Heidegger's philosophy and Christianity

While there might be in some cases a connection between a philosopher’s politics and his philosophy, and while several writers have assumed that there is a connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics, I can’t visualize what that connection might be.

When I was studying theology, and this may have been when I first encountered Heidegger, I spent some time reading Rudolf Bultmann. It is well known that Bultmann was influenced by Heidegger, and this influence has probably been described by any theologian who has written about Bultmann. For example, in a discussion of “Bultmann’s use of existentialist categories in order to interpret Paul’s view of man” (from The Two Horizons, New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description) Anthony Thiselton writes “Bultmann refuses to interpret soma in substantival terms, when Paul clearly uses it to characterize human existence. Hence Bultmann concludes that soma in Paul represents a way of being rather than a substance or a thing: ‘Man does not have a soma; he is a soma.”

Then on page 40 Thiselton’s writes, “In due course we shall look closely at Bultmann’s use of Heidegger’s categories for the interpretation of the New Testament. Meanwhile, we may note that a number of writers apart from Bultmann argue that there are close affinities between Heidegger’s view of human existence and the New Testament portraits of man. The New Testament scholar Erich Dinkler writes: ‘When Heidegger criticizes man as enslaved by the pseudo-security of concrete objects . . . when he analyzes idle talk and gossip as an attempt to escape from ultimate anxiety towards death – then he says nothing else than what Paul has said characterizing man according to the flesh. In fact Heidegger’s portrait of the thrown and fallen man is very similar to what Paul with the Greek term xanthasthai says about self-glorification and boasting.’ In particular Dinkler considers that Heidegger’s view of the human tension between fate and freedom comes close to the New Testament description of man. He continues, ‘As a New Testament student I cannot refrain from saying that it is just this interrelation and correlation of freedom and predestination explained by Paul . . . which we re-discover here in philosophical terms.’”

On page 41 Thiselton writes, “It would be a mistake, however, to limit Heidegger’s relevance to New Testament Interpretation to the so-called ‘existentialism’ of Being and Time. The detailed work of Ernst Fuchs on the text of the New Testament also owes much to the stimulus of Heidegger’s later thought. . . .”

“It was Ernst Fuchs who first translated the hermeneutical discussion from the categories of inauthentic and authentic existence derived from Being and Time into the later Heidegger’s analogous distinction between everyday language of the subject-object dilemma and the uncorrupted language of being.’

On page 42, Thiselton writes, “The twenty or so writings of Heidegger that span the years 1935 to 1960 reflect a pessimistic assessment of the capacity of the language of the Western language-tradition to convey anything other than the day-to-day practicalia of technology and idle talk. . . .”

On page 201, Thiselton writes, “. . . Heidegger’s philosophy is individualistic in two particular ways. First of all, although he rejects Descartes’ starting point of the cogito, Heidegger rejects not so much beginning with the individual self, but beginning with a self which is isolated from its world as the epistemological subject in an act of cognition. Dasein is more than a thinking subject, but it remains an ‘I am.’ This is the theme of Paul Ricoeur’s essay entitled ‘Heidegger and the Question of the Subject.’ Ricoeur writes, ‘The kind of ontology developed by Heidegger hives ground to what I shall call a hermeneutics of the ‘I am’, which is a repetition of the cogito conceived of as a simple epistemological principle.’ The objection voiced by Heidegger against the starting-point of Descartes is not that it began with the ‘I am,’ but that it starts with ‘a previous model of certitude.’ Indeed, ‘a retrieval of the cogito is possible only as a regressive movement beginning with the whole phenomenon of the ‘being-in-the-world.’ Although he recognizes the centrality of Being and language in Heidegger’s later writings, Ricoeur concludes that even in this later period the ‘hermeneutics of the “I am”’ is not entirely abandoned, since the role of ‘resolve’ and freedom in the face of death in Being and Time is taken over by ‘primordial poeting (Urdichtung) ‘as the answer to the problem of the who and to the problem of the authenticity of the who.’

And this isn’t intended to portray Heidegger as a Christian, but it is to say that several Christian theologians were inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy. Apart from the Christians who were influenced by Heidegtger, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was written in 1943, some say, as an atheistic treatment of Heidegger’s existential principles (Being and Time was written in 1927). Surely nothing can be further from the triumphalist, ethnic oriented Fascism than secular existentialism.