The Phenomenology of Religious Life

Afterword of the Editors of the Lecture Course Winter Semester 1920–21

Afterword of the Editors of the Lecture Course Winter Semester 1920–21 Martin Heidegger held the lecture course “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” as a private lecturer in the winter semester 1920–1921 at the University of Freiburg. According to the schedule of courses, it was held Tuesdays and Fridays from noon to one o’clock. It began on October 29, 1920; the last class was held on February 25, 1921. This is what it says in the dating of the postscripts. The manuscript of the lecture course is lost. Even an announcement by the manager of the Nachlass in several wide-circulating newspapers brought no hint of its location. Yet there are five sets of notations, which allow for the approximate reconstruction of the train of thought and articulation of the lecture course. Three of these notations (Oskar Becker, Helene Weiß, Franz-Josef Brecht) are found in the German Literary Archives of Marbach; two are kept in the Husserl Archive of Leuven. From the total notations it is clear that Heidegger’s lecture course falls into two distinctly differentiated parts, which are separated by a caesura at the end of the lecture on November 30, 1920. In Oskar Becker’s notations, which employ a separate pagination for each of the two parts, the end of the first part is marked by the following sentence: “Owing to uncalled-for objections [Einwänden Unberufener], broken off on the 30th of November, 1920.” A query addressed to the archive of the University of Freiburg could find no explanation of the sort of objections. Presumably through these Heidegger saw himself forced to proceed abruptly from the extensive “Methodological Introduction” to the “Phenomenological Explication of Concrete Religious Phenomena”—thus the title of the second part of the lecture course according to Becker. Becker’s quite legible notation probably derives from stenographical notes which were immediately transcribed after each lecture. Even if he at times significantly simplified Heidegger’s sentences, and, as a rule, shortened them as well as providing his own structure , his notations can serve, in regard to the first part of the lecture course, as a foundation for the preparation of the text. Becker’s notes on the first part of the lecture course are complete; in the second part are missing the lectures given on December 10th, and those from the 10th to the 20th of February. The notations of Helene Weiß and Franz-Josef Brecht, dated throughout, are dependent upon one another for many long passages, and in others literally identical. In Helene Weiß’s handwriting there are three different versions [Konvolute]: the relatively legible, paginated text of notations itself; additions to this text; as well as a partial copy of Brecht’s notes. Compared to Becker’s notations there is here a sort of terminologically simplified, considerably shorter version of the lecture course. This is also true of the notes taken by 256 The Phenomenology of Religious Life [340–341] Brecht, in which some paragraphs without doubt originate from other unidenti fiable note-takers. To these sources, we can add the notations of Franz Neumann of the Husserl Archive of Leuven, which was available to the editors in a transcription of unknown handwriting. They were made readily available to us by Professor S. Ijsseling and Mr. S. Spileers. The version contains only the first part of the lecture course, but it offers additional materials that were taken into account for the constitution of the text. The as yet untranscribed notations by Fritz Kaufmann in an old stenography, which are also in Leuven, could not be enlisted. The preparation of the text required, first of all, the complete transcription of the Marbach notations through the editors. The reconstruction of the train of thought, which was carried out on the basis of an ascertained chronology of the particular lectures, made it possible to bring the available text material into a coherent order. For the first part of the lecture course, Becker’s notations served as the guiding text. The preparation of the second part was more complicated in that Becker’s notations lose precision and are also incomplete. Thus, the appropriate passages had to be reconstructed out of the other sets of notes. Every statement that was not redundant was considered. In regard to authenticity, the text, prepared in this manner, cannot be compared to editions based on original manuscripts. The editors are aware of the problems regarding this sort of “secondarily authentic” constitution of texts. In...