Reflections on Martin Heidegger's Approach to Early Christianity
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Present History: Reflections on Martin Heidegger’s Approach to Early Christianity Gerhard Ruff What led the young Heidegger to interpret the Christian life as a phenomenological paradigm in his 1920-1921 lecture course, ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’? The following essay points modestly in the direction of an answer: a preoccupation with the problem of reconciling history and logic, which Heidegger inherited from Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, and an early dissatisfaction with Husserl’s approach to phenomenology. Heidegger was not interested in Christianity for its own sake, but because of methodological reasons native to phenomenology. Nonetheless, in the course of his research into early Christianity he offers the philosophy of religion an interesting alternative to the pervasive theoretically- disengaged approach to religious phenomena. In his early philosophical work, Heidegger was already occupied with the question of the accurate understanding of “history”. His habilitation supervisor Rickert distinguishes historical understanding in the strict sense from definition-bound scientific thinking. In Rickert’s view, history could never achieve the common meanings or strict definitions necessary to a science. Dilthey’s more generous understanding of history as an alternative way of thinking presented Heidegger with a way out of this neo-Kantian dichotomy between science and history (Dilthey 1959: 253ff). Dilthey points out that any philosophical investigation of the question of history must start with the Christian belief in the Incarnation of God. The destruction of the ancient concept of God as an eternal substance represents for Dilthey the origin of Western “historical consciousness”. Approaching history through Dilthey, Heidegger turns from the neo-Kantian preoccupation with definitions to the prior question of the origin of historical consciousness. It is in the light of this change in direction that Heidegger’s first lectures show their inner coherence. Heidegger’s assumption that philosophy as a science depends on a 234 Ruff generic understanding – objectivity – repeats the neo-Kantian science- history dichotomy. While Heidegger draws inspiration from thinkers like Dilthey and Schleiermacher, he does not find any method in either thinker with which to rigorously examine the genesis of “historical consciousness”. Nonetheless, he takes a key assumption from Dilthey and carries it through Husserlian phenomenology into his own way of thinking: whatever else history might mean to philosophy, it could never become an “object” of thinking. Philosophical rigor in history cannot be achieved by objectification, but rather by strictness of understanding. This entails a rejection of any idealistic approach to an understanding of the origin of Christian historical consciousness. Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences gave Heidegger a direction, but it was the formal logic of Emil Lask that led Heidegger away from his first teacher, Rickert, toward phenomenology and his new teacher, Edmund Husserl. In his “transcendental-empiricist” system of logic, Lask develops a non-dualistic view of form and matter which allows for a philosophically adequate doctrine of meaning. It is worth noting that Lask is one of the few of Heidegger’s early philosophical influences whom he cites with high esteem in Being and Time. Heidegger’s first two published works, ‘Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus’ (‘The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism’) and Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (The Doctrine of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus) may be read as already overcoming, through a focus on judgment and formal logic, the neo- Kantian question of validity. Although Heidegger first made the acquaintance of Franz Brentano’s thought during his school-years, it was the phenomenology of Brentano’s pupil Husserl that gave him access to a strictly philosophical elaboration of consciousness and history. Heidegger’s famous “break-through” lecture, ‘Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem’ (‘The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews’) demotes the neo-Kantian notions of subjectivity and objectivity to the status of secondary, derivative phenomena. At the same time, Heidegger undermines the implicit idealism of Husserl’s phenomenology through a new emphasis on the non-objectifiability of “world” (Husserl 1976: 51). While objectivity results from the theoretical attitude, Heidegger’s notion of “world” is intended to prevent thinking from taking this turn into de- vivification (Entlebung). To emphasize the inner coherence of pre- theoretical experience, he introduces the neologism “to world”. More.