Heidegger & Catholicism: Some Very Introductory Notes

Heidegger and Catholicism: Some Very Introductory Notes Heidegger’s influence on twentieth and twenty-first century Catholic thought is well known. Without a doubt the most famous Catholic Heideggerian is Karl Rahner, whose theology, it is widely agreed, has – so far – had the deepest impact (for better or worse) on the post-conciliar Church. Besides Rahner there are also, among others, Johannes Baptist Lotz, Gustav Siewerth, Max Müller, and Bernhard Welte. More recently, there is Jean-Luc Marion, who, despite his criticisms of Heidegger, is very much under Heidegger’s sway, especially with regard to his conception and critique of “metaphysics.” But Heidegger himself was raised Catholic and took his faith very seriously as a young man. There can be no doubt, then, of the influence of Catholicism on Heidegger’s own thought. Heidegger’s father was the sexton at their parish, St. Martin’s, in the town of Meßkirch in southwestern Germany, some fifty miles south of Tübingen. Heidegger entered the seminary at Konstanz as a teenager and at twenty entered the Jesuit novitiate at Feldkirch in Austria, lasting all of two weeks – the official reason for his departure was poor health – and eventually transferring to the seminary in Freiburg and studying at the university there. During this time, 1909-1911, Heidegger also penned articles and reviews for a conservative Catholic journal called Der Akademiker. The Heidegger of this period was a fierce opponent of theological modernism. In a laudatory 1910 review of F.W. Förster’s Autorität und Freiheit published in Der Akademiker he urged that... the Church will, if it is to remain true to its eternal treasure of truth, justifiably combat the destructive influences of modernism, which is not conscious of the sharpest contradictions in which its modern views of life stand to the ancient wisdom of the Christian tradition.1 In 1911, again for health reasons, Heidegger left the seminary and his theological studies but remaining at the university in Freiburg, turned his attention to mathematics, natural science, and philosophy. He completed his doctoral dissertation in philosophy in 1913 and his Habilitationsschrift in philosophy in 1915. The doctoral dissertation was on the theory of judgment in psychologism and the Habilitationsschrift was on Duns Scotus’s theory of the categories and meaning. (Actually, part of Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift was unwittingly on Thomas of Erfurt, whose Grammatica speculativa was at the time attributed to Scotus.) Heidegger comments on the dissertation and the Habilitationsschrift in a 1915 curriculum vitae: My increasing interest in history facilitated for me an intense engagement with the philosophy of the Middle Ages, which I recognized as necessary for a fundamental development of Scholasticism. For me this engagement consisted not primarily in a presentation of the historical relations between individual thinkers but rather in an interpretive understanding of the theoretical content of their philosophy with the aid of modern philosophy. Thus my investigation into Duns Scotus’s Theory of Categories and Meaning came about. My basic philosophical convictions remained those of AristotelianScholastic philosophy. With time I recognized that the intellectual wealth stored up in it 1 Translation by J. Protevi, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14/15 (1991): 493. 1 must allow and demands a far more fruitful evaluation and application. So in my dissertation on “The Theory of Judgment in Psychologism,” which concerned a central problem of logic and epistemology and took its bearings simultaneously from modern logic and from the basic judgments of Aristotelian-Scholasticism, I tried to find a basis for further investigations.2 Heidegger obviously shows signs here of having grown more comfortable with modernity. He is interested in a kind of synthesis of scholasticism and modern thought. John van Buren calls this Heidegger’s “Neo-Neo-Scholasticism.”3 But from around 1917 Heidegger began to move away from Catholicism in the direction of Protestantism and especially Lutheranism. This seems to be indicated, inter alia, by the joint evidence of a couple letters of Edmund Husserl (one from 1919 to Rudolf Otto4 and another from 1920 to Paul Natorp5) who in 1917 had only recently become acquainted with Heidegger at Freiburg. However, Husserl regarded Heidegger’s drift toward Protestantism as being guided more by intellectual interest than a religious commitment. Why had Heidegger become disenchanted with Catholicism? He explains this in a 1919 letter to a Catholic priest and friend Engelbert Krebs: Epistemological insights extending to a theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity and metaphysics – these though in a new sense.6 Abandoning Catholicism, what did Heidegger hope to find in Lutheranism? This is hard to say. It is probably the case that Heidegger was more interested in Luther himself than his movement. Whatever motivated Heidegger’s initial attraction to Luther, it seems that by the early 1920s he saw in the reformer’s writings, to simplify to the extreme, important clues about the practical nature of intentionality, which is always driven by “care” (Sorge), or so one might gather from the lectures and letters of the period. Consider these intriguing retrospective remarks of Heidegger written in 1938 (or 1939?) – i.e., a decade after the appearance of Being and Time – in a book entitled Besinnung that was not intended for publication (but which has since been published as vol. 66 of the Gesamtausgabe): And who would not want to recognize that a struggle with Christianity reticently accompanied my path hitherto, a struggle that was not and is not a “problem” that one takes up to address, but a preservation of and at the same time, a painful separation from, one’s origins: the parental home, homeland, and youth. Only one who was so rooted in an actually lived Catholic world may be able to have an inkling of the necessities that like 2 Quoted by J. van Buren in The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 54. You can find a translation of the rest of the text in T. Kisiel and T. Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of Heidegger’s Early Occasional Writings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), pp. 7-9. 3 Cf. The Young Heidegger, p. 52-58. 4 The letter is translated in Becoming Heidegger, pp. 363-365. 5 This letter too is translated in Becoming Heidegger, pp. 366-368. 6 From Supplements, trans. J. van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 69. 2 subterranean quakes have been at work in the pathway of my inquiry hitherto. Moreover, the Marburg period offered a profound experience of a Protestant Christianity – all of which as what had to be overcome from the ground up but not destroyed. It is not proper to speak of these most inward confrontations since they do not revolve around issues that concern the dogma of Christianity and articles of faith, but rather only around the sole question: whether God is fleeing from us or not, and whether we, as creating ones, still experience this flight genuinely.7 Heidegger’s talk here of a preservation (Wahrung) of and a separation (Ablösung) from his origins, which include his Catholicism, invites an application of Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung, that is, the simultaneous preservation and cancelation (in different respects) of something, usually an earlier stage of a thing or a person’s development. The full-grown plant preserves part of the reality of the original seed and cancels out another part of it. You could say that a kind of synthesis is achieved in the later stage of the plant’s growth (and, in fact, different kinds of syntheses were occurring all through its development). So, it would appear legitimate, then, to see Heidegger’s thought as in some manner incorporating the Catholicism of his youth. My aim in these remarks was simply to present a very introductory glance at Catholicism’s influence on Heidegger for people who are unaware of it. For those who are interested in this question there are several books that contain some very good studies of it: Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, John van Buren’s The Young Heidegger: Rumor of a Hidden King, John D. Caputo’s Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics, Laurence Paul Hemming’s Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice, and S.J. McGrath’s The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken. Robert Vigliotti’s unpublished Fordham Ph.D. dissertation, Martin Heidegger's Earliest Writings, also has helpful material. Much of the material in this paper is drawn from these books. But as you will notice from their titles, none of the above books focuses solely on the influence of Catholicism on Heidegger’s thought. That book, as far as I know, has yet to be written. 7 Mindfulness, trans. P. Emad and T. Kalary, (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 368. I have slightly altered the translation. 3