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

TWO Heidegger and the Philosophy of Religion

TWO Heidegger and the Philosophy of Religion s we observed in the previous chapter, Heidegger directed his philosophy toward the facticity of human being. His approach to religion must be understood from the standpoint of this guiding interest. As the winter semester approached in 1920, Heidegger announced his upcoming lecture course, entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.”1 At the time, the theological literature of Rudolf Otto and Friedrich Heiler was widely circulated.2 Husserl had found Otto’s book, The Idea of the Holy, an impressive first beginning for a phenomenology of religion, albeit little more than a beginning. “It would seem to me that a great deal more progress must be made in the study of phenomena and their eidetic analysis before a theory of religious consciousness as a philosophical theory could arise.”3 As I will show later in this chapter, Husserl was committed far more to an eidetic orientation in the phenomenology of religion than Heidegger. In this lecture course Heidegger presented an explication of the fundamental event of the Christian experience of life as it appears in the letters of Paul. In particular, Heidegger paid A 35 36 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion special attention to the fourth and fifth sections of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, with the aim of showing how this earliest contribution to the New Testament marks a decisive moment, wherein the Christian experience of life becomes manifest in and through the question of the coming of Christ. This coming is described as a sudden occurrence, like a thief in the night. The suddenness and unpredictability for which one must solemnly wait was a point of fascination for Heidegger. In particular, he focused upon Paul’s notion of ‘kairos,’ which signifies one’s delivery to a moment of decision, a moment that cannot be reached through a calculation. The kairos does not represent a mastery of time, but rather the uncertainty inherent in the future. This defining characteristic of the kairos belongs to the history of life’s actualization, which itself rejects any attempt at objectification.4 In the moment of kairos one’s life is at stake. Attempts at mastery or control of this moment express the wrong attitude with which this moment must be encountered. The question here, however, is how Heidegger, as a philosopher , understood this conception within his philosophy of the facticity of life. First, he formalized the fundamental Christian experience of life. He does not choose a position with respect to the particular content of this experience, but rather limits himself to investigating the sustaining conditions of its possibility . Heidegger asks whether the kairological moment can be preserved within the history of the actualization of life and the unpredictability of the eschaton. It could potentially be understood as a possibility that we ourselves have or something that is under our control, so that the future that withdraws from us becomes part of our own planning. Yet, if it were to be understood thus, the specific character of the kairos would then be lost in a totalizing form of calculation. The future would then be conceived in the end as a horizon of consciousness out of which experiences evolve in a certain order. For Heidegger, the kairos has more to do with the conditions of the possibility of facticity, which it goes on to determine in a formal way.5 For what takes place — the content in the moment of the kairos — can itself never be deduced. If it is possible to encounter properly the suddenness of the kairos, it must be accomplished without the aid of deduction. Given his emphasis upon the kairological moment in facticity , how is one to understand Heidegger’s position as a philosophy of religion? In a rough, Hegelian-inspired sketch, one could say that religion is the domain of representation, of the historical and situational context of human existence, and furthermore that philosophy is the domain of conceptual thinking, wherein one tends to withdraw from both representation and history. In this picture, religious representations are taken to refer to a content represented in the image, and the image itself is a representation of the concept. Yet is it possible to reproduce the representation of religion on the level of concepts? Is this conceptual approach the most suitable way to understand the representations of life as they are presented in Christianity? If so...