The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

14 The Mystery of All Life

14 The Mystery of All Life THE MODEL FOR Heidegger's notion of Ereignis was hardly transcendental idealism, but rather his own phenomenology of religion and, more specifically, medieval mysticism and the Romantic mysticism of Schleiermacher's free Christianity , which he understood as reassertions of primal New Testament Christianity against its Hellenization. Accordingly, he planned to give his course on "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism" in WS 1919-20. But his courses of KNS and SS 1919 had already taken up not only his former historical heterology of "the something" (being), but also the ultimate sense of this, namely, a mystical-personalist heterology that was influenced especially by Eckhart, but also by the mystical strains in Novalis, Schlegel, and Hegel. However, here he gave up his former identification of philosophy with "the true [religious] worldview" and now used the lifeworld of Christian mysticism as an ontic model for gleaning general ontological insights, just as he applied the same strategy to the lifeworld of art in Sophocles, Holderlin, and Schlegel in 1919, to the religious lifeworld of Pauline kairology around 1920-21, and to the morallifeworld and technical work-world of Aristotle's ethics in 1921-23. In 1919, he was working mainly with an analogy between the ontic (Christian mystical experience) and the ontological (experience in any sense), which concerns not merely proportionality (similarity of proportions or structure ), but rather something like synecdoche (similarity of an exemplary part and the whole). The medieval mystic's unio mystica and abandonment (Hingabe ) in the mysterium tremendum of the analogical efflux of the Divine Life also tells us something about the way that all experience is abandoned in the mysterious depth-dimension of the differentiating Ereignis of being, just as do Schleiermacher's "feeling of [the] absolute dependence" of finite particularity on the divine infinite universe, the artist's ecstatic releasement and abandon in creative work, the trusting "surrender" of Pauline-Lutheran faith to the kairological Parousia of the Deus absconditus, the earnest absorption of Aristotelian practical wisdom in the lethe and kairological kinesis of futural moral ends, the Aristotelian artisan's dedication to a craft, the mountaineer's abandonment in the sunrise, or the family's heartfelt surrender to the "evening meal." 295 296 New Beginnings The analogy between mystical experience and experience in any sense can be expressed more precisely in terms of the similarity of two intentional configurations . On the one hand, we have the religious configuration of Heidegger 's Eckhartian model from 1915-16 and of his own modern reformulation of medieval mysticism during those years, which took the following shape: the undifferentiated unity of the Godhead (content-sense); the soul's self-surrendering devotion (Hingabe) to God (relational sense); and the differentiating emanation of the divine efflux (temporalizing-sense). On the other hand, we have Heidegger's ontological configuration of 1919, namely, the indifference of the primal something or being (content-sense); the personal I's self-surrendering abandonment in and devotion to (Hingabe) being (relational-sense); and the differentiation of Ereignis (temporalizing-sense). Indeed, we already find Heidegger referring in 1919 to this configuration as "the mystery ... of all life," that is, to a concept of ontological mystery that will later turn up again as the "mystery of being" in his publications after 1930. Though he apparently used the term "mystery" to describe Ereignis only in his letter of May 1, 1919 to Blochmann, the concept is nonetheless operative in his courses of the sam~ year and in those following. The present chapter thus examines, one by one, the intentional moments of this analogy to Christian mysticism in Heidegger's concept of ontological mystery, beginning with content-sense, turning then to temporalizing-sense, and finally dealing with relational sense and enactment-sense. I also show that this ontological reinscription of mysticism continued to be effective in Heidegger 's subsequent attempts to model his new beginning on a more direct return via Luther and Kierkegaard to the kairological time of the New Testament, and on his Christianized reading of Aristotle's notion of aletheia praktike. I argue that, influenced by Schleiermacher's mystical Protestantism and Natorp's synthesis of Eckhart and Luther, Heidegger's phenomenology of religion around 1920-21 was in fact developing a kind of Lutheran mysticism and mystical Lutheranism. I stress that, though modeled on the ontic sphere of Christian experience, the young Heidegger's concept of ontological mystery is not restricted to either the Christian lifeworld or "mystical experience" in any religious sense...