
The "Religious Dimension" of Heidegger
Among the most enduring questions that has been posed by students of Heidegger's thought is the question of what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the "religious dimension." This is the question, or group of questions, concerning the relations between religion, theology, and philosophy in Heidegger's life and thought. Heidegger began his intellectual life as a seminarian, and continued, albeit with some degree of ebb and flow, to discuss religious themes and to converse with theologians for the remainder of his life. The facts are now all quite well-known, thanks largely to the work of scholars in the past decade.
There is, unfortunately, no univocal reading of this mass of biographical evidence, for Heidegger's relationship to religion, though intimate, was ambivalent. The new direction taken by Heidegger in philosophy immediately following the First World War corresponded to a painful break with his Catholic faith. At nearly the same time, Heidegger began to invoke the "atheism" of philosophy (e.g., G61 197). Near the end of his tenure at Marburg, Heidegger stressed to his friend Elisabeth Blochmann that "[r]eligion is a basic possibility of human existence of a completely different sort than philosophy" (HB 25). In this same letter, Heidegger at one and the same time describes his theological period at Marburg as a thing of the past while admitting that he has not achieved the proper standpoint from which this issue can be adequately investigated.
In the 1930s, Heidegger's interpretive efforts were directed much more frequently at Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and the pre-Socratics than at Luther or the New Testament. Yet during this same period, Heidegger often spent weeks in retreat at the Benedictine monastery of Beuron, not far from his hometown (see HB 31f., 40f.). Beginning in WS 1934–1935, Heidegger also begins a decades-long engagement with Hölderlin's poetry, in which the latter's religious discourse, and religious conception of the poetic vocation, plays a large role (see G39). In an unpublished text from the late 1930s, Heidegger offers his most lengthy reflections on matters of divinity since his WS 1920–1921 lectures on Paul, while at the same time sharply criticizing the "Jewish-Christian" conception of God (G66 225–256). In another text from this same period, one finds Heidegger offering the following observations about his own work:
But who could deny that a confrontation with Christianity discreetly accompanied the whole path up to this point? — A confrontation which was not and is not some "problem" that was latched onto, but rather at once the preservation [Wahrung] of my own origin — of the parental house, homeland, and youth — and a painful separation from it. Only someone thus rooted in a really vital Catholic world could have an inkling of the necessities that exerted an effect on the path of my questioning up to this point like subterranean earthquakes. (G66 415)
Not surprisingly, the evaluations of Heidegger's "religious dimension" reflect the ambiguities of the matter. Some of the earliest scholars to receive Heidegger's work in the English-speaking world were theologians, most of whom tended to give a narrowly theological reading of Heidegger in which "Being" was equated with God. A version of this reductive tendency that is less sympathetic to Heidegger can be seen in the commentaries of his students Karl Löwith and Hans Jonas, who read Heidegger's philosophy in a critical vein as crypto-Christianity or crypto-Gnosticism. The problem with these readings lies precisely in their reductive quality. They fail to do justice to the ambiguities of Heidegger's life and thought, to the balance between resistance to and enthusiasm for religion and theology. Such a reduction also manifestly falsifies the sheer breadth of Heidegger's work, the variety of (non-religious) influences on it, and, most importantly, his virtual silence on obviously theological issues of a systematic nature (e.g., Trinity, soteriology, etc.).
Among more sympathetic readers, a kind of "disciplinary" explanation has been offered for the ambiguities of Heidegger's biography. Some commentators recognize the impact of Christian religiosity on Heidegger's philosophy, yet are faced with the challenge of Heidegger's silence on many theological questions and of his insistence on the incommensurability of philosophy and theology. Commentators as diverse as Rudolf Bultmann and Jeffrey Barash maintain that this situation can be explained with reference to Heidegger's starting point in "philosophy" as opposed to "theology."
While this is certainly an improvement over the reductive approach, the terms of this explanation remain unclarified. What is to be understood by the alleged distinction between "philosophy" and "theology"? Is this simply an institutional or sociological distinction? If so, does it rule out a more genuinely philosophical or doxographical explanation of Heidegger's "religious dimension"? Surely not, especially since Heidegger himself regarded the interpenetration of philosophy and theology to be a philosophical issue of paramount importance. Is the distinction between "philosophy" and "theology" a more substantive one, perhaps along the lines of the traditional distinction between reason and faith? If this is indeed the case, then this explanation is even more problematic, for it fails to include an adequate account of what Heidegger took to be the substance of the distinction between philosophy and theology.
One might be tempted at this point to relegate this entire issue to the realm of biography rather than philosophy. Indeed, some of the best evidence for Heidegger's "religious dimension" comes not from his published works or lecture courses, but from the facts of his education. This move is, however, out of keeping with the philosophical significance that Heidegger himself attached to this "religious dimension," as the quote at the beginning of this chapter indicates. The project of finding a philosophical answer to the question of the "religious dimension" remains important.
Among recent commentators, there are several who have gone the farthest toward providing such an answer: John Van Buren, Theodore Kisiel, and István Fehér. Fehér approaches the issue through Heidegger's self-interpretation as a philosopher, arguing that Heidegger "transposes" a specific interpretation of theology onto the "level of philosophy." That is, his very conception of what it means to do philosophy rests upon a view about what it means to do theology. The nature of this antecedent interpretation of theology can be seen clearly in Heidegger's 1927 essay "Phenomenology and Theology" (G9 45–78/39–62). What Fehér establishes is that there are substantive doxographical issues involved in the question of Heidegger's "religious dimension."
Van Buren's The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King provides a detailed treatment of Heidegger's theological interests. Most of the facts of the case are also presented by Theodore Kisiel in The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time. Heidegger was of the opinion that a unique intellectual breakthrough had occurred in early Christianity and that it was subsequently concealed by the importation of Greek metaphysics by the Fathers. Heidegger was an avid reader of thinkers like Meister Eckhart, Luther, and Kierkegaard, whom he regarded as men who had revived the spirit of original Christianity. Van Buren describes the results in this way:
He took the Christian experience of such realities as mystery, Parousia, Kairos, wakefulness, and falling to be a specific "ontic" model from which to read off and formalize general and ontically noncommittal "ontological" categories that would make up his new beginning for phenomenological ontology.
As Van Buren convincingly argues, it was an important part of Heidegger's project to "save" this original Christianity from its subsequent falsification. He describes Heidegger's work as a "creative reinscription" of the basic "intentional configuration" of primal Christianity as the basis for a new kind of "metaphysics." According to Van Buren, Heidegger's famous critique of the metaphysical tradition was self-consciously modeled on its earlier foes, such as Luther and Kierkegaard.
As for the more negative side of Heidegger's relation to Christianity, Van Buren and Kisiel are also in agreement. Van Buren argues that Heidegger eventually came to abandon his earlier project of retrieving original Christianity, turning instead to the "Greco-German axis" of the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin. Kisiel locates Heidegger's break with Christianity much earlier, around 1922, and argues that Heidegger's interest in religion was always really "philosophical." While Van Buren seems to lament Heidegger's turn away from original Christianity, Kisiel seems to view Heidegger's "Christian" period as a time well-lost, and as one that impairs the alleged universality of Heidegger's fundamental ontology.
While both Van Buren and Kisiel have shed some much-needed light on Heidegger's "theological origin," their accounts need to be modified in several important respects. First of all, nothing that Heidegger says clearly indicates that he wanted to give a formal or "neutral" version of Christian faith, one acceptable to "mere reason," in the way that previous philosophers like Kant or Hegel had. To the contrary, Heidegger seems to have rejected the traditional notion of "objectivity" altogether, along with the companion idea that there are timeless truths of reason. He denounces both the paradigmatic status of timeless and dispassionate mathematics for philosophy, as well as the widespread "demand for observation which is free of standpoints" (G63 72/56, 82/63).
Thus there is no indication from Heidegger that his interests in early Christianity were purely "philosophical," as this view suggests. Nor is there any reason to think that Heidegger's aim was to articulate some sort of universal philosophical religion, or that he was skeptical about the core doctrines of Christianity. For example, in a 1951 seminar, Heidegger tells a questioner that faith has no need of philosophy (G15 435f.). Indeed, unlike Kant, Heidegger never once objects to Christianity on epistemic grounds. His occasional denunciations of "religious ideology and fantasy" and "fanaticism" are not suggestive of some more global doubt about the rationality of religious belief. Indeed, such denunciations are fully compatible with a robust Christian faith.
Heidegger's outspoken critiques of religion and theology are always aimed at narrow confessionalism and at an "inauthentic" faith that dodges tough questions (e.g., G40 5f., 80, 132). In a letter to Heinrich Rickert dated February 27, 1917, during a period recognized as lying prior to his "break" with Christianity, Heidegger claims never to have aligned himself with the "narrow [engen]" Roman Catholic standpoint, and to profess a more liberal "free Christianity" (HR 42). As in his earliest period, Heidegger continued to maintain later that theology, as it has developed throughout the course of European civilization, was infused with metaphysical assumptions that are fundamentally opposed to the spirit of original Christianity (G65 411; G67 155). Such claims certainly imply a rejection of theology in its present form, but are completely consistent with an attempt to provide a new philosophical groundwork for the conceptual articulation of faith. Heidegger himself clarifies the situation in a 1943 essay on Nietzsche:
For Nietzsche, Christianity is the historical, secular-political phenomenon of the Church and its claim to power within the formation of Western humanity and its modern culture. Christianity in this sense and the Christian life of the New Testament faith are not the same. [...] a Christian life is not necessarily in need of Christianity. Therefore, a confrontation with Christianity is by no means an absolute battle against what is Christian, no more than a critique of theology is a critique of the faith for which theology is supposed to be the interpretation. (G5 219f./164)
Further, in his Letter on Humanism of 1947, Heidegger discusses the religious and theological import of his inquiries into being in a way strongly reminiscent of his views in the early 1920s, though in different language (G9 161/252f., 169/258). In 1951, he told participants in a seminar that he was still "inclined" to write a theology, and that were he to do so, he would purge it of the taint of metaphysics (G15 436).
Van Buren's thesis that Heidegger sought a "retrieval" of original Christianity must be extended beyond the early 1920s to encompass the whole of his career. A further question lingers, however. Given that this thesis is a sustainable one, what does it mean to "save" primitive Christianity? This question becomes more urgent when one turns to the work of Heidegger's colleague Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann's theology of "de-mythologizing" the New Testament proclamation is aimed at a reassertion of original Christianity in language that can be appropriated by citizens of a post-Enlightenment world. Criticisms notwithstanding, Bultmann's work preserves some of the essential doctrinal content of historical Christianity, such as the resurrection and justification by faith. If Bultmann's work is taken as a model for "saving" primitive Christianity, then it is hard to see how this project can be genuinely ascribed to Heidegger. One searches in vain for anything like the doctrines of traditional Christianity in Heidegger's thought.
Heidegger's project of "saving" primitive Christianity was not something that could be recognized as being part of the traditional theological disciplines of dogmatics and apologetics. Indeed, Heidegger's understanding of the "atheism" of philosophy signifies that a philosopher, even as a Christian philosopher, simply cannot proclaim a "world-view." Furthermore, the historical interpenetration of metaphysics and theology led Heidegger to be extremely reticent about speaking as a "theologian." What Heidegger's project amounts to is a critique of what he called "onto-theology" that points the way to the experience of faith.
During WS 1921–1922, Heidegger records some thoughts "on introduction [zur Einleitung]" (G61 197/148). The core of his philosophical approach is the "actualization of questionability," not in the sense of arid skepticism, but in such a way that "it alone might lead to a situation of religious decision" (G61 197/148). To "save" Christianity, for Heidegger, is not to defend or to clarify the dogmas of a historical faith, but rather to lead into [einleiten] the experience that is and remains the essence of religion. If Heidegger's work does not belong to dogmatics or to apologetics, perhaps one could say that it is a sort of "homiletics."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Heidegger's Religious Origins by Benjamin D. Crowe. Copyright © 2006 Benjamin D. Crowe. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.