Heidegger's Philosophy of Religion: From God to the Gods

ONE The Pre-Historical Heidegger

ONE The Pre-Historical Heidegger n ongoing relationship to theology, to faith, and the church runs like a thread throughout Heidegger’s life. Heidegger was born, so to speak, in the church. His father was a sexton, who led both a vocational and a familial life under one roof, in a house situated next to the church. As a young child and schoolboy, Martin’s playtime was ever carried out with the church as his backdrop. And later, as a young student, Heidegger’s intellectual pursuits were inspired by his interest in theology. It is highly likely that the relationship that Heidegger maintained to faith, theology, and the church throughout the whole of his work can be traced back to this early influence. Whatever value this backdrop may have had for Heidegger at different points in his life, it is the environment out of which his thought began. In this chapter, I will discuss the way in which Heidegger first attempted to conceptualize an ahistorical Catholicism, and how he later came to the historicity of religion through Friedrich Schleiermacher. Moreover, I will discuss Heidegger’s A 11 12 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion rejection of a theoretical approach to religion, while nevertheless endeavoring to preserve the piety of philosophy — including the piety of the philosophy of religion. The term ‘pre-historical’ is to be taken here in reference to the timeless character of scholastic and neoscholastic Catholicism, the intellectual environment out of which Heidegger emerged, and the period prior to his adoption of a historical perspective. The ontological and temporal determination of the ‘earlier’ and ‘prior’ is to be understood as piety (Frömmigkeit). THE EARLIEST PUBLICATIONS Heidegger’s earliest published work borrows from the language of Catholicism conveyed by his teachers, and he clearly identi fies himself with this language.1 For example, in his first review in 1910, “Per mortem ad vitam,” he rejects all tendencies toward personality cult and individualism.2 Also, in a short essay, “Zur Philosophischen Orientierung für Akademiker,” written in 1911, Heidegger maintains that philosophy must be a mirror of the eternal, as it is in scholastic philosophy. The problem that he saw in the philosophical work of his contemporaries was that it served as a mirror for their subjective opinions , personal feelings, and wishes. He reproached particular worldviews that were grounded in life, rather than in the eternal.3 It is likely that his youthful aversion to modernism was borrowed from Carl Braig, his mentor in theology during this period.4 Despite having giving up his studies in theology in 1911, Heidegger continued to attend Braig’s lecture course on dogmatic theology, and he recalled much later conversations that he and Braig shared on scholastic and idealistic-speculative theology.5 As a high school student, Heidegger had already read Braig’s book, Vom Sein: Abriß der Ontologie. In this book, Braig includes a passage from St. Bonaventure, which holds that just as the eye does not see light itself when it is directed toward a manifold of color, the mind’s eye does not see being itself when directed to entities singly or as a whole.6 And yet, it is only by way of being that we can encounter entities in the first place. The mind’s eye receives, as it were, an objectless impression, much in the way that one who only sees light sees nothing per se. What later emerges in Heidegger’s work as the ontological difference has its roots in this connection between transcendental philosophy and ontology. The former asks about the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, seeking not to bring new objects of knowledge forth, but rather what makes objects of knowledge as such possible. The latter, seen from Bonaventure’s perspective, gives the transcendental question an ontological answer through that nonobjective condition which Bonaventure calls ‘being’ (and here, Bonaventure also differentiates himself from Plato, who sought such a condition in the idea of the good). Here we can see an opening up of the difference between being and entities, which served originally to prevent the mistake of identifying being with the highest entity or with the whole of entities. In the later chapters of this study, we shall see how this theme becomes more central in Heidegger’s work. Braig himself was a notorious opponent of modernism, and was credited with coining the term.7 Braig saw in modernism both a...