Heidegger's Confessions

The Remains of Saint Augustine in "Being and Time" and Beyond

Ryan Coyne

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226209449
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Although Martin Heidegger is nearly as notorious as Friedrich Nietzsche for embracing the death of God, the philosopher himself acknowledged that Christianity accompanied him at every stage of his career. In Heidegger's Confessions, Ryan Coyne isolates a crucially important player in this story: Saint Augustine. Uncovering the significance of Saint Augustine in Heidegger's philosophy, he details the complex and conflicted ways in which Heidegger paradoxically sought to define himself against the Christian tradition while at the same time making use of its resources.Coyne first examines the role of Augustine in Heidegger's early period and the development of his magnum opus, Being and Time. He then goes on to show that Heidegger owed an abiding debt to Augustine even following his own rise as a secular philosopher, tracing his early encounters with theological texts through to his late thoughts and writings. Bringing a fresh and unexpected perspective to bear on Heidegger's profoundly influential critique of modern metaphysics, Coyne traces a larger lineage between religious and theological discourse and continental philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE

Heidegger’s Paul

Introduction

“At least I tried. The guiding notions which, under the names ‘expression,’ ‘experience,’ and ‘consciousness,’ determine modern thinking, were to be put in question with respect to the decisive role they played.”1 With these words Heidegger reflected upon his early Freiburg lecture courses (1918–1923) more than thirty years after they were delivered. By the time he published these remarks in 1958 as part of a “quasi-fictional”2 confession entitled “Dialogue on Language,” the hermeneutic phenomenology spelled out in Being and Time had receded from his view. The treatise that made him famous had also propelled him into a series of endless revisions, sending him in search of a way to directly interrogate the meaning of Being in general. In the “Dialogue” we learn that the project articulated in Being and Time had originated with a series of rash attempts to jettison “the sphere of subjectivity and of the expression that belongs to it.”3 In hindsight these attempts seemed ill-advised, primarily because their goal was unattainable: “Nobody can in just one single leap take distance from the predominant circle of ideas, especially not if he is dealing with the well-worn tracks of traditional thinking—tracks that fade into realms where they can hardly be seen.”4 But if in this manner the later Heidegger sought to disparage his very first lectures and seminars at Freiburg, he nevertheless revealed their guiding thread, suggesting that his inquiry into the relation between expression and existence was the crucible in which Being and Time first took shape as well as the guiding line for his meticulous early readings of ancient, medieval, and modern texts.

The present chapter considers Heidegger’s 1920–1921 winter lecture course entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” in this light, underscoring the irreducibly ambivalent status of religion in Heidegger’s earliest critiques of the relation between expression and experience. Just prior to his disavowal of the philosophy of religion in 1922, Heidegger wagered that the phenomenological investigation of what he called “primordial Christian religiosity” could reinvigorate contemporary philosophical analyses of lived experience. This wager is particularly evident in the manuscript for Heidegger’s winter 1920–1921 lecture course, the bulk of which is devoted to commenting upon Paul’s first and second letters to the Thessalonians. It is clear that Heidegger believed for a time that these two texts, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, could actually help to clarify contemporary philosophical accounts of temporality by providing sound guidance for the conceptualization of historical becoming. At issue here is the fact that in its attempt to establish Paul as model for conceiving time philosophically, the commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians generates a hidden dilemma in Heidegger’s work that never got resolved, but that nonetheless set the stage for Heidegger’s painstaking de-theologization of Augustinian anthropology in 1921.

The dilemma as I describe it below is a function of the role that Pauline eschatology briefly played for the early Heidegger, whose interest in religiosity was directly related to his sense of the potential, and potential shortcomings, of Husserlian phenomenology. It is well known that by the time Heidegger began lecturing on religiosity in 1920 he was already convinced that Husserl had reopened the possibility of articulating a science of lived experience, even as he worried that Husserl’s methodological breakthroughs were jeopardized by his uncritical reliance upon Cartesian metaphysics. In pitting Pauline eschatology against contemporary philosophical and historicist conceptions of time, Heidegger aimed to capitalize on these breakthroughs while revamping the concept of life underpinning them. And yet the attempt to utilize primordial Christian religiosity as a model to be emulated necessarily wound up casting this religiosity in the role of an enemy to be vanquished. The present chapter thus identifies the subtle ways in which primordial Christian religiosity functions as a mimetic rival for Heidegger in his handling of New Testament sources, one that is displaced through the development of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.

The real significance of Pauline eschatology in the context of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures comes into view only if we see that in the “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” Paul is made to embody the redemptive suffering of the crucified Christ. This typologizing of Paul, however, is far from self-evident in the course manuscript. I argue below that it emerges only if we retrace Heidegger’s rather submerged and highly suggestive treatment of the Pauline katechon, the obscure figure identified in 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7 as holding off the end time, delaying the coming of the man of lawlessness or Antichrist. It is the constitutive role of the katechon in the structure of Pauline eschatology that accounts for the fundamentally ambivalent status of religiosity for Heidegger, as this structure threatens to overturn the very philosophical presuppositions Heidegger wanted it to confirm. To advance this argument, the present chapter maintains a tight focus on the years 1919–1921. Rather than turning directly to Heidegger’s exegeses of Pauline texts, it begins with a brief but detailed look at the conception of human life these exegeses were meant to ratify. It then spells out the argument of Heidegger’s 1920–1921 “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.” In a last step it highlights the tightly regulated circulation of concepts through which Heidegger sought to establish the primacy of his own notion of contemporary historical becoming by appealing to the alleged source of primordial Christian religiosity.

The Hermeneutical Intuition

In his authoritative study of the early Heidegger, Theodore Kisiel underscores the crucial significance of the 1919 War Emergency Semester (Kriegsnotsemester) course (KNS 1919), entitled “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,”5 as paving the way for the analysis of existence elaborated in Being and Time.6 Added to the German academic calendar to accommodate an influx of students returning to university studies from military service, the course provided Heidegger with the chance to articulate his own account of phenomenology as a descriptive science. Before an audience largely unfamiliar with the finer points of Husserlian methodology, Heidegger crafted an intricate defense of the unity of lived experience. Set forth in vitalist terms indebted to the late nineteenth-century German life-philosophy and the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, the defense places in sharp relief the view of self-consciousness that the 1920–1921 commentary on Paul was meant to corroborate. The core of the defense consists in demonstrating that concepts do not necessarily interrupt the flow of experience, nor do they portion it out into discrete yet ultimately falsifying snapshots of an unbroken but otherwise inaccessible whole. On the contrary, concepts can in fact allow the intentional subject to resonate with its experiential contents and thereby to achieve a sort of genuine self-possession.

The controlling metaphor of resonance provided the foundation upon which Heidegger would eventually construct the figure of human Dasein or “being-there” in subsequent essays and lecture courses. If we take a close look at the KNS 1919 lecture course, we can discern the sense in which Heidegger’s attempt to circumscribe the psychic realm as the primary object of philosophical inquiry was part of an effort to overhaul the basic procedures of Husserl’s account of phenomenological reduction.7 This will also afford us the chance to specify the sense in which phenomenology could be a science of the historical—a capacity which the early Heidegger was also willing to extend to certain discursive treatment of religion: “History in its most authentic sense is the highest object of religion, religion begins and ends in it.”8 Thus before turning to religiosity in the early Heidegger we must first explain the sense in which phenomenology, as a science of the historical, is hermeneutics.

The KNS 1919 lecture course begins with Heidegger pointing out the many problems that proliferate around contemporary philosophical uses of the term worldview. Heidegger rejects the assumption that philosophy is or should be the science of values.9 Seeking to rebuff depictions of philosophy as inductive metaphysics he sets out to redefine the relation between truth and validity. The notion, he argues, that philosophy’s goal is to achieve a specific “worldview,” a metaphysical viewpoint from which the world is interpreted in a universally binding sense, is a common though mistaken notion of philosophy’s true potential. According to Wilhelm Windelband, scientific discourse posits normative axioms in the service of establishing their a priori validity.10 In reply, Heidegger asks “whether truth as such constitutes itself in an original worth-taking.”11 If the phenomena of truth and value derive their sense from the most concrete level of experience, then they must be traced back to a level at which first-person experience is not already deformed by the intrusion of theory or the objectification of experiential contents. When life is lived to the fullest extent possible, the “I” simply lives “in” the world as it is encountered, without overlaying values upon things. Does this “I” encounter what is intrinsically of value by positing values to itself? Does the valuable here take the form of an object or prescription that stands over “me” for whom it is binding? “Clearly not,” Heidegger replies. “I experience value-relations without the slightest element of an ‘ought’ being given. In the morning I enter the study; the sun lies over the books, etc., and I delight in this. Such delight is in no way an ought; delightfulness as such is not given to me in an ought-experience. I ought to work, I ought to take a walk: two motivations, two possible kinds of ‘because’ which do not reside in the delightful itself but presuppose it.”12 The two modes of taking delight stand opposed here, in an opposition that furnishes the basic schema elaborated by the rest of the course.

In one mode, the phenomenon of delight is constituted by the act of positing the valuable by abstracting values from the vital flow of experiential contents. When lifted from the immediate richness and intensity of the experiential flow, valuing becomes synonymous with the act of positing norms that reflect back upon life from above it. The value as so posited has been disconnected from the concrete experience of what is truly valuable for me. Superimposed upon concrete life, it is given as if from elsewhere. But the valuable need not be encountered in this manner as standing above me, abstracted from the vital flow of life. In a more basic mode of experience, I can encounter what is delightful, and thus what is of value for me, from within the vital flow of experience and thus as marked by its radical particularity. At this level I do not necessarily posit something as delightful so much as I simply delight in it. This seemingly trivial observation matters greatly in the KNS 1919 course precisely because it implies that not all forms of reflexivity entail abstracting or standing apart from the simple intention of life in its devotion to experiential contents. The “I” who simply delights in the delightful has not yet morphed into the theory-laden “subject” who relates to the world through a veil of normativity. This dichotomy between two modes of value is the linchpin in Heidegger’s argument that philosophy is primordial science, by which he means that it is a descriptive science of the fundamentally vital unity of cognition and sensation, the science of the primordial intention of life in its intrinsically meaning-conferring identity. This identity takes shape as what Heidegger calls the “pre-theoretical” level of existence—“theory” being for Heidegger a modification or a “de-vivification” of an originally vital impulse that refers back to its source in a more basic form of being toward entities in general.13

When Heidegger adopts the language of life-philosophy in referring to lived experience as concrete, he has in mind not only the concrescence of experiential contents woven together as a coherent and meaningful totality, but also the fact that this totality is ineluctably marked as mine. When I adopt a theoretical posture toward what is valuable or true, I place it at a distance from me. Standing opposite the content of my experience, I have already departed from the simple intention of living “in” something. This minimal alienation puts me at a distance from my Being as a historically particular entity, which is why the theoretical realm points back toward something more original and alive, something not yet objectified or “re-moved [ent-fernt], lifted out of the actual experience.”14 The theoretical gaze, which turns experiential contents to stone, entails a relation with things that is literally evacuated of vitality. Its objective correlate is the thing-experience or Dingerfahrung which constitutes the natural scientific relation to entities.15 And just as concrete life does not conform to the category of thinghood, so too the subjective correlate of thinghood is characterized as an altered, de-vivified form of experience devoid of all reference to the particularity of the historical individual: “The historical-I is de-historicized into the residue of a specific ‘I-ness’ as the correlate of thinghood.”16 By opposing theory and the pre-theoretical, Heidegger assumes the burden of showing how a descriptive science of experience could possibly be pre-theoretical. He also must account for why it seems that life cannot maintain itself for long at a pre-theoretical level, why it so easily degrades into theory.17

Rejecting the primacy of theory, Heidegger seeks to redefine what he calls the “psychic.” He argues that unless it can be proven that the psychic is given as an autonomous and identifiable sphere of experience, the science of self-consciousness will remain no more than a fiction. This is the real dilemma confronting Heidegger in the KNS 1919 lecture course, which culminates in the question concerning the origin of all rational principles. Are rational principles intrinsic to pre-theoretical life? If so, does this mean that life is self-structuring? Or as Heidegger asks: “Can the axiomatic problems, the questions concerning the ultimate norms of knowing, willing, and feeling, be demonstrated in the psychic itself? Do I stand in the psychic as in a primordial sphere? Is the genuine origin or ‘primal spring’ [Ur-sprung] to be found here?”18 His response to this question comes in the form of a vehement defense of the view that any descriptive science worthy of the name must express its object without distorting it, and that it must bolster one’s original standing in psychic sphere. The examined life is not simply transparent to itself; it is in fact a richer, more intense version of the unexamined life.19 Far from paralyzing life or breaking it up into a series of approximations, conceptual determination vivifies the very impulse it seeks to capture.

To access the life he presupposes to be self-vivifying, Heidegger must first show how life can overcome thing-experience, or what he calls “the sole supremacy of the sphere of things.”20 By 1919 Heidegger had already ascribed to life the tendency to reduce the manifold senses of Being to the notably de-vivified meaning of the object. And he had already determined that the psychic realm is not at all a “thing,” since thinghood is constituted outside the pre-theoretical realm. At issue, then, was to determine the domain of experience in which “I” may encounter myself primordially as living in the world, starting with environmental experience. As with the analysis of value, the founding interconnections of worldly experience are not superimposed upon the events of which they are comprised. The world is first and foremost an event—an idea Heidegger seeks to capture in the phrase “es weltet” (it worlds). In everyday life I need not first assemble the component of my experience in order for them to take on meaning; I do not first have to add up the features of a desk—wooden surfaces arranged at right angles to each other, having mass, extension, color, etc.—before I encounter it as the coherent meaningful totality I call a “d...