Traces of Heidegger’s Religious Struggle in his Phenomenology of Religious Life

Alfred Denker

With its saying, thinking lays inconspicuous furrows in language. They are still more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the fields.

Martin Heidegger

The different manuscripts and student notes of lecture courses that are published in volume 60 of the collected edition of Heidegger’s works, the Gesamtausgabe, document five decisive years of Heidegger’s philosophical development in general, and of his work in the field of the phenomenology of religion in particular. Later we will take a closer look at these papers and see how Heidegger’s struggle with religion surfaces repeatedly. After a brief sketch of his early years, we will discuss key elements in Heidegger’s life and intellectual development until 1922. This first part should give us some idea as to what kind of evidence of his struggle we should look for in the text of GA60. In the second part of the paper, we will take a closer look at some of this evidence. Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in the south German town of Meßkirch.1 His father was a cooper, and the sexton of Saint Martin’s church, where Heidegger occasionally served as an altar boy. His mother was born and raised on a farm in nearby Göggingen, where Heidegger spent most of his holidays as a boy. His devout Roman Catholic parents were neither poor nor rich. When he was 14 years old, Heidegger left Meßkirch to continue his education at the Gymnasium in Constance. For boys from modest families, the financial support of Roman Catholic endowments was necessary to allow them to finish their high school educations. In return they were expected to study theology, and later become priests. While visiting the Gymnasium, Heidegger lived from 1903 until 1906 at the Konradihaus, the seminary where Conrad Gröber was rector. Gröber, a father-figure to Heidegger and the 22 Denker later Archbishop of Freiburg, gave the boy a copy of Brentano’s dissertation on Aristotle as a birthday present in 1907. From 1906 until 1909 Heidegger lived in Freiburg, graduating from the Berthold’s Gymnasium in the summer of 1909. As planned, he began his novitiate with the Jesuits of Tisis in September. After two weeks, however, he was dismissed for health reasons. He subsequently moved to the seminary in Freiburg and continued his theological studies at the university there. In February 1911 a deteriorating heart condition forced Heidegger to abandon all plans to become a priest. In October 1911 he registered in the new department of mathematics and physics, where he took courses in mathematics, history, physics and philosophy. In philosophy Professor Heinrich Rickert became his most influential teacher.2 On July 26, 1913, Heidegger received a doctorate in philosophy with his first dissertation, entitled ‘The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism’. His future looked promising; philosophy professor Arthur Schneider and history professor Heinrich Finke began grooming the talented young scholar for the Freiburg University’s chair of Catholic philosophy. A grant from the Catholic Church enabled Heidegger to start work on his qualifying dissertation. On the advice of his mentors Heidegger decided to write on Duns Scotus’s doctrine of categories and meaning. At this time he still thought his lifework would be taken up with a comprehensive presentation of psychology and medieval logic in the light of modern phenomenology. It therefore came as a great shock and bitter disappointment when, a year after he had successfully completed his qualifying dissertation and obtained his veni legendi on July 26, 1915, the department of philosophy awarded the chair to Josef Geyser. This has all become common knowledge within the field of Heidegger studies, and we do not need to linger any longer on these well-trodden pathways. For our present purposes it suffices to establish that Heidegger came from a solid and devout Roman Catholic background, from which he slowly distanced himself from 1914 onwards.

1. From “Italian Salad” to a New Understanding of Christianity

When discussing Heidegger’s intellectual biography in his student years, it is important to remember that there was a strong Protestant and liberal