PhÄNomenologie Des ReligiÖSen Lebens

McGrath - Young Heidegger's Problematic Reading of Augustine - JCRT 4.1

The Young Heidegger's Problematic Reading of Augustine's Ontological Restlessness

A review of Martin Heidegger, Ph'nomenologie des Religi'sen Lebens. Gesamtausgabe, Band 60. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1995. (Available at at http://www.klostermann.de/.) An English translation is in preparation at Indiana University Press by Jennifer Gosetti and Matthias Lutkehermolle under the title Phenomenology of Religious Life.

Sean J. McGrath
University of Toronto

It is a lamentable situation that Heidegger's critique of Scholastic ontology is now better known in continental circles than Scholastic ontology itself. The Heideggerian critique of 'onto-theology' has hardened into a dogma, an unreflectively repeated formula that has lost its moorings in its original sources. We all know that the Scholastics forgot being because they reduced ontology to God. By defining being in terms of that which never comes to be nor changes, that which excludes temporality, the Scholastics made it impossible to think the being that we are. Philosophical theology precludes phenomenological ontology.

Notes

Sean J. McGrath teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2002. He is currently preparing his first book for publication: God and the Being that We Are: Heidegger's Readings of Scholasticism.

' 2002 Sean J. McGrath. All rights reserved.
Updated 07/28/21.
http://jcrt.org/archives/04.1/mcgrath/

Martin Heidegger, 'Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus,' ed. Claudius Strube, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 60: Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 157-299. Hereafter GA60.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York, 1996), 172-173.

The distinction between the content-sense, relational-sense, and enactment-sense is the heart of the young Heidegger's phenomenology of the fore-theoretical. In any comportment or fore-theoretical intention, I can distinguish the what of the comportment, that toward which I am oriented, the how of the comportment, the way I am oriented to it, and the enactment of the comportment, the historically differentiated living out of the comportment in different life situations. The what and the how are fore-theoretical figures for Husserl's noema and noesis; the notion of an enactment-sense to a comportment that would be different from its content and relational senses is unique to Heidegger. See Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 61: Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, ed. Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Otlmanns (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 52-53. Hereafter GA61.

GA60 164. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988), 1: 229.

GA60 164, 298. Heidegger comments on Augustine, City of God, trans, Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), Book 11, Chapter 26, p. 459: 'We do indeed recognize in ourselves an image of God, that is of the Supreme Trinity. It is not an adequate image, but a very distant parallel. It is not co-eternal and, in brief, it is not of the same substance as God. For all that, there is nothing in the whole of God's creation so near to him in nature. . . . We resemble the divine Trinity in that we exist; we know that we exist, and we are glad of this existence and knowledge. . . . In respect of those truths I have no fear of the arguments of the Academics. They say, 'Suppose you are mistaken?' I reply, 'If I am mistaken, I exist.' A non-existent being cannot be mistaken; therefore I must exist, if I am mistaken.' Dilthey comments on the same text. Cf. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1: 234.

GA60 299.

Heidegger acknowledges the relationship of his notion of care to Augustine in History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 302: 'It was seven years ago, while I was investigating these structures in conjunction with my attempts to arrive at the ontological foundations of Augustinian anthropology, that I first came across the phenomena of care.' See also Being and Time, 404, n. 4.

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Book 10, chapter 28, p. 202.

Ibid., 10, 33, p. 208.

GA60 231.

Ibid., 10, 37, p. 214-15.

Ibid., 10, 27, p. 201.

Formal indication is a crucial phenomenological notion in the young Heidegger. Where direct expression is not possible, language can exhortatively point to a phenomenon in the way of expression. Rhetoric and irony are formally indicative. What matters here is not what is said but how it is said. To grasp a formally indicated meaning I must enact the meaning in my situation. That the longing for happiness formally indicates God means that our notion of God necessarily remains without a content, yet we are given a sense how the content could be enacted. See GA60, 62-5.

GA60 195, 197.

Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 198.

GA60 196.

GA60 198.

Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions, trans. David L. Mosher, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 70 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 49-52.

GA60 259-63, 265, 281-2.

At this point Heidegger introduces Luther's theologia crucis into the lecture. According to Luther, to presume to possess knowledge of God is to forsake our human lot: historicity, uncertainty, faith. See GA60 282.

GA60 164, 172. Cf. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1: 233-237.

GA60 259.See also GA60 272: 'The fundamental aesthetic meaning of enjoying (frui); that which is enjoyed (fruendum) is tripartite, intelligible and beautiful things . . . in corruptible and ineffable beauty ' God. Frui is the fundamental characteristic of the basic Augustinian comportment to life itself. Its correlative term is beauty; it contains an aesthetical moment, as does the summum bonum. ' Therewith a basic dimension of the medieval object of theology (and of spiritual history in general) is determined: it is the specifically Greek concept. The enjoyment of God (fruitio Dei) is a decisive concept in medieval theology; it is the main motive that leads to the development of medieval mysticism.'

See GA61 197.

Augustine, Confessions, 10, 28, p. 202.

This conclusion is significantly different than that of John D. Caputo in his Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). See especially p. 247.

See Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, q. 3.

Cf. Bernhard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 105-106: 'Being in love with God, as experienced, is being in love in an unrestricted fashion. All love is self-surrender, but being in love with God is being in love without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservations. Just as unrestricted questioning is our capacity for self-transcendence, so being in love in an unrestricted fashion is the proper fulfilment of that capacity.'