Existential scepticism and christian life in early Heidegger

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 45, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 273-289

  Elliott, Brian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547547749     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2004.t01-1-00255.x     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, London: Oxford University Press, 1933, p. 199
2. Hans Georg Gadamer, Heidegger's Ways (New York: SUNY, 1994), p. 169
3. In his comprehensive study, The Genesis of 'Being and Time' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Theodore Kisiel offers a quite different version of Heidegger's remarks: 'I myself am no longer even regarded as a "philosopher" [by Husserl, "der Alte"], I am "still really a theologian'" (p. 150). Here Heidegger is found to be genuinely ill at ease with the self-description 'theologian', rather than provocatively insisting upon such a status. Such a construal eminently aids Kisiel's general interpretation of Heidegger's 1920-1 religion lectures as an exploration of a privileged but ultimately dispensable sphere of phenomena, useful for working out the formal structure of human existence. While recognizing that 'religious experience is the most pretheoretical, and so in its way an ultimate test of the phenomenological method' (p. 219), Kisiel insists that the real contribution of the religion lectures was 'not the religious content but rather the abstrusely formal elaboration of his hermeneutic phenomenology' (p. 218). Against this, the present paper contends that the very attempt to formalize the Christian motifs in the analytic of Dasein is not actually realized in Heidegger's work up to and including Being and Time. A further contention here put forward is that Heidegger himself remained undecided on the point of an effective neutralization of the ethico-religious content of his thought. Such indecision, I would further argue, stems from a basic tension between the pull towards Husserlian universalism on the one hand and towards Kierkegaardian particularism on the other
4. Cf. GA 19
5. Principally, Letters to the Thessalonians, Romans and Galatians
6. For a more detailed assessment of Heidegger's interpretation of Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics see my 'Heidegger and Aristotle on the Finitude of Practical Reason' in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (31/2 [May 2000], pp. 159-183)
7. Heidegger's Ways, pp.174-5
8. Numbers in brackets refer to Book X of Augustine's Confessions