Heidegger'S Black Notebooks and The Future of Theology: Edited by Mårten Björk and Jayne Svenungsson

HEIDEGGER’S BLACK
NOTEBOOKS AND THE

FUTURE OF THEOLOGY
Edited by Mårten Björk and Jayne Svenungsson
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the
Future of Theology
Mårten Björk · Jayne Svenungsson
Editors
Heidegger’s Black
Notebooks and the
Future of Theology
Editors
Mårten Björk Jayne Svenungsson
University of Gothenburg Centre for Theology and Religious
Gothenburg, Sweden Studies
Lund University
Lund, Sweden
ISBN 978-3-319-64926-9 ISBN 978-3-319-64927-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64927-6
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Acknowledgements
We wish to express our gratitude to Amy Invernizzi and Phil Getz at

Palgrave Macmillan for their encouragement and support. Thanks are
also due to Anders Karitz Foundation and Olaus Petristiftelsen, whose
generous support facilitated this intellectual endeavour. Finally, we wish
to express our gratitude to the Swedish Foundation for Humanities
and Social Sciences, who first enabled this project by offering generous
support to the symposium ‘Heidegger and Theology—after the Black
Notebooks’, held at Lund University, Sweden, in December 2015.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Heidegger and Theology after the Black

Notebooks 1
Jayne Svenungsson
2 Religion in the Black Notebooks: Overview and Analysis 23

Judith Wolfe
3 In the Spirit of Paul: Thinking the Hebraic Inheritance

(Heidegger, Bultmann, Jonas) 49
Hans Ruin
4 Why Heidegger Didn’t Like Catholic Theology:

The Case of Romano Guardini 77
George Pattison
5 Anarchist Singularities or Proprietorial Resentments?

on the Christian Problem in Heidegger’s Notebooks
of the 1930s 99
Ward Blanton
6 Monotheism as a Metapolitical Problem: Heidegger’s

War Against Jewish Christian Monotheism 131
Christoph Schmidt
vii
viii Contents
7 Love Strong as Death: Jews Against Heidegger

(On the Issue of Finitude) 159
Agata Bielik-Robson
8 Apocalypse and the History of Being 191

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback
9 Gottwesen and the De-Divinization of the Last God:

Heidegger’s Meditation on the Strange and Incalculable 211
Elliot R. Wolfson
10 Confessions and Considerations: Heidegger’s Early

Black Notebooks and His Lecture on Augustine’s
Theory of Time 257
Marius Timmann Mjaaland
11 The Irritability of Being: Martin Heidegger, Hans

Driesch and the Future of Theology 277
Mårten Björk
Index 315
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Mårten Björk is a Doctoral Student in Theology and Religious

Studies at Gothenburg University, Sweden. His dissertation is about
the discussion on eternal life and immortality amongst Christian and
Jewish German-speaking philosophers and theologians in the period
from 1914 to 1945. He has published several essays and articles, for
example ‘Plotinos’ in Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage (2017) and
‘Representation and the Unrepresentable: Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt
and the Limits of Politics’ in The Contemporary Relevance of Carl
Schmitt (2015).
Jayne Svenungsson is Professor of Systematic Theology at Lund

University, Sweden. She is the author of Divining History: Prophetism,
Messianism and the Development of the Spirit (2016) and co-editor of
Jewish Thought, Utopia and Revolution (2014), Monument and Memory
(2015) and The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility (2018). She has
also published numerous articles on political theology, philosophy of his-
tory and twentieth-century Jewish thought.
ix
x Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University

of Nottingham, UK, and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology,
Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Her publications include:
The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (2011), Judaism
in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (2014) and Jewish
Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (2014). She
is also a co-editor of Bamidbar. The Journal for Jewish Thought and
Philosophy, which appears in English in Passagen Verlag, in Vienna.
Ward Blanton is Reader in Biblical Cultures and European Thought at
the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, for which he also teaches in
Paris and Rome. He is the author of A Materialism for the Masses: Saint
Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (2014); Displacing Christian
Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (2007); and co-
editor with Hent de Vries of Paul and the Philosophers (2013).
Marius Timmann Mjaaland is Professor at the Faculty of Theology,
University of Oslo, Norway, and President of the Nordic Society for
Philosophy of Religion (since 2006). His publications include The
Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy and Political Theology (2016), Autopsia:
Kierkegaard and Derrida on Self, Death and God (2008) and numerous
articles on existentialism, theology, political philosophy and phenom-
enology.
George Pattison is 1640 Professor of Divinity at the University of
Glasgow, UK, having previously held positions at the universities of
Cambridge, Aarhus and Oxford. He is also a Visiting Professor in
Theology at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively
on the relationship between existentialism and theology, including the
Routledge Guidebook to the Later Heidegger (2000) and Heidegger and
Death (2013). He is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Theology
and Modern European Thought (2013) and is currently working on a
three-part Philosophy of Christian Life.
Hans Ruin is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Sweden.
He is the President of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology and
a member of the board of Nietzsche-Studien, Sats and Jahrbuch für
Hermeneutische Philosophie. He is co-editor for Södertörn Philosophical
Editors and Contributors xi
Studies and has published extensively on phenomenology, hermeneutics,

deconstruction and philosophy of history and memory. He is also the
author of Enigmatic Origins: Tracing the Theme of Historicity Through
Heidegger’s Works (1994), An introduction to Being in Time (in Swedish,
2004) and Freedom, Finitude, Historicity. Essays on Heidegger’s Philosophy
(in Swedish, 2013).
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosophy at
Södertörn University, Sweden. She has previously worked as Associate
Professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in
Brazil. Her field of specialization is continental philosophy, with focus
on phenomenology, hermeneutics, German idealism and contemporary
existential philosophy. She has authored and edited several monographs
and volumes in Swedish, Portuguese and English, including Lovtal till
Intet—essäer om filosofisk hermeneutik (2006), Att tänka i skisser (2011),
Being with the Without, a conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy (2013),
Dis-orientations. Philosophy, Literature and the Lost grounds of Modernity
(2015), ‘History Today’, special issue of the journal Philosophy Today
(2017) and most recently The End of the World (2017).
Christoph Schmidt is Associate Professor at the Department of
Comparative Religion and the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew
University, Israel. He has published four books and numerous articles on
questions dealing with the problem of political theology in modern secu-
lar culture. He is presently working on a book on Heidegger’s ‘dramat-
urgies of truth’.
Judith Wolfe is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of
St Andrews, UK. She has written two monographs on Martin Heidegger:
Heidegger’s Eschatology (2013) and Heidegger and Theology (2014). She
has also co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian
Thought (2017) and published numerous articles on theology and phi-
losophy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.
Elliot R. Wolfson a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish
Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha
and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at University of
California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications includ-
ing Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of
Menahem Mendel Schneerson (2009), A Dream Interpreted within a
xii Editors and Contributors
Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011), and Giving

beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (2014). The
Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism and the Jewish Other,
and Heidegger and the Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis,
will appear in 2018.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Heidegger and Theology

after the Black Notebooks
Jayne Svenungsson
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the reception of Heidegger in several
ways entered a new phase. These were the years during which the damn-
ing studies of both Victor Farías (1987) and Hugo Ott (1988) appeared.
While Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies had been well known ever since his
own explicit commitment in his inaugural speech as the Nazi-installed
rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, Farías and Ott, using newly
uncovered documents, laid bare the extent of Heidegger’s involvement
with National Socialism.1
The shift between the 1980s and 1990s was also the time when
Heidegger’s lecture series from the early Freiburg period began to
appear in the Gesamtausgabe of his works.2 These now famous lectures
revealed Heidegger’s intense interest in religious experience as a key field
for phenomenological enquiry. Even more so, it seemed that Heidegger
first discovered phenomenology as a method essentially through his
engagement with religious experience, and more particularly, with
‘Christian’ (Pauline, Augustinian) experience.3
J. Svenungsson (*) 
Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University,
Lund, Sweden
© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Björk and J. Svenungsson (eds.), Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the
Future of Theology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64927-6_1
2 J. Svenungsson
Again, this was not entirely new knowledge. Just as Heidegger’s

political preferences had been known through the very trajectory of his
life, so the theological roots of his thinking had been indicated by him-
self, notably in a well-known and often quoted comment from the early
1950s: ‘Without this theological origin, I would never have embarked
on the path to thinking. And our origin always remains our future.’4
Moreover, the theological undertones of Heidegger’s late philosophy
had been a topic of debate all along the way, not least among theologians
(a topic to which I shall come back in a moment).
Yet the availability of the early Freiburg lectures raised the debate
about the significance of theology for Heidegger’s philosophy to a new
level. In addition, an array of ground-breaking studies on the theological
genesis of Heidegger’s early phenomenology appeared during the same
years, the most significant of which were Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis
of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993), John van Buren’s The Young
Heidegger (1994), and Kisiel’s and van Buren’s jointly edited volume
Reading Heidegger from the Start (1994).5
In what ways did the newly uncovered material cast Heidegger’s
philosophy in a new light? To gain an answer, we need to look closer
at Heidegger’s venture, during the first Freiburg period, to formulate
what he termed a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’.6 His endeavour, more spe-
cifically, was to retrieve the ‘factical’ or concrete experience of life that
lay concealed beneath the sediments of tradition, be it of classical the-
ological texts such as Paul’s letters, or of philosophical works such as
Aristotle’s ethics. An embryo to this desire to break through the surface
of traditional philosophy’s abstract categories can be found already in his
Habilitationsschrift on Duns Scotus from 1915. In a paragraph of the
postscript, Heidegger briefly discusses the relationship between Scholastic
philosophy and medieval mysticism. While it has been commonplace
throughout modernity to represent Scholasticism and mysticism as coun-
ter-currents in medieval ecclesial life, Heidegger marks a clear distance to
such a view. Instead he indicates that it is only against the backdrop of
the lived religious experience testified to in the mystical sources that the
abstract categories of Scholasticism in the first place become intelligible.7
What is here expressed in embryonic form reaches its full-fledged
form five years later in Heidegger’s lecture series on the ‘phenom-
enology of religious life’, comprising readings of the New Testament,
Neoplatonism and Augustine. It is famously the Pauline epistles that cap-
ture Heidegger’s interest in the New Testament, in particular Galatians
and Thessalonians. The significance of those letters for Heidegger lies in
1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 3
the way in which they offer the very key to the ‘factical lifeworld’ of the
New Testament communities: the expectation of the parusia—the final
return of the Christ. In light of these eschatological expectations, early
Christian life entailed an existence in constant uncertainty and insecu-
rity, echoed in Paul’s caution ‘For you yourselves know very well that
the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5: 1–2).
Heidegger paints a sharp contrast between this disposition of uncer-
tainty and the existential complacency characteristic of the speculative
eschatologies of the surrounding world as well as of later Christian atti-
tudes. Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians to keep ‘awake and sober’
should be seen in light of this contrast—his answer regarding the ‘when’
of the parusia is not a fixed time, but precisely an urging for watchful-
ness. According to Heidegger, what is revealed here are two fundamen-
tally opposed forms of ‘factical life’: on the one hand, a life in existential
insecurity and ‘affliction’ (Bedrängnis), on the other, a life that remains
caught in the ‘worldly’, complacent with a closed system of answers as
regards the existential questions of ‘what’ and ‘when’.8
The argument brought forward by Kisiel, van Buren and others, was
that Heidegger’s early phenomenological studies of religious experience
in fact revealed the genesis of Being and Time. In other words, it was
possible to discern a direct genealogy from his early hermeneutics of fac-
ticity to the ‘existential analytic’ of Dasein undertaken by Heidegger in
his magnum opus from 1927. For instance, one could assume that the
distinction between two fundamentally opposed forms of factical life
in his readings of Paul expressed a preliminary stage to the distinction
made in Being and Time between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ existence.
Of particular interest was the way in which authentic existence (char-
acterized by ‘resoluteness’ and ‘being-unto-death’ and so on) seemed
to correspond to the form of factical life that Paul prescribed to the
Thessalonians, whereas inauthentic existence (characterized by an incli-
nation to ward off the precariousness of existence and escape to a crowd
mentality) seemed to correspond to the form of factical life that Paul
turned against. In addition, as Jean Greisch painstakingly revealed, the
concept of ‘care’ (Sorge)—one of the key determinations of Dasein in the
existential analytic—found its prototype in Heidegger’s observation that
the factical life of the early Christian communities not only meant a life
in existential affliction, but also a life characterized by ‘absolute concern’
(absolute Bekümmerung).9
It was not only the existential analytic that seemed to be anticipated
in Heidegger’s early phenomenological works. Also his more general
4 J. Svenungsson
philosophical venture to dismantle the history of metaphysics could be

traced back to his youthful engagement with theological sources. For
instance, John van Buren pointed to the crucial role the young Luther
played for Heidegger’s emerging critique of metaphysics and argued that
his concept of a ‘destruction’ (Destruktion) of the metaphysical tradition
found its prototype in Luther’s term destruere. Luther used this verb in
the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, alluding to a prophecy related by Paul
in 1 Corinthians 1:19: ‘For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of
the wise”’. However, what Luther wished to ‘destroy’ was not wisdom as
such, but the particular form of wisdom manifested in what he termed a
‘theology of glory’ (theologia gloriae), a theology that sought God only
in his glory and majesty and was unable to see him in the suffering of
the Cross. In a similar way, Heidegger’s project of a ‘destruction’ of the
Western philosophical tradition—echoed a few decades later in Derrida’s
déconstruction—was far from an attack on philosophy as such, but rather
an attempt to restore philosophy to its true calling. It thus seemed, van
Buren concluded, that Heidegger’s critical Auseinandersetzung with the
history of metaphysics was at least in part inspired by the Reformer’s rad-
ical confrontation with Scholastic philosophy.10
While the discovery in the early 1990s of Heidegger’s ‘theological
roots’ brought his thinking into a new light, it also put essential parts
of twentieth-century theology in a new perspective. For if it was the
case that Heidegger’s phenomenology in the first place evolved as an
attempt to adequately describe religious—even Christian—experience,
then that undoubtedly brought a new dimension to the strong attrac-
tion his philosophy had exerted on generations of Christian theologians.
This was not least the case with Being and Time, which had been a vital
inspiration for Rudolf Bultmann’s ‘demythologization’ programme. To
be sure, by the time Heidegger completed Being and Time, his interest
in concrete examples of factical life (as for instance in the New Testament
communities) had given way to an endeavour to ‘formalize’ the struc-
tures of factical life into a more general or neutral conceptualization. But
the fact remained that these formalized structures were in no small part
engendered by close studies of Christian sources. As John Caputo aptly
remarked in his 1993 study Demythologizing Heidegger:
It was precisely because Being and Time was in part the issue of an attempt
to formalize the structures of factical Christian life that it was greeted with
such enthusiasm by Protestant theologians such as Bultmann. … When
Christian theologians looked into the pages of Being and Time they found
themselves staring at their own image – formalized, ontologized, or, what
amounts to the same thing, ‘demythologized’.11
However, to understand the strong influence Heidegger exerted on

generations of theologians, it is not enough to point to the intellectual
indebtedness of his thinking to Christian sources. Equally important is
to consider the particular predicament of theology in the twentieth cen-
tury. This was a time when theology was pushed to the margins both cul-
turally and academically, and influential voices argued that the discipline
simply did not live up to modern philosophical standards. In this precari-
ous situation Heidegger offered recourse. With his sense for the radical
historicity of all experience, his criticism of modern calculative thinking
and his concern for the aspects of human life that cannot be rational-
ized, Heidegger opened a pathway at a point where all other philosophi-
cal options seemed to lead to dead ends.12
This was the case especially on a methodological level. In his 1927
lecture ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, Heidegger himself had given
his view on the status of theology as an academic discipline. Theology is
here defined as an ‘ontic’ or ‘positive’ science, dealing with a positum or
given region of beings (which in the case of theology is the content of
Christian faith or what Heidegger terms Christlichkeit). As an ontic sci-
ence, theology (like ‘chemistry’ or any other ‘positive’ discipline), stands
in ‘absolute’ contrast to phenomenology, which is operating on an onto-
logical level. The line of thought here is an elaboration of the argument
in Being and Time which was published the same year: whereas phenom-
enology offers an analysis of the general or formal structures of human
existence, the task of theology is to thematize the same structures within
a ‘regional’ discourse founded on faith (as an example, Heidegger men-
tions the theological concept of ‘sin’, which ultimately could be referred
back to the more fundamental concept of ‘guilt’).13
What may appear as a reductive view of theology turned out to be
exceedingly popular among theologians. The most well-known exam-
ple, as already mentioned, is Rudolf Bultmann, who entertained a life-
long friendship with Heidegger and took considerable inspiration from
his endeavour to work out a formalized phenomenological structure
of human existence.14 In tandem with Heidegger’s analytic of exist-
ence, the great New Testament theologian sought to uncover the uni-
versal-existential message (the ‘kerygma’) of the canonical Gospels and
6 J. Svenungsson
thereby relieve them—and above all their modern readers—of their

ancient mythological worldview. As Caputo remarks, it is tempting to
see in Bultmann’s demythologization programme a kind of reversal of
Heidegger’s venture in Being and Time, a ‘de-formalizing’ of the exis-
tential analytic, as it was brought back and applied to the Christian
sources it ultimately drew on.15
That being said, we need to remind ourselves, again, what made this
methodological approach so attractive to theologians: in an era of grow-
ing dechristianization in the Western societies, with fewer and fewer peo-
ple being familiar with ‘thick’ Christian language, phenomenology made
it possible to communicate theology to a secular world. Moreover, in the
academic context, phenomenology offered theology a foundational narra-
tive that enabled it to regain scientific credibility. In this respect, one may
fairly say that Heidegger contributed to salvage theology as an academic
discipline at the modern university. Numerous were the twentieth-cen-
tury theologians who adopted (in one way or another) Heidegger’s view
on theology as indebted to a more general phenomenological description
of the human existence, from existentialists such as Paul Tillich and John
Macquarrie, to modern Thomists such as Edith Stein and Karl Rahner.16
Not all theologians accepted Heidegger’s division of labour between
theology and phenomenology, however. Among the theologians who
never became convinced about Heidegger’s significance for theol-
ogy were, not least, Karl Barth.17 It is therefore something of an irony
that one of the strongest theological spokesmen for Heidegger during
the post-war era was Barth’s student and successor at the chair in Basel,
Heinrich Ott. Yet this is not entirely incongruous. Ott had a profoundly
Barthian conception of the task of theology and had little patience with
Bultmann and other Marburg theologians’ existentialist appropriation
of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In 1959, he published a book entitled
Denken und Sein. Der Weg Martin Heideggers und der Weg der Theologie,
in which he argued that Heidegger’s philosophy was in fact more com-
patible with Barthian theology than with Bultmannian theology. Unlike
Bultmann and the circle around him, Ott saw the real theological rel-
evance of Heidegger not in his early phenomenology, but rather in his
thinking after the ‘turn’ (Kehre) in the 1930s. More precisely, he found
in Heidegger’s mature reflections on humanity’s primordial relation to
being and language an analogy—and thereby an enriching perspective—
to the believer’s relation to God’s Word (understood in its full Barthian
dimension).18 Interestingly, Heidegger immediately concurred with Ott
regarding the relevance of his later philosophy for theology. In a letter to

Ott on the appearance of Denken und Sein, Heidegger wrote: ‘As long
as anthropological-sociological conceptualizing and the conceptualizing
of existentialism are not overcome and pushed to the side, theology will
never enter into the freedom of saying what is entrusted to it.’19
The debate that followed upon the publication of Ott’s book in many
ways became the starting point for the prolific and long-lasting recep-
tion history of Heidegger’s late philosophy among theologians. In the
autumn of 1959, the annual meeting of ‘the Old Marburgers’, a group
of Bultmann’s former pupils, chose as its topic the relation of Heidegger
to theology. Heidegger himself was invited to conduct a seminar, which
he reportedly concluded by remarking that the door remained open for
a ‘nonmetaphysical God’. He also proposed that the next year’s meet-
ing should be dedicated to the theme ‘New Testament Exegesis and
Systematic Theology’—which it was a year later, with Heinrich Ott as
one of the key note speakers.20
In the years that followed, the debate about Heidegger’s relevance
for theology was continued by Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling, Eberhard
Jüngel and others. Steeped in a Bultmannian tradition, these theologi-
ans were highly critical of Ott’s appropriation of Heidegger, although
they did not share Bultmann’s own reserve with regard to Heidegger’s
late thinking. In 1961, Ebeling conducted a seminar on theology and
Heidegger’s late philosophy in which Heidegger himself participated, and
Heidegger was to remain a central inspiration to ‘the New Hermeneutic’
of Ebeling and Fuchs. By the same time, the debate moved overseas,
as the American theologians James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb in
1963 launched a new volume series (at Harper & Row) intended to
provide theological interaction between ‘the Old World and the New’.
The first volume was dedicated to ‘The Later Heidegger and Theology’,
and the presentation on the front flap enthusiastically declared that
‘Heidegger’s publications since World War II reveal that his thought has
taken a remarkable turn away from its earlier focus on the structure of
human existence. This volume explores the special value and relevance
of the later Heidegger for Christian theology’.21 A year later, in 1964,
Heidegger was invited to give the inaugural lecture at a conference con-
vened by Drew University, but eventually had to withdraw for reasons of
health. The conference, devoted to the relevance of Heidegger’s thought
to Protestant theology, took place as scheduled, with Heidegger’s (and
Bultmann’s) earlier student Hans Jonas as a replacement.
8 J. Svenungsson
These historical episodes reveal not only the extent to which theo-
logians took inspiration from Heidegger, but also the extent to which
Heidegger engaged in a dialogue with the leading theologians of his
time. Although the debate about ‘Heidegger and theology’ reached
something of a pinnacle in the early 1960s, the theological reception
history of Heidegger’s late philosophy has been going on, more or less
unbroken, ever since. In 1979, a few years after Heidegger’s death, a
colloquium on the relevance of Heidegger’s late thinking for ‘the ques-
tion of God’ was held in Paris. Among the participants were an array
of philosophers and theologians that would later be associated with
the so called ‘theological turn’ within French phenomenology, nota-
bly Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion.22 It would take us too far
afield to begin to delve into the prolific debate on Heidegger’s signifi-
cance for ‘the question on God’ within French phenomenology from the
1980s and onwards. Suffice to say that this debate, in its turn, gave a
vital impetus to the international theological debate in the 1990s, when
the wave of ‘postmetaphysical theology’ began to surge.23 Although the-
ologians involved in this latest wave of Heidegger’s theological reception
history are generally highly critical of Heidegger, it is noteworthy that
the theological debate to a very limited extent has reflected the more
general discussion about Heidegger’s political and ideological sympa-
thies, especially since the early 1990s was also the period when Farías and
Ott’s studies gained international attraction and brought Heidegger’s
work into new light.
The publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks from 2014 and
onwards poses against this background a special challenge to theology.
While the debate has been fierce and at times poisoned within the philo-
sophical community, this has in many ways merely been an intensifica-
tion of a debate that has been going on for decades. The same cannot
be said of the theological community, which only more recently has
begun to engage critically with Heidegger’s ideological sympathies.
This is not, however, the only reason why the notebooks present a spe-
cial challenge to theology. At least two more reasons can be given. The
first has to do with the most damning of the new facts revealed by the
notebooks: Heidegger’s overt embracement of Antisemitic stereotypes
and conspiracy theories. Although the paragraphs in question amount to
a dozen of instances out of hundreds of pages, these instances reveal in a
breathtaking way how Heidegger’s privately held Antisemitism was in fact
profoundly intertwined with his philosophical ideas.24 The longstanding
exculpatory narrative that his Nazi Party membership was an aber-

ration with no deeper connection to his thinking thus has to be aban-
doned once and for all. That being said, the notebooks also make clear
that Heidegger’s Antisemitism was quite distinct from the crude Blut und
Boden racism of the Nazis. But this hardly makes it less problematic, espe-
cially from a theological viewpoint. If Heidegger’s Antisemitism—replete
with sinister clichés of the Jews as rootless, calculative and deceitful—can
be inscribed in a long tradition of Western anti-Judaism, then this also
brings to the fore Christian theology’s painful part in this history.25
The second reason why the Black Notebooks pose a special challenge
to theology has to do precisely with Christianity. While remarks on Jews
and Judaism are made only a handful of times (making them, as stated,
no less chocking), Christianity and above all Catholicism is a constant
theme of Heidegger’s critical reflections during these years. To be sure,
Heidegger pinpoints ‘World Jewry’ (Weltjudentum) as one of the main
drivers of the modern will to master and control all beings. And yet Jews
are ultimately depicted as only a symptom of a larger metaphysical curse
that is traced all the way back to the biblical idea of a Creator God. It
is this idea of a highest being that defines all other beings in stable and
intelligible categories that has paved the way for the modern tendency to
reduce being to a series of objects that can be measured and calculated.
However, it was only with Christianity that this idea was institutionalized
and made into the ideological framework that came to define the entire
Western history.26
Whereas Christian theologians both earlier and later payed tribute to
Heidegger for offering a bulwark against modern instrumentalizing rea-
son, the Black Notebooks reveal that Heidegger himself—at least during
these dark years—saw Christianity as essential to the kind of calculative
thinking that had brought about humanity’s estrangement from being.
At this point, however, one may remark once more that what the note-
books offer are not entirely new revelations. With regard to the rela-
tionship between Heidegger’s thinking and Christianity, we have in this
respect an interesting document in the lecture that Hans Jonas delivered
at the 1964 conference at Drew University. As already mentioned, Jonas
was called in as replacement for Heidegger, who had withdrawn for rea-
sons of health.
The lecture that Jonas finally delivered is intriguing in a num-
ber of respects. Reflecting on the appeal of Heidegger’s thought to
Christian theologians, Jonas first drew attention to the extent to which
10 J. Svenungsson
Heidegger’s philosophy in fact embodied elements from Christian the-

ology; categories such as guilt, care, anxiety, call of conscience, reso-
lution and authenticity were all derivative from a biblical language.
Interestingly, Jonas thereby touched upon aspects of Heidegger’s
thought that were to be debated more widely only in the 1990s, when
his lectures from the early Freiburg period were made available in the
Gesamtausgabe (see above). But Jonas was not primarily interested in
revealing the presence of secularized Christianity in Heidegger’s think-
ing. Rather he wished to enquire what this meant for theology, especially
for those Protestant theologians who had sworn intellectual fidelity to
Heidegger. First and foremost, Jonas suggested, it meant that those the-
ologians were in no small part reimporting their own original product.
However, if this was indeed the case, then perhaps theologians ought to
think a second time and ask themselves what they were in fact importing
when reimporting their own product in Heideggerian shape.27
This question, Jonas made clear, was not for him as a Jewish philos-
opher to answer, but strictly for the Christian theologian. Nonetheless
he left no one in doubt about his own position on the issue. Pointing
to the fundamental incompatibility between Heidegger’s ‘fate-laden
character of thinking’ and the biblical view on history and the human
being, Jonas questioned the way in which the theologians had let them-
selves be seduced by Heidegger’s idea of thinking as the self-unveiling
history of being itself. His sober but relentless polemic reached its pin-
nacle in a passage where he countered the theologians’ embracing of a
Heideggerian conceptualization in their approach to the Bible, reducing
the biblical texts to a linguistic record of humans’ ‘answer’ to the call of
being:
[Q]uite consistently, is the Bible [according to these theologians] taken

as one linguistic record of such answer, ‘the Biblical answer to the word
of God’. But I find more than human answer in the Bible, taken by its
own claim. I hear questions to man, such as these: ‘Adam, where are you?’
(Genesis 3:9); ‘Cain, where is Abel your brother?’ (Genesis 4:9): this is not
the voice of being; and ‘He has told you, O man, what is good and what
the Lord requires of you: what else but to do justice, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God?’ (Micah 6:8). This requires more than
a linguistic answer.
But as to Heidegger’s being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden

happening upon thought: so was the Führer and the call of German des-
tiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right,
fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger’s thought
provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls—linguistically
or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of
being that issues the call. But to the believer, ever suspicious of this world,
depth may mean the abyss, and force, the prince of this world. As if the
devil were not part of the voice of being! Heidegger’s own answer is, to
the shame of philosophy, on record and, I hope, not forgotten.28
These gripping words tell us above all something about Jonas; as Richard
Wolin remarks in his sensitive rendering of the episode at Drew: ‘by
daring to confront Heidegger’s Nazism directly and—what was at the
time even more controversial—by seeking to tie the philosopher’s politi-
cal lapsus directly to the deficiencies of his thought, Jonas displayed
the unwavering moral integrity that would become the hallmark of his
life and work’.29 However, the words may also be read as an invitation
to theology to gain a more reflective approach to its own long-lasting
romance with Heidegger. Although the conference at Drew reportedly
ended with the audience giving Jonas a standing ovation, theology by
and large continued with business as usual with regard to its intellectual
indebtedness to Heidegger.
The premise of the present volume is that this is no longer pos-
sible. To be sure, what is revealed in the Black Notebooks is not that
Heidegger’s philosophy in any simple way leads to totalitarian think-
ing. But as Adam Kirsch remarked at the publication of the first vol-
umes in English—echoing Jonas’s reflection from 1964—Heidegger
in an important sense leaves the door open for such thinking, ‘because
he values the intensity and authenticity of a belief over its goodness or
truthfulness’.30 This observation does not amount to a naïve appeal that
Heidegger’s works should be shelved once and for all, as if these works
were no longer of any concern for us. Indeed, if there is one thing we
truly ought to learn from Heidegger, it is precisely his emphasis on our
historicity—the critical insight that it is only when we recognize ourselves
as part of a historical tradition that we can criticize this tradition without
ending up in more subtle forms of repression. What the observation does
amount to, therefore, is firstly, that it is perhaps more important than
ever for theologians to engage critically with Heidegger’s writings, and
12 J. Svenungsson
secondly, that there is a need to re-examine the critical potential of the

biblical legacy—in both its Jewish and Christian interpretations—to offer
counter-narratives to the totalitarian tendencies to which Heidegger’s
own thinking offers little resistance.
The following chapters take on this twofold task in various ways.
Although all the authors share the basic premise stated above, they are
far from being in agreement about the implications of this premise for
the understanding of theology’s relation to Heidegger, as well as for
the future task of theology. A brief summary of the structure of the
book will give an indication of these different approaches to the overall
theme of the volume. In Chap. 2, Judith Wolfe offers an overview and
an analysis of the role of religion in the Black Notebooks. After a sum-
mary of Heidegger’s appropriation of Christian eschatological motifs in
his thinking of the 1910s and 1920s, she turns to the strong anti-Chris-
tian polemics of the notebooks and discusses them in their biographi-
cal as well as their philosophical contexts. While Heidegger’s animosity
towards Christianity seems to have culminated in the 1930s, his later
thinking displays a more conciliatory attitude. This posture of openness
is not, however, to be interpreted as a return to Christianity. As Wolfe
argues in the final part of the chapter, the radical apophaticism charac-
teristic of Heidegger’s late thinking is at basic odds with the Christian
orientation towards a revelation of God that has already occurred.
Nevertheless, she concludes, ‘Heidegger’s last god represents a signifi-
cant revision of his thought whose provenance and significance is the
central puzzle of the Black Notebooks in their relevance for theology’.
In the following chapter, Hans Ruin explores Heidegger’s relation
to the biblical inheritance by looking closer at his early fascination with
Paul’s epistles. As has already been indicated, Heidegger was not alone
in finding his own philosophical voice in and through a reading of the
Pauline letters. This was a venture which he to a large degree shared
with his colleague and friend Rudolf Bultmann, as well as with their stu-
dent Hans Jonas. Focussing on their different appropriations of Paul,
Ruin offers a moving rendering of the evolving relation between the
three thinkers. While for Heidegger Paul was a voice of original factic-
ity—but ultimately also a source for his choice of National Socialism—for
Bultmann, Paul and Christianity rather served as a bulwark against totali-
tarian temptations. When Jonas late in his career returned to Paul, it was
both in response to Heidegger’s betrayal and in order to reinvent Paul as
a Jewish existential thinker. Paradoxically, this reinvention of Paul as an
ethical thinker had an unmistakably Heideggerian imprint. However, as

Ruin argues, this seeming paradox ultimately only reveals the intricacy of
Heidegger’s indebtedness to the biblical inheritance.
In Chap. 4, focus is shifted from Heidegger’s deep entanglement with
the Pauline-Lutheran reception history of biblical texts to his relation
to Catholicism. Heidegger himself hailed from a profoundly Catholic
milieu and spent the first years of his academic studies with the prospect
of becoming a Catholic priest. Against this background it may seem sur-
prising that Catholicism in particular is the target of Heidegger’s hos-
tility towards Christianity in the Black Notebooks. George Pattison’s
subtle argument in this chapter is that the opposite may very well be the
case, i.e. that Heidegger’s aversion against Catholicism rather should be
seen in light of his own personal and intellectual trajectory as a Catholic.
This becomes particularly clear in the case of Romano Guardini, the
Catholic colleague whom Heidegger repeatedly names in the notebooks
as exemplifying what he dislikes about Catholic theology. Through an
exploration of the parallels between Heidegger’s philosophical venture
and Guardini’s theological-philosophical project, Pattison reveals how
Heidegger’s strained relation to Catholicism partly can be seen as a bat-
tle with his own shadow.
This line of thought is pushed even further in Chap. 5, where Ward
Blanton suggests that Heidegger’s entire philosophy can be seen as an
attempt to wrestle free not only from his own Christian past, but from
Christianity in general. The Black Notebooks are marked with iterations
of a desire for a ‘new beginning’, a new philosophy that will break free
from its Christian limitations. However, as Blanton observes, in this very
desire for a radically new beginning, Heidegger ends up repeating the
standard suppersessionist motifs of Christianity versus Judaism, where
the latter has to give way to the former in a dialectical zero-sum game. In
this respect, Heidegger not only remained firmly within the structure he
so forcefully wished to overcome, but also failed, Blanton concludes, ‘to
keep pace with his own best insights about how to challenge inherited
anti-Jewish fantasies about Christian origins’.
A quite different approach to the same topic is offered by Christoph
Schmidt in the following chapter. Rather than seeing the deficiencies of
Heidegger’s quasi-apocalyptic desire for a new beginning as itself part of
the ‘Christian problem’ (to use Blanton’s vocabulary), Schmidt locates it
within a tradition of aestheticized polytheism. Not unlike Hans Jonas—
in the Drew University lecture referred to above—he paints a sharp
14 J. Svenungsson
contrast between Heidegger’s theopoetics of the Greek gods, on the one

hand, and ‘Judeo-Christian’ monotheism, on the other, arguing for a
deep incompatibility between the two narratives. Schmidt ends his expo-
sition by posing the intriguing question whether Heidegger’s antithetical
approach to the biblical legacy as well as his idealization of an aestheti-
cized polytheism continue to inform essential parts of European political
philosophy today.
An even more unrelenting reading of the Black Notebooks is offered
by Agata Bielik-Robson in Chap. 7. Bielik-Robson opens the chap-
ter by recalling Levinas’s remark, in Entre Nous, that Heidegger’s
death-oriented vision of life left no place for being-with-the-other
and that the only Mitsein he envisaged boiled down in the end to
Zusammenmarschieren, ‘an army of isolated Daseins exercising their
authenticity in their totally mobilised Todesbereitschaft’. But Levinas
was not the first and not the only Jewish philosopher who uttered his
objection to Heidegger’s overestimation of death by drawing ‘out of the
sources of Judaism’. After a brief discussion of how Levinas’s misgivings
about Heidegger are corroborated by the newly available notebooks,
Bielik-Robson turns to an array of Jewish thinkers—Franz Rosenzweig,
Hannah Arendt and Harold Bloom—who all opposed the Heideggerian
mode of doing philosophy solely under the auspices of death. Inspired
by these thinkers, the rest of the chapter is devoted to an exploration of
a different vision of finite existence, one which takes its cue in the intel-
lectual heritage of the Song of Songs and sees human existence as marked
first and foremost by passionate and loving relations with others.
The two succeeding chapters both explore the theological undertones
of Heidegger’s late thinking through close readings of specific passages
in the Black Notebooks. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback investigates
the apocalyptic nature of the notebooks and argues that Heidegger’s
idea of the end as an ‘endless end’ and his idea of the ‘other beginning’
are at the center of his confrontational relationship with theology and
Christianity. Since Heidegger ultimately regarded the Christian and the
Jewish traditions as part of the same metaphysical inheritance, she further
argues, an understanding of the apocalyptic nature of Heidegger’s think-
ing is essential if we are to fully grasp the nature of both his Antisemitism
and his anti-Christianism. In equally critical terms, Elliot R. Wolfson
examines the recurring concept of ‘the last god’ in the notebooks. This
enigmatic concept, which would remain central to Heidegger’s thought
to the end, signified to him the fissure of being that opens and closes
itself in relation to those who practice restraint. Most notably, the epoch
of the last god signified the time when the gods would be over and done.
In response to Nietzsche’s death of god, the last god is the god after
there are no more gods, the god depleted of godhood, the god that is
neither transcendent nor immanent. Those who would use Heidegger as
a foundation to construct a new theological edifice, Wolfson contends,
have simply not grasped the collapse of the polarity of theism and athe-
ism intimated by the intimation of the last god.
The analysis of Heidegger’s ‘last god’ is further enhanced in
Chap. 10. Marius Timmann Mjaaland here offers an intriguing paral-
lel reading of the earliest Black Notebook and a lecture on Augustine’s
Confessions that Heidegger gave in 1930 at St Martin’s Archabbey in
Beuron. Heidegger’s fascination with the Confessions not only sheds
light on the strongly confessional nature of the notebooks. It also
adds interesting perspectives to Heidegger’s notion of a ‘future god’,
which in light of this parallel turns out to be something of a counter-
confession to Augustine’s belief in the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Like
Wolfson, Timmann Mjaaland finds in Heidegger’s last god a gnostic fig-
ure, devoid of any content beyond the philosopher’s own poetical imagi-
nation. A more charitable reading would perhaps see in Heidegger’s
quasi-apocalyptical confessions an expression of a trembling hope,
despite the despair dominating his Black Notebooks. And yet, Timmann
Mjaaland concludes, it is thoughtworthy that this confession to a radi-
cally unknowable god offered no foothold or guidance against the politi-
cal and ideological perversions of the Nazi regime, just as it did not offer
any grounding, comfort, or resistance at the day of the Untergang.
In the eleventh and final chapter, the dual aim of this volume, both
critical and constructive, is staged one last time. Mårten Björk here
investigates the anthropology that underpins Heidegger’s endeav-
our to liberate Dasein from the ‘animality’ of humanity, and argues for
a link between this anthropology and his embracing of Nazism as well
as his theology of the last god. The ominous contours of Heidegger’s
anthropology emerge as they are contrasted with the biologist and neo-
vitalist philosopher Hans Driesch’s philosophy of the organism, which
Heidegger himself used in his 1929/30 lecture series The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics. These famous lectures give us privileged access
to the unfolding of Heidegger’s thinking towards an Antisemitic and
pro-Occidental mythology of the last god in the Black Notebooks. The
contrast with Driesch’s holistic and strongly ethical concept not only of
16 J. Svenungsson
human life, but of life in general, makes the deficiencies of Heidegger’s

mythopoetical thinking appear in yet clearer light. Even more so, with
its strong sense for the sensuous character of all beings—a sense that also
gives us the ability to see the senselessness of suffering and to hope for
the redemption of all life—the forgotten neovitalism of Driesch may very
well inspire the future path of theology. For, although theology neither
could nor should take leave of Heidegger, it has become time to enter
a new more critical phase in the theological engagement with his works,
a phase that may also engender a rediscovery of thinkers that were out-
shone by the mesmerizing ‘dark star’ of twentieth-century European
thought.31
Notes
1. Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Joseph Margolis and Tom
Rockmore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Hugo Ott,
Martin Heidegger: A Political Life trans. Allan Blunden (London:
HarperCollins, 1993). Numerous studies on Heidegger’s political
engagement and the political nature of his philosophy have appeared
during the past decades; to mention but a few of the more significant
works, see Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism
into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935,
trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009);
Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (eds), The Heidegger Case: On
Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992),
and Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin
Heidegger. Exp. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); NB
the new preface added by Wolin to the 2016 edition, ‘The Politics of
Epistemology: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in Real Time’, ibid., xi–li.
2. See vol. 56–63 of the Gesamtausgabe. The volumes that in particular
incited the scholarly debate were Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA
60 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995); Phänomenologische Interpretationen
zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, GA
61 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), and Ontologie: Hermeneutik der
Faktizität, GA 63 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988). References to
Heidegger’s works will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed by the
volume number. Translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.
3. The issue of whether the religious experience expressed in Paul’s letters
can legitimately be termed ‘Christian’ is a matter of intense debate, hence
the scare quotes. Several of the chapters (see esp. Chaps. 3 and 5) in this
volume touch upon this debate.
4. Martin Heidegger, ‘Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache’ (1953/1954),

Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), 91.
5. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993); John van Buren, The Young
Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994); John van Buren and Theodore Kisiel (eds), Reading
Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994). Other significant studies from
the same period include John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), Jean-François Courtine
(ed.), Heidegger 1919–1929. De l’herméneutique de la facticité à la méta-
physique du ‘Dasein’ (Paris: Vrin, 1996); Jean Greisch, L’arbre de vie et
l’arbre du savoir: Le chemin phénoménologique de l’herméneutique hei-
deggérienne (1919–1923) (Paris: Cerf, 2000). In the past decades,
numerous studies have continued to explore the theological roots of
Heidegger’s early philosophy; see e.g. Frederick van Fleteren, Martin
Heidegger’s Interpretations of Saint Augustine (Lewiston: Edwin
Mellen Press, 2005); Benjamin Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Judith Wolfe,
Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s
Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Duane Armitage,
Heidegger’s Pauline and Lutheran Roots (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016);
Sylvain Camilleri, Heidegger et les grandes lignes d’une phénoménologie
herméneutique du christianisme primitif (Dortrecht: Springer, 2017). A
good overview is given by S.J. McGrath and Andrzej Wierciński (eds), A
Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2010).
6. For an extensive study of this venture in its various aspects, see
Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity,
Being, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
7. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns
Scotus’ (1915), Frühe Schriften, GA 1 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978),
410.
8. Heidegger, GA 60, 98–105.
9. See Greisch, L’arbre de vie, 204–205. See also Heidegger, GA 60, 98.
10. John van Buren, ‘Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther’, in idem and Theodore
Kisiel, Reading Heidegger, 159–174.
11. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 173.
12. The best overview up to date—both of Heidegger’s complex rela-
tion to theology and of theology’s complex relation to Heidegger—
is given by Judith Wolfe in Heidegger and Theology (London and New
York: Bloomsbury, 2014). The book was published the same year as
18 J. Svenungsson
the first volumes of the Black Notebooks appeared in German, and the
Notebooks were thus not taken into account in the study. Wolfe’s chapter
in this volume can in this regard be seen as an important complement to
the monograph.
13. Martin Heidegger, ‘Phänomenologie und Theologie’ (1927),
Wegmarken, GA 9, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), 47–78.
14. Bultmann and Heidegger established a close intellectual collaboration
during Heidegger’s years in Marburg (1923–1928), and the appre-
ciation seems to have been strongly mutual; see e.g. Heidegger’s letter
to Karl Jasper on 18 June 1924, where he points out Bultmann as the
only stimulus in an otherwise dull milieu: Martin Heidegger and Karl
Jasper, Briefwechsel 1920–1963 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), 49. On
Bultmann and Heidegger’s friendship, see also Hans Ruin’s contribution
to this volume.
15. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 173.
16. It should be emphasized that there are considerable differences in the
ways in which these theologians appropriated phenomenology; neither
Stein nor Rahner, for instance, accepted Heidegger’s view on theol-
ogy as operating merely on an ontic level. For a more extensive discus-
sion of these four theologians and their relation to Heidegger, see Wolfe,
Heidegger and Theology, 177–193.
17. The sentiments of disesteem were mutual; Heidegger dismissed Barth as a
‘lightweight’ theologian; see ibid., 153.
18. Heinrich Ott, Denken und Sein. Der Weg Martin Heideggers und der Weg
der Theologie (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1959).
19. Heidegger to Ott, quoted by Ott in idem, ‘What Is Systematic
Theology?’, in James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb (eds), The Later
Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 110.
20. The episode about Heidegger and the meetings of the Old Marburgers is
related by James M. Robinson in ‘The German Discussion of the Later
Heidegger’, in idem and Cobb, The Later Heidegger and Theology, 5–6.
21. Quoted from the front flap of Robinson and Cobb, The Later Heidegger
and Theology.
22. See Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen O’Leary (eds), Heidegger et
la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980). For an English introduc-
tion to the debate (including a translation of the study by Dominique
Janicaud that initiated the debate), see Dominique Janicaud et al. (eds),
Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, trans.
Bernard G Prusak et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
23. Uncountable examples of relevant works could be given here, depend-
ing, of course, on the definition given to ‘postmetaphysical theology’. Let
me therefore only indicate a few examples of the theological reception
of the French ‘turn’ in various regions and theological traditions. In the

United States, an important arena for the debate were the Villanova con-
ferences convened by John Caputo in the late 1990s and early 2000s; the
publications from these conferences give a good overview of the debates,
see esp. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds), God, the Gift and
Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). In the
UK, the Radical Orthodoxy movement, when launched in 1999, was in
many ways inspired by the French discourse, see John Milbank, Catherine
Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology
(London: Routledge, 1999). In the Benelux countries, an early contri-
bution to the debate was given by Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate
(eds), Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), and in the Scandinavian
context my own study, Guds återkomst: En studie av gudsbegreppet inom
postmodern filosofi (Göteborg: Glänta, 2004) played an important role in
introducing the debate.
24. For an overview and introductory discussion of the Antisemitism of the
Black Notebooks, see Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish
World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2015).
25. For a thoroughgoing study of the relation between Christian theological
anti-Judaism and modern philosophical anti-Judaism (and subsequently
Antisemitism), see my study Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism
and the Development of the Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2016).
26. Most chapters in this volume touch upon Heidegger’s anti-Christian
polemics, but for an overview and discussion of the biographical back-
ground to his strong anti-Christian sentiments during these years, see
esp. Chap. 2.
27. Hans Jonas, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, The Review of Metaphysics, vol.
18, No. 2 (December 1964), 211–214.
28. Ibid., 218.
29. Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans
Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 104.
30. Adam Kirsch, ‘Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi’, Tablet, 26 Sept.
(2016). Accessed by 24 June 2017: http://www.tabletmag.com/
jewish-arts-and-culture/books/214226/heidegger-was-really-a-real-nazi.
31. To borrow the apt metaphor used by Tom Rockmore in Heidegger and
French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being (London and
New York: Routledge, 1995), xi.
20 J. Svenungsson
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Kirsch, Adam. ‘Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi’. Tablet, 26 Sept.
(2016). Accessed by 24 June 2017 from: http://www.tabletmag.com/
jewish-arts-and-culture/books/214226/heidegger-was-really-a-real-nazi.
Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993.
McGrath, S.J., and Andrzej Wierciński (eds). A Companion to Heidegger’s
Phenomenology of Religious Life. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Milbank, John, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds). Radical Orthodoxy:
A New Theology. London: Routledge, 1999.
Ott, Heinrich. Denken und Sein. Der Weg Martin Heideggers und der Weg der
Theologie. Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1959.
Ott, Hugo. Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. Translated by Allan Blunden.
London: HarperCollins, 1993.
———. ‘What Is Systematic Theology?’. In The Later Heidegger and Theology.
Edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb. New York: Harper & Row,
1963, 77–111.
Robinson, James M. ‘The German Discussion of the Later Heidegger’. In The
Later Heidegger and Theology. Edited by idem and John B. Cobb. New York:
Harper & Row, 1963, 3–76.
Rockmore, Tom. Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism
and Being. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Rockmore, Tom, and Joseph Margolis (eds). The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy
and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
Svenungsson, Jayne. Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the
Development of the Spirit. Translated by Stephen Donovan. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2016.
———. Guds återkomst: En studie av gudsbegreppet inom postmodern filosofi.
Göteborg: Glänta, 2004.
Trawny, Peter. Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy. Translated
by Andrew J. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
van Buren, John. ‘Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther’.In Reading Heidegger from
the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought. Edited by idem and Theodore Kisiel.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, 159–174.
———. The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King. Bloomington: Indiana
van Buren, John and Theodore Kisiel (eds). Reading Heidegger from the Start:
Essays in His Earliest Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994.
22 J. Svenungsson
van Fleteren, Frederick. Martin Heidegger’s Interpretations of Saint Augustine.

Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.
Wolin, Richard. Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas,
and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
———. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. Exp. ed.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Wolfe, Judith. Heidegger and Theology. London and New York: Bloomsbury,
2014.
———. Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early
Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
CHAPTER 2
Religion in the Black Notebooks:

Overview and Analysis
Judith Wolfe
Introduction1
I have argued at length elsewhere that Heidegger’s early philosophical
path was guided, among other things, by a strong though idiosyncratic
interest in eschatology. In the years 1909–1915, Heidegger—who was
born into a devout Roman Catholic family in 1889 and espoused the
anti-Modernist cause in his youth—gradually dissociated himself from
post-Vatican I Catholicism against the background of his growing sense
of the importance of philosophical questions ‘as questions’. By this he
primarily meant two things: one, the epistemological questions about
metaphysics posed first by Kant and now by Husserlian phenomenol-
ogy; and two, the problem of ‘historicity’ for our understanding both of
individual human existence (as inherently temporal) and of Christianity
(as a historically situated and developing religion). Searching for a theo-
logical method capable of doing justice to lived experience rather than
assuming the spurious god’s-eye view of the Neo-Scholastic philosophia
perennis, Heidegger, after 1915, began to synthesize Schleiermacher’s
J. Wolfe (*) 
University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK

24 J. Wolfe
and the medieval mystics’ ‘proto-phenomenology’ with the emphasis on

suffering and mortality he found in the early Luther, Friedrich Hölderlin,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Overbeck. The result
was a phenomenology of religious life that took affliction—suffering our
own finitude—as the basic religious experience.2
These concerns converged on a re-appropriation of early Christian
eschatology in Heidegger’s thought of the early 1920s, within the con-
text of similar but competing appropriations by other theological think-
ers of the time, especially Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen. Following
a dominant interpretation in early twentieth century Protestant scholar-
ship, Heidegger posited, in the early 1920s, a profound irreconcilabil-
ity of earliest (‘authentic’) Christian experience—centrally characterized
by eschatological expectation—on the one hand, and the subsequent
development—when this expectation failed to materialize—of a Christian
philosophy and culture on the other. Building on his phenomenological
analysis of affliction with our own finitude as the basic religious expe-
rience, Heidegger now found in early Christian eschatological expecta-
tion an instantiation par excellence of authentic religious existence. His
description of this expectant restlessness, however, turned out to be fun-
damentally at odds with its original Christian context, for Heidegger’s
commitment to a phenomenological description of the human situa-
tion—that is, a description of that situation solely from within—led him
to divorce the ‘existential’ experience of expectation from its (from this
perspective merely ‘existentiell’ or derivatively postulated) object, the
‘blessed hope’ of the coming Kingdom of God. As a consequence, that
hope no longer appeared as constitutive of, but rather as fundamentally
inimical to ‘eschatological’ unrest as Heidegger understood it, because
it projects an end to that unrest, and so a cancellation of the nexus of
authentic existence.
Against the Christian vision, Heidegger thus developed, in the mid-
1920s, an eschatology without eschaton that culminated in his account
of being-unto-death in Being and Time. On this account, its own being
is, at the deepest level, a question for each person. This question cannot
be answered or resolved in any traditional sense, because as soon as a
person’s existence is complete and therefore in theory intelligible, that
person is no longer there to be capable of understanding it. The con-
summation of one’s existence—death—is at the same time its negation.
To live authentically within these conditions can only mean to live in
2 RELIGION IN THE BLACK NOTEBOOKS: OVERVIEW AND ANALYSIS 25
resolute anticipation of this perpetual, inavertible, and inescapably per-

sonal possibility: to ‘be unto death’.
The main two shifts in Heidegger’s eschatological thought in the
1930s are from the individual (Dasein) to the people (Volk), and from
radical negativity (an eschatology without possible object) to apophatic
positivity (an eschatology with an unknown but anticipated object). In
Being and Time and related texts, the main focus of his eschatological
perspective is the individual in his or her mortality. Towards the end of
Being and Time, however, Heidegger moves his attention away from
individual existence towards collective or national life, aiming to repeat
on that level the question what a radically temporal existence can mean.3
Within the incomplete framework of Being and Time, this corporate per-
spective is never fully worked out, but a vague appeal to ‘destiny’ begins
to be formulated which Heidegger works out further, in proximity to the
Nazi party, in the early 1930s.4 In the years 1933–1934, the categori-
cal impossibility of fulfilment that has been such a central characteristic
of Heidegger’s eschatology is briefly submerged by a (short-lived) hope
for the fulfilment of a national destiny in the National Socialist state. But
already in 1934, Heidegger becomes disillusioned with the regime, and
begins, primarily via his readings of Hölderlin, to re-assert the uncer-
tainty and (perhaps perpetual) futurity of his vision of individual and cor-
porate existence. Still, unlike in Heidegger’s early work, eschatology as
configured in the 1930s no longer ‘teaches us exactly what death teaches
us’, as Franz Overbeck had put it.5 On the contrary, the anticipation of
a god whom we can neither summon nor dispense with is now to be
the heart of the human vocation. This attitude, though submerged in his
writings outside the Black Notebooks, shapes Heidegger’s thought from
that time to the end of his career in the late 1960s, when he mysteriously
remarks to Spiegel magazine that ‘only a god can now save us’.
Contesting Christianity
By contrast to Judaism, which is mentioned only a handful of
times, Christianity is a constant theme of the Black Notebooks, and
Heidegger’s anti-Christian polemics are incomparably more pro-
nounced and developed than his (condemnable but largely conventional)
Antisemitism.6 The primary target of his critique is the Roman Catholic
Church as the dominant form of cultural and academic Christianity in his
26 J. Wolfe
state Baden. To fight against the church (Kirche) as a whole, Heidegger

concedes, is useless—‘but we must fight against Catholicism’.7
This animus against Christianity in general and Catholicism in par-
ticular is motivated both biographically and philosophically, and must
be understood against the background of Heidegger’s abiding concern
about the inadequacy of modern universities (which were, he thought,
steadily degenerating into mere polytechnics8), and the squeezing of phi-
losophy departments by efficiency reviews on the one hand and church
control on the other.
In a letter to his friend Elisabeth Blochmann shortly after his return
from Protestant Marburg to Catholic Freiburg in 1928, Heidegger
expressed his ‘abhorrence’ with ‘present-day Catholicism’ (as well as
institutionalized Protestantism).9 Much of his dismay resulted from the
control that the church still exercised on the Philosophy Faculty and the
university as a whole—something that had troubled Heidegger since his
student days, when the Anti-Modernist Oath had been one of the cata-
lysts of his departure from Roman Catholic scholarship.10 This tension
escalated when the Concordat of 1932 between Baden and the Holy
See cemented Roman Catholic authority over the Philosophy Faculty’s
chairs in Christian philosophy and medieval history, stipulating that they
be held by ‘personages suitable for the impeccable education of students
of theology’.11 The Faculty Board, on which Heidegger served, strongly
protested the consolidation of these ‘Concordat Chairs’, but was ignored
by the Senate.12 Years of friction followed. In 1941, after the death of
its incumbent, the Faculty (no doubt aided by an anti-Christian regime)
temporarily abolished the Concordat Chair in Christian Philosophy, re-
dedicating it to psychology; to what extent Heidegger was involved in
this effort is unclear.13 The chair reverted to its confessional status in
1946, with Max Müller as its first post-war incumbent.14
Heidegger, who had devoted much of his intellectual energy since
the early 1920s both to university reform in general and to a rigorous
defence of the essential separation of theology and philosophy as disci-
plines, did not suffer these impositions lightly. His double failure—to
bring academic reform to the university and to assert his vision of phi-
losophy even in his own faculty—made him particularly hostile to all per-
ceived encroachments of ‘Christian philosophers’ on his academic field.15
Heidegger’s growing commitment, in the late 1920s, to philosophy
over and against theology was reinforced by, and in turn encouraged,
an increasingly exclusive focus on the ‘degenerate’ form of Christianity
which he had criticized from the beginning. While in the early 1920s,
Heidegger was still confident that Christianity had the resources to set
against the spurious, damaging god’s-eye-perspective of Scholasticism
an authentic, aboriginal Christian experience of eschatological anxiety,
he now began to share Overbeck’s conviction that Christianity’s earli-
est experience no longer remained a live option for it, and was conse-
quently no viable model for the present.16 All theology was now the
‘mortal enemy’ of philosophy,17 precisely because the task of philosophy
was to open and sustain the unanswerable question of existence, while
the basis of faith and theology was to hold fast to (in his view prema-
ture or simplistic) answers. ‘In the philosophical problem of existence’,
Heidegger wrote in 1928, ‘there is necessarily … an absolute opposition
to all Christianity’.18 This ‘systemic’ focus, as already noted, went hand
in hand with a renewed focus on Catholicism rather than Protestantism
as most genuinely representative of Christianity—‘The Catholic Church’,
as he wrote in 1932, ‘alone “is” Christendom’.19 Heidegger retained this
re-orientation towards Roman Catholicism, both positive and negative,
for the rest of his life.20
Throughout the 1930s, Heidegger was vociferous in his antago-
nism in lectures and student assessments. In 1935, he opened his lec-
ture series Introduction to Metaphysics with the taunt that to believe in
the Bible as divine revelation was to bar oneself from asking the basic
philosophical question, ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’,
since one’s very starting point was a particular (assumed) answer to that
question, made with reference to a creator god.21 As second examiner of
doctoral and post-doctoral work written under the supervision of Martin
Honecker, the Chair in Christian Philosophy, Heidegger was equally
critical. Of Max Müller’s qualifying thesis on Thomas Aquinas, he noted
that ‘though the author talks a lot about “problems”, these remain con-
fined to a dogmatic domain which is itself not at all problematized, and
within which the decisive questions of philosophy are not raised because
they cannot be raised’.22 ‘Christian philosophy’, Heidegger concluded
in his Introduction to Metaphysics, is nothing but ‘a square circle and a
misunderstanding’.23
In the Notebook entries of the same period, Christianity’s ‘ essential
referral to a creator god is the fulcrum of Heidegger’s critique of the
modern Western worldview.24 The entire ‘history of beyng’—‘beyng’
(Seyn) now spelled in Hölderlin’s archaizing form—is here cast as a story of
28 J. Wolfe
how it [beyng] loses its only-just-dawning truth, which belongs to itself

(aletheia in phusis), and thus has to displace its ‘essence’ to the façade of
being [Seiendheit]; how the latter makes beings into originated creatures;
how these creations of a creator-god become things present-at-hand to
humans now arranging themselves as subjects; how presence-at-hand
as the essence of beings (objects) raises to supremacy the ever-more self-
concealing, artificing haunting [machenschaftliches Unwesen] of Beyng
(phusis—techne).25
Modernity, in Heidegger’s analysis, has reduced the world to mere

resources that can be calculated and used to satisfy men’s needs. The
Christian God is both the archetype and the supposed justification of this
misapprehension, satisfying the human need for mock-absolute power,
and reducing the world to a ‘creation’ to be measured and handled at
will. ‘The average in all beings is the most acute enemy of the gods. But
the Christian God is perhaps himself the absolute average and therefore
the most persistent in the West. He is, moreover, as if made for moder-
nity, since one can count and bargain with him’.26
The Christian legacy, in other words—and this was Heidegger’s real
concern—was not confined to confessional Christianity and the power
of the state church to impose it on individual university posts or curric-
ula. Rather, this legacy had defined an entire era in the history of being,
infecting all modern philosophy with the basic supposition of a creator
god who defined natures that were stable and intelligible, and could
therefore be measured and utilized.
In this dominance, the Christian church seemed to Heidegger to
swallow all opposition. It irked him greatly that modern Catholicism
appropriated thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,27 distorting
them in its own image.28 But even secular modern philosophy, in its
explicit opposition to Christianity, was to Heidegger merely an unwitting
replication and therefore reinforcement of Christianity’s basic principles.
Those who now pervert the last remnant of philosophy into worldview-
Scholasticism in order to be ‘contemporary’ should at least have the
insight and rectitude of thought to make St Thomas Aquinas their (only
appropriate) patron saint, so that they may learn from him how to be
uncreative on a grand scale and yet astutely put essential ideas at the ser-
vice of faith and give it a decisive framework. Why is this not happening?
Because they lack the power and, above all, the technical assurance even
for such generous derivativeness of thought. The confusion is so great that
they do not even recognize that their ‘political’ and ‘nationally relevant’
philosophies are nothing but meagre shadows of Scholasticism.29
Christianity, he concludes, ‘triumphs again through the production of

subservient opponents, whose sphere is limited to the inversion of the
Christian doctrine of man. … Inversion is collapse and relapse—but
never emancipation as liberation’.30
Although Heidegger focused his criticisms on the Roman Catholic
Church as the dominant institution of Christendom, he also nursed
a specific grudge against the Confessing Church, to which he denied
any genuine power or even sincerity. The ‘Confessing Church’, he
wrote in 1938, was merely ‘Roman Papalism in the form of German
Protestantism: the latest form of cultural Christendom: Christianness
masking the claim to a crumbling worldly rule’.31
His acrid dismissal of the Confessing Church shows, perhaps more
starkly than any of his other comments, the fixity of Heidegger’s con-
viction of Christianity’s absorption in the intellectual and social power
structures he criticized, and of its lack of resources to overcome them.
His contempt for the Confessing Church seems to stem from, or at
least correlate with, his long-standing animus against dialectical theol-
ogy and Karl Barth. Already in 1927, Heidegger had dismissed Barth
to his colleague Rudolf Bultmann, who was then also part of Barth’s
circle, as a ‘lightweight’ without enough sense to grasp the philosophi-
cal issues at stake,32 and urged Bultmann to ‘make clear that something
like “dialectical theology” is a mere spectre’.33 In 1931, he remarked
in his Notebooks: ‘the vacuity and fraudulence of so-called “dialectical
theology” doesn’t even deserve notice; it is Protestant Jesuitism of the
worst kind’.34 The later Notebooks attest the extent to which Heidegger
regarded the Confessing Church as near-synonymous with Barth and his
circle, and accused both of concealing ulterior motives under ultimately
implausible theological talk:
Then there are also ‘Christians’ who, because they cannot fathom what is
really going on, think they are living in the ‘catacombs’ when just recently,
when there were opportunities everywhere for political power sharing,
they knew themselves in ‘heaven’. The Pharisaism of Karl Barth and his
comrades outstrips that of ancient Judaism by the dimensions staked nec-
essarily by the modern history of being. This appendage seems to think
that shouting as loudly as possible about the long-dead God will somehow
30 J. Wolfe
lead to a realm of decision about the divinity of the gods. They think that
by taking refuge in the past through ‘dialectic’ talk, they are raised out of
time into eternity, while they, as the real destroyers, merely undermine ‘the
future’ (not the progress) of humanity. In reality, they are nevertheless the
completely peripheral and unwitting promoters of brutalitas – they belong,
in their own way, among the indispensable, insofar as they too forestall
essential knowledge and keep clear the way of the brutalitas of Being.35
Heidegger’s dismissal of the Confessing Church deserves more research.

What is clear is that he thought a more thorough-going alternative to
prevailing worldviews was necessary than a Christian rhetoric that he
regarded (however perversely) as superficial. His own estimation of what
was needed, however, underwent considerable change over the course
of the 1930s. This development also serves as a strong focal lens on his
changing relationship to Nazism. That complex interaction is the burden
of the remainder of this essay.
Contesting the Nation

The Notebooks’ strong anti-Christian strain is noteworthy but not nec-
essarily surprising: its substance (if not its acridity) is consonant with
Heidegger’s later writings as a whole, though his relationship to theol-
ogy and theologians mellowed considerably in the 1940s and 50s.36
More remarkable is the arch of his attempted alternatives to the Christian
predicament. The anti-political as much as anti-clerical pessimism of
1931, the sudden surge of optimism that the Nazi movement might cat-
alyse a renewal of his generation’s metaphysical standing, the bitter dis-
missal of that hope after the failed rectorship, and the gradual formation
of an apophatic eschatology inspired by Hölderlin are the real sites of the
Notebooks’ theological interest.
In 1931, Heidegger opened his intellectual diary with the repeated
complaint that Being and Time was not being received as intended:
rather than bringing genuine change, it was unthinkingly assimilated
into the production line of ‘polytechnic’ university culture.37 How,
Heidegger asked again and again in these early notebooks, could his
project—which should elicit a consciously lived life, not more idle talk—
be actualized? In those early days, Heidegger dismissed both politics
and faith as possible sources of renewal, mocking the ‘cheap superior-
ity of faith’ in the same breath as the ‘fake vivacity of politics, whose
intellectual-spiritual paralysis cries to heaven’.38 The National Socialist

movement, like Christianity, seemed to him merely opium for the
masses: ‘Let the many be awakened, yea saved, to peoplehood, or left
to the theologians and scribblers of theology outscreaming each other
today’.39 His own project needed the leadership of the noble few.40
Nevertheless, Heidegger’s ambition was now (whether or not it had
been in 1927) for a corporate rather than a merely individual renewal.
To understand his book aright, he maintained, it was sufficient neither
to take it as personal spiritual direction, nor as academic philosophical
commentary, but as a redirection of the German orientation to being as
a whole. What was at stake was nothing less than the ‘distant calling’ of
the German people to an unprecedented ‘depth of existence and breadth
of horizon’,41 spearheaded by a ‘spiritual-intellectual nobility … strong
enough to shape the tradition of the Germans anew from out of a great
future’.42
This rhetoric situates Heidegger’s project, or the way he now conceived
it, within the larger self-understanding of Weimar philosophy and theology
as tasked with the reformulation of an ideal and practical vision of Germany
after the trauma of the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles—a
vision that the political system of the Weimar Republic was not seen as
fit to furnish or sustain. More specifically, his rhetoric situates Heidegger,
however uneasily, within the contemporaneous re-appropriation of nine-
teenth-century idealist and Romantic nationalism, as fostered for example
by the German Philosophical Society under neo-Fichtean Bruno Bauch.
Heidegger’s own remarkable 1929 turn to Fichte, Hegel and Schelling
is attested in his lecture courses of 1929 and 1930 on German Idealism
(Fichte, Hegel, Schelling) and the Philosophical Situation of Today and on
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In June 1929, he wrote to his colleague
Karl Jaspers about his ongoing lectures: ‘I’m currently lecturing on Fichte,
Hegel, and Schelling for the first time—and am discovering a whole new
world’.43
Before specifying what was distinctive about Heidegger’s rediscov-
ery of Fichte and Hegel, it is instructive to sketch the trend in which
it, though idiosyncratically, participated. Many intellectuals at the time,
including those of the German Philosophical Society, looked back to
Fichte and nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism as a framework for
the reconstruction of a Germany in crisis. That nationalism, carried by
the educated middle classes, had centred on the hypostatization of the
German national ‘spirit’ (Geist) as unadulterated expression of the divine
32 J. Wolfe
‘world spirit’ that would, in its self-realization, perfect the world. That
realization was seen as, at heart, a matter of education more than politi-
cal or military action, and played a major part in the rise of the German
research universities. In his 1808 Addresses to the German Nation (which
became a model not only for the rhetoric of the German Philosophical
Society but also for Heidegger’s 1933 Rectoral Address44), Fichte
declared that it was in the Germans that ‘the seed of human perfection
[was] most decisively planted, and to whom progress in this develop-
ment [was] entrusted’. ‘If you perish in this your essence’, he exhorted
his countrymen, ‘then all hope of the entire human race for salvation
from the depths of its evils perishes with you’.45 In 1821, Hegel simi-
larly argued that Germany’s ascendancy would mark the ‘absolute rule’
of Spirit, in which ‘all peoples would find their salvation’.46
When the German Philosophical Society pledged its allegiance to
Hitler in 1933, it was with this vision in mind.47 At its October meeting,
to which Hitler sent greetings, Bauch spoke of National Socialism as the
beginning of a ‘wonderful national revival’ of the Fichtean dream, des-
tined to ‘radically overcome the malign spirit of pragmatism and materi-
alism’—a vision, he added, which German philosophy would support as a
‘sacred duty and task’.48 Bauch went on to deliver guest lectures on ‘the
people as a structure of nature and meaning’ (Das Volk als Natur- und
Sinngebilde) and ‘Fichte and the political task of reconstruction of our
time’ across Germany.49
The extent to which the National Socialist vision remained underde-
fined and so invited philosophical and religious projection at the begin-
ning of the 1930s is demonstrated by the 1932 correspondence of
Heidegger and his theological colleague Rudolf Bultmann. In autumn
1932, after a volume filled with dejected grumbling, Heidegger opened
a new volume of his intellectual diary with the exuberant observation
of ‘a people’s gloriously awakening will in the midst of a great world-
darkness’.50 In November, he wrote with excitement to his friend
Bultmann that National Socialism might be a movement with enough
driving force to instil in Germany as a whole the kind of conscious life
he envisioned. Bultmann, who was never a Nazi, and later joined the
regime-resisting Confessing Church, agreed that although he regret-
ted National Socialism’s consolidation into a political party, the ‘actual
movement was, and perhaps still is, something great, with its instinct for
the ultimate, its feeling of solidarity, and its discipline’.51
Although Heidegger’s version of National Socialism differed in

important respects (to be specified in the next section) from that of the
neo-Fichteans and neo-Hegelians, it shared with them the projection of a
spiritual vision of Germany onto an essentially pragmatic regime. Though
he did not invest his vision of spiritual renewal directly in a politi-
cal programme, Heidegger now saw ‘metaphysics as meta-politics’,52
earnestly hoping that the ongoing political revolution would act as a cat-
alyst for a second, spiritual-intellectual one. It was this second revolution
that Heidegger regarded as the yet-to-be-realized essence of Nazism.
The relation of this ‘spiritual-intellectual Nazism’53 to the politi-
cal regime was always volatile. Shortly after assuming the rectorship of
Freiburg University in 1932, Heidegger wrote to his friend Elisabeth
Blochmann that the political upheavals of the moment were ever at risk
of ‘getting stuck in the superficial’, but had the potential to become
the ‘way of a first awakening’—provided that ‘we are preparing our-
selves for a second and deeper one’. In the surge of that second awak-
ening, Nazism as a political party, he thought, would be overcome.
The movement, he wrote in 1932, had a responsibility to ‘become
nascent’ or ‘begin to begin’ (werdend werden), shaping the future by
‘stepping aside as a mere construct in the face of it’.54 He warned that
if the party did not ‘sacrifice itself as a transitional phenomenon’,55 but
was itself absolutized and treated as ‘complete, eternal truth dropped
from heaven’, then it was merely ‘aberration and folly’.56 Rather, the
present, he emphasized to Blochmann, would only be comprehensible
from out of the future.57 And if Germany did not continually ‘fight
for an existential breadth and depth drawn from the silent essence
of being’, it would have ‘squandered its end—a small and laughable
end’.58
But like the neo-Fichteans, Heidegger was ‘caught in the trap of his
own ideas’.59 Hitler and his chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, increas-
ingly contemptuous of the old, ‘spiritual’ understandings of the German
nation as bourgeois obfuscations, defined Volk instead as ‘a substance of
flesh and blood’ requiring racial purification and Lebensraum.60 In his
programmatic Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Rosenberg defined
for this ancestral people a ‘religion of blood’ commensurate with its
nature. The fatal flaw of Christianity, in Rosenberg’s view, was precisely
its disregard for the ‘law of blood’: ‘the stream of blood-red, real life,
which rushes through the veins of all true peoples and every culture’ and
34 J. Wolfe
‘alone enables the creation and maintenance of values’.61 Heidegger,

too, at that time dismissed Christianity as an ossified system that evaded
rather than encouraged spiritual effort; but his hope was for a people
trained in radical questioning and intellectual striving, not steeped in
blood-and-soil nationalism.
Heidegger’s opposition to the Nazi leadership’s definition of the
Volk, and his growing disappointment with their stubborn commitment
to that definition, became a constant refrain of his Notebooks from
1933/34 onwards. National Socialism, he warned, was in danger of cut-
ting itself off from ‘the great tradition’.62 ‘Is all this just domineering
mindlessness running riot?’.63 ‘Primary school teachers gone wild, tech-
nicians without jobs, and displaced bourgeois as the guardians of the
“people”—as those who are supposed to set the standards’.64 ‘And the
much-discussed people [Volk]? I.e. its innermost spiritual destiny? Is being
plunged into desolation and lethargy such as the Germans have never yet
experienced’.65
Heidegger associated this failure particularly with Hitler’s shift of
emphasis from the people as a spiritual entity to the people as defined
by blood: ‘The subject character [of the people] is rigidified by the pri-
oritization of the biological (i.e. in reality unbiological) interpretation of
peoplehood, which particularly sticks in the minds of the masses…’.66 To
define ‘the people’ biologically and ‘biological’ in terms of blood (blut-
mäßig), he thought, was simply to absolutize presence-at-hand, a mis-
representation he had attacked since at least Being and Time.67 Instead of
representing the essence of the people as fixed by its ancestry or territory,
Heidegger argued, that essence should be apprehended as a task requir-
ing a consistent and effortful orientation towards Being itself. ‘Blood and
soil’ nationalism, to him, constituted a failure in this fundamental task,
and so a betrayal of Germanness itself. ‘When a people posits itself as
autotelic, egotism grows to enormous dimensions, but no true realm or
truth is gained—the blindness of Beyng ensconces itself in an arid and
rough ‘biologism’ that promotes strong-arming in words. All this is fun-
damentally un-German’.68
In its reduction of the people to a thing present-at-hand, Nazism for
Heidegger became merely another transposition of Christianity that rep-
licated its structure and perpetuated rather than helped overcome the
desperate condition of the West. Indeed, it is one of the constant refrains
of his later Notebook entries that aspects of Nazism, like other ‘totaliz-
ing’ systems, were merely ‘inversions’ of Christianity: ‘These “worldview
wars” [are] so entangled’ in the modified metaphysics of Western

thought that they ‘don’t fathom how deeply they share the same crum-
bling ground’ –‘unquestioning assumption of Being, groundlessness of
truth, determination of humanity by its essence’—as their ‘opponent’.69
Neither, for Heidegger, had anything to do with genuine philosophy
anymore. In 1935, he suggested that he preferred the honesty of those
who dismissed philosophy as ‘useless’ or ‘impossible’ to those peddling a
‘National Socialist philosophy’, which ‘is even more impossible and vastly
more superfluous than a “Catholic philosophy”’.70 Within this intellec-
tual wasteland, his own philosophy remained, for Heidegger, a lone first
overcoming of the totalizing frameworks represented by both Nazism
and Christianity.71
Contesting the Apocalypse

But what was the substance of Heidegger’s vision of Germany and
‘intellectual-spiritual Nazism’, developed amid but also against neo-
Fichteanism and -Hegelianism?72 The answer can be framed by an aspect
of nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism and its appropriation by Nazi
rhetoricians that is often remarked upon in histories of political ideas, but
seldom in philosophical treatments, namely the eschatological thrust of
the German Reich envisioned by both. Fichte and Hegel had consciously
appropriated the Christian apocalyptic tradition especially of Joachim
of Fiore, whose apocalyptic periodization of history into the empires of
God the Father (Old Testament), the Son (New Testament and Church),
and the Holy Spirit (the age to come) served as the model for Hegel’s
own periodization in the Philosophy of Religion, and for his eschatologi-
cal Germanic Realm in the Philosophy of Right.73 The identification of
the World Spirit harnessed by Germany with the Holy Spirit of Scripture
made this appropriation of the biblical foretelling of an eschatological
outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh (e.g. Joel 2:28–9; Acts 2:17)
an atural one.
The nationalist revival of the 1920s and 30s brought with it a pro-
jection onto Hitler’s promised Reich of the quasi-messianic kingdom
envisioned by Fichte and Hegel, now with a redoubled emphasis on the
suffering and struggle that had been part of biblical as well as Hegelian
eschatology. In biblical prophecy, the coming of the eschatological age
was preceded by its ‘birth pangs’ (Matthew 24:8; Romans 8:22)—by
war, persecution, and natural disaster. In Hegel’s rational eschatology,
36 J. Wolfe
this suffering was folded into the dialectical self-realization of Spirit. The
final phase of that self-realization, the ‘Germanic empire’, could only
arise out of ‘infinite pain’ and the confrontation of ‘absolute negativity’.
This is the absolute turning point; spirit rises out of this situation and
grasps the infinite positivity of this its inward character, i.e. it grasps the
principle of the unity of the divine nature and the human, the reconcili-
ation of objective truth and freedom as the truth and freedom appearing
within self-consciousness and subjectivity, a reconciliation with the fulfil-
ment of which the Nordic principle … of the Germanic peoples, has been
entrusted.74
The early myth of the Nazi Reich participated fully in this imagery.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, author of the programmatic Germany’s
Third Empire (1924), chose ‘the Third Reich’ as an epithet for the
Germany of the future not just by reference to the two preceding
‘German’ empires, but above all to Joachim of Fiore’s apocalyptic ‘third
empire’ of the Holy Spirit.75 The condition from which this Reich would
be born was as one of pain and mourning, symbolized by the ‘sable
flag of need, humiliation and utter bitterness’ which he saw flying over
Germany, and which Hitler and Goebbels concretized in the ‘blood
flag’ of the failed beer hall putsch liturgically paraded as a symbol of the
sacrifice necessary for the coming of the kingdom.76 Hitler encouraged
the apocalyptic terminology of a ‘Third Reich’ until 1938, when he dis-
carded it for more pragmatic language.77
Heidegger’s embrace of the Nazi promise was premised precisely on a
‘grotesquely sophisticated receptiveness to [these] initially rhetorical calls
for self-sacrifice’,78 inflected by a critique of Hegel’s insufficiently radi-
cal valorization of negativity or death. In 1929, Heidegger concluded
his lectures on idealism with a discussion of Hegel’s definition of eter-
nity as absolute presence. He shared Hegel’s focus on ‘absolute nega-
tivity’ (or ‘death’, as Hegel famously glossed the term in the preface to
his Phenomenology of Spirit) as the crucible of peoplehood. However, he
strongly rejected Hegel’s conception of death as preliminary or sublat-
able. Where for Hegel, death was a necessary turning point ultimately
sublated in the self-realization of Spirit, for Heidegger, it remained
(as it had been in Being and Time) the ultimate, impossible possibility
of human existence which could only be anticipated, yet never grasped
or overcome. Heidegger’s critique of a Hegelian understanding of the
state, in fact, repeated his earlier critique of Augustine’s eschatology on

the level of corporate rather than individual existence. Just as he felt that
Augustine had betrayed his aboriginal insight into the radically temporal
character of human existence by his neo-Platonic vision of eschatological
stasis,79 so he criticized Hegel for his sublation of negativity into abso-
lute presence.
In the National Socialist rhetoric of sacrifice, Heidegger (absurdly)
saw the possibility of a more radical national dedication to being-
unto-death than that made possible by Hegel. His 1934/5 lectures on
Hölderlin paint a concrete image of a people formed by this dedica-
tion. The close fellowship of soldiers at the front, Heidegger maintains
there, has nothing to do with shared enthusiasms or distance from other
friends.
On the contrary, it finds its source solely and most deeply in the fact that
the closeness of death as sacrifice had first set each in the same nullity,
which then became the source of unconditional co-belonging. Precisely
that death, which each human being has to die on his or her own, and
which isolates each individual to the utmost, precisely that death and the
readiness for its sacrifice are what first creates the space of community
from which fellowship springs. Does fellowship therefore arise from fear?
No and yes. No, if like the philistine one means by fear only the helpless
trembling of panic-stricken cowardice. Yes, if one understands fear as the
metaphysical proximity to the unconditioned which is granted only to
the highest independence and readiness. Unless we force powers into our
existence [Dasein] which bind and isolate through free sacrifice as uncon-
ditionally as death – i.e. which grasp at the roots of each individual’s exist-
ence – and are rooted as deeply and fully in genuine knowledge, there can
be no ‘fellowship’, but at best a modified societal form.80
The urgency of this national re-orientation towards being-unto-death

was the primary motor of Heidegger’s public speeches as Rector.
Throughout 1933, he called students to ‘grow unceasingly in [their]
courage to sacrifice [themselves] for the salvation of our people’s
essence’,81 ‘led by the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces
the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history’.82 What
is significant here is not so much the rhetoric of sacrifice, but the fact
that in Heidegger’s vision, the people’s ‘essence’ was not something
pre-existing the willing anticipation of death, but arising from that sac-
rifice itself. The people’s ‘spiritual mission’ was not substantive but
38 J. Wolfe
performative, driven, like the sacrifice that realized it, by the essential
questionableness of existence. ‘[I]n our present time’, Heidegger had
told his students in 1930, ‘we have no footing in any objective, uni-
versally binding knowledge or power; the only foothold [Halt] that
remains to us is our bearing [Haltung]’.83 And his Rectoral Address in
1933 concluded: ‘This people works at its fate by … continually fight-
ing for [erkämpfen] its spiritual world anew. Thus exposed to the most
extreme questionableness of its own existence, this people wills to be a
spiritual people’.84 As James Phillips put it so well, ‘Heidegger’s nation-
alism in 1933 was not … the “psychological solution” to the anxiety of
1927, but, on the contrary, its formulation as a philosophical-political
program’.85
Reconfiguring Eschatology
And yet the redirection of the call to being-unto-death from the individ-
ual to the Volk does not leave intact the radical commitment to mortality
which fuels that call in Being and Time. In that earlier work, as we recall,
Heidegger derives moral responsibility from the nature of the human
person, which has no fixed essence, but consists precisely in possibility—
that is, in the human orientation towards a future self which is shaped
(but not predetermined) by both internal and external forces. This basic
potentiality of the human person seems ordered towards the achievement
of a whole and therefore true self. But this orderedness towards fulfil-
ment, on Heidegger’s account, is ultimately illusory, for the paradigmatic
possibility of human life turns out to be the final and unavoidable pos-
sibility of death, which is at the same time the impossibility of any longer
being a self. The nature of each human person thus presents itself as a
question to that person which cannot ultimately be answered, but only
sustained as question. Being-unto-death is the resolute living-out of that
sustainment.86
On the national level, Heidegger repeats the structure of an unde-
termined essence yet to be realized in active choice and struggle, whose
active moment of self-realization, however, is structured not linearly
towards fulfilment, but peripeteically towards an eschatological end that
is both telos and catastrophe.
The first aspect of this structure—German ‘nature’ as task rather than
given—is a frequent theme of the Black Notebooks. ‘The true essence
of the Germans’, Heidegger writes in 1938, for example, ‘demands of
them the fight [Kampf ] for their essence; this fight must itself be fought
for [erkämpft]’.87 ‘Culture’, on this understanding, is nothing other
than ‘the warlike fabric of the existence and destiny of a people exposed
to god and history (war in the sense of polemos)’.88 Both the National
Socialist programme and the Christian Church demonstrate their weak-
ness precisely by foreclosing this calling by a premature definition of
humanity and Germanness. ‘But who would presume’, Heidegger pro-
tests at the restriction of the school curriculum to poets ‘promoting …
German folkdom [Volkstum]’, ‘especially in such confused “times”,
to fix for “eternity” what it is to be German and a people—at a time
which perhaps is itself nothing but the result of a misidentification of
Germanness on the basis of nationalism’.89
It is the second aspect—the peripeteic horizon of this task of self-
realization—that is more puzzling. This horizon is announced in unam-
biguously eschatological terms throughout the Black Notebooks as
the awaited advent of a ‘last god’.90 But while this advent demands a
national enterprise oriented towards its own limit, that limit is not merely
an end but also a second beginning.91 The people, Heidegger is clear,
cannot give itself its own essence: it is, after all, precisely the forceful
‘enframing’ of the world (which he now identifies with both Christianity
and Nazism) which has caused the present god-forsakenness.92 It can
only empty itself through ‘complete conversion’ and ‘silent waiting’93 to
prepare a space into which the radically other ‘god’ can descend. Unlike
death, this god determines the people’s essence not by negation but by
donation: The god ‘must already have arrived if a people is to find its
essence’.94
Where Being and Time insisted on the unflinching acceptance that
no parousia would wrest existence from the radical negativity of death,
therefore, the Black Notebooks arrive at a contrary insistence pre-
cisely on the need for openness to a god who must come from with-
out, or doom humankind by remaining absent.95 This remains central
to Heidegger’s thought to the last, when he tells an incredulous Spiegel
reporter in a final interview:
Philosophy will not be able to bring about an immediate change in the

current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy, but of all
merely human thought and desire. Only a god can now save us. I see the
only possibility of rescue in preparing, through thought and poetry, a read-
iness for the appearance of this god or for the absence of this god in our
40 J. Wolfe
downfall; so that we will not, to put it crudely, ‘croak’, but, if we go down,

go down in the face of the absent god.
[Philosophy and the individual can do nothing more than] prepare this
readiness to hold themselves open for the arrival or non-appearance of the
god. Even the experience of non-appearance is not nothing, but a libera-
tion of man from what I have called, in Being and Time, his addiction to
that-which-is.96
It is important to stress that this posture of openness cannot be inter-

preted as a return to Christianity. Even on an understanding of
Christianity as vitiated rather than essentially constituted by an onto-
theological understanding of God and the world, Heidegger’s radical
apophaticism regarding the nature of the god to come is at basic odds
with the Christian orientation by and towards a revelation of God that
has already occurred. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s last god represents a
significant revision of his thought whose provenance and significance
is, I submit, the central puzzle of the Black Notebooks in their rele-
vance for theology. It will take sustained work to delineate the contri-
bution of these difficult texts to what we already know of Heidegger’s
‘last god’ from his volumes on Hölderlin and Contributions to Philosophy.
Some of that work is the burden of the following chapters of this book.
What should be stressed at the outset is the integral importance, in
Heidegger’s own mind, of his world-historical drama of being to the
philosophical counsel of mindful receptivity for which his late work is
generally praised. Any reception of that later work will have to come to
terms with the idiosyncratic eschatological vision within which it arose in
the 1930s, and which has too often been dismissed as a marginal poetic
flourish. It will be a large task to assess the full scope or significance of
this eschatological narrative, but the Black Notebooks both demand and
enable that task.
Notes
1. The Black Notebooks written during the Nazi period span fifteen manu-
script volumes bound as three published volumes: Martin Heidegger,
Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), GA 94 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2014); Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39),
GA 95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014); and Überlegungen XII–XV
(Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941), GA 96 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014).
References to Heidegger’s works will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) fol-

lowed by the volume number. Translations are by the author unless other-
wise stated. My thanks to Luisa Melloh for her research assistance and to
the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews for enabling it.
2. Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin
Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 1–3.
3. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927), GA 2 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1977), §§72–77.
4. Much stronger readings than my own of the continuity between §§72–77
of Being and Time and Heidegger’s Nazi involvement can be found,
e.g., in Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in
Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999); Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991).
5. From the unpublished ‘Kirchenlexikon’ (a collection of several thousand
index cards), on a series of cards entitled ‘Christentum Eschatologie
Allg.’, 2–3; quoted in Rudolf Wehrli, Alter und Tod des Christentums
bei Franz Overbeck (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1977), 229; Franz
Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur, ed. by C.A. Bernoulli (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 297–298.
6. I have offered an interpretation of these statements in Judith Wolfe,
‘Caught in the Trap of His Own Metaphysics’, Standpoint, June 2014,
accessed 5 June 2017: http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/5583/full.
7. Heidegger, GA 94, 186.
8. See e.g. ibid., 193.
9. Heidegger to Blochmann, 8 August 1928, in Joachim Storck (ed.),
Martin Heidegger / Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel 1918–1969
(Marbach: Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1990), 32.
10. See Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, Chap. 2.
11. ‘Concordat between the Holy See and the Free State of Baden’,
Addendum to Article IX, in Badisches Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt
1933, 19.
12. See Sylvia Paletschek, ‘Entwicklungslinien aus der Perspektive der
Fakultätssitzungen’, in Die Freiburger Philosophische Fakultät 1920–1960:
Mitglieder, Strukturen, Vernetzungen, ed. Eckhart Wirbelauer (Freiburg: Karl
Alber, 2006), 58–107, here 70, documenting the minutes of the Philosophy
Faculty Board meeting of 20 December 1932 (UAF B3/798, 32).
13. For a full account of philosophical appointments in Weimar and Nazi
Germany, including the Concordat Chairs, see Christian Tilitzki, Die
deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten
Reich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002).
42 J. Wolfe
14. A detailed account of Heidegger’s institutional conflicts with the

Concordat Chair and its students, and especially of his relationship with
Max Müller, can be found in Judith Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology
(London: T&T Clark, 2014), Chap. 7.
15. See Heidegger’s letter to Karl Jaspers of 1 July 1935, in which he speaks of
the ‘faith of his youth’ and the ‘failure of the rectorship’ as two thorns in
his flesh; in Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (eds), Martin Heidegger / Karl
Jaspers: Briefwechsel 1920–1963 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), 157.
16. Franz Overbeck, Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie
(Leipzig: C.G. Naumann, 1873); Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur,
7; see esp. Heidegger to Blochmann, 8 August 1928, in Storck, Martin
Heidegger / Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel 1918–1969, 32.
17. Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (1919–1961), GA 9 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2004), 66.
18. Heidegger to Julius Stenzel, 14 April 1928, quoted in Hugo Ott, Martin
Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988), 158.
20. This is corroborated in 1947 by Heidegger’s erstwhile student and life-
long friend Max Müller; see Max Müller to Alois Naber SJ, 2 February
1947, in Holger Zaborowski and Anton Bösl (eds), Martin Heidegger /
Max Müller: Briefe und andere Dokumente (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2004),
71–81; quote from 74.
21. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935), GA 40
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), 9.
22. ‘Martin Heideggers Gutachten zur Habilitation Max Müllers’ (1937),
published in Zaborowski and Bösl, Martin Heidegger / Max Müller:
Briefe und andere Dokumente, 68–70; quote from 70.
23. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 9.
25. Ibid., 66.
27. Ibid., 182.
28. Ibid., 186. See also George Pattison’s chapter in the present volume.
30. Ibid., 463; see also 401.
31. Ibid., 522.
32. Heidegger to Bultmann, 29 March 1927, in Andreas Großmann and
Christof Landmesser (eds), Rudolf Bultmann / Martin Heidegger:
Briefwechsel 1925–1975 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2009), 24–26; quote
from 25.
33. Heidegger to Bultmann, 14 March 1927, in ibid., 19–22; quote from 22.
For a fuller treatment of Heidegger’s relationship to Barth and dialectical
theology in the 1920s, see Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, Chap. 5.

36. See Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 135–137, 158–164.
37. See e.g. Heidegger, GA 94, 193.
38. Ibid., 94.
39. Ibid.
40. See e.g. ibid., 121.
41. Ibid., 125.
42. Ibid., 121.
43. Heidegger to Jaspers, 25 June 1929, in Biemel and Saner, Martin
Heidegger / Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel 1920–1963, 123.
44. See Hans D. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi
Germany (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 31.
45. J.G. Fichte, ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation’, in Werke: Auswahl in sechs
Bänden, vol. 5 (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920), 609.
46. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1942), §352, 218–219.
47. See Mitteilungen der Deutschen Philosophischen Gesellschaft 10 (April
1933), 1. See also George Leaman, ‘Reflections on German Philosophy
and National Socialism: What Happened and Why It Matters to
Philosophy’, in Marion Heinz and Goran Gretic (eds), Philosophie und
Zeitgeist im Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2006), 233–250.
48. Published as Bruno Bauch, ‘Wert und Zweck’, Blätter für deutsche
Philosophie 8 (1934), 39–59.
49. See Sven Slotter, ‘Die Tyrannei der Werte: Philosophie und Politik
bei Bruno Bauch’, in Klaus-M. Kodalle (ed.), Angst vor der Moderne:
Philosophische Antworten auf Krisenerfahrungen (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2000), 89–103; quote from 98.
51. Bultmann to Heidegger, 14 December 1932, in Großmann and
Landmesser, Rudolf Bultmann / Martin Heidegger: Briefwechsel 1925–1975,
187–188.
53. Ibid., 135.
54. Ibid., 114–115.
55. Ibid., 125.
56. Ibid., 59.
57. Heidegger to Blochmann, 30 March 1933, in Storck, Martin Heidegger /
Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel 1918–1969, 60. See also GA 94, 243
and 244.
44 J. Wolfe
59. Hannah Arendt to Günther Gaus, in an interview given on 28 October

1964 on his television show Zur Person (ZDF).
60. Adolf Hitler, ‘Das dichterische Wort im Werk Adolf Hitlers’, Wille und
Macht: Führerorgan der nationalsozialistischen Jugend 8 (15 April 1938);
quoted in Klaus Vondung, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 208.
61. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der
seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (Munich: Hoheneichen-
Verlag, 1930), 23.
62. Heidegger, GA 94.
63. Ibid., 174.
64. Ibid., 187.
65. Ibid., 173.
66. Ibid., 521–522.
67. Heidegger, GA 95, 22; see also 117.
69. Ibid., 401; see also Heidegger, GA 95, 161.
71. See e.g. ibid., 475–476.
72. See e.g. ibid., 101.
73. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §352 and §358; G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion, trans. Peter Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990), vol. 3. See also e.g. Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Jayne Svenungsson, Divining
History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit, trans.
Stephen Donovan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016); Judith Wolfe,
‘Eschatology’, in Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber
(eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Chap. 40.
74. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, sec. 358, translation emended.
75. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire, trans. E.O.
Lorimer (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), 12–13. On Nazism’s appro-
priation of apocalyptic language, see e.g. Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische
Religion des Nationalsozialismus, 2nd ed. (Munich: Fink, 2002), B.I.1–3;
Klaus Vondung, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion: Potentials and
Limits of an Analytical Concept’, Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions 6, no. 1 (2005), 87–95; Judith Wolfe, ‘Messianism’, in Nicholas
Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (eds), The Oxford Handbook
of Theology and Modern European Thought (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 301–324; esp. 310–315.
76. See Vondung, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion: Potentials and
Limits of an Analytical Concept’.
77. For a fuller account, see Wolfe, ‘Messianism’.

78. James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 55.
79. See Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, Chap. 3.
80. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’
(1934/35), 3rd ed., GA 39 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1999), 73.
81. Martin Heidegger, ‘Aufruf an die deutschen Studenten’, Freiburger
Studentenzeitung 8, no. 1 (3 November 1933); rpt. in Bernhard Martin,
Martin Heidegger und das ‘Dritte Reich’: Ein Kompendium (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 177.
82. Heidegger, ‘Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität’
(Rectoral Address, 27 May 1933), in Martin Heidegger, Reden und
andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (1910–1976), GA 16 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2000), 70–117; quote from 70.
83. Heidegger, ‘[Studenten ehren Professor Heidegger]’ (1930), in ibid.,
755–758; quote from 758.
84. Heidegger, ‘Selbstbehauptung’, in ibid., 114.
85. Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk, 76.
86. For a fuller version of this account, see Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology,
Chap. 6.
90. See e.g. IV.179, IV.288, IV.292, V.1, V.4, V.15, etc. See also Martin
Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938), 3rd
ed., GA 65 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003), esp. 405–419.
91. See e.g. Heidegger, GA 94, 243, 244.
92. E.g. ibid., 167, 210.
93. Ibid., 170.
95. E.g. Heidegger, GA 94, 262.
96. Ibid., 114, 125, 174.
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———. Sein und Zeit (1927). GA 2. Edited by F.W. von Herrmann. Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1977.
———. Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938). GA 94. Edited by
Peter Trawny. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014.
———. Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39). GA 95. Edited by
———. Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941). GA 96. Edited by
———. Wegmarken (1919–1961). GA 9. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Hitler, Adolf. ‘Das dichterische Wort im Werk Adolf Hitlers’. Wille und Macht:
Führerorgan der nationalsozialistischen Jugend 8 (15 April 1938).
Leaman, George. ‘Reflections on German Philosophy and National Socialism:
What Happened and Why It Matters to Philosophy’. In Philosophie und
Zeitgeist im Nationalsozialismus. Edited by Marion Heinz and Goran Gretic.
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, 233–50.
Martin, Bernhard. Martin Heidegger und das ‘Dritte Reich’: Ein Kompendium.
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989.
Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur. Germany’s Third Empire. Translated by E.O.
Lorimer. London: Allen & Unwin, 1934.
O’Regan, Cyril. The Heterodox Hegel. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994.
Ott, Hugo. Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie. Frankfurt:
Campus, 1988.
Overbeck, Franz. Christentum und Kultur. Edited by C.A. Bernoulli. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963.
———. Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie. Leipzig: C.G.
Naumann, 1873.
Paletschek, Sylvia. ‘Entwicklungslinien aus der Perspektive der
Fakultätssitzungen’. In Die Freiburger Philosophische Fakultät 1920–1960:
Mitglieder, Strukturen, Vernetzungen, edited by Eckhart Wirbelauer. Freiburg:
Karl Alber, 2006, 58–107.
Phillips, James. Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Rockmore, Tom. On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991.
Rosenberg, Alfred. Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-
geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit. Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1930.
Slotter, Sven. ‘Die Tyrannei der Werte: Philosophie und Politik bei
Bruno Bauch’. In Angst vor der Moderne: Philosophische Antworten auf
Krisenerfahrungen. Edited by Klaus-M. Kodalle. Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2000, 89–103.
Sluga, Hans D. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Storck, Joachim, ed. Martin Heidegger / Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel
1918–1969. Marbach: Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1990.
Development of the Spirit. Translated by Stephen Donovan. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2016.
Tilitzki, Christian. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer Republik
und im Dritten Reich. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002.
Vondung, Klaus. Die Apokalypse in Deutschland. Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988.
———. ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion: Potentials and Limits of an
Analytical Concept’. In Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1
(2005), 87–95.
Wehrli, Rudolf. Alter und Tod des Christentums bei Franz Overbeck. Zurich:
Theologischer Verlag, 1977.
Wolfe, Judith. ‘Caught in the Trap of His Own Metaphysics’. Standpoint. June
2014. Accessed by 5 June 2017: http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/5583/full.
48 J. Wolfe
———. ‘Eschatology’. In The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian

Thought. Edited by Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, Chap. 40.
———. Heidegger and Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2014.
———. Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early
Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
———. ‘Messianism’. In The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European
Thought. Edited by Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 301–324.
Zaborowski, Holger, and A. Bösl, eds. Martin Heidegger / Max Müller: Briefe
und andere Dokumente. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2004.
CHAPTER 3
In the Spirit of Paul: Thinking the

Hebraic Inheritance
(Heidegger, Bultmann, Jonas)
Hans Ruin
Introduction
Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture series from the semester 1920 to
1921 on the ‘Phenomenology of religious life’ and notably its detailed
existential interpretation of Paul is not only a remarkable piece of inter-
pretative–exegetical literature.1 It is also, as several commentators have
already pointed out, perhaps the true starting point of the adventure of
the existential analytic as such.2 Heidegger comes to the Pauline text
equipped with neo-Kantian epistemology, Husserlian phenomenol-
ogy and the existentialism of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, fusing his own
writing with the letters of Paul, interpreting and appropriating the text,
but also letting himself be read and appropriated by it. It is a blending
of discourses, of phrases, words and tonalities where Heidegger finds
himself and his own critical voice partly in and through Paul. It is here
that he introduces the topic of so called factical life experience, devel-
oped through a detailed exegesis of, first of all, Galatians and First
H. Ruin (*) 
Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden

50 H. Ruin
Thessalonians, which in the next semester is followed by a close reading

of sections from Augustine’s Confessions.
Through the topic of factical life experience, Heidegger here reaches
for the fundamental comportment of existence, where it lives in and
through a relation with and commitment to its world. The opening
pages of the course are also a declaration of principle in regard to the
dominant thought patterns of academic philosophy, theology and soci-
ology of religion. Here he marks out his difference with regard to the
liberal and neo-Kantian way of discussing religion, either in terms of psy-
chological feeling or in terms of a priori moral categories or historical
necessity. Against Ernst Troeltsch and the dominant trends of ‘science
of religion’ (Religionswissenschaft), he argues for the need to approach
the phenomenon of religion from a phenomenological standpoint in its
facticity, not as an object of study, but as a mode of enactment, of Vollzug
and of making sense.
The key concept, through which he reaches for this new access to the
sphere of religion—to the religious—and subsequently to the Pauline
text, is that of ‘the historical’ (das Historische).3 And in the detailed expli-
cations of Paul’s texts that follow, he reaches into new depths of finite
existential temporality as a situated life in uncertain expectancy. The Paul
that emerges through this reading is not the one of dogmatic Lutheran
theology, drawing primarily on Luther’s reading of Romans, but a life
praxis, a mode of living comportment, in and from out of which all such
doctrinal conclusions must be elicited as secondary phenomena.
In making Paul into a prototypical witness for a heightened awareness
of what it means to live a situated historical life, Heidegger also situates
himself, tacitly, in a complex and controversial interpretative and spiritual–
political context. The Paul that he reads, and from whom he also takes
both a philosophical and rhetorical power, is the Paul of a supposedly
‘original Christianity’. The Jewishness of Paul, the fact that Paul and his
discourse are situated within the context of Jewish messianic literature,
is never addressed. Heidegger is not interested in historicizing Paul, nor
is he interested in Paul as the original author of Christian theological
doctrine. For him, the main purpose is to release the philosophical–exis-
tential undercurrent of the theological discourse, in order to make its
pre-theoretical and pre-doctrinal content happen again. Yet, as pointed
out by several recent critics, the basic premise that Paul is the voice of
a supposedly ‘original’ Christianity is never questioned as such.4 In this
respect, the rightly celebrated early interpretations of Paul also illustrate a
3 IN THE SPIRIT OF PAUL: THINKING THE HEBRAIC INHERITANCE … 51
dimension of Heidegger’s work that was highlighted by Marlène Zarader

in an important book from 1990, La dette impensée (‘the unthought
debt’). Its subtitle is ‘Heidegger and the Hebraic Inheritance’ and
what it seeks to document are the different ways in which Heidegger,
throughout his work, avoided to recognize and even actively repressed
the Jewish intellectual roots of his own thinking.5 Following the pub-
lication of the Black Notebooks, this line of critical interpretation has
become more pertinent and has already motivated significant new inter-
ventions, notably from Donatella di Cesare.6
Moving beyond the horizon of Zarader’s and di Cesare’s critical argu-
ment, there is also the difficult question of the Pauline theological legacy
and its role in the intellectual construction of Christian anti-Judaism. We
should avoid thinking of this in terms of historical ‘guilt’, which does
not contribute to an intellectual understanding of an already too guilt-
ridden history. It suffices to recall the historical–textual facts, namely that
it is in Paul’s letters that the idea is first articulated, according to which
(ancient) Judaism and its law are both overcome and fulfilled in its ear-
lier messianic promise through the birth and sacrificial death of Christ
on the Cross.7 Thus, it is in Paul that we first find the original covenant
between the Jewish people and its God reinterpreted as the first or the
old covenant in relation to its fulfilment in the second and new covenant
between God and humanity. In short, when discussing Heidegger’s
appropriation of Paul in the context of anti-Judaism, and especially
when doing so in the context of the philosophical–theological divide, we
should also try to take into account the longer legacy of anti-Judaism
that is part of the Pauline–Christian legacy itself. To navigate in a more
precise and responsible way on this incendiary territory is very difficult,
yet it is a challenge which is important to assume. It involves not only
abstract questions of intellectual legacies and the proper handling of his-
torical accounts, but also personal issues of sincerity, responsibility and
basic human decency.
This last point brings us to the particular constellation of thinkers
that I will be discussing here: Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann and Hans
Jonas. For it was not only Heidegger who at an early stage of his intel-
lectual career found his philosophical voice and vocation in and through
a reading of the Pauline letters. The first book published by Bultmann
in 1909 (at the age of twenty-five) was also a study of Paul, a rhetorical
study of the letters in the context of the Greek genre of the diatribe.8
And it was to Paul that Bultmann would also return over the course of
52 H. Ruin
his life, at decisive moments, for an articulation of a life in faith that he

himself also sought to live. Hans Jonas, too, started his academic career
with a small book on Augustine and Paul, a book that he published in
1926 (also at the age of twenty-five), eight years before his famous study
of Gnosticism from 1934. The book on Paul opens with a dedication
to Bultmann, but philosophically, it came directly out of Heidegger’s
seminar, which he had followed with passionate interest five years ear-
lier. When the three of them were again virtually united one last time
almost half a century later, in the magnificent Festschrift for Bultmann
on his eighty-fifth birthday in 1970, after the disasters and betrayals that
tore them and their world apart, Jonas’s contribution was a new essay on
Paul, again on Romans 7.
On the basis of this constellation of thinkers and texts, I here want
to present a reading that is meant to highlight some of the philosophi-
cal and theological stakes involved in these interpretative endeavours,
while also connecting them on a more personal level. For in the end,
the questions provoked by the topic of Heidegger and Antisemitism also
have an irreducible personal–existential component. We can discuss at
any length the increasingly obscure and arcane conceptualizations of the
history of being, of who and what is included and who is not. But at the
end of the day, the question of how to assess Heidegger and his views in
relation to the question of Judaism also compels us to form a concep-
tion of the man and his actions in the face of the historical situation in
which he found himself and in response to which he made his choices
and shaped his fate. For this purpose, the constellation with Bultmann
and Jonas carries some particularly important lessons as we seek retro-
spectively to make sense of what actually took place in these convul-
sive and difficult times. My own teacher and supervisor in Stockholm,
Aleksander Orlowski, who first introduced me to Heidegger, had a deep
personal experience of the conditions and mechanisms of totalitarian-
ism. As the sole survivor of a Jewish Polish family under German occu-
pation, and as a citizen for many years in Communist Poland, he always
reminded us that it is easy to judge people’s actions when you are located
outside of a totalitarian society. Under such circumstances, everyone has
to make compromises. It is only by comparing similar people in similar
situations that we can retrospectively hope to see what was indeed pos-
sible and what was not possible to do in this or that specific situation,
thus forming the basis of a better judgment. In the end, it is our actions
under concrete historical circumstances that reveal who we are as ethical
beings, not our philosophical learning and predilections. A very bright

mind can exist in a weak and vain character and a more solid character
will not necessarily come with intellectual lucidity. Comparing Heidegger
and Bultmann around the time of the National Socialist revolution is an
illuminating exercise in this respect.
Heidegger Reading Paul

At the heart of Heidegger’s reading of Paul is the topic of so called fac-
tical life experience, and the attempt to grasp from within the move-
ment of life itself in its commitment to the world. The ‘historical’ in life
is meant to capture this temporal, finite movement of existence through
both commitment and vulnerability and in its fundamental incalculabil-
ity. It is from within this existential situation that Paul supposedly speaks
to his congregation in the making. It is a discourse animated by a height-
ened sense of risk, as a life without certainty, and in relation to which it is
even more important to open oneself to hope, wakefulness, resolve, etc.
In this way, Heidegger orients himself towards what he takes to be the
basic existential meaning of the Pauline discourse, as characterized by a
temporal horizon of the coming of Christ, of the Parousia, not primarily
understood in the context of a theological–metaphysical dogma but as an
open horizon of lived meaning.
At the heart of this philosophical interpretation of Christian–Lutheran
theology is the peculiar temporal–historical sense of living in a disjointed
time, a time of wakefulness and resolve. It is a kairological time, from
the Greek kairos, to which Paul also refers as ‘the decisive moment’.
It is in 1 Corinthians 15 that Paul forges the metaphor of ‘the blink-
ing of an eye’, the ripe ophtalmou, which Kierkegaard, and following him
Heidegger, will repeat as the image for the concentrated temporality of
the Augenblick (Øjeblik).9
In response to such a historical predicament, one can no longer sim-
ply rely on one’s tradition, for this tradition has come to an end, partly
through a kind of inner self-corruption and self-forgetfulness. Therefore,
it is necessary to dismantle its claim on us in the present and to re-open
the question of possibly more original levels of meaning within this
inheritance itself. This experience of a cut or caesura in the very fabric of
history and tradition can be clearly sensed in Paul’s own discourse, where
we read repeatedly that the law in its old form has come to an end and
that it is now time to live in and through the spirit.10
54 H. Ruin
Heidegger’s radical appropriation of the epistles merges at this point

with his own sense of how the tradition of philosophy has reached an
impasse and that there is a need for a ‘destruction’ of the very leg-
acy of Western metaphysics as we read in Being and Time seven years
later.11 There are multiple motives behind this drastic imagery. But it is
Paul who first states that in relation to the previous tradition it must be
‘destroyed’, or as he writes in 2 Corinthians 10:4: ‘I destroy buildings of
thought’ (logismos kathairontes), which in the Latin translation reads as
concilia destruentes.12
This sense of a crisis in tradition, and the necessity of somehow start-
ing anew, also motivates the programme of ‘destruction’ in Heidegger’s
thinking. It is a project that is at once destructive, critical and construc-
tive, since its ultimate purpose is not negative but positive. It seeks to
retrieve lost and unthought possibilities in previous philosophical sys-
tems, and ultimately to access that very same tradition as if for the very
first time. Perhaps most importantly, it outlines an experience where the
subject is not the master of itself but exposed in its historical finitude,
open to possibility, having to live awake and prepared, without certainty.
Bultmann and Marburger Theology

The impact of Heidegger’s reading and hermeneutic mode of access-
ing the early Christian texts can be seen in the students that followed
the course and in his friendship with Rudolf Bultmann, which followed
directly upon his move to Marburg and his new position in 1924.13
Their correspondence from these years provides a testimony of the deep
sense of affinity that developed between them, as they quickly moved
from the polite Sie to the more intimate Du of a friendship that would
last throughout their lives, including after long interruptions.14 Many
of the letters are concerned with academic business, with forged and
broken alliances, and large parts are simply short and private words of
friendship. But between the lines and in some of the letters, the deeper
philosophical issues surface, as in a letter from 29 March 1927, where
Heidegger describes himself and his friend as approaching Christianity
from two very distinct positions; Bultmann from that of a specifically
Christian ontic one, where the ontological is played down, whereas
Heidegger comes from the inverse position, the ontological, in relation
to which the specifically Christian is toned down. This letter recalls the
main point of the only principal text that Heidegger ever wrote on the
topic of ‘Phenomenology and theology’, composed precisely around this

time, a lecture that he first presented in 1927, and which he dedicated
to Bultmann when it was published in a separate edition more than forty
years later in 1970. There he stresses the fundamental difference between
the disciplines, locating theology among the positive sciences and desig-
nating its positive content as the explication of a life in faith. In contrast,
philosophy is a discipline that is concerned with being, and in virtue of
this preoccupation, it is clearly, even decisively, distinct from any of the
positive sciences, be it physics or theology.
Yet at the same time, philosophy has the ability, and perhaps even the
responsibility, to explore and clarify the ontological concepts and phe-
nomena that underlie the concepts used to articulate a life in faith.15
Later from the same year, there is a letter in return from Heidegger, in
response to a demand from Bultmann concerning an article he has been
asked to write on Heidegger’s philosophy, where the latter summarizes
the basic sources of his own thinking in a few sentences, stressing that
‘Augustin, Luther, Kierkegaard are essential for the elaboration of a rad-
ical understanding of Dasein’.16 Here Paul is no longer mentioned by
name, but the impact of his legacy is affirmed as part of this inner theo-
logical inheritance of the existential analytic.
Five years later, in 1932, Bultmann writes an essay on Paul, on
‘Romans 7 and the anthropology of Paul’. His main message is that
Paul’s anthropology is not a ‘subjectivism’, but one that must be under-
stood on the basis of his ‘historical existence’, his geschichtlicher Sein.17
Man is not divided between a good and pure spirit and a bad and cor-
rupt body, but man is division, Zwiespalt, where what is at stake is
always his authenticity, his Eigentlichkeit. The only salvation lies in the
moment and how he lives the moment, the Augenblick. Therefore, it is
not a question of following the letter of the law but to seek out its basic
intuition, the Anschauung that leads to life. In the end, man must aban-
don himself to the address of God, his Anspruch.18 As we shall now see,
this somewhat marginal essay points to important events in the year that
follows.
Responding to Turbulent Times

Later in the same year, on 11 December 1932, Bultmann writes a
long letter to Heidegger that gives us a glimpse into their sentiments
and political orientations at this critical moment in history. Initially, he
56 H. Ruin
describes in some detail his work on the concepts of pistis and kerygma,
and why he sees these as the central questions of theology today. Then
suddenly he poses the question of whether it is indeed true, as he has
been told, that Heidegger has joined the party? He admits that he
holds certain hopes for the movement, but as it develops into a party
he sees only corruption and the prospect that it will mislead students
into becoming local Führers, and finally he writes that he finds it hard
to envision Heidegger in the company of some of these people.19
Heidegger responds within a few days to this letter, on December 16th.
To begin with, he repeats again that their way of approaching the-
ology is different, that for him it is more a question of helping theol-
ogy to awaken itself through the means of a philosophical reflection, a
Besinnung. Then, on the topic of his suspected party membership, he
answers as follows: ‘That I should be a member of the NSDAP, that is a
smell from the latrines, as they say in the military (ein Latrinengerüch)’.
He admits that he has received several requests to join and then retorts:
‘I am not a member of this party and I will never be a member of this
party, just as I never was a member of any other party’.20 Having made
this declaration, he admits that he too is positive with regard to much
in the party, in much the same sense that he takes Bultmann to have
articulated.
After this letter, there is no significant preserved exchange until June
1933, six months later. In the meantime, history has turned and the
two men have made their choices. In April 1933, Heidegger is elected
as new rector of Freiburg University under the auspices of the new
National Socialist regime, as one of the most highly profiled intellectuals
to step forth as a representative of the new government. From the Black
Notebooks, we have the unique testimony of his own inner doubts, as he
writes in an undated note from around this time of how his choice fills
him with the sense of having ‘betrayed his conscience’, his Gewissen.21
But on 27 May, he nevertheless presents his Rectoral address where he
speaks of the need for resolution, of affirming the German destiny and
of the great new outbreak (Ausbruch), and of the need for spiritual guid-
ance and leadership, affirming its rootedness in the original beginning of
Greek philosophy.22
A few weeks after the speech, he receives a letter from Bultmann. The
latter has not read the full speech, but he has read a summary of it in
a newspaper. The tone of the letter is restrained, contorted and trou-
bled. Bultmann writes that he lacks the force to affirm the moment in
a similar way and that he seeks his strength elsewhere, in their shared
sources, in Kierkegaard and even in Nietzsche (!). He sees the present as
characterized by a ‘hubris’ behind which he detects a hidden anxiety, a
verdeckten Angst.23 His words of farewell resonate with both concern for
and estrangement vis-à-vis his friend: ‘Considering what you now have
to carry, and concerned of whether you have chosen the right place and
time to involve yourself, I send you my wishes’.24 After this letter, there
are only occasional short messages, interrupted by a plea from Bultmann
to Heidegger in 1935 to engage himself against a renewed attack on the
university, to which there is no further response from Heidegger. Then
there is a letter from Heidegger in October 1939 where he declares that
what happens now is not ‘history in the essential sense’, that what is tak-
ing place is Machenschaft and that the partial closing of the university
is perhaps not a bad thing, considered that it is groundless and without
reflexive capacity (besinnungsfeig). Instead, it all hinges on the capacity
to prepare for what is coming after what is now, through ‘a reflection on
what endures’ (Besinnung auf das was standhält). After this lonely and
belated realization of where things are going, expressed through a futile
hope in some sort of reflexive resistance, there is no further contact until
the mid-1950s, when the correspondence is again resumed, mostly in the
form of polite greetings.
In his response to Heidegger’s surprising turn in the spring of 1933
and the choice to invest his philosophy and personal prestige in support
of Hitler and National Socialism, Bultmann speaks in convoluted terms,
expressing his disappointment in indirect ways. However, earlier in that
very same month, when Heidegger had given his Rectoral address,
Bultmann had also addressed his students, in a smaller circle, but at a
public event, where he had spoken of the task in the present, not the task
of philosophy and science, but of the task of theology and of theologians.25
Here he too had spoken of Besinnung and of responsibility, of the spe-
cific responsibility of theologians for developing a sense and meaning of
Christian faith for ‘our generation’.
It is astonishing to read this lecture alongside Heidegger’s Rectoral
address. For here, Bultmann uses the very same language from Being
and Time and its analysis of facticity, at times even verbatim, but
reaches a very different conclusion. To understand God as the creator
does not mean that man is determined by eternal principles but instead
through the concrete situation of the moment, of the Augenblick. This
means that we always find ourselves in our situation. In this situation,
58 H. Ruin
the belief in God and the sense of the people, of a Volkstum, can stand
in a positive relation, and in a ‘destinal community’, a Gemeinschaft des
Schicksals. God is not immanent in the world, instead, he occupies a dis-
tance. Bultmann cites 1 Corinthians 7, stating that faith is not a negative
relation to the world but a positive attitude that is nevertheless critical.
From the perspective of faith, we can see how man always wants to con-
trol and rule over creation, forgetting that he is himself created, mistak-
ing himself for its creator and thereby making himself guilty of sin. This
is followed by a declaration that no state and no nation are so pure as to
allow itself to take its will directly from God. From every people can arise
both beauty and nobility, but in every people, it is also possible that the
demonic and the sinful can erupt.26 From Christian faith, and from the
Pauline message, it should thus be possible to draw a critical power that
could preserve a living reflection, a Besinnung that could find a sense of
love through the experience of grace.
Bultmann lists in very clear terms what he sees as the problems and
the risks in the present time: the denunciations, the defamations and
the repression of free speech. And then at the very end, he speaks out in
unambiguous terms: ‘As a Christian I must deplore the injustice done to
the German Jews through such defamations’.27
This is what it was possible to say in May 1933. This is also what it was
possible to say in May 1933 on the basis of the same existential analytic
of finite human existence, indeed of the very same matrix of thought,
that Heidegger a few weeks later would mobilize in his support of the
National Socialist seizure of power and its new university politics.
In Hans Jonas’s obituary for Bultmann from 1976, we get another
glimpse of the man from this same period. Jonas recalls with lucid
and deeply moving words how he came to see Bultmann and his fam-
ily one last time that same summer of 1933, the only friend to whom
he paid a visit before leaving Germany for good. He recounts that when
he described how Jews were now even being excluded from the soci-
ety for the blind, he looked at Bultmann and saw how a ‘deathly pallor
had spread over his face’. At this point, he writes, I knew that ‘in mat-
ters of elementary humanity one could simply rely on Bultmann’.28 To
this anecdote, he adds the story of how, upon his return to Germany
after the capitulation, having just learned of his own mother’s death
in Auschwitz, he came to visit the Bultmann family unannounced and
dressed in British military gear. He was greeted by them both with words
and tears and with the question of whether it was indeed the second
volume of his Gnosis that he was carrying with him in the package under
his arm. This meeting, he writes, restored in him his sense of the possi-
bility of the ‘constancy of thought and the loving interest across the ruin
of a world’.29
Heidegger’s Lonely Years

Heidegger’s continued work and philosophical development from
the mid-1930s up until the end of the war is a remarkable and
almost unfathomable story in itself. This is the time of his great
Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche, two volumes that were published in
the early 1960s and that provoked a whole new chapter in the recep-
tion of Nietzsche’s work. It is the time of his work on the early Greek
philosophy and on German idealism. It is the attempt to forge a new
form of philosophical non-positing and non-objectifying discourse, man-
ifested most clearly in Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). It is a
period of extraordinary productivity, a laboratory of thought that has
kept his readers and interpreters busy for more than half a century. Last,
but not least, it is the time of his profound engagement with Hölderlin.
During these years, it is clear, not least from the Black Notebooks, how
he sees the entire Western civilization as doomed by machination, nihil-
ism and calculative thinking. He places his hopes in Hölderlin and the
possibility of a ‘second beginning’ in relation to the first Greek begin-
ning, a mythico-poetical return of a possibility that was somehow lost
or betrayed along the way. This is accompanied by an increasingly sharp
critique of Christianity, of the Church and of Judaism, which here all
blend into one historical entity, a kind of historical betrayal that it is the
task of thinking to somehow repair. In the previously published texts on
this topic, notably Contributions, completed in 1938, there is no discus-
sion of Christianity and Judaism. ‘The second beginning’ (das andere
Anfang) is primarily articulated in relation to a Greek first beginning.
It is only in the recently published notebooks that the historical other
of this cultural revolution is mentioned by name, namely the Jewish–
Christian.
One important inspiration for this diagnosis and its cure is of course
Nietzsche, whose analysis of nihilism takes its point of departure in the
historical invention of monotheism and of a world defined in moral
terms, a moral or moralizing metaphysics. If we are to locate the imme-
diate overall intellectual matrix within which Heidegger’s discourse
60 H. Ruin
during these years can be situated and possibly understood, we therefore

need to look first towards Nietzsche’s critique of the Jewish–Christian
legacy, and also towards Hölderlin’s hopes for a deeper unification with a
lost Greek origin. But it is not simply a question of a return in the more
naïve sense of earlier generations of German Hellenophiles. The ancient
world is gone and will not return: what awaits us as our particular chal-
lenge is the possibility of beginning anew, of becoming ourselves a
beginning, precisely in the form of ‘a second beginning’. This is also the
formulation that we find in the darkest, most shocking quotation from
the Black Notebooks, a paragraph from 1942, which includes the state-
ment that what is happening now is the ‘self-annihilation’—the Selbst-
vernichtung—of the Jews.30 As the German state has opted for a ‘final
solution’ in the form of murder on an industrial scale as its response
to its so called Jewish problem, Heidegger sits there alone, with all his
Jewish colleagues, teachers and friends long departed, arrested or killed,
reaching the philosophical conclusion that what is happening now is ulti-
mately that the Jews are somehow murdering themselves.
The sheer horror of this remark repels us from even trying to inter-
pret it. And yet it has—from the viewpoint of the conceptual castle that
he has built for himself—an inner consistency and logic. If nihilism, the
emptying of all values, the transformation of the world into one great
machination and device of power and control, is the belated effect of
Christian metaphysics, with Christianity being the extension of Judaism,
then what is happening out in the streets and in the industrial factories
of death, can indeed be defined as the Jews killing the Jews. The world
has become one great device of mechanization and power, where all we
can hope for is another beginning. We should not, he writes, try to write
new histories of the West, instead we should try to be more Western,
more abenländisch, which he specifies as anfänglicher den Anfang anfan-
gen lassen, to ‘let the beginning begin in a more original way’. And this
should take place—he explicitly declares—ausserhalb des Judentums
und d.h. des Christentums, ‘beyond Judaism, and, i.e., also beyond
Christianity’. 31
Was Bultmann ever fully aware of where Heidegger was going during
these dark years? And if he had known, what would he have said? Would
their friendship have survived the knowledge of where his thinking had
led him? While Heidegger was lashing out against Christianity and the
organized churches, not least the Confessional Church, Die Bekennende
Kirche, the Lutheran congregation that evolved as a critical reaction
to Hitler’s attempt to domesticate the Lutheran churches altogether,

Bultmann was risking his own security and well-being precisely through
his involvement in the Confessional Church.32 In 1941, Bultmann had
also given another critical sermon, where he spoke out against what was
happening to the church, mobilizing Christianity again as a potential
source of resistance. In this sermon, he notes that many of the churches
are destroyed, finally declaring: ‘Germany is no longer a Christian
nation’.33
For Bultmann, his Christianity and his faith, and his never failing
reliance in a fundamental Pauline spirituality seems to have served him
through the dark years and given him resources to resist at least in him-
self and his proximity the ongoing destruction of dignity and decency.
For him, a message of love and care for the other as mediated through
grace took him through these times of increasing isolation and despair.
Heidegger too despaired about the present. From approximately 1935
onward, it is clear, even more so with the publication of the Black
Notebooks, that he saw himself as in opposition to the political and spir-
itual development of his time. The letter from 1939 to Bultmann, the
last before the long silence and one that may even have involved a certain
risk in sending, clearly shows him distancing himself from what is taking
place. Yet, while Bultmann continues to find spiritual orientation in his
own version of Pauline Christianity, Heidegger openly rejects the entire
spiritual legacy of Paul and of Judaism, of Christian spirituality generally
and of institutional religion in particular.
Yet we should raise again the question with which I began, namely:
from where does Heidegger draw his hopes in, and his conception of,
a second and other beginning? It is repeatedly stated that it is a Greek
beginning and that it is supposedly a question of returning directly to
that particular historical promise. But what does it mean to read, inter-
pret and decipher history as a possibility of a return and of a new begin-
ning? From where does such a figure of thought even emerge? Certainly
not in any Greek philosophical sources, where such modes of temporal-
ity and historical promise are not to be found (if we are not to look in
the obscure metaphysics of Pythagorean and Platonic metempsychosis, the
transmigration of souls). No, it is only in the Jewish prophetic and mes-
sianic literature generally, and most radically expressed in Paul, that the
very shape of history in which Heidegger here places his hopes for the
future is first conceived and poetically articulated. It is Paul who forges
the image of history as the inner death of tradition, and the possibility of
62 H. Ruin
a new birth, a second beginning and a new covenant. It is impossible not

to trace Heidegger’s radical and distorted apocalyptic ruminations dur-
ing these years at least partly to precisely the tradition that he, according
to a perverse logic of repression, refuses to recognize as even belong-
ing to the history of being in the first place. As he seeks an articulation
of a hope in the face of the forgetfulness of a machination, the source
of which he claims to be Judaism, he grasps for a historicity of being,
the form of which is modelled on the messianic and kairological sense of
time that was most forcibly articulated in precisely the Pauline letters.
This remark is not only valid for the basic form of his messianic histor-
ical schema. It is also true of the ethical–ontological orientation of this
thinking from the mid-1930s onward, where he begins to do distance
himself from a philosophy of subjectivity, will, power and control, opting
instead for the primacy of hearing and belonging, of being addressed and
of the Ereignis, as a name for the experience of an unpredictable happen-
ing. But where, indeed where again, if not in the prophetic and Pauline
literature do we find these tropes? It was not incidental that theologians
were attracted and continue to be attracted to Heidegger’s thinking. For
it remains firmly situated within a discursive, affective and—dare we even
say—ontological context of the Jewish prophetic messianic literature.
Jonas and the Return to Heidegger’s Paul

In our attempt to trace the strange vicissitudes of a Pauline legacy in and
through Heidegger’s work, we have one more text to revisit, without
which this entire exercise loses its edge and purpose. It is an analysis that
permits us to probe further into the fundamentally ambiguous standing
and repercussion of the Hebraic inheritance in this sad and convoluted
history. The text in question, mentioned briefly at the outset, is the essay
on Paul and Romans 7 that Hans Jonas wrote late in life as his contribu-
tion to Bultmann’s Festschrift in 1964.
The title of this essay, as it was published some years later in an
English collection, is ‘The Abyss of the will’.34 It is a short text, not even
fifteen pages, but over these pages, it concentrates a personal, philosoph-
ical, theological and also historical drama in a uniquely dense manner.
It opens with an expression of personal gratitude to Bultmann for his
friendship during times when, as Jonas writes—and leaving no doubts
as to who is implied—many another bonds ‘were broken and irretriev-
ably lost in the dark abyss of our time’.35 He then recapitulates what it
was that he accomplished back then around 1930, namely an ‘existential

analysis of the Pauline self-experience as it finds expression in Romans
7.7–25’.36 Its formulations are said to have been at the heart of the
Pelagian struggle concerning the freedom of the will that also involved
Augustine. Yet, it is in Paul that we should first look for the core of this
matter, as he speaks not just for a historically contingent group, but of
how the failure of the law holds for the pagan and the Christian, no less
than for the Jew.
To articulate an existential reading of this problematic was the topic
of his early work, Jonas continues. Now he wants to try out the idea of a
primal sin as discussed by Paul and Augustine, as something that is inev-
itably committed and constantly renewed, and somehow rooted in the
manner of movement of the human will itself. If this is the case, then it
should be sought in the experience of an insufficiency that springs from
the ontology of human existence as such.37 Only on this condition, he
writes, ‘do the Pauline statements have the validity they claim’. In other
words, it is only if we are able to translate its theological message back
into a comprehensible existential form that it can carry its own genu-
ine message. He then cites the full opening of Romans 7, which ends
with the line: ‘But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead
wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not
in the oldness of the letter.’ (Rom. 7:6).
As a premise for his subsequent systematic argument, Jonas then
states that ‘all thinking and acting is reflexive’. We know that we think
and that we will—volo me velle.38 The ‘will’, he writes, is a priori always
there, underlying all single acts of the soul. The ‘will’ that performs this
permanent decision, or rather, that exists as its performance, is the fun-
damental mode of being of Dasein in general. In brief, he adds, ‘will’ sig-
nifies precisely what Heidegger has explored under the heading of ‘care’
(Sorge).39 Ultimately, all the basic moral phenomena—freedom, choice,
responsibility, conscience and guilt—are said to be rooted in this primor-
dial reflexiveness, as itself the ontological basis of freedom.
This apparently innocent gesture, using Heidegger’s existential–onto-
logical vocabulary for an exegetical purpose, is on one level trivial. It was
done often by then, in theology no less than in literature, psychology
or anthropology. But here the stakes are different. Here the stakes are
very much higher. Here it is Hans Jonas, the uncompromising Zionist
warrior and American philosopher, who is returning in virtual form to
Germany to pay tribute to his Lutheran teacher through a reading of
64 H. Ruin
Paul—through a reading of Romans—with the ultimate purpose of prov-

ing the universal existential validity of its message and who at this very
moment, again, leaves the word to Heidegger, as the inevitable philo-
sophical premise for his attempted interpretation.
This is the same Hans Jonas, who the very same year had been called
in on short notice to replace Heidegger himself as keynote speaker
at a theological conference at Drew College in New Jersey, to which
Heidegger had accepted an invitation from which he then withdrew
for reasons of poor health.40 This is the same Hans Jonas, who in this
seminal replacement lecture, entitled ‘Heidegger and theology’, used the
opportunity to emphatically warn his ‘theologian friends’ to go along
with Heidegger, for both theological, philosophical and most impor-
tantly for political reasons, referring in particular to how the latter’s true
involvement in National Socialism had been revealed two years earlier
through Guido Schneeberger’s volume Nachlese zu Heidegger, which
gathered a large body of documents relating to the Rectorate in particu-
lar and to Heidegger’s politics in general, also touching on the issue of
his Antisemitism.41
In his reading of Paul, Jonas states that the analysis must also account
for the necessary failure of freedom, and of its inevitable ensnarement
in itself. For the freedom of the will must also be the unfreedom of the
will, in order that the insufficiency thesis be not simply—as Nietzsche
had argued—‘a mere slander of man’. The will has the capacity to step
back and objectify and subjugate the world, but in doing so, it ultimately
also objectifies itself, making itself into its own object. In doing so, how-
ever, it forsakes its inner humility and replaces its unmediated creatureli-
ness with the pride of mediacy. It leaves its spontaneous willing of itself
and makes itself instead into the object of its will, side-glancing, compar-
ing itself with others. Instead of living the act, it becomes the observable
actor. Jonas then poses the rhetorical question: ‘shouldn’t this be at least
one meaning, perhaps the minimal as well as the fundamental meaning,
of the Pauline concept of “self-glorying” in one’s work?’ (a remark that
presumably refers to 1 Cor. 5:6).42 The point is that this self-glorying
objectification of oneself is a trap set by freedom itself. It is even said to
be caused by a law that is not external but internal, not ‘heteronomous’
but ‘autonomous’, using Kant’s terminology.
To break this self-mirroring of the subject in relation to itself, the
hyperbolic sense of its will must somehow be contained, it must pause
itself and come to see itself also in its inner non-sufficiency. For Kant,
the solution lies in autonomy, in a will that refuses all external adaption
and that only wills itself. Yet even in this understanding of the problem,
there lies a risk. In the thought of a pure autonomy—‘I am the will that
wills myself and my own law’—this inwardness produces a self-gratifying
objectification of itself, also known under the name of ‘vanity’. This is a
temptation that is no less corrupting than the good will that counts on a
gratification from outside. Indeed, it may possibly even be worse, since it
can be enjoyed without delay, ‘in the very performance of the act.’43
We should stop at this point and consider closely not only what Jonas
is actually saying but also what his argument implies. He is basically
accusing Kantian morality for leaving the way to a kind of hubris and
vanity of a will that relishes in its own ability to will itself. And in its
place, he posits the deeper dichotomy of the authentic and the inauthen-
tic as a way to describe the basic existential antinomy of the moral real-
ity as such, ‘independently of all theories concerning the ground of the
moral norm’. Putting it in brief terms, he states: ‘the antinomy means
that under the condition of human ambiguity the attempt at holiness of
will condemns itself to an unholy will’. And he ends the exposition as
follows: ‘It is my opinion that this antinomy stands behind the despair of
the Pauline self-description.’44
The apparently subtle interpretative gesture is in fact monumen-
tal. What Jonas is doing is celebrating his Lutheran-Kantian teacher by
disparaging Kant and the rational ethics of the Enlightenment with the
help of the tools that he has obtained from his National Socialist phi-
losophy teacher, who at this decisive moment is again called in to help
him to properly read Paul. He is called in to read a Paul who is no longer
primarily the founder of Christianity and the original—if yet unin-
tentional—architect of (Christian) anti-Judaism, but a Paul who here
emerges as an original Jewish existential thinker, supposedly the first who
was able to articulate this basic human ethical condition.
We should not fail to note that it was precisely a vanity—Eitelkeit—
of the will that the Pauline Bultmann had accused Heidegger of having
succumbed to in his Rectoral address. And it was again this hubris of
the will, as the will to power and the will to will, that Heidegger him-
self would later place in question as he withdrew after his ‘turning’ in
the mid-1930s and that he would repeat in his Letter on Humanism
after the war, also as a refusal of Kantian ethics. Indeed, it was to his
Pauline, Lutheran and—dare we now also say—Jewish intellectual roots
that Heidegger also returned, in his attempt to find a way out of nihilism
66 H. Ruin
and machination, arguing that it would be possible to invent it anew,

but now on the basis of a somehow purified Greek legacy, without any
connection to the Jewish–Christian inheritance that had enabled him to
articulate these thoughts in the first place.
In Jonas’s reading, Jesus is the one who ‘exposes the bad “piety of the
law”’, whereas Paul’s critique strikes at all piety of the law. Jesus con-
demns from outside a false and corrigible attitude. Paul on the other
hand describes from within, a true and unavoidable experience.45 In
Jonas’s reading, Paul has seen through not only the bad Pharisee but also
the good Pharisee, the one that relishes in his capacity to will and to fol-
low the law. This is why he has to be led to the experience of the deeper
dialectic of standing under the ‘condition under the law’. The Pharisee
has not yet found grace, for he has not recognized that he is a sinner also
for and under the law. What Jesus takes into consideration is the lowest
form of legality, the hypocritical inability to live and incorporate the law.
What Paul does, however, is to seek out the highest mode of law-piety
for his critical object, by pointing out an inner difference in the very exis-
tential premise, by showing that we cannot will ourselves as lawful but
must recognize our inner finitude also before the law.
What does this argument mean in terms of historical parallels and con-
clusions? It means nothing less than that Jesus is here Kant and Paul is
Heidegger. And it is Heidegger who gets the last word, as the one who
has seen through the inner disunity and lack of plenitude in human sub-
jectivity and moral will before the law. Paul is here the deeper thinker, a
deeper thinker than Christ, a deeper Jewish thinker. Yet his thought at
this point becomes accessible only from the modern, secular interpreta-
tive framework of the existential analytics as explored and articulated by
Heidegger.
What about Paul’s own contribution to Christian anti-Judaism? Jonas
does not touch directly upon this historically and theologically sensitive
and complicated issue, which, considering the occasion—his celebra-
tion of his Pauline German Professor—becomes even more difficult to
address. Still, he can be seen as addressing it in his own way, when add-
ing that the death of Christ on the cross has no rightful place in Jesus’s
own message. From the perspective of Jesus, all men have immediate
access to God and to a genuine being before him, so long as they hear
and heed to his call. As we remind ourselves of this distinction, Jonas
writes, we only reiterate the old, if much-disputed, proposition that
Paul’s message about Jesus as the crucified Christ signifies a decisive step
beyond Jesus’s own message, a step through which ‘the paths of the old
creed and the new really part’.46 In this particular context, Jonas does
not go further in the analysis of the emergence of the Christian–Jewish
divide as it is theoretically prepared in and through Paul’s theology. The
implications of his remarks are nevertheless significant, especially in rela-
tion to our overall problematic here, namely Heidegger’s own version of
metaphysical anti-Judaism. From the viewpoint of Jonas’s interpretation,
Paul is the deeper existential thinker but, through his unwarranted his-
torical–metaphysical interpretation of the death of Christ on the Cross,
he has moved beyond the Gospel of Christ and also beyond the tradi-
tion of deep ethical wisdom that animates and enables his message in the
first place.
Jonas does not say so himself, and perhaps he does not see the full
implication of his intervention, but through this last critical gesture, he
can also be read as having captured Heidegger’s own philosophical–
historical trajectory. The Pauline Heidegger had a philosophical anthro-
pology that probed deeper into the human ethical condition than the
Jesus-like Kant (a figure to which also Bultmann belongs, if we are to
follow what Jonas would later write in his obituary on how the latter had
a share in both Kant’s ‘strengths and weaknesses’).47 Yet in his attempt
to break free from the history of metaphysics, and through his transfor-
mation and reversal of a history after which there is no longer any place
for Judaism, Heidegger betrayed his own background as well as his
own deepest intuitions. Through his conjecture of a history where the
human spirit should somehow begin anew, through a second beginning,
through a second ontological covenant, Heidegger has replicated—in
a strange and contorted way—a movement of thought enacted already
in and by Paul. For in Paul, we find not only a profound articulation
of the human ethical predicament, in Paul, we find also a reconceptu
alization of history. In Paul, we find the messianic phantasy of history
beginning entirely anew, leaving the old behind, transforming the his-
torically contingent death of its ethical hero into a world-historical and
redemptive event, thereby dividing humanity into a before and an after,
and thereby—unknowingly—anticipating the exclusion of his own peo-
ple from its own continued tradition.
Jonas’s reading of Romans presents Paul as the source of a profound
ethical insight, but also as the inventor of an ultimately misguided his-
torical mythology. He does not spell out the applicability of this schema
to Heidegger, as I have suggested it here. But his interpretation can
68 H. Ruin
nevertheless make Heidegger’s trajectory legible in its ambiguous

dependency and rejection vis-à-vis his Jewish–Christian intellectual inher-
itance as we also know it from his own testimony. I am thinking in par-
ticular of the remarkable biographical statement ‘My Pathway Hitherto’
that Heidegger jots down in 1937/1938 and that was added as an
appendix to the volume Mindfulness.48 Over the course of a couple of
pages, he lists and summarizes in a fairly conventional way his philosoph-
ical trajectory from the earliest academic works up until the contempo-
rary interpretations of early Greek philosophy and of Nietzsche. But after
having provided this account, he shifts focus over the last pages, turning
away from the manifest philosophical questions to his experience of and
struggle with religion. I quote the passage at length, since it recalls sev-
eral of the topics that have been discussed above:
And who would not want to recognize that a confrontation with

Christianity reticently accompanied my entire path hitherto, a confronta-
tion 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
ownmost provenance: the parental home, homeland and youth. Only one
who was so rooted in such an actually lived Catholic world may be able to
have an inkling of the necessities that like 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 is what had to be overcome from the ground up but not
destroyed.49
These contorted formulations and confessions of the personal–existential

impact of the struggle with the faith of his childhood add a deeper
dimension to Heidegger’s trajectory as we have followed it so far. This
‘reticent’ ground and background of his philosophical struggles and con-
frontations portray him here as someone who never entirely abandoned
his Christian culture for a secular–philosophical world view, but who
still continued to enact this struggle as also a philosophical task, trans-
formed into a historical–metaphysical challenge. For on the next page of
this personal posthumous confession, Heidegger also writes of how only
someone who was truly rooted (wahrhaft verwurzelt) in this way can
experience the true significance of finding a new grounding (Gründung)
in the form of a ‘creative transformation wherein everything inceptual
grows up into the height of its summit’.50 In this formulation, we can
again sense the powerful legacy of a Pauline messianic spirituality in his

very way of phrasing his philosophical challenge. It is only through the
break with the old that its true meaning can genuinely reach into its pos-
sibility as a new foundation.
Concluding Reflections
When the mode of thought depicted above takes on the form of a his-
torical–metaphysical schema of radical reversals, cancellations and new
covenants, it is led beyond the initial realization of the finite, thrown
and indebted nature of its existence. That this was also how Jonas read
Heidegger’s move from the existential analytic to the history of being is
not explicitly stated in his text. Yet from our present vantage point, we
can sense how his judgment on Paul could be seen to apply to the direc-
tion taken by Heidegger in the 1930s and 1940s in particular.
In using Heidegger’s early existential ontology for a reading of the
Pauline letters, Jonas is not trying to celebrate or restore the reputa-
tion of Heidegger as a philosopher. Ultimately it is not about him.
To the extent that it is about someone, it is about Bultmann and their
shared appreciation for what Heidegger in his early, and perhaps most
creative years, was able to think and articulate. And in leading the way
towards a secular–philosophical reading of Paul as an ethical–existential
thinker, Jonas is not only returning to commemorate his student days.
The potential implications of his reading are much greater than that. By
providing a new access to Paul, not as a Christian theologian, but as an
ethical thinker—as a Jewish ethical thinker—at a point in history where
the disastrous legacy of a combative Pauline Christianity in relation to
the so called old faith had led European Christian culture to commit its
greatest crime, he can also be seen as opening up a trajectory of thinking
this legacy from a new perspective.
To the extent that Heidegger’s thinking can also contribute to this
important project, it should be recognized as such, beyond all personal,
ethico-political, as well as historical–metaphysical failures and betrayals.
This is at least what Jonas seems to be saying. At this very moment in
time, which is not just Jonas’s moment in the mid-1960s but also our
moment today, the necessity of thinking the inner links between the tra-
ditions and legacies of the Greek and the monotheistic Jewish–Christian
spiritual–intellectual traditions from a non-confessional standpoint—in
both a demythologizing and a deconstructive mode—is as important
70 H. Ruin
as ever.51 It is a question of exploring the sense and validity of Paul’s

‘universalism’ as not just a specifically ‘Christian’ idea, but as both a
Greek philosophical and a Jewish ethical–religious conception. It is a
question of rethinking the inner links and trajectories between texts and
legacies that were torn apart by confessional obligations and institutional
rivalries, and to release the power of this inheritance so as to think it
anew in its tormented ambiguity and its promise.
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA 60
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995); Eng. trans.: Phenomenology of Religious
Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004). References to the German original of Heidegger’s works will
be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume number.
Translations are by the author unless otherwise stated. Over the last years,
I have been engaged in a project of trying to read and interpret philo-
sophically the Pauline letters, focusing in particular on the topics of sacri-
fice and subject-formation. The initial inspiration for this work came from
Heidegger’s lectures but also from the extraordinary rise of interest in
this material among influential contemporary philosophers, notably Jacob
Taubes, Alan Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek. See Hans
Ruin, ‘Faith, Grace, and the Destruction of Tradition: A Hermeneutic-
Genealogical Reading of the Pauline Letters’, in Journal for Cultural
and Religious Theory, vol. 11:1 (2010), 16–34; ‘Circumcising the Word:
Derrida as Reader of Paul’, in Peter Frick (ed.), Paul in the Grip of
Philosophers, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 71–93; and ‘Anxious
Spirits—Pneumatology in Heidegger, Paul, and Kierkegaard’, in Topos 1
(2014), 39–52.
2. See e.g., Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Being and Time (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2, 69–115 (Kisiel was one
of the first scholars to have access to the courses). See also Benjamin
Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
3. Heidegger, GA 60, 31–33.
4. Ward Blanton makes this point in Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy,
Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007), where he shows how Heidegger’s reading of Paul, inadvertently
or not, realigns itself with a tendency in much of traditional theologically
motivated Pauline scholarship in downplaying the fact that Paul was pri-
marily a Jewish messianic reformer.
5. Marlène Zarader, La dette impensé. Heidegger et l’héritage hébraique (Paris:

Seuil, 1990).
6. See her Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2016).
In a chapter on Heidegger’s interpretation of Paul, di Cesare points in
particular to how he refrains from placing Paul in his Jewish tradition,
presenting him just as an ‘original Christian’ thinker; see 354–361.
7. I say this in full awareness of the last forty years of critical scholarship on
Paul and Judaism that was initiated by pioneering works such as Krister
Stendahl’s Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (London: SCM Press, 1977)
and E.P. Sander’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of
Patterns of Religion (Fortress Press, 1977), both of which were seminal
to the so called ‘New Perspective on Paul’. According to this perspec-
tive, Paul is seen not in opposition contemporary Judaism, but rather as
a reformer who sought formulations that could open up Jewish law and
practices also to non-Jews. For a more recent summary of this change
in perspective, see James Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul (Tübingen:
Mohr, 2005). This historical awareness of the intellectual and philo-
sophical context of Paul is also what guides my own reading here. But
my point is that even if it is possible to distinguish this other Paul today,
beyond Christian anti-Jewish agitation, the fact remains that it is in the
Pauline letters that we first find articulated a figure of a break with and
renewal of tradition that will open up a reception history within which we
eventually also find Heidegger.
8. Rudolf Bultmann, Der Stil der paulinischen Predigt und die kynisch-stoische
Diatribe, in Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen
Testaments 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1909).
9. For a more extensive analysis of this concept, its historical context and
also its role in Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics, see ch. 8 in my
Enigmatic Origins (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994).
10. The extent to which this is meant as an upheaval of the law, or just its
rejuvenation, and also the extent to which this applies rather to the non-
Jewish members of the new congregation, is a question of disputed his-
torical interpretation of the letters that I cannot address here. Again, it
suffices to note the remarks that do point in the direction of a radical
reversal, and that speak of a life in the spirit as a figure of radical renewal.
11. See Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: State University Press,
2009), Sect. 6, 20–21.
12. After the publication of Heidegger’s lectures on religion and on Paul in
1994, a number of studies have appeared which explore the extent to
which the very formation of existential ontology during the early 1920s
must be seen as interwoven with Heidegger’s turning towards Luther
and early Christianity. See e.g. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins.
72 H. Ruin
Among more recent books are Duane Armitage’s Heidegger’s Pauline

and Lutheran Roots (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). The most ambitious
study in this line of interpretation so far is Sylvain Camilleri’s Heidegger
et les grandes lignes d’une phénoménologie herméneutique du christianisme
primitif (Dortrecht: Springer, 2017).
13. For a condensed philosophical account of the philosophical and theo-
logical impact of Heidegger’s encounter and dialogue with the Marburg
theology, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Martin Heidegger und die
Marburger Theologie’, in Erich Dinkler and Hartwig Thyen (eds), Zeit
und Geschichte: Dankesgabe an Rudolf Bultmann zum 80. Geburtstag
(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1964), 479–490.
14. Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger, Briefwechsel 1925–1975
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2009).
15. To the legitimacy and meaning of this strict separation, of this proximity
and distance, of this distance in proximity, and the rationale behind its
affirmation, I return below. It will resonate between them one last time,
as Bultmann responds to its re-publication in 1970.
16. Bultmann-Heidegger, Briefwechsel, 47–48.
17. Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Römer 7 und die Anthropologie des Paulus’, in
Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstallt, 1973),
379–390, here 383.
18. Ibid., 389.
19. Bultmann-Heidegger, Briefwechsel, 187.
20. Ibid., 191.
21. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), GA
94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 110.
22. See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’,
trans. Karsten Harris, in Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering (eds),
Martin Heidegger and National Socialism (New York: Paragon House,
1990), 5–13.
23. Heidegger-Bultmann, Briefwechsel, 193–194.
24. Ibid., 195.
25. The text under the title ‘Die Aufgabe der Theologie in der gegenwärti-
gen Situation’ was presented on 2 May, and printed later the same year in
Theologische Blätter 12 (1933), 161–166. It is reprinted as an appendix to
the Heidegger-Bultmann correspondence, Briefwechsel, 277–286.
26. Heidegger-Bultmann, Briefwechsel, 282.
27. Ibid., 286.
28. Hans Jonas, ‘Is Faith Still Possible? Memories of Rudolf Bultmann and
Reflections on the Philosophical Aspects of His Work’, The Harvard
Theological Review, Vol. 75, No. 1 (January 1982), 3.
29. Ibid.
30. Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948), GA
31. Ibid.
32. For a discussion about Heidegger’s remarks on the Bekennende Kirche
in the Black Notebooks, see Judith Wolfe’s contribution in the present
volume.
33. See Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich,
ed. by Dean G. Stroud (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2013), 142–143.
34. Hans Jonas, ‘The Abyss of the Will’, ch. 18 in his Philosophical Essays:
From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1974), 335–349.
35. Ibid., 335.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 337.
38. Ibid., 338–339.
39. Ibid., 339.
40. The official title of the conference was ‘A Second Consultation on
Hermeneutics: Theological Discourse and the Proclamation of the
Gospel’. It was organized by Stanley Romaine Hopper, dean of the Drew
Graduate School, who asked the participants to explore the relevance of
Heidegger’s philosophy for Protestant theology.
41. See Hans Jonas, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, The Review of Metaphysics,
vol. 18, No. 2 (December 1964), 207–233.
42. Jonas, ‘The Abyss of the Will’, 340.
43. Ibid., 342.
44. Ibid., 344.
45. Ibid., 346.
46. Ibid.
47. Hans Jonas, ‘Is Faith Still Possible?’ 14–15.
48. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, GA 66 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997);
Eng. trans., Mindfulness, trans.: Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary
(London: Continuum, 2016).
49. Ibid., 415; Eng. trans., 356.
50. Ibid., 416; Eng. trans., 357.
51. For a more recent version of this challenge, let me refer to the subtle
reflections on Paul that we find in the work of Derrida, and that I explore
in my ‘Circumcising the Word: Derrida as Reader of Paul’. See also Ward
Blanton’s contribution in the present volume.
74 H. Ruin
Works Cited
Blanton, Ward. Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New
Testament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Der Stil der paulinischen Predigt und die kynisch-stoische
Diatribe. In Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen
Testaments 13. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1909.
———. ‘Römer 7 und die Anthropologie des Paulus’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze.
Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstallt (1973): 379–390.
Bultmann, Rudolf and Martin Heidegger. Briefwechsel 1925–1975. Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2009.
Camilleri, Sylvain. Heidegger et les grandes lignes d’une phénoménologie herméneu-
tique du christianisme primitif. Dortrecht: Springer, 2017.
Crowe, Benjamin. Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity.
Di Cesare, Donatella. Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah. Frankfurt: Klostermann,
2016.
Dunn, James. The New Perspective on Paul. Tübingen: Mohr, 2005.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Martin Heidegger und die Marburger Theologie’. In
Zeit und Geschichte: Dankesgabe an Rudolf Bultmann zum 80. Geburtstag.
Edited by Erich Dinkler and Hartwig Thyen. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (1964),
479–490.
Heidegger, Martin. Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948). GA 97.
Edited by Peter Trawny. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2015.
———. Being and Time. Translated by Joam Stambaugh. Albany: State
———. Besinnung. GA 66. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.
Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997.
———. Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London:
Continuum, 2016.
———. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. GA 60. Edited by Matthias
Jung, Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly and Claudius Strube (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1995).
———. Phenomenology of Religious Life. Translated by Matthias Fritsch.
———. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927.
———. ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’. Translated by Karsten
Harris. In Martin Heidegger and National Socialism. Edited by Gunther
Neske and Emil Kettering. New York: Paragon House, 1990, 5–13.
Jonas, Hans. ‘Heidegger and Theology’. The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 18, No. 2
(1964), 207–233.
———. ‘Is Faith Still Possible? Memories of Rudolf Bultmann and Reflections
on the Philosophical Aspects of His Work’. The Harvard Theological Review,
Vol. 75, No. 1 (1982), 1–23.
———. Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Being and Time. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
Ruin, Hans. ‘Anxious Spirits—Pneumatology in Heidegger, Paul, and
Kierkegaard’. Topos 1 (2014), 39–52.
———. ‘Circumcising the Word: Derrida as Reader of Paul’. In Paul in the Grip
of Philosophers. Edited by Peter Frick. Minneapolis: Fortress Press (2013),
71–93.
———. Enigmatic Origins. Tracing the Theme of Historicity Through Heidegger’s
Works. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994.
———. ‘Faith, Grace, and the Destruction of Tradition: A Hermeneutic-
Genealogical Reading of the Pauline Letters’. Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory, Vol. 11:1 (2010), 16–34.
Sanders, Ed P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of
Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977.
Stendahl, Krister. Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. London: SCM Press, 1977.
Stroud, Dean G., ed. Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in
the Third Reich. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2013.
Zarader, Marlène. La dette impensée. Heidegger et l’héritage hébraique. Paris:
Seuil, 1990.
CHAPTER 4
Why Heidegger Didn’t Like Catholic

Theology: The Case of Romano Guardini
George Pattison
Heidegger Versus Catholic Theology

In many respects it seems appropriate to borrow the biblical category of
‘Songs of Complaint’ for Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, since page after
page is filled with litanies of complaint. There are a number of recur-
rent targets for these complaints, including people who have misunder-
stood the whole thrust of his philosophy (especially those who say he
got all his ideas from Kierkegaard and/or Nietzsche), people who don’t
understand philosophy at all, seeing it solely in terms of developing one
or other Weltanschauung (world-view), people who don’t understand
the true meaning of National Socialism (including those who confuse the
idea of Volk with biological kinship), and, not least, Roman Catholicism.
Also important is the danger posed by the present phase of planetary
technology.
Naturally, those who interpret Heidegger in an exclusively bio-
graphical perspective will be likely to take the remarks about Roman
Catholicism as a case of the excessive zeal of an un-convert, that is to
G. Pattison (*) 
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland

78 G. Pattison
say, that it reflects his own sometime frustrated or at least abandoned

ambitions to become a Catholic philosopher. The thrust of this chapter,
by way of contrast, is to indicate why Roman Catholicism constituted a
particular challenge to Heidegger’s intellectual-political thinking in these
years and therefore why it made good philosophical sense for him criti-
cally to reflect on it. However, my argument is also that it is not Roman
Catholicism in general that is the challenge but a more particular current
of German Catholic thinking of which one of the leading representatives
at the time was Romano Guardini.
What Heidegger doesn’t like about Catholic theology in general is
illustrated by a 1932 entry in the notebooks, where Heidegger com-
ments on the danger that Catholicism poses to National Socialism. Here
he writes that:
German Catholicism is now beginning to take over the intellectual (geisti-

gen) world of German Idealism, of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and to let
itself be transformed in its distinctive way and with the clear and assured
means of its own tradition. In its own way it takes over an essential and
powerful tradition and uses it to prepare a new intellectual ‘position’ for
itself, whilst National Socialism runs the risk of emphasizing its other-
ness and novelty so loudly that it cuts itself off from the great tradition
and runs into helplessness and half-heartedness … Fighting the Church is
pointless … but to fight against Catholicism when it transforms itself into
the intellectual-political centre and does so with all the assured inner struc-
ture of its powerful ecclesiastical ‘organization’ is a fundamental challenge.
But before this challenge can be met it is necessary to have an appropriate
point of departure and a clear knowledge of the situation.1
Reading such passages, one has a sense that Heidegger has some very
particular target in mind behind the general denunciation. But who? The
answer is:
We lack all great intellectual seducers – but the mediocre ones are thereby
all the more numerous. The most serious and above all the sharpest
(geschicktester) is, e.g., the theologian Guardini. He runs through all the
intellectual possibilities of the great figures from amongst the poets and
thinkers, never dully and never crudely Catholic and always with the
appearance of a modern ‘struggle’ for truth and with all the mean of con-
temporary thinking and speaking. But an essential question is never ven-
tured and he never even struggles with anything except questions that have
4 WHY HEIDEGGER DIDN’T LIKE CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: THE CASE … 79
not been posed now for a long while –; it’s always a matter of being in the
secure and newly assured possession of answers for those eager to flee all
questions. For the average sort of people who are too lazy or too tired to
think this indeed gives the appearance of being ‘creative’ but it’s all just
a matter of a very sharp reproduction of what the Church Fathers and
Apologists of the first Christian centuries already ‘practiced’ in their own
way. Today’s ‘intellectual life’, however, is so directionless and so lacking in
any criteria that it is not merely satisfied with such an authorship but even
regards it as superior to what went before.2
Romano Guardini and Heidegger:

Biographical Background
But who was Guardini, and why should Heidegger single him out for
particular criticism? Born in 1885, in Italy, Guardini was brought up in
Germany from the age of one. He was almost the same age as Heidegger
and, like Heidegger, attended Freiburg University where he gained his
doctorate in 1915 with a thesis on Bonaventure, under the supervision
of Engelbert Krebs. Again like Heidegger, some of his earliest publica-
tions had been in the Catholic journal Der Akademiker. It is unclear
what level of personal contact they may have had in this period, although
their paths were to cross again, and significantly, in 1945–46. In the
meantime, in 1923, Guardini was appointed to a chair at the University
of Berlin dedicated to ‘The Philosophy of Religion and the Catholic
World-View’ (Weltanschauung). The title of this post is, we may say,
ominous with regard to how Heidegger might judge it, given his con-
tempt for the identification of philosophy with ‘world-views’, expressed
not only in the Black Notebooks but from at least 1919 onwards. Later
in this chapter we shall explore further the reasons for this contempt, but
for now we return to Guardini himself.
In Berlin, Guardini soon became an important focus of Catholic
intellectual life. Amongst the distinctive features of his thought was an
emphasis on liturgy, where he became an influential figure in the then
developing liturgical movement, and an engagement with literature
and culture. Amongst those attracted by his work were Hans Urs von
Balthasar, and given the role that literature and culture would come to
play in von Balthasar’s own theological word it is not hard to see why.
Indeed, von Balthasar would in 1971 be the second winner (following
Karl Rahner) of the Romano Guardini Prize for ‘the interpretation of
80 G. Pattison
life and world in the domain of culture in the broad sense associated
with Romano Guardini’. As Paul Silas Peterson notes in a recent study of
von Balthasar’s early thought, whilst Guardini was by no means the only
Catholic theologian engaging with literature at the time, aspects of his
thought would be especially appealing to the Swiss theologian, includ-
ing an emphasis on Kierkegaard and Goethe, coupled with a critical
view of contemporary society, especially in its technological aspect, and
the promotion of a dynamic and organic view of freedom. Like many
in the 1920s, in art and politics, on left and right, Guardini also spoke
of the stirring of ‘a new freedom’ that would address and resolve the
current crisis of the West.3 Indeed, if we look at the range of Guardini’s
major publications in the inter-war period, they not only anticipate von
Balthasar’s own future agenda, they also parallel many of Heidegger’s
interests in this period: Kierkegaard, Rilke, technology (Letters from Lake
Como), Pascal, Dostoevsky, Dante, Augustine, and, above all, Hölderlin,
to whom he devoted a substantial study published in 1939.
In the context of the Third Reich, a chair in the ‘Catholic world-
view’ was not welcome, and the post was suppressed in 1939. Guardini’s
position was aggravated by an essay on ‘Der Heiland’ that directly
contradicted the Antisemitic view of Jesus as instantiating an Aryan
Saviour-myth parallel to Dionysus or Baldur. He lived in semi-seclusion
from 1939 to 1945, when liberation brought a rash of interesting job
opportunities. Amongst these was the chair at Freiburg that had been
held by Martin Honecker until his death in 1941.4 This had been a
‘Concordat Chair’, that is, a chair in a public university that did not have
a Faculty of Theology but for which the Catholic Church had the right
of appointment. On Honecker’s death, Heidegger seems to have been
amongst those instrumental in deconfessionalizing the post and making
it a purely secular post in the psychology of religion, to which Robert
Heiss, who became Dean of the Philosophy Faculty in 1945 after hav-
ing been declared politically clean, was appointed (although subsequent
suspicions of NSDAP membership have emerged). In 1945 this chair was
redesignated a chair in Christian Philosophy and the University encour-
aged Guardini to accept it. In August 1945, Heidegger himself wrote to
Guardini in amicable terms, pressing him to take up the offer. However,
Guardini had already accepted a post at Tübingen, where he began lec-
turing in the Winter Semester of 1945/46.
However, this was not the whole story. In summer 1945, the
University of Freiburg had still hoped that Heidegger could be
re-instated and the ‘dream ticket’ was to have Guardini in the restored
Concordat Chair and Heidegger in the philosophy chair. However,
by autumn 1945 it had become clear that Heidegger would not be
approved by the Allied authorities and already in August Pro-Rector
Franz Büchner had begun writing to Guardini in order to persuade him
to take over Heidegger’s own chair. However, perhaps in his own way
echoing the comments we have heard from Heidegger, the Catholic phi-
losopher insisted that ‘I am not a specialist in any one area, but simply
someone who looks at things and historical events and reflects on what
he sees; a critic and interpreter, if you like’.5 Büchner wrote back that,
nevertheless, ‘For you of all people to take over Heidegger’s chair would
be a symbolic act of extraordinary power, because it would signal unmis-
takably that Germany’s universities, having gone through the misery of
existential philosophy, are now awaiting the liberating word from a man
who has repeatedly transcended the intellectual realm to enter the spir-
itual, and for whom philosophy and theology ultimately form a single
whole’.6 As for Guardini’s comment that he was only a critic and inter-
preter, Büchner suggested that Heidegger’s own best work was, pre-
cisely, as a critic and interpreter of Plato and Hölderlin. In the light of
what we have heard from the Black Notebooks, we can only imagine
Heidegger’s mortification had Guardini accepted, but he didn’t, prefer-
ring to use his energies to getting his post at Tübingen fully secured and
having it re-titled ‘the Philosophy of Religion and the Christian World-
View’. Later he would move to a chair in Munich from where he would
in 1949 write in support of Heidegger’s reinstatement, calling him ‘the
most potent force in German philosophy today’.7 Having turned down a
Cardinal’s hat, Guardini died in 1969. Amongst those acknowledging his
influence have been both Joseph Ratzinger and Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
All of this may seem a distraction from the philosophical interpreta-
tion of the Black Notebooks, but this biographical sketch indicates, I
think, just why Heidegger might have singled Guardini out for particular
comment. On the one hand, it is clear that there was considerable over-
lap in their intellectual milieu and interests stretching over a thirty-year
period. On the other hand, it is precisely this proximity that throws their
differences into sharper relief and, as we shall see, these differences are
not reducible to Heidegger having been amongst the great thinkers of
the Western tradition and Guardini having been but a critic and inter-
preter. It is this mixture of proximity and distance that makes Guardini
(rather than any of the then contemporary Catholic theologians who had
82 G. Pattison
taken the path of Neo-Scholasticism) especially well-suited to helping

identify just what it was Heidegger most disliked about Catholic philoso-
phy and why. If the ‘hardened tradition’ of Scholasticism is Heidegger’s
target in Being and Time,8 both he and Catholic theology itself had
moved on by the 1930s and it was now, precisely, Guardini’s innovative,
non-scholastic kind of dynamic theology (a theology that was also deeply
and extensively engaged in interpreting the literature and culture of his
time), that provided the more significant threat to Heidegger’s project—
not perhaps in a narrowly philosophical perspective, but certainly with
regard to its possible influence on the course of intellectual and cultural
development.
Guardini’s Theological Challenge to Heidegger

I shall focus the remainder of this chapter on a small selection of
Guardini’s publications from the relevant period that especially highlight
what I have referred to as the simultaneous proximity and distance that
characterizes the relationship between their two bodies of work. I shall
start by sketching some of the main ideas of Guardini’s early ‘systematic’
work Der Gegensatz, Versuche zu einer Philosophie des Lebendig-Konkrete
(1925), which, as he states in the Introduction, reflects his teaching at
Berlin in 1923–1924. This bring us to the idea of a ‘world-view’, which
I shall develop by reference to his inaugural lecture in Berlin ‘On the
Essence of a Catholic World-View’ (1923), before commenting briefly
on his Letters from Lake Como, published serially between 1923 and
1925 before turning, finally, to his 1939 Hölderlin book. In each case,
we find a pattern of proximity and distance to Heidegger’s thought,
with the relevant tension reaching its highest degree in the case of their
respective interpretations of Hölderlin.
As we have heard, Guardini did not regard himself as a systematic
thinker, and in the preface to a 1955 re-edition of Der Gegensatz, first
published in 1925, he referred to it as ‘basically just the sketch of an
idea’.9 Nevertheless, it does introduce us to some of his most character-
istic ideas. As the title suggests, it is an attempt to focus philosophy more
closely on the concreteness of life. As in Heidegger’s own early work this
reflects the context of early twentieth century Lebensphilosophie, although
Guardini remained closer to the theme of life than did Heidegger (who
had sought to distance himself from Lebensphilosophie quite early on).
Guardini’s philosophy is a philosophy of life that, as such, seeks to reflect

the dynamism, openness, and concrete fullness of life as it is lived.
Precisely for this reason, Guardini acknowledges from the outset that
there are limits to any kind of systematization. Nonetheless, what he
offers in this ‘sketch’ is a way of organizing our experience of life by ref-
erence to a sequence of interrelated polarities, not entirely unlike what
Anglophone readers may be familiar with through Paul Tillich’s sys-
tematic theology (although Tillich ultimately pushes his schemata more
firmly in the direction of a ‘system’ than does Guardini).
Guardini organizes these polarities in three sequences that he calls
intra-empirical, trans-empirical, and transcendental. The first is determi-
native for the world of empirical experience in the most general terms.
The polarities here are: firstly, the dynamic and the static; secondly,
form and something for which Guardini admits having difficulty find-
ing the right word, since its primary characteristic is simply the negation
of form—we might call it ‘the chaotic’; thirdly, the whole and the par-
ticular or individual. Yet these are not sufficient to account for what we
experience as a dimension of inwardness that, in relation to the empirical
world, has the character of a ‘jenseits’, a ‘beyond’ that, as such, has ‘ulti-
mate validity’ for how we experience all that we do in fact experience.
This inner realm (the trans-empirical) is in turn explicable in terms of
three key polarities: firstly, creativity versus givenness; secondly, regular-
ity versus originality; and, thirdly, inwardness versus what Guardini calls
‘Außer –sich-stehen’, ‘standing outside ourselves’—perhaps what Tillich
called the ‘ecstatic’ quality of existence. Finally, there are the transcen-
dental polarities of relatedness and separation and unity and multiplic-
ity. Collectively, all the polarities can be grouped into two sets, one of
which emphasizes order, form, wholeness, and regularity while the other
engages the dynamic, originary, productive fullness of inner-worldly
life. Importantly, these are effective both at the level of individual life
and throughout the various forms of social life—family, culture, and
the state—as well as in what is more specifically personal and religious.
Indeed, in Guardini’s Catholic perspective, it is ultimately misleading to
see social life as disconnected from the realm of religious values and reli-
gious leadership, a point to which we shall return. Taken together, then,
the polarities simply are ‘the way in which life is living’.10
It is crucial for Guardini that none of the polarities, singly or in
their combined sequences, can stand alone. Life as it is lived and is
84 G. Pattison
living within and without us occurs as involving some combination of

polarities; one person is more dynamic and active, another more stable
and settled, but no one is completely the one or the other. Life is both
formed and ever-changing and therefore we should not so much seek to
reduce it to one or other pole (as philosophies such as vitalism or formal-
ism might seem to do) as to discern the rhythm in which the particular
and concrete relationship between the polarities moves forward in time.
Indeed ‘rhythm’ becomes a key technical term in Guardini’s philosophy
of life. Yet for there to be such a unifying rhythm the concrete living
entity must have both a middle or centre and a measure, its middle being
in a distinctive sense its inwardness, that is, what gives it just this par-
ticular ultimate character that it has. This middle, then, is not so much
the essence or the ‘what’ of the entity as such but what holds the whole
pattern of movement and relationships in which it is what and as it is
together. To find the middle is to find the ultimate ‘origin’ that is ‘source
and, at the same time, the point from which we may exercise mastery
over our lives’.11 This is therefore not an external constraint, but what
enables us to identify it as a distinctive element within a process of flux
and endless transformation—a point well-illustrated in Guardini’s discus-
sion of Hölderlin’s poem ‘The Rhein’, which will be discussed below.
Clearly, such a ‘middle’ cannot be known through conventional philo-
sophical concepts (and much of what Guardini is setting out is implic-
itly critical of then current paradigms of Thomist teaching), nor even
intuitions, it can only be known in a kind of vision (Anschauung) that is
active, symbolic, and grounded in our own being.12
But doesn’t such a concrete vision of life seen in the moment of being
lived mean, in the end, a focus on the particular at the expense of the
whole? The question is complicated by the fact that, for Guardini, the
very openness of life (and therefore of any presumed knowledge of life)
means that the whole could really only be known by a position from
outside the world, i.e., by God. Human beings, however, can at least
approximate to such an, as it were, retrospective view from ‘beyond’ by
means of and in faith. It is therefore faith that makes it possible for us
to have a world-view, that is, a view of the world as a whole and in its
wholeness, that is cognizant of the middle and measure that makes the
world meaningful whilst preserving the real openness of concrete, actual
life. Faith gives us a ‘distance’ (Abstand) from the world and does so on
the basis of revelation, revelation in which ‘the supra-worldly God enters
into the world’ and thus ‘a world-view is ultimately God’s view (Blick)
on the world, Christ’s view’.13
In the light of these comments, we can see that the inaugural lecture
‘On the Essence of a Catholic World-View’ not only responded, as an
inaugural lecture should to the title of Guardini’s chair, but already indi-
cates a central characteristic of his thought. From what is said in Der
Gegensatz we might even say that Christian thinking in its fullness has to
take the form of a world-view whilst, conversely, the only truly adequate
world-view is, in fact, the Christian and, more specifically, the Catholic
world-view. Indeed, Guardini’s lecture reinforces the reasons for thinking
that Catholicism might have a natural affinity with the idea of a world-
view in a way that Protestantism does not, especially when it is a matter
of the kind of Protestantism associated with, e.g., the theology of cri-
sis or the existential theology of a Bultmann. For Protestantism, at least
in the forms best-known to Heidegger, had effectively separated the life
of faith from the task of constructing a holistic interpretation of life and
the world. Spurred on by Kierkegaard, it had focussed the whole issue
on the religious struggle of the individual. But (as Guardini would later
argue in his own essay on Kierkegaard) for all the truth and all the pas-
sion that such a position can involve, it can only ever be a one-sided
moment in the overall dynamically polar movement of life as a whole.
Only Catholicism is in a position to take that step back from the world
and, in faith, to see that world as a whole in a distinctive world-view.
World-view is, of course, a concept that Heidegger had long regarded
with distrust, contempt even. Already in the conclusion to the published
version of his thesis on Duns Scotus’ doctrine of categories, he had criti-
cized understanding philosophy in terms of world-views. In Heidegger’s
words, such worldviews are never more than ‘an ever-provisional sum-
mary of what is knowable’ but what is needed is ‘a breakthrough to true
actuality and actual truth’.14 A similar reserve runs through the 1919–21
review of Jaspers’ Psychology of World-Views, whilst the Black Notebooks
themselves strike a strongly polemical tone:
‘World-views’ fall outside the circle of creative thinking (philosophy) and

likewise of great art. They are, however, the ways by which philosophy and
art are made immediate, i.e., organized so as to be useful and thus mis-
usable by all and sundry. Philosophy, therefore, can never be a ‘world-view’
and shouldn’t even think about taking over its place; indeed, philosophy
86 G. Pattison
can’t even set out to determine any one world-view but just has to put up
with it or with being used by it or just move on by. The so-called ‘theoreti-
cal’ foundations sought for world-view are thus a peculiar mixture of half-
philosophy and half-science, lacking the rigour of thinking just as they lack
the rigour of research.15
Guardini, for his part, takes the opposite view. Acknowledging the dif-
ficulty of defining what a world-view actually is, he opens his lecture by
affirming that the development of a world-view is a genuine scientific
task ‘and not just an overall summary of a cultural or apologetic nature.
Indeed, it is a distinctive science, not a mixture of philosophy and theol-
ogy’.16 However, as he immediately adds, he is not there to talk about
world-views in general but to set out what is involved in a specifically
Catholic world-view. However, before he gets to telling his audience just
what this is, he has some further remarks about world-views in general.
Unlike the individual positive sciences a world-view takes a holistic
view of the world. But even though it may also include non-theoretical
elements, its aim is, nevertheless, to affirm the truth of what it proposes.
The aspiration towards wholeness might seem to parallel a similar aspi-
ration discernible in Being and Time, and as Guardini notes, metaphys-
ics too seeks the whole. However, whereas metaphysics is orientated
towards what is essential and universal, a world-view seeks the truth of
what is essential as it shows itself in concrete actuality. Another competi-
tor in the attempt to offer a view of the whole is history, but this too
can be pursued in terms of universal laws, although when it focuses more
on the concrete and particular, it does then come into a certain proxim-
ity to world-views. However, by way of contrast with history (it seems),
a world-view is not just about discerning what is the case, inclusive of
values and duties, but also seeks to interpret the demand that the world
thus represented places upon human beings. Yet, naturally, a world-view
is not itself life since ‘it is about seeing (Anschauung), contemplation,
and not doing or acting’17—although, by clarifying the demands that the
world is making upon us it also provides a basis for action.18 ‘World-view
is the encounter of man and world, standing over against one another,
eye to eye … It is a seeing and a knowing, even if its knowing is satu-
rated with a very different degree of content, heavy and near to life, than
is the case with science or philosophy’.19
But what is this ‘world’ that is thus viewed in a world-view? It has,
Guardini says, three elements. Firstly, it is the totality of all external
things and occurrences, inclusive of humanity itself insofar as we belong

to the physical world; next it is the world of the human, properly speak-
ing; and, ‘finally, it is the absolute ground and origin of world and of
humanity: God’.20 As we have already heard in Der Gegensatz, it is divine
revelation that makes possible the distance from the world that enables
us in turn to see the world as world. As he now puts it, it provides the
standpoint ‘that frees those who stand upon it for a real “encounter”
with the world, a true “Thou-saying” and free for a clear encompass-
ing and over-view, for uncorrupted evaluation’.21 This is the viewpoint
from which we see the world as Christ sees it. However, as Guardini is
quick to point out, this does not mean that the individual human being is
assumed to be capable of a perfected vision. Faith takes variable individual
forms and many will be acutely aware of their shortcomings in all dimen-
sions of life, yet ‘even inner emptiness can be “faith” before God …’.22
None of this, however, is ‘merely’ theoretical since it confronts us
with both a challenge and a demand: ‘Do we have such a faith? Are
we serious about it? With its certainty woven through with questions,
its optimism ever-tempted, its criteria so seemingly alien to the world,
are we ready to risk asserting the reality and validity of such a faith,
indeed its absolute reality, its definitive validity over against the sure-
footed certainty of life, of science, and of philosophy?’ Guardini asks.23
Yet if this seems to make a very particular kind of faith definitive of the
Catholic world-view, Guardini insists that the Catholic world-view is not
one world-view alongside others, it is not a ‘type’. Each of Augustine,
Thomas, and Loyola may represent a particular ‘type’ of faith but what
is characteristic of the Catholic world-view is precisely that it embraces
them all. As he will again say in Der Gegensatz, the unity of life is a unity
of paradoxical and polarized elements. In Catholicism this unity exists
precisely in and by virtue of the concreteness of the ecclesial community.
The ‘wholeness’ of the Catholic world-view is thus not the whole of any
one individual vision but the dynamic and developing life of the whole
Church: ‘She is the historical bearer of the complete vision (Blick) with
which Christ sees the world’.24 And the teaching of the Catholic world-
view ‘is the scientific apprehension of this vision and of what it sees’.25
Having heard Heidegger’s comments on the nature of world-
views and of philosophical claims on their behalf, it is not hard to see
the gulf that must exist between their two fundamental approaches to
the intellectual challenge of the contemporary situation (noting that
88 G. Pattison
‘situation’ is also another object of Heidegger’s lamentations in the Black

Notebooks). Yet in Guardini’s comments about the Church, we also see
the shadow of what will be a theme in Heidegger’s political thought,
namely, that the task of thinking is ultimately not just a task for the indi-
vidual but for a community. In Heideggerian terms, it is not just a matter
of Heidegger reading Heraclitus but of Germany encountering Greece
anew. As Peterson has noted in his study of von Balthasar, it is just this
kind of emphasis that characterises a number of Catholic thinkers in this
period (he thinks that von Balthasar was one of them and that Guardini
had at least a tendency in that direction), whose chief complaint against
Nazism was that it sought its religious foundation in Neo-paganism
whereas, they claimed, Catholicism could and should have provided a
better and more adequate grounding for the new Germany that Nazism
sought to build.
There are many tangled and vexed issues here that it is not appropri-
ate to explore further in the present context, other than to note how the
way in which Guardini relates the question of world-view to the question
of community further underlines why Heidegger might have found just
this kind of Catholicism challenging to the philosophical-political vision
that we see him seeking in the Black Notebooks. Moreover, their analy-
ses of what is wrong with the modern world and why that world needs
to find a new grounding through the risk-filled ventures of, respec-
tively, believers and thinkers show significant affinities. These come to
vivid appearance in Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in
Technology and the Human Race. As these letters show, Guardini had
already in the early 1920s defined the core challenge facing the modern
world as being, precisely, the question concerning technology on which
Heidegger would increasingly focus his attention from the mid-1930s
onwards.26
The letters offer reflections on a journey Guardini took to his native
Italy, contrasting the way of life he encountered there with the indus-
trial world of contemporary Germany. He compares architecture, social
mores, and, as here, two fundamentally different conceptions of boat
building and boat use.
Take a vessel sailing on Lake Como. Though it is of considerable weight,

the masses of wood and linen, along with the force of the wind, combine
so perfectly that it has become light … We have here an ancient legacy of
form. Do you not see what a remarkable face of culture is present when
human beings become masters of wind and wave by fashioning wood and
fitting it together and spanning linen sails … Certainly we pay for it already
with a certain remoteness. We are no longer plunged into the sphere of
wind and water as birds and fishes are. The Dionysiac surrender has been
reshaped … [Yet] The lines and proportions of the ship are still in pro-
found harmony with the pressure of the wind and waves and the vital
human measure. Those who control this ship are still very closely related
to the wind and waves. They are breast to breast with their force. Eye
and hand and whole body brace against them. We have here real culture–
elevation above nature, yet decisive nearness to it.27
However, this is already lost in some degree when the modern engine
driven boat is substituted for sail and it is completely lost when we con-
sider a modern ocean liner: ‘… a colossus of this type presses on through
the sea regardless of wind and waves. It is so large that nature no longer
has power over it; we can no longer see nature on it. People on board
eat and drink and sleep and dance. They live as if in houses and on
city streets’.28 And, he adds, this is no longer a matter of simple pro-
gress along a given scale, no longer a matter of incremental change, but
‘a fluid line has been crossed that we cannot fix precisely but can only
detect when we have long since passed over it’: ‘something decisive has
been lost’.29
Perhaps, in comparison with Heidegger, a certain uncritical concept
of ‘nature’ has been assumed by Guardini, yet, to put it in Heidegger’s
terms, the basic distinction between a kind of technē that remains
informed by physis and the kind of technē that is imposed on the world
in the manner of what Heidegger will call the modern Gestell, not exactly
but well translated by the English ‘enframing’, is very much in line with
a fundamental element in Heidegger’s own critique of technology. It is
in this vein that Heidegger speaks of how a traditional windmill ‘does
not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it’ or tradi-
tional farming ‘does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of
the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and
watches over its increase’.30 Modern agriculture, however, does ‘chal-
lenge’ the soil as it is transformed into ‘the mechanized food indus-
try’. ‘Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore
to yield uranium … uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which
can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use’.31 When a
90 G. Pattison
hydro-electric plant is constructed on the Rhine, this is not ‘technology’

in the same sense as the ancient wooden bridge that once spanned the
river. The river itself has been changed and has become a source of
power that can be stored and that is in itself indifferent vis-à-vis its use or
whether it has been generated by water, wind, the sun, coal, or nuclear
power. The river has become, simply, Bestand, a reserve or resource to
be managed in accordance with human demands that are only tangen-
tially respectful of and responsive to its distinctive character. ‘But it will
be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps.
But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a
tour group ordered there by the vacation industry’.32
Two ways of relating human craft and its environment, then—and at
this point Heidegger and Guardini seem united in their analysis of what
both see as perhaps the determining character of the modern world. And
whilst both may be tempted, as many in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries have been tempted, simply to reject the modern development,
both understand that it is not possible simply to opt out of the concrete
demands of actual life. Thus Guardini: ‘we must transform what is com-
ing to be. But we can do this only if we honestly say yes to it and yet
with incorruptible hearts remain aware of all that is destructive and non-
human in it. Our age has been given to us as the soil on which to stand
and the task to master. At bottom we would not wish it otherwise. Our
age is not just an external path that we tread; it is ourselves’.33 The deci-
sion concerning technology, then, is one in which the essence of being
human is itself at issue.
Moreover, like Heidegger, Guardini discerns a particular role for what
he calls the entry of the ‘Germanic essence’ into history in the transfor-
mation that is now needed—although (like Heidegger) he immediately
insists that this is not ‘an ethnic reality’ but is intimately connected with
inwardness of faith in Jesus Christ, after whom, he says ‘all new religions
are literary fantasies’.34 Here, of course, is the decisive difference: that
for Guardini the new beginning can only be a new Christian, indeed a
new Catholic beginning, although (to repeat) his understanding of this
is very different from that of his contemporaries who looked back to the
Middle Ages as the model for social and intellectual renewal—indeed, he
is even prepared to put St Peter’s itself on the wrong side of the decisive
divide between the older and newer relation between nature and human-
ity. Again, then, the very proximity between Guardini and Heidegger
reveals in the end a decisive and far-reaching difference.
In Heidegger’s thinking about the possibility of a new, German

beginning of philosophy, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin plays a central
role, often overlooked in English-language secondary literature in favour
of Heidegger’s accompanying return to the first beginnings of philoso-
phy in Heraclitus and Parmenides. Although sometimes grouped with
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, it is Hölderlin who not only best expresses
the need of the present time, but also points towards the possible future
Novum in which humanity will move beyond the violent global triumph
of technology.35 Heidegger’s turn to Hölderlin from the 1930s onwards
also involves weaving together a number of strands that are each impor-
tant in their own right but that, through the poet, come into common
focus: the need and destitution of the present, the true Fatherland, the
poetic vocation and the nature of language, the relationship between
Germany and Greece, the flight and possible return of the gods (or
sometimes ‘the’ God), the manifestation of the Holy.
In contrast to the methodological atheism of Being and Time, the
appeals to the Holy are striking. Indeed, in his prefatory remarks to a
broadcast reading from Hölderlin, Heidegger identifies ‘the Holy’ as
the definitive content of the poetic word. Yet, equally, he insists that this
does not mean any assimilation of Hölderlinian thought to Christian
doctrine. Perhaps his clearest statement of this is in comments on the
poem ‘Andenken [Remembrance]’: ‘This “Holy” is not simply the divine
as that is found in some existing “religion”, in this case the Christian
[religion]. The Holy does not at all let itself be characterized in “theo-
logical” terms, since all “theology”, already presupposes the theos, the
God, and does so with such certainty that wherever theology comes on
the scene the God has already embarked on flight’.36 The Greeks, he
says, never had any theology and neither the German Christians, nor the
Confessing Church, nor the Catholic Church is capable of discovering the
true holiness of the Fatherland. All alike perpetuate a nineteenth-century
intellectualism, but, he comments, this means that whoever thinks in this
way ‘does not think Germanly’.37
This refusal of theology may have its justification regarding certain apol-
ogetic approaches to literature and it may also have its justification with
regard to the undoubted ‘pagan’ elements in Hölderlin himself. Yet even
in terms of Hölderlin’s work, there are passages that also point towards the
possibility of a ‘Christian’ reading—and it is striking that even when com-
menting on a poem such as ‘Der Einzige [The Unique One]’ Heidegger
assiduously avoids dealing with the most ‘Christological’ verses.38
92 G. Pattison
Against the background of what we have seen thus far of the

Heidegger/Guardini relationship, what are we to make of the relation-
ship between Heidegger’s Hölderlin and Guardini’s 570-page 1939
study Hölderlin: Weltbild und Frömmigkeit? Will this exemplify precisely
the kind of ‘theological’ reading that Heidegger abhors? Or will we find
here too a complex relationship of proximity and distance between the
two thinkers?
There is certainly one respect in which their approach to the poet is
markedly similar, namely, that neither engages with current critical lit-
erature—Guardini confesses at the outset to not even having read either
of von Böckmann, Hölderlin und seine Götter (1935) or Hildebrandt,
Hölderlin. Philosophie und Dichtung (1939). Guardini is also in agree-
ment with Heidegger in viewing Hölderlin as something other than a
‘poet’ or ‘artist’ in any conventional sense. His opening sentence reads:
‘The present work proceeds from the conviction that Hölderlin’s poetry
is of a different kind from that which has been developed in moder-
nity’.39 Hölderlin is not an ‘artist’ but a ‘seer’.40 ‘The point of origin
from which Hölderlin’s poetry proceeds belongs to another order of
inwardness or elevation (according to which metaphor for remote-
ness one prefers) that no longer belongs to the sphere of subjectiv-
ity’.41 Indeed, Hölderlin’s poetic vocation is ‘Not only stronger or more
arousing or more deeply manifesting the unconscious but is essentially
different’.42
This essential difference is likewise manifested in his personal life,
although, again like Heidegger, Guardini does not want to explain the
poetry by means of the life but sees the tragedy of the life as a conse-
quence of the poetic vocation, the manifestation of a ‘loss of place
[Ortlosigkeit]’ that results from having been seared by the fire of
Apollo’s heavenly lightning.43 Consequently, Guardini suggests, the
reader’s primary task is precisely to seek out this defining poetic vocation
rather than debate the fine points of comparative criticism.
Likewise, Guardini shares Heidegger’s views that Hölderlin’s defining
themes—rivers, mountains, figures from Greek mythology, etc.—are not
to be viewed as allegorical or symbolic. What Guardini says of Hölderlin’s
rivers, for example, could almost equally well have been said by
Heidegger. Having acknowledged a degree of symbolism that Hölderlin
indeed shares with other poets such as Goethe (e.g., the river as a symbol
of life), he nevertheless claims that there is also something ‘more’.
When early human beings first had to do with a river, what they saw in
the first instance was actual water: source, course, flow, and running out
into the sea. But this was more than what we understand in terms of geo-
graphical concepts. It was a being [Wesen]. This is not intended ‘anthro-
pomorphically’, as indicative of a lack of scientific knowledge and clear
concepts; nor is it a ‘personification’ of an abstract object in the man-
ner of imaginative thinking, but what took place here was genuine vision
[Anschauung]. What was intended was that which flowed, which froze
in winter and came back to life in spring, that overflowed its banks and
became dangerous, but also sustained travel and fishing. And precisely this
was a being, a mysterious, frightening and yet alluring reality, a personal
being with a will. One could encounter this someone in the figure of a
bull, of a man, or a woman, but these figures were not ‘allegories’ of the
river nor were they its ‘soul’ but the river itself – religious, mysterious and
at the same time empirically real.44
Hölderlin, the seer, sees again this ‘ancient numinous experience’ of the
river, albeit he does so in, with, and under the conditions of his own
‘late’ time—and in doing so he sees a figure in which the whole of life
(‘das ganze Dasein’) is opened to interpretation.45
Guardini’s exposition is developed through a sequence of what
he calls ‘circles’: river and mountain (first circle), humanity and his-
tory (second circle), the gods and the religious relationship (third
circle), nature (the fourth circle) and, finally, as the fifth circle ‘Christ
and the Christian’. It is not germane to the task in hand to go into the
detail of this exposition but, broadly, we can see how it is informed by
the dynamic philosophy of Der Gegensatz as it attempts to track what
Guardini sees as the essential living movement of Hölderlinian poetic
thought. Each circle is driven by the internal tension of its polarities
into the next but is also retrospectively illuminated by it and the truth,
we may say, is nowhere other than in the whole or, to be precise, in the
movement towards the whole.
One point, however, is worth focussing on in connection with
Heidegger. It may seem surprising that Guardini seems to place ‘nature’
above both history and the gods. This is because he sees ‘nature’ as
encompassing everything that had gone before. As he says at the start
of this ‘circle’, ‘To speak of nature is to speak of everything that was
important to Hölderlin’.46 But nature, in this sense, is not exclusive of
human beings; on the contrary, the dynamics of human beings’ relation
94 G. Pattison
to nature are central both to the meaning of nature and of the human.
As Guardini concludes his 130-page exegesis:
Nature is the whole. But the whole is a secret. The expression of this secret
is the World-spirit. Everything that can be named subsists in this whole:
things, human beings, and also the gods. This whole is the ultimate to
which everything else is related. In it, the gods are bound to one another
… [But] nature itself is not a god; it is not less but more than what this
idea means in Hölderlin’s usage. It is what simply is, beginning, continua-
tion, and end.47
But—and the question again returns us to the philosophy of Der

Gegensatz and the inaugural lecture—is this it? Is there anything beyond
all that is thus encompassed in nature? Is the whole all? And what does
this question mean for Hölderlin’s treatment of Christ?
Here, Guardini concedes that, as in ‘Der Einzige’, where Christ is
seen as the inheritor of Dionysus and Herakles, an aspect of Hölderlin’s
Christ is indeed continuous with and belongs to nature. Yet there is also
a difference, although not necessarily a difference that calls for a clear
either/or.48 Christ himself is mythologized as ‘the numen of eventide
and of the end, an end that is not absolute but a return and a new begin-
ning within nature’.49 This same pattern extends to God the Father, to
the Holy Spirit, to heaven and hell, and the Eucharist. In a poem such
as ‘Germanien’, this makes possible a virtual fusion between the image
of Christ, Germany itself, and a mystical Greece. Acknowledging that
from the point of view of Christian doctrine this cannot appear as any-
thing other than an entire dissipation of Christianity, Guardini neverthe-
less suggests that there is more going on than what a merely theoretical
comparison might allow: ‘it has a quite different force, as the nature of
the phenomenon, the religious authority of the personality who speaks
and the force of his experience, a force that penetrates to the very heart
of the matter’.50 What we are left with is not an answer but a ques-
tion, that is, the question as to whether, in the end, Hölderlin’s Christ-
figure bursts the limits of nature and world and manifests a sovereignty
proper to any fully Christian understanding of existence. This last pos-
sibility, Guardini believes, remains open—although, as he concludes,
Hölderlin’s internal struggle between a ‘natural’ Christ and a ‘sover-
eign’ Christ remained undecided when he himself collapsed into silence.
A decisive ‘Christian’ reading therefore remains possible, though, in a
sense, undecidable. Yet it is precisely in the sovereign impulse that makes

Hölderlin more than just a poet and more than a poetic philosopher that
this undecidable possibility is to be found: this is perhaps the same ‘place’
where Heidegger for his part heard the poetic word as a fundamental
contestation of Christianity and of the theological.
Conclusion
In his view of Hölderlin’s poetic creativity Guardini again manifests a
curious proximity to Heidegger, coupled with a decisive distance. And
precisely because of the unique place of Hölderlin in Heidegger’s own
path of thinking, we can see here a crucial test-case for how we assess
the overall relationship between them. Is Guardini’s interpretation ‘theo-
logical’ in the negative sense defined by Heidegger? Has Guardini pre-
supposed his theistic God as the ultimate goal and ground of poetic
creativity? Is his concluding question just an apologetically-attuned rhe-
torical ploy? Or is it, perhaps, Heidegger who is here the dogmatist,
whose exclusion of the Christian is a means of prior assurance against the
openness and the demand of Hölderlin’s shattering vision?
Let us remind ourselves of the Black Notebooks’ judgement on
Guardini:
He runs through all the intellectual possibilities of the great figures from
amongst the poets and thinkers, never dully and never crudely Catholic
and always with the appearance of a modern ‘struggle’ for truth and with
all the mean of contemporary thinking and speaking. But an essential ques-
tion is never ventured and he never even struggles with anything except
questions that have not been posed now for a long while –; it’s always a
matter of being in the secure and newly assured possession of answers for
those eager to flee all questions.51
Guardini himself was probably right in his self-deprecation vis-à-vis the

comparison with Heidegger with which Büchner sought to gain him for
the Freiburg chair. Yet, if only with regard to the Hölderlin book, there
do not seem to be grounds for saying that this offers only the ‘appear-
ance’ of a struggle for truth or that no essential question is posed—and
still less that the question is one that has not been posed for a long while.
After all, it seems in the end to be at least an aspect of the question
with which Heidegger himself is struggling in these same years, namely,
96 G. Pattison
whether the new beginning of the West can be thought otherwise than
in the sign of all that the West has inherited not only from the Greeks
but from Christianity. And perhaps Heidegger himself mostly addresses
this question by simply avoiding it or, more precisely, denouncing it in
the manner of a demagogue rather than attending to all that might be
stirring within it—as his own best recommendations for thinking might
suggest we should.
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938),
GA 94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 186. References to Heidegger’s
works will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume num-
ber. Translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.
2. Ibid., 345.
3. Paul Silas Peterson, The Early Hans Urs von Balthasar. Historical Contexts
and Intellectual Formation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 53.
4. Honecker is perhaps chiefly now known for failing his student Karl
Rahner’s doctoral dissertation.
5. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger. A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden
(London: Fontana, 1994), 354.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 364.
8. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. GA 2 (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1993),
22.
9. Romano Guardini, Der Gegensatz, Versuche zu einer Philosophie des
Lebendig-Konkrete (Mainz: Mathias Grünewald, 1985), 9.
10. Ibid., 145.
11. Ibid., 153.
12. Ibid., 182. Guardini is aware that Anschauung is the conventional transla-
tion of intuitio and is indeed making the point that this is misleading,
since Anschauung says something slightly different from and more than
intuitio.
13. Ibid., 204.
14. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (eds), Becoming Heidegger: On
the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2007), 82.
15. Heidegger, GA 94, 283–284.
16. Romano Guardini, ‘Vom Wesen katholischer Weltanschauung’ in idem,
Unterscheidung des Christlichen. Gesammelte Studien 1923–1963 (Mainz:
Mathias Grünewald, 1963), 13.
17. Ibid., 19.
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Ibid., 19.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. Ibid., 23.
22. Ibid., 25.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 31.
25. Ibid., 33.
26. I am not suggesting that Heidegger was directly influenced by Guardini
in this regard, although it can’t be ruled out that he knew of the Letters
from Lake Como—the debate about technology and its limits was wide-
spread in the German-speaking world in the interwar years, with impor-
tant contributions from thinkers as diverse as Spengler, Tillich, Benjamin,
and Marcuse. Nevertheless, Guardini’s Letters are an especially eloquent
statement of a kind of approach that is especially close to that which
Heidegger himself will develop.
27. Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and
the Human Race, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1994), 26.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Ibid.
30. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays,
trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 14–15.
31. Ibid., 15.
32. Ibid., 16.
33. Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, 81.
34. Ibid., 86.
35. It is clear both from letters and from the Black Notebooks themselves,
that Heidegger regarded the Second World War as the clearest realization
of the essence of modern technology.
36. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’, GA 52 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1982), 132–133.
37. Ibid., 133.
38. George Pattison, ‘Heidegger’s Hölderlin and Kierkegaard’s Christ’, in
Stephen Mulhall (ed.), Martin Heidegger (International Library of Essays
in the History of Social and Political Thought) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006),
403.
39. Romano Guardini, Hölderlin: Weltbild und Frömmigkeit (Leipzig: Jakob
Hegner, 1939), 11.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
98 G. Pattison
42. Ibid., 12.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 26–27.
45. Ibid., 31.
46. Ibid., 357.
47. Ibid., 484.
48. Ibid., 560.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 563.
Works Cited
Guardini, Romano. Der Gegensatz, Versuche zu einer Philosophie des Lebendig-
Konkrete. Mainz: Mathias Grünewald, 1985.
———. Hölderlin: Weltbild und Frömmigkeit. Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1939.
———. Letters from Lake Como. Explorations in Technology and the Human Race.
Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.
———. ‘Vom Wesen katholischer Weltanschauung’. In idem, Unterscheidung
des Christlichen. Gesammelte Studien 1923–1963. Mainz: Mathias Grünewald,
1963, 13–33.
Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’. GA 52. Edited by Curd
Ochwadt. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982.
———. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by
William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
———. Sein und Zeit (1927). GA 2. Edited by Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrman.
Kisiel, Theodore and Thomas Sheehan (eds). Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail
of His Early Occasional Writings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2007.
Ott, Hugo. Martin Heidegger. A Political Life. Translated by Allan Blunden.
London: Fontana, 1994.
Pattison, George. ‘Heidegger’s Hölderlin and Kierkegaard’s Christ’. In Stephen
Mulhall (ed.), Martin Heidegger (International Library of Essays in the History
of Social and Political Thought). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 391–404.
Peterson, Paul Silas. The Early Hans Urs von Balthasar: Historical Contexts and
Intellectual Formation. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015.
CHAPTER 5
Anarchist Singularities or Proprietorial

Resentments? on the Christian Problem
in Heidegger’s Notebooks of the 1930s
Ward Blanton
Once more: the world is in reconstruction (im Umbau) toward itself. We

are again approaching the truth and its essentiality – we are becoming
mindful (wir werden gesonnen) of everything the truth requires to take it
up and to take a stand within it – to become the ones who are indigenous,
who stand on native soil.
The one who can be indigenous (Boden-ständig) is the one who derives
from native soil, is nourished by it, stands on it – this is the original (das
ursprüngliche) – that is what often vibrates in me through body and disposi-
tion – as if I went over the fields guiding a plow, or over lonely field-paths
amid ripening grain, through winds and fog, sunshine and snow, paths which
kept mother’s blood, and that of her ancestors, circulating and pulsing…
The other indigenous ones – to them this root has withered, but they per-
sist on the way back to the soil and to esteeming the soil.
Martin Heidegger, Black Notebooks1
W. Blanton (*) 
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

100 W. Blanton
In the letters [sic] to the Galatians, Paul is struggling with the Jews and
the Jewish Christians. Thus we find the phenomenological situation of reli-
gious struggle and of struggle itself.
Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life2
This is a tale of the mirror of high philosophy in everyday anti-Judaisms and

of one type of a ‘return’ to an ‘indigenous’ experience also mirroring itself in a
crasser version of the same. It is a story, moreover, of the way that even while
this fantasized return home seems always to be doubled, with Heidegger
always excluding himself from the others, his fantasy about ‘struggling with
the Jews and the Jewish Christians’ so to speak will remain undoubled over
the course of so many years, unified, as if the given ground to which all his
high flying discourses would eventually fall back to earth. Ours is a tale, there-
fore, of philosophy’s repetition compulsion vis-à-vis the Christian problem.
As a preamble to this tale, let us situate ourselves initially with the
view of a surveyor who declares there is no way to map modern phi-
losophy or modern religion from a vantage point which eludes, or stands
outside of, an unfolding and interlocking series of crises, co-optations,
and catastrophes. Our thinking will not—however we stick to the pro-
verbial best of intentions—remain outside these catastrophic coordinates.
Rather, our thinking is always worldly in the sense that it will always be
forced to find transformations of (or migrations within) these events
themselves. My own interventions in the complex Heidegger affair start
from this place. On this occasion in fact I would like to start explicitly
from the interlocking of two specific catastrophes—neither of them inno-
cent and neither of them philosophical legacies we should forget. Let us
begin then with Heidegger’s fascination with a new philosophical start
in the 1930s, reading it over against Heidegger’s negotiation of what
I sometimes describe as the persecutorial invention of Christianity, the
archive of which never ceased to envelope Heidegger’s work. Among
other things, I want to unfold a bit further here one of my frequently
repeated assertions in the early chapters of A Materialism for the Masses,3
namely, that we have not yet taken seriously enough the way some of
the central gestures constituting the archival ‘invention of Christianity’
continue to radiate with dramatic reverberations through modern and
contemporary continental philosophy. I will claim that in the notebooks
of the 1930s, Heidegger sometimes fails to keep pace with his own best
insights about how to challenge inherited anti-Jewish fantasies about
Christian origins. Far from being a sideline issue, my claim here is that
5 ANARCHIST SINGULARITIES OR PROPRIETORIAL … 101
the flat footed repetition of a traditional (i.e., persecutorial) Christian-

origins story in Heidegger’s work during this period is central and also
something which makes usefully clear how Heidegger’s own political
debacle was not simply personal or political (as so many Heideggerians
seem so quick to say these days), but also deeply philosophical in a way
which threatens to render his promising thought about singularity and
self-reliance entirely pointless. Put more pointedly, Heidegger doesn’t
simply fall into anti-Jewish animosities on these occasions, though that
is a serious enough topic in its own right. What I would like to point
out also is that on these occasions Heidegger likewise destroys the cen-
tral insights of his philosophy of singularity. Read this way, I want to
say that Heidegger’s anti-Judaism in fact destroys the philosophy to
which he otherwise often enough seemed to be pointing. In doing so,
Heidegger, despite himself, remains centrally within an old, even ancient,
set of philosophical coordinates that, as already mentioned, I like to call
the Christian problem.4
To be sure, these interlocking starting points will at first blush for
some seem an odd place from which to articulate a reading of the 1930’s
notebooks. After all, are not the Black Notebooks everywhere marked
with iterations of a desire for the new philosophy to break free of its
Christian limitations? Is not this the last place we should be trying to
sense archival repetitions of that moment of ‘Christian origins’? In fact,
it is precisely because Heidegger sometimes says such forceful things
about Christianity’s limits that I find all the more haunting a repetition
of some of the standard, and even entirely clichéd, stock motifs of, say,
Christianity versus Judaism, as ways of grappling with what Heidegger
is doing in the notebooks. Repetition compulsion was always about a
strange necessity which seems always to emerge over a field we would
otherwise imagine to be purely contingent. As ever, here we ignore
the archival comparisons to the detriment of our own philosophical
experimentations.
In keeping with my surveyor’s assertion about catastrophes we inherit
but do not escape, this is the situation of thought and its stock repe-
titions—its capture in a play of haunting or affecting analogies. In the
end, I want to say that Heidegger—despite himself—succumbs at crucial
moments in the notebooks to a very common persecutorial temptation,
one Heidegger inherits among other places from the archive of Christian
origins.5 At stake, philosophically, will be the desire of freedom in think-
ing and the question of whether this freedom could affirm its expression
102 W. Blanton
in a way besides persecutorial antagonism for that which will stand in as

that thought’s flawed doppelganger. In a word, Heidegger—despite his
bold self-assertions of having stepped beyond it—stumbles on the stum-
bling stone which is the Christian problem, one we have overcome today
all the less to the degree we no longer recognize ourselves to be facing it.
Alienation, Mission, Singularity

The lines cited at the beginning of this essay about philosophical recon-
struction or a return home are typical of Heidegger’s reflections in the
notebooks of the early 1930s. His intuition of a homecoming was, dur-
ing that period, often enough the very name of the philosophical revolu-
tion he believed to be signalling itself in and through his own work. The
singularity or self-assertion of the new philosophy or the philosophical
revolution would be a kind of coming home, even a kind of (somehow
revivified or sublimated) ‘return’ to home which becomes greater than
ever before. In the early to mid-1930s especially, Heidegger’s notebooks
were never far from this kind of messianic or exilic tableau, with himself
as the voice crying in the wilderness of alienated and misguided others.
Not long before this particular declaration of a return home from exile,
for example, Heidegger would confess that this ‘reconstruction toward
itself’ or coming ‘home’ of the philosopher was in a sense a finding of
‘God’. Such connections can in fact be very surprising for those who
have worked carefully through texts like Being and Time (1927).
As Heidegger would scribble (and, we must always remember, then
edit for eventual publication) in his notebooks: ‘We first find God again
when we lose the world no longer and truly exist in the power of world-
formation.’6 Everywhere one catches the frequency, picks up on the way
a return home conjures the buzz of a free being surging forth in the
production of beings. Heidegger, in fact, seems fairly obsessed in these
texts with the thematics of this eventalizing ‘return’ home, and he often
gestures toward the idea that such an event—on the way, almost here—
is precisely the drama which will enact his earlier analyses of Being and
Time.
The connections are so strong on this point that, in his own encoun-
ter with the Black Notebooks, Karsten Harries notes the links Heidegger
makes on this score and, indeed, agrees with them in a fairly straightfor-
ward sense. Harries finds in them confirmation of his own challenging
pronouncements about the Heidegggerian legacy from decades earlier in
1976. As Harries points out: ‘“The formal character of Being and Time”,
I wrote, “makes it like a vessel that demands to be filled. This demand
does not come to fundamental ontology from without but is gener-
ated by the ontological analysis itself.”’7 A political experiment in some
sense was already in the cards. Indeed, Harries goes on to say that this
pre-scripted need is seeking satisfaction in Heidegger’s language of the
‘home’ within the notebooks.
Harries’s suggestion seems trustworthy, and here we must add that
the frequent—and structurally solicited—language of home sits some-
times uneasily along the equally frequent thematics of empowering or
the energetics of eventalization whereby Heidegger elicits a sense of the
dramatic nature of his new philosophical movement. Heidegger’s note-
books of the early to mid-1930s are chock full of the language of a kind
of empowering, eventalizing energy which flows through certain forms of
relatedness. There is the ‘jolt’ which brings to life and which everywhere
elides itself into the ‘attunement’ of a frequency which, so to speak,
installs its own—grounds its own—sender and receiver.8 This language
is that which carries a sense of an-archic or self-reliant creativity in phi-
losophy. It is, I would suggest, the substance of Heidegger’s much valor-
ized ‘anarchism’, a topic to which we will return. But does this vibrant
substance hold out, as it were, does it rest in itself, eluding the propri-
etorial—and resentful—temptation to become agonistically aggressive
toward competitors, which is to say essentially reliant on something out-
side itself?
Rectorship and Resentment
In Heidegger’s reflections (or, in fact, carefully managed self-presenta-
tions) after what he soon lamented as his ‘foundered year [Ein gescheit-
ertes Jahr]—a lost one…’ while Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg,
it is easy to note a kind of heightening of an almost apocalyptic tension
in which Heidegger senses the emergence of a true spiritual movement
or return ‘home’.9 If he had hoped to lead an emancipation of the uni-
versity which leads to a new spiritual invention of the old and inherited
ways of life, Heidegger’s sense of the deferral of this event seems to have
elicited from him a kind of darkening riff in his discourse of the ‘new
native’ of the university. The powers of reified and alienating reality
were too strong for Heidegger’s spiritual exodus from the bureaucratic,
representational, and functional-technical mode of self-organization.
104 W. Blanton
Germany’s self-assertion will for Heidegger remain dominated by what

he sometimes calls ‘vulgar Nazism’,10 a kind of fallen simulacrum of
the spiritual breakthrough for which he hoped. Heidegger’s response
to the situation seems in the notebooks in the 1930s always to up the
ante, so to speak, and there is evidently here a burgeoning of a kind of
dark variation of his earlier hopes in a spiritual return to the homeland.
Everywhere there is a kind of unconquerable ‘bourgeois philistinism’, a
‘bureaucratized student body and instructors’, a reduction of university
life to ‘meeting needs’, a missing of the real ‘vocation’ of the university
to inventively recreate the ‘essence’ of the people.11
The most important section of today’s university is the public-relations

office – wielding the greatest possible authority. It is reported there that
such and such a number of S.A. men are fed in the refectory, that the
building of the new gym increased employment, that an excursion to the
North Sea newly brought together students and instructors, etc., etc. –
and so what?12
If a functional-technical way of life is increasingly absorbing the univer-

sity even under Heidegger’s oversight, Heidegger’s accompanying sense
of what it will look like to overcome this resistance and its ‘liberal-spir-
itual’ obfuscation of a true spirit-movement begins over time to grow
darker, as if becoming more aggressive in relation to the form of life it
must depose. In this respect, we should pay close attention to the way in
which Heidegger speaks his usual rhetoric of the risk or indeed ‘danger’
involved in authentic spiritual self-assertion. In the notebooks he reflects,
for example:
Should the state of the movement of 1933–34 merely be interpreted and

decanted into bottles as ‘what has been attained’ – an end of state – or is
this only the prelude to the great future of the people? Only if it is this –
which we believe – does it harbor the guarantee of greatness. But then the
question comes to the fore: which powers create and unfold this future?
Certainly not those powers which are ever satisfied with the hitherto, but
also not those that now follow behind as latecomers and ‘interpret’ and
make palatable – i.e., harmless – everything liberal-spiritual (liberal-geistig).
Seen from here a mistrust of the ‘old’ over and against the ‘new’ is not
only justified but is even necessary. Yet if this mistrust blindly extends to all
spiritual endeavor (alle geistige Anstrengung) and to every seeking already
long ago equal to such endeavor and equipped for it, and if everything is
thereby thrown indiscriminately into a melting pot of ‘intellectualism’

and ‘theorizing,’ then it becomes a thwarting and disfiguring of creative
happenings.13
When the Sibyl of the free spirit speaks, it does so with a world-trans-
forming violence that must not be obfuscated by the latter day interpret-
ers of the oracular (or, rather, poetic-political) utterance. What good old
ways of equipping or enacting the free invention of the self-reliant spirit
are those we are being encouraged here not to mistrust, Heidegger does
not begin to say—though clearly the problem is that these old modes
of executing self-reliance are becoming overthought, mere theory with-
out the teeth, so to speak, of real ‘creative happenings’ in Germany.
Heidegger’s silence on this point is perhaps all the more ominous the
way it is simmering just under the surface of this text.
Moreover, this lack of a kind of spirit-technics of real transformation,
it is clear, indicates that a day-after intellectualizing and justifying of
the real forces of transformation fulfil the role of a liberal-spiritualizing
of everything that is not only more powerfully creative but also more
dangerous. The stylistics of a passage like this are crucial, and before we
make such lines into the usual bland and generic ‘tropics of the event’,
or a merely formal declaration about the nature of a free self-forming
happening, we could just as well ask the more offensively deflationary
question. What, in 1933, did Heidegger have in mind as the more dan-
gerous enactment—the less ‘liberal’ enactment—which the university
seemed so keen already to suppress or to sublimate, in any case to make
more palatable and safer? What is the older, more creative, and more
dangerous way that the ‘liberals’ (who are everywhere at this point in
the notebooks) want to render into a more functional-tactical-respectful
occurance?
Some entries later, Heidegger would hit a similar note when—in a
striking transformation of the tone of those comments with which he
began—he wrote:
If truth lies in the power of ‘race’ (of the native-born one) (des
Eingeborenen), will and should the Germans then lose their historical
essence – abandon it –organize it away – or will they not have to bring it to
the supreme tragic denouement (zum höchsten tragischen Austrag bringen
müssen)? Instead of which, those who are now bred are shortsighted and
oblivious!14
106 W. Blanton
One of the things that intrigues here is the way Heidegger is develop-
ing during this period a taste for the tragedy, and perhaps the taste for
darkly implicit threats, along with the accompanying theme of the sac-
rifices to come. Heidegger laments that he lives in a moment when his
peers fail to understand that the ‘firstfruits’ of a new harvest or (read
through the New Testament and Pauline links to firstfruits language) a
new age are meant to be evacuated, lost, sacrificed –precisely not invested
in the building up of the tabulated powers of progress: ‘First fruits—
true ones—are sacrificed, immolated (werden geopfert, kommen in die
Flammen); but they are not passed around and certainly not paid for and
transported.’15 Again, Heidegger seems clearly to distinguish his own
sense of a revolution to those of his merely calculating ‘liberal’ contem-
poraries by presenting his own rhetoric as a darker and more ominous
version of their own.
One question is whether, in the inflation of the rhetoric of agonistic
violence, Heidegger does not precisely annihilate some of his own best
insights about singularity and difference. Heidegger’s work teeters on
the verge of a distinction between the empty, self-reliant, or merely per-
formative invitation of a kind of new gospel and the persecutorial, threat-
ening tactics of a fascistic homeland. He is, in other words, struggling
with the Christian problem in philosophy. Inasmuch as Peter Sloterdijk
often situates his own writings explicitly within a Nietzschean desire to
outdo Christianity by overcoming Christian logics of resentment, his
diagnoses of Heidegger are worth recalling here.16 In Rage and Time,
for example, he writes:
Rage becomes the momentum of a movement into the future, which one
can understand as the raw material for historical change. As elementary as
these considerations may appear, their implications reach into the inner-
most motives of twentieth-century philosophy. If they are correct, they
necessitate important modifications to one of the most well known theo-
rems of modern philosophy. If they are correct, one should not interpret
existential time as the immediate being-toward-death, as Heidegger in
Being and Time suggests an interpretation that is as well known as it is
rushed. The being-whole-ability of existence is what matters to the thinker,
an ability that does not depend on the fact of the individual considering his
own death in order to ascertain his directedness toward something that is
an unconditional future fact. Dasein can just as well orient itself because it
traverses the distance from humiliation to revenge as a whole. Existential
time emerges from such anxiety toward its decisive moment. Such an act of
endowing for one’s own being-toward-goals is more powerful than every
vague heroic meditation of the end. When Dasein is angry it does not have
the form of running ahead toward its own death, but of an anticipation of
the indispensable day of rage.17
In his longer diagnosis of modern philosophical resentment, Sloterdijk

tends to focus—as he does in this paragraph—on the role of resentment
over against Greek myths of recognition, but it is clear that the entire
project of Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time could just as well be read as the
trial of Heidegger in relation to the Christian problem of whether there
is a free, rather than persecutorial, news to tell.18 Is Heidegger a philoso-
pher of the freely self-grounding singularity or a hopeful investor in the
‘rage bank’ of revenge and aggressivity?
Anarchism’s Sacrifice—or the Sacrifice of Anarchism?

Heidegger will again and again in the notebooks come back to the
notion that philosophy is necessarily untimely, ‘inopportune’ and there-
fore pointless—certainly not functional. Philosophy’s revelations are
outside the realm of calculation and technics, and this has profound
implications for the logic of the enemy within Heidegger’s writings. As
he writes in the notebooks:
Christianity is victorious once again through the production of the oppo-

nent in subjection to it, whose only option is the overturning of the
Christian view of mankind. Yet overturning is indeed a coarsening and
constricting of the essential relations (for Christianity, essentially the rela-
tion to the creator God). Overturning is inversion and reversion—but
never overcoming as liberation (Umstülpung ist Umund Rückfall—aber
niemals Überwindung als Befreiung).19
Real freedom, real self-reliance would therefore elude the logic of rebel-
lion or dialectical contestation which, precisely, Christianity seems so
good at enforcing. For me, perhaps the key element in that tradition,
from Reiner Schurmann to Peter Trawny, of reading Heidegger as a kind
of nominalist anarchist or as someone with the taste for a philosophy
of singular differences expresses itself here. Indeed, Heidegger himself
points out these kinds of links often enough in the notebooks.
108 W. Blanton
But we should beware, indeed following Heidegger’s own advice,

lest we aestheticize and tame—attempt to make ‘harmless’—the way his
rhetoric seems to flow back and forth between the openness of an event,
or the freewheeling anarchy of a spiritual self-assertion, and decidedly
concrete calculations of retributive violence borrowed from tales of sac-
rificial economies of old. In the years after the short-lived hopes of the
rectoral period, Heidegger will in fact increasingly link the two together:
the revelation of the self-assertion of spirit will involve, decidedly, a sacri-
fice, a ‘tragic denouement of the German people’, a tarrying with the full
violence of the event, rather than the ‘liberal spiritual’ intellectualism or
sublimated niceness which would apparently betray it.
Heidegger’s edifice groans and creaks like the old-fashioned
Lutheranism he inherited, and we should not miss what is quite simply
the obvious overlap between the Heideggerian escalation of ‘spiritual
danger’ vis-à-vis an everyday spirituality and that Lutheranism which
would forever urge the would-be believers to eschew all ‘Pharisaic’,
or simply Jewish, forms of calculating legalism in relation to God.20
Heidegger would even suspect, like almost every Christian contempo-
rary, that he was—internally—still a calculating ‘liberal’, a term which
would often enough (and soon explicitly so) be entirely interchangeable
with the word ‘Jew’ in these writings. Indeed, it is this interchangeabil-
ity which will finally express itself in Heidegger’s post-war fantasies of a
global ‘Jewish conspiracy’, which is—let’s be clear—simply another name
for what he describes throughout the 1930s as the liberal problem of
technocratic or functional reason. From his early writings in which he
finds in his fantasy of Paul-versus-the-Jews a vision of ‘struggle as such’
to the post-war fantasies of a technocratic-functional world handed over
to a global ‘Jewish conspiracy’, Heidegger is actually not ever straying far
from the everyday clichés of the Christian problem in Germany, never
facing them, never overturning them, despite his claims to be moving
ever farther afield from Christianity.
What is hindering the risky self-assertion of the university in the
1930s, for example? Only its internal liberal/Jew:
Why does one not have the courage (den Mut) to see the university as it
is: a hodgepodge of groups of professional schools, a hodgepodge shoved
together by some ministry? It is because ‘one’, deep within, thinks ‘liber-
ally’ (weil ‘man’ zuinnerst ‘liberal’ denkt) i.e., becomes enraptured menda-
ciously with the mere semblance of ‘universitas’, indeed since ‘one’ now
has the power and will some day (through whatever channels as the reward
of whatever ‘organization’) receive a place in this sphere called the ‘univer-
sity’, a sphere constantly reviled in public and hotly striven for in private.21
For me, the rhetorical and formal link that Heidegger rehearses again
and again is that link between a revolution grounded in the ‘open’ and
the sacrifice, presumably, of the liberals—or Jews—inside and around us.
It also matters little that, on this occasion, Heidegger’s sights seemed to
be set on one professor already known for his anti-Jewish activities and
another who would likewise become an important Nazi ideologue, Ernst
Krieck and Albert Baeumler. Heidegger simply wants to outdo both of
them in his radicality of the spiritual opening, the opening of freedom.
What we need to note is that the link between self-assertion and an
aggressive logic of ‘sacrifice’ is a kind of non-sequitor on Heidegger’s
own hypernominalist or anarchic grounds, an indication of a lack of free-
dom in his capacity to reconceptualize the coordinates within which he
finds himself. For all the openness of the open, for all that being appears
as a questionable and questioning sphere, Heidegger’s discussions are
almost everywhere in the notebooks directly something very different,
solicitations to sacrifice one representational type for another. And, as
seems to be endemic to the case, to enact a migration from one type to
another is to imply a kind of aggressive mirroring of the one in relation
to the other. To read Heidegger’s resentment in the notebooks and then
try to keep the different types a matter of nonrelational or indifferent
difference would be a striking misstep, even if that misstep has become a
path well worn by many of Heidegger’s latter day disciples.
It is with this in mind that I find, once again, a great threat implied
when Heidegger declares that his ‘liberal’ (and soon to become ‘Jewish’)
contemporaries are those who are unable to undergo a self-assertion
which is, at the same time, a ‘lawless grasping of the unthought’ which
constitutes their thinking. Again, this assertion is not non-relational; it
is a critique, a refusal, an enactment of what makes the liberal a mere
pacifier of a really dangerous spirituality beyond the law. And when
Heidegger’s much valorized spirituals emerge on one side, the liber-
als are left to stand in an entirely uncertain position as to the sacrificial,
tragic grasping of the unthought for which the Heideggerian revolution-
aries are constantly preparing and for which they constantly rehearse in
a kind of quiet resoluteness (or at least quiet inscriptions in their private
notebooks).
110 W. Blanton
In other words, for me it seems that Heidegger has things precisely

the wrong way around when he suspects that the temptation Christianity
poses for the revolution or self-assertion of free spirit is that of a ready-
made ‘morality’ or a discourse of ‘belief’. As he writes in 1934:
The confusion in the ‘spiritual’ situation – this situation does not allow its
most proper plight (ihre eigenste Not) to appear and is so weak (in its sem-
blant strength) that it fears its plight instead of exulting in it. Meanwhile,
positive Christianity is demanded – or conceded – on the basis of the con-
cordat and the universal perplexity and the need for a certain ‘morality’;
besides this – besides those doctrines – there are the all too hasty ones
who make a movement out of ‘belief’; then those who mix an unclear
Germanity with a still more diluted Christianity; then those few who form
for themselves a standpoint out of sheer Godlessness; and finally the major-
ity, the sheer indifferent ones, who look on and wait for something to
which they can ‘attach’ themselves one day. If all this is not a flight of the
gods – if this is not Godlessness – the lack of all art is no wonder!22
Again, Heidegger excludes himself from what he disavows as a ready-

made and obfuscating struggle of ‘types’. That he would fail to see his
own calls for spiritual freedom to be very similar to a working through of
his own earlier readings of Pauline Christianity is perhaps therefore quite
striking. Indeed, in the very moment when he escalates all of the various
stances in the cultural stew to a kind of misstep of one form or another,
inasmuch as they all indicate a ‘confusion in the “spiritual” situation…’,
he seems—despite himself—like he may be more a Christian (as he
understood it earlier on) than ever before. Indeed, in keeping with that
earlier line from his reading of Pauline Christianity, Heidegger seems
once again to find in the tableau of a spirit-freedom versus Judaism to
be, precisely, where he finds himself: ‘In the letters [sic] to the Galatians,
Paul is struggling with the Jews and the Jewish Christians. Thus we find
the phenomenological situation of religious struggle and of struggle
itself.’23
Naturally, Heidegger on occasion clearly presents himself as farther
from Christianity than most of his peers, even those peers who are close
to Christianity through their antipathy towards it. Heidegger frequently
ridicules, for example, Catholics for getting a sense of themselves—
imagining themselves to be modern and relevant—by contesting other
readymade identity groups or new cultural developments. He also finds
frequently annoying others’ desires for him to become more embroiled

in polemics with other university administrators. Heidegger thus per-
forms himself in this section and many others as the one who, because
the authentic version of spiritual struggle, secedes from these other forms
of agonistic polemical relation.
In doing so, ironically, Heidegger inflates another discursive opera-
tion which seems perhaps to incite the return of a modern Christianity
with more blisteringly present power than any of these others. Even as
Heidegger performs himself as the most removed from Christianity,
to me it seems he has the opposite problem, namely, that he does not
remove himself far enough from one of the fundamental, indeed cli-
chéd and knee-jerk, operations of Christianity, namely, its superses-
sionist aggressivity toward those other groups it claims to transcend.
Heidegger stumbles on the stumbling stone of the Christian problem for
philosophy. Read this way, despite himself, Heidegger’s open revolution
becomes haunted by dark and not so veiled threats toward those whom
the revolution would transcend, so many ‘liberals’ who would soon
enough become in Heidegger’s writings so many ‘Jews’.
It is in this sense that I disagree with Reiner Schürmann’s impres-
sive analysis in Heidegger On Being and Acting: from Principles to
Anarchy. Read against the Black Notebooks, Schürmann ventriloquizes
well Heidegger’s many assertions about being above the fray, free and
easy—rather than reactionary or resentful—a singular soul rather than a
combative dialectician. In a discussion of Heidegger’s epoch of the tech-
nocratic world-picture, for example, that period of ontological history in
which a coming to be is a coming-to-be-functional with a network of
servicability, Schürmann leads the charge for the emancipation of a kind
of anarchist spirituality from the Heideggerian writings: ‘It is obvious
that Heidegger does not oppose a counter-violence or at least not a vio-
lence of the same kind of institutionalized violence. He does not call for
some counterattack. He does not seek confrontation and expects noth-
ing from it.’24
Or, as Schürmann went on to write from the New School in New
York in the early 1980s: ‘The violence Heidegger espouses before the
institutionalized assault is the nonviolence of thinking.’ The free anar-
chic response which secedes from, rather than combats directly, the vio-
lence of the current world order, we are told, is lost on many of those
for whom Heidegger ‘is recruited into the ecologist cause or some other
112 W. Blanton
remedial [sic] program’.25 As Schürmann goes on to explain in the

same passage:
What is missed when Heidegger’s recollection of being is turned into a

parody of dialectics, is the change of level on which he discusses technol-
ogy: not the pros and cons, nor his or our or anyone’s or consciousness’s
‘for’ and ‘against’, affirmation and negation, but technology’s native site.26
I agree with Schürmann that there is indeed this virtual ‘Heidegger’ in

these texts. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that we must point out
the way the scents of agonistic and resentful violence in the notebooks
must be identified as the death of this particular Heideggerian legacy.
A resentful dialectician looking to crush the opposition while spouting
off about the openness of being and the singular (rather than dialecti-
cal) site of emergence of being is just a revenge-monger masquerad-
ing as Schürmann’s happy nominalist hippy. Or, differently put, the
Heideggerian legacy must, now more than ever, face the fundamental
philosophical problem that I call ‘the Christian’, the problem, to this day,
of resentment in the form, precisely, of supersessionist aggressivity.
Spirit’s Buzz
Derrida’s lectures, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, could be read
as a kind of masterpiece of strategic offense and deflationary repetition,
two gestures which often served Derrida well in relation to his master
thinkers. On this occasion, Derrida imagines a Heideggerian theatre, a
mode of presenting a lecture which at first seems unremarkable enough.
This theatre, naturally, has a stage on which are presented costumes,
bodies, words, and gestures over time. Locked into this theatrical tab-
leau, however, Derrida’s lecture wonders aloud about shifting references
to the spirit or the spiritual in Heidegger’s work as this work was scripted
onto page after page over the course of Heidegger’s life. Of course, such
an approach to, say, the history of ideas within a philosopher is very tra-
ditional—as Derrida’s lectures often were. Here the intriguing twist on
the traditional mode of presentation is simply that Derrida’s time-theatre
was focused on a character which tended to be neglected, in this case—
surprisingly—the role of spirit in Heidegger’s work.
We should not miss however that, precisely in this traditional guise,
Derrida’s reflections could be taken as a kind of deflationary offense
against the Heideggerian project, a form of deconstruction through

banalizing literalization and even plodding biographism. After all,
Heidegger’s entire enterprise was premised on the destruction of the
two key aspects of this Derridean tableau of a spirit-theatre. For a start,
of course, Derrida’s imaginary theatre offends against the fundamental
prohibition within the Heideggerian project, the prohibition against pre-
tending one can play out philosophy as a series of self-same scenes within
linear time as a kind of generic medium or container of real philosophy.
Derrida’s second strategic offense, very similar, transgresses another
great commandment: not to want to observe spirit as a kind of self-same
actor over time. Derrida’s reflections appear then as two blasphemies
against the two main commandments of the Heideggerian order.
Derrida points out that there is a ‘provocatively “retro” character of
this Of Spirit’, but then goes on to justify it by suggesting, in a typical
Derridean gesture, that
It was perhaps necessary to run the risk of a classical academicism so as

to mark, while yet leaving it open – for it is not my intention to deal with
it – the French dimension, the Franco-German chronicle in which we are
situating Heidegger during this conference which was also an Erörterung
keeping the questions ‘open’, in view of this place.27
All this is fair enough, and as ever Derrida presents his work as (always
strategically) locked into various aporiae and forced decisions inherited
from the linguistic apparatuses of the past. One could hardly argue with
it. But isn’t the more direct and immediate impulse to be ‘provoca-
tively “retro”’ at this point (meaning in this context to be rather plod-
ding, linear, and biographical) not better named by declaring it the way
of scandal for a Heideggerian self-narration, indeed the self-understand-
ing of so-many gatekeepers of the Heideggerian legacy? Is there not
more rebellion at work in the young acolyte in relation to his master-
thinker? Why else transgress the two fundamental commandments of the
Heideggerian system? There’s a question.
Derrida’s theatre is one in which, in a willing deflation of the com-
mand to deconstruct these figures the character, after-images, reso-
nances, acts, ectoplasms, and auras of spirit may be watched by any
daydreaming or bored member of the audience. Derrida’s gestures to
the backgrounded histories of discursive regimes, sending-and-receiving
machines, or what he elsewhere calls ‘tele-technological’ relays, appear
114 W. Blanton
then in merely formal language.28 As he writes, ‘I shall begin to follow

modestly the itineraries, the functions, the formations and regulated
transformations, the presuppositions and the destinations’ of spirit in
Heidegger’s writings.29 Moreover, Derrida’s spirit theatre will end up
focusing on the way that spirit, despite Heidegger’s own promises to
refuse this term as yet another reification of the question of being, not
only haunt the master’s texts but also burst into life—and with no scare
quotes or deflationary or deconstructive gestures—when Heidegger
gives his fateful address to the university as its rector for the Nazis.
Heidegger’s Nazi period, therefore, is where Derrida’s deflationary or
recalcitrant narration was always headed, and Derrida takes time to milk
the moment of its arrival:
It’s the law of the quotation marks. Two by two they stand guard: at the
frontier or before the door, assigned to the threshold in any case, and these
places are always dramatic. The apparatus lends itself to theatricalization,
and also to the hallucination of the stage and its machinery; two pairs of
pegs hold in suspension a sort of drape, a veil or a curtain. Not closed, just
slightly open. There is the time this suspension lasts: six years, the suspense
of the spectator and the tension which follows the credits.30
And then, the suspense—and the suspension or bracketing of the word

‘spirit’ as a non-Heideggerian term of reified or ossified Being—is bro-
ken, broken through with the revelation of spirit ablaze as the spirit of
Heidegger’s university under Hitler. As Derrida manages the scene:
‘In the wings, spirit was waiting for its moment. And here it makes its
appearance. It presents itself. Spirit itself, spirit in its spirit and in its
letter, Geist affirms itself through the self-affirmation of the German
university.’31
I like Derrida’s text best when we step back at this point from his con-
stant references—almost always in merely formal language—to the com-
plex semantic histories of the terms he is considering. Indeed, I like to
read these empty gestures to complexity and the call for further work,
as a kind of reaction formation against the trauma of this moment of his
master’s curtain coming back. Why not rather imagine Derrida, whose
own career and the philosophical movement bearing his own name had
so much to do with his careful commitment to the Heideggerian corpus,
in a more aggressive mode here? Why not continue to read Derrida in
keeping with the deflationary structure of his theatre or in keeping with
the theatrical blasphemy against those two greatest Heideggerian com-

mandments? Derrida claims to begin with this certainty, ‘the certainty
of not fully understanding what, in the end, rules Heidegger’s spiritual
idiom’.32 He has a sense of the ‘kerygmatic tone’ of the rectoral address,
and—as ever—he claims that Heidegger is playing here, precisely in the
kerygmatic presencing of spirit-as-rectoral-flame—the last of the metaphy-
sicians rather than its overcomer. He even says that ‘One could say that he
spiritualizes National Socialism. And one could reproach him for this, as
he will later reproach Nietzsche for having exalted the spirit of vengeance
into a “spirit of vengeance spiritualized to the highest point”’.33 Derrida
does not make explicit here the link, the archival history, which elides
itself into the usual hyphen he repeats in his mentions of a ‘Platonic-
Christian’ enemy of Heideggerian thought. We should highlight it here,
as the problematic fall into ‘metaphysics’, his failing to avoid the openness
of the question, and so on, are entirely oriented by the mode in which
Heidegger will take up a persecutorial naturalizing of the enemy of spirit,
its leader and its rector. There is, as Jacob Taubes struggled to make clear
through an encounter with Carl Schmitt, an ‘enmity’ question which
seems most directly to crystallize the ‘metaphysical’ question on the table
here.34 As for Derrida, I think that no other approach could keep pace
with the deflationary shock of the curtains pulling back onto spirit now
ablaze in itself, meaning, of course, with the deflationary revelation that
at his highest and most ecstatic moment of being cast into his thinking of
being, Heidegger stands there a Nazi stooge.
And worse than a stooge, as Heidegger never makes himself or this
moment of tragi-comic theatre into a joke, which would have been his
only route to maintaining his thought on the side of sense. Heidegger
did not, as Derrida points out, forever avoid spirit as that very master-
term his own philosophy ostensibly foreclosed. Derrida does not say,
however, that Heidegger did seem to refuse to the end to become the
stooge on this stage, never accepting the triple face slap, the sneaky eye
poke, the stomped foot, or the haymaker fist on the head which even a
Larry, Curly, or Moe could have offered him. Indeed, one could read the
Black Notebooks as part of Heidegger’s life-long efforts to manage his
legacy against precisely this redemptive gesture of comic-tragic collapse,
ever refusing the philosophical role of the sublime idiot or the tragically
failed effort to enact an emancipation. I find this scene of the stooge
on the spirit stage, a stooge who always refuses to become so, a more
116 W. Blanton
immediate, simple, but also intractable problem for Derrida than many
of his abstract gestures to the complexities of semantic histories.
Indeed, is not this particular stooge who refuses always to become
so, not—even more than Derrida’s tale of a final revolution or final
university solution of ‘spirit’—the place to locate what Derrida earlier
described as what he would try to show in his theatre that ‘what remains
unquestioned in the invocation of Geist by Heidegger is, more than a
coup de force, force itself in its most out-of-the-ordinary manifestation’.35
Something is lost when the acolytes of the master try to cope with this
particular irruption of force itself—once of course that buzzy name for
the revelation of divinity in all its violently self-reliant and self-grounding
sovereignty—with formal gestures to the complexity of semantic histo-
ries. As Derrida says again and again in this text, force will have been that
which forces itself into speech, time. It is what we might call (steering
Derrida’s interest in negative theology and how to avoid speaking in this
essay) that which forces us to speak about what we do not intend to, sov-
ereignty itself in the form of phenomena.
Read this way, Derrida’s reflections are perhaps a very traditional tale
of the violence of the sacred. Heidegger tried to elude it, to defuse and
deconstruct it, but somehow as if by a mysterious repetition compul-
sion, such gestures only made the absent master signifier all the stronger.
When the crossed out Spirit would return, it would do so with a venge-
ance. If so, I would like to add another footnote from the history of reli-
gion, borrowed from the torn clothes and angry denunciations at the
trial of a Jesus or a Socrates. If an irrepressible sovereignty of a sacred
violence irrupts, speaking the unspeakable (as seems to concern Derrida),
then the audience is really only left with the option to respond in simi-
lar terms, terms that somehow say what can’t be said, a non-language
of counter-violence or counter ‘force itself’: a phrase like Fuck you, for
example. Readers of Heidegger as master thinker should treat themselves
to the experience. How else to address the stooge on this stage, all the
more horrific for having—to the end—refused to become so?
Modern Ontology and a Jewish World Conspiracy

When in his 1920/1921 lectures on the phenomenology of religion,
Heidegger makes two synthetic assertions, he makes some very trou-
bling claims that are worth remembering as we read the 1930s note-
books or when we consider his later declarations that the modern world
reveals itself as, somehow, almost miraculously, a Judaizing technocracy.

In those earlier lectures, Heidegger summarizes Paul’s encounter with
the Galatians as a ‘struggle with the Jews and Jewish Christians’, giving
‘the struggle’ a very obvious enemy—the Jewish. In doing so, naturally,
Heidegger was repeating the oldest of clichés from the ‘Christian origins’
stories in which what is new in Christianity is obstructed by what is recal-
citrant amongst ‘the Jews’. Heidegger’s second synthetic statement, a
profound marker of orientation for his own thinking of phenomenology
at that point, may be for our purposes even more striking. Heidegger
adds, after all, that the clichéd tableau of Paul struggling against Jews
becomes, rather astonishingly, the leading exemplar for ‘the phenomeno-
logical situation of religious struggle’ more generally and, indeed, more
generally still, ‘of struggle itself’.
In the docile repetition of supersessionist Christian origins stories, and
in his early situating of his own efforts to refound philosophy as a rep-
etition of this tableau, Heidegger takes a path which obstructs his own
striking insights about the nature of an-archic or self-reliant principle, his
own insights about singularity. He stumbles, once more, on the Christian
problem. After all, again and again in his lectures on the Pauline texts,
Heidegger will repeat that career-making assertion that the event of
truth grounds itself, that it is (in a certain sense, ‘tragically’) responsible
for those things it projects as its enemies and obstructions. Everything
else, every reification of the enemy, every naturalization of the enemy,
every objectification of the obstruction, simply obscures the fundamental
insight in question about how a happening of truth gives itself its own
coordinates, sketches them out in ecstatic projection, trust, or pistis.
In Heidegger’s rendering of Paulinism, not to mention his sustained
support of the demand in his later work, the philosopher demands of the
community of trust that it bear its own load in relation to its enemies,
that it bear its responsibility in their manufacture rather than naturaliz-
ing them. In an excellent line about Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians,
for example, Heidegger distinguishes between a reified ‘belonging’ and
a ‘living effective connection with God’ which, precisely, acknowledges
that the ‘anguish’ or thlipsis of the believers’ situation is not an exterior
contingency but, rather, the intimate mode in which their particular ‘joy’
reveals itself.36 That is a moment when Heidegger certainly sensed the
an-archic or singularizing vibrancies of a non-foundational philosophy
of difference, but it is a moment which is rendered entirely moot once
he starts to play around with the naturalization of Jewish enemies of a
118 W. Blanton
gospel. It is an insight which must be maintained against another more

traditional and supersessionist way of rendering the Christian origins
story, and that is the Christian problem Heidegger fails to navigate well
as his singularities turn to strategies and threats in the 1930s notebooks.
As if acting out my suggestions about philosophy’s repetition compul-
sion in relation to the archive of Christian origins stories, not only will
the young Heidegger repeat the persecutorial logics of this archive, but
he even generalizes this logic by claiming it is another name for ‘struggle
itself’. The recalcitrant ‘Jews’ you will always have with you, we might
say, and in fact that is just what Heidegger gives us in the longer run
of his career—that is what the Black Notebooks make clear. Even when
he wants to separate himself from Christianity, we find in the notebooks
a struggle between the logic of freely self-grounding singularities and a
more persecutorial and proprietorially naturalized identity of the phi-
losopher and his philosophical revolution. The very freedom of the an-
archic self-grounding of truth is at stake in whether one naturalizes one’s
enemies, perhaps if one names them at all. Heidegger is the philosopher
who perhaps more than any other made the point. And yet, at crucial
moments, he forgets, falling into the most clichéd and scripted forms
of animosity—indeed, I think we should take seriously the haunting
echoes and the way in which we could read Heidegger as, frequently
enough and despite his best insights into the paradoxes of singular-
ity, scripted and clichéd—mechanized—by the stereotyped tableau of
Christianity emerging from a world-historical narrative break between a
recalcitrant Judaism of mere law and calculation and a freely self-ground-
ing experience of divinity. In a word, don’t the notebooks suggest to us
that we should take Heidegger’s own earlier writings on Paul with the
utmost seriousness? In his rendering of the Galatians, controversy is the
very nature of a phenomenologically grounded philosophical struggle, or
even a perennial question for ‘struggle itself’. What else do we have, in
the end, when Heidegger eventually juxtaposes the freedom of thought
to a global technocracy which, he fantasizes, is yet another name for
Judaism?
The issues are crucial to the many intriguing discussions of this
course in relation to the ‘formal indication’ which is so crucial for
Heidegger’s development. What we need to write in blazing buzzing
colours is that the ‘formal indication’ which gives access to the experi-
ence of time in the Pauline community is that which also gives access
to a generalized model of ‘struggle itself’, namely, struggling against
‘Jews and Jewish Christians’.37 It is a witness to the continued wholesale

domination of traditional supersessionist ways of understanding Paul,
even among those concerned to remedy Heidegger’s lack of engagement
with Judaism, that most readers of Heidegger’s analysis of the Pauline let-
ters do not mention his striking comments in this regard. We should put
the issue forcefully, remembering that Heidegger does not simply discover
in a Paulinist experience of messianic temporality the ‘formal indication’
which gives an intriguing form of access to that experience, one which
will then haunt also his discussions of Being and Time. The issue here is,
even more, that Heidegger finds Paul struggling to press an experience of
time as a form of ‘struggle’ against ‘Jews and Jewish Christians’.38
Derrida presented Heidegger’s ‘spirit’ as waiting in the wings to break
free, in itself, as force itself, in the fantasy of the university’s self-assertion
under Hitler, but we could say just as well that what is waiting in the
wings during this period is, despite his efforts to distance himself from
Christianity, the Christian nomination of the ‘Jew’ as precisely what is
obstructing the revelation of Christian freedom. When Heidegger will
eventually claim that the triumph of a technocratic world-picture ontol-
ogy is the same thing as the world becoming ‘Jewish’, then we will have
returned to his earlier declaration, in the name of self-grounding phe-
nomena, that Paul’s struggle against Jews was the indication of struggle
itself. Once more the repetition compulsion that is the Christian problem
bursts into bloom. Heidegger’s earlier passage on Paul is haunting for
a reading of the oscillations in the Black Notebooks from a singularity
politics to a politics of resentment and ominous threats. If we might put
it in the language of Heidegger’s reading of Paulinism, at stake here is
whether the philosopher opens up yet another dreary game of merely rei-
fied community belonging or whether the philosopher unleashes some-
thing like a ‘living effective connection’ with the self-sustaining energies
constituting a very different kind of being together.
Between Fascism and the Open: Heidegger and the

Future of Continental Philosophy
We are not finished with the Christian problem in philosophy. Indeed,
to this day we scarcely name the problem as such, and the slightest ges-
ture to the secularization of our traditions or of our own relative lack
of interest in religion seems always enough to put us off the scent.
120 W. Blanton
I conclude therefore with the fascinating intervention of Gianni Vattimo

and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to
Marx (2011). All too briefly summarized, Vattimo and Zabala articulate
the powerful claim that a kind of an-archic Heideggerianism is a cru-
cial ongoing contribution of philosophy for contemporary struggles to
affirm democratic experimentation with—or invention of—a common
good. Against what they call the merely ‘framed democracies’ on offer
from economic and philosophical managers from Francis Fukuyama to
some of the ongoing governance of the European Union, their an-archic
Heideggerianism would in fact foster—at a democratic level—a perma-
nent ‘crisis’ of legitimation. This crisis, moreover, opens up currently
existing ‘frames’ of democracy to radical revaluation and restructuring
through the experimentally self-reliant projections of the people. There
is a great deal to say about this important intervention of Vattimo and
Zabala, which is a significant touchstone in ongoing efforts to articulate
the relevance of Heidegger’s work to political life.
I will only comment on some aspects of their story, but I want to note
several of the rhetorical structures which seem to me to pop up consist-
ently in this book. For a start, note that Hermeneutic Communism is
replete with suggestions about how, finally, a kind of emptied Christian
religiosity—secularized or made ‘weak’ through hermeneutical self-reli-
ance—becomes interchangeable with the ‘weak ontology’ on offer as
the ongoing relevance of Heidegger’s philosophy. In a chapter entitled
‘Interpretation as Anarchy’, for example, the authors repeat with admi-
ration Richard Rorty’s assertion that the ‘hermeneutical or Gadamerian
attitude is in the intellectual world what democracy is in the politi-
cal world. The two can be viewed as alternative appropriations of the
Christian message that love is the only law’.39 Indeed, this tradition can
be summarized as ‘anarchic’ politics precisely because of the way the tra-
dition can subvert itself, revolutionize itself, from within. For Vattimo
and Zabala, Martin Luther becomes one of the great precursors not
only of the Schürmannian or anarchic Heidegger they admire but also of
Freud’s reading of Europe through the lens of the biblical.40
On another occasion, of the oddly self-referential and yet exces-
sive status of ‘divinity’ in Heidegger, Vattimo and Zabala find a useful
philosophical updating of the New Testament Gospels. As they rewire
Heidegger’s famous claim about a god, the two write:
‘Only communism can save us’. We do not believe this is a ludicrous para-
phrase, since it could even be justified by quoting the Gospel: ‘For where
two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them’
(Matthew 18:20). … In a Nietzschean-Christian style, one could say: Now
that God is dead and the absolute truth is not credible anymore, love for the
other is possible and necessary.41
Thus a communism that we could believe in would be the miracle which

would change everything—but only insofar as we believe it, the ‘divinity’
function always being a strange and auratic mirroring of our own pro-
jections.42 Elsewhere, the philosophers seem to elaborate those genealo-
gies of the an-archist Heidegger (and of Reiner Schürmann’s Heidegger)
which develop links to nominalist philosophers and Franciscan theolo-
gians as well. On such occasions, the authors play up the theological
archive behind the notion of a use ‘without dominion’ of the world, a
vision which the two translate provocatively but helpfully as the notion
of a ‘classless society’.43 They go on to suggest that the Heideggerian
‘open’ could also be linked to the ‘weak messianic power’ in Walter
Benjamin or, indeed, to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament
Gospels.44
My point here is only to note the way in which Vattimo and Zabala
associate Heidegger’s an-archism, or his philosophy of singularity
and difference, with a heavily Christianized biblical legacy. All this is
fair enough in the game of philosophical genealogy, but it does raise
the old question therefore of how these two will cope with the peren-
nial Christian problem in philosophy. Will another gospel, so to speak,
arise to cast out singularity for the sake of a persecutorial and natural-
izing foundationalism of some sort? With that question in mind, I was
struck by Gianni Vattimo’s intervention in a fascinating anecdotal and
biographical reflection entitled, ‘How to Become an Anti-Zionist’.45 In
that piece (and again to summarize all too briefly), Vattimo makes sev-
eral interesting statements about his experiences as an Italian philoso-
pher and politician. My favourite aphoristic summary emerges from the
way Vattimo presents his current experience as in some sense stranded
between a horror of Italian Fascism and the receding fantasy of an
American Wild West, as if our thought were in some sense stranded
between Fascism and some mythical promise of ‘the open’. That is, after
all, precisely where I think Heidegger was stranded in his own analogical
repetition of the problem of Christian origins.
122 W. Blanton
What strikes me about Vattimo’s aphoristic synthetic comment about

Fascism and the ‘open’ of the Wild West fantasies is the way it use-
fully crystallizes so many of the recent Italian philosophical ambitions,
stranded as they all seem to be somewhere between a Fascist ‘home’
which must be eschewed and a lack of coordinates—a lack of ground for
resistance—against global capitalism and the ‘framed democracies’ which,
they argue plausibly, are increasingly armed for the sake of capitalism’s
maintenance and defence. I find Vattimo very illuminating on this point.
After all, do these coordinates—caught between Fascism and the open—
not usefully illumine many other Italian thinkers at present? Roberto
Esposito, for example, shuffles the philosophical archive wondering aloud
whether he can hit upon an ‘affirmative biopolitics’ which he articulates
as a kind of immanence of self-reliant self-grounding which nevertheless
does not fall into fascistic intolerance or persecutorial violence toward
those imagined not to share therein.46 Similarly, throughout his dec-
ades long homo sacer project, Giorgio Agamben has always looked to a
kind of Franciscan or nominalist Paulinism as the promise of a politics
which is anarchically self-reliant in the sense that a singular form-of-life is
affirmed—again, however, without that form itself becoming a persecu-
torial machine or an identity of ‘dominion’.47 This is the Christian prob-
lem for our time, perhaps, as if stranded between Fascism and the open.
Because it is so, I feel that it is here where the singularity stories of
Vattimo could be sacrificed if he does not more effectively elude a tra-
ditional persecutorial or scapegoating story of ‘Christian origins’—espe-
cially when that ‘new’ gloss on the old religious tradition will be an
an-archic Heideggerianism. The problem comes not from the elision
of, say, Franciscan nominalism, or Lutheran revolutionism, but from
the way these elisions always seem—as if on auto-pilot—to evoke once
more the problem of Judaism as the obstruction of a new thought of
the open as anarchic singularity. Do we have reason to fear? Consider
the easy narrative flow of Vattimo’s ‘How I Became an Anti-Zionist’
where, once again, it is insinuated that Heideggerian anarchism belongs
to a Christian tradition of ‘the open’ which may be opposed to a dif-
ferent, and stronger (less deconstructed) ‘legitimacy’ which is drawn
from strong myths of election, exceptionality, and proprietorial owner-
ship.48 Vattimo, always touchy about witch hunts against Heidegger,
even declares that he valorizes ‘Kafka, Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin,
Bloch’ and that in fact he would never gainsay their value to his thought
simply to spite those who call upon these philosophers to legitimate what
cannot be legitimated:
I will not do to them what the Zionist Nazi hunters have done to
Heidegger, when they think of liquidating him because he sided with
Hitler. Once again I cannot free myself from the problem of Israel;
it is ultimately like the original sin spoken of in the Old Testament, the
Hebrew Bible.49
To be sure, there is a great deal more to be said about Vattimo’s essay,

but in the end it is the shorthand of our philosophical narrations which
does a great deal of work in, easily and summarily, destroying our best
insights about a politics of singularity. And here too, like clockwork or
a repetition compulsion, a new and Christianized ‘open’ seems to elicit
the question of another mode of legitimation which must undergo a
forced sacrifice, a forced giving up of the other’s illegitimately pro-
prietorial self-protectivism. Who, in the end, is not surprised that a
Christianized anarchic or ‘weak’ ontology will not rather quickly get
around to the need to focus on the problem of, as the title of this col-
lection has it, Deconstructing Zionism, and this as the specific instance
which always seems to inhere to the more general topic (as in the sub-
title), of A Critique of Political Metaphysics. The problem to which the
whole world—or all the politics of the world—seems liable, therefore
(and, again, like clockwork) seems to embody itself in a special case
which becomes exemplarily grievous and an exemplary obstruction of
the insights of the Christian open. ‘How to Become an Anti-Zionist’?
One starts by becoming a Heideggerian Christian, apparently. Could we,
indeed must we, not map the game back into Heidegger’s writings, with
the global critique of metaphysics giving way to a politics of self-reliant
self-grounding, only to have this answer immediately obstructed by the
figure of the Jew? Was not in this sense the young Heidegger frighten-
ingly prescient when he elided Paulinism into a post-metaphysical phe-
nomenology only to ruin the same insight by imagining this resource as
part of a struggle against Jews? And if Heidegger would declare, both
earlier and much later in his career, that this struggle of self-reliant self-
grounding against Jews was in fact the general image of ‘struggle itself’,
then have we in fact progressed very far in our philosophical struggle
with the Christian problem?
124 W. Blanton
To say it once more, I am not interested here in the specific questions

of griefs and grievousness, which seem to me enough to go around in
the topics addressed in Deconstructing Zionism. What I am saying is
that the ‘Christian problem’ is about the underlying narrative substrate
of philosophy’s breakthroughs to self-reliance or an-archic affirmation.
Every time it gets there it seems to fantasize something like a new faith,
a new religiosity, and in some sense a revolutionized Christianity—even
as it does so in profoundly traditional terms with all the persecutorial
or anti-Jewish accoutrements of some of Christianity’s most lamentable
self-narrations. As I say, the point here is not to adjudicate or to moral-
ize, but to point toward the doggedly forceful repetitions, all the more
dogged and forceful the more we declare ourselves ‘beyond’ this religion
or unconcerned about the maintenance of its inherited narratological
coordinates. As Freud might have put it, we seem still to be discover-
ing ourselves amidst a paradoxical necessity of the return—and replay—
of a persecutorial Christian story, despite the fact that we continue to
repeat to ourselves that this repetition would be of no interest to us,
that it would be purely contingent. And what is this necessity in con-
tingency but what Freud declared—throughout his own negotiation of
biblical traditions in modern political life—repetition compulsion? It is
dealing with that uncanny force of necessity in contingency that we must
approach if we are to work through the Christian problem in philosophy.
Heidegger, I have argued, took leave of his promising an-archism
at precisely those moments when he failed to elude a broadly superses-
sionist and persecutorial agenda which can, to this day, rightly be called
Christian. For me, therefore, theology need not give up on the texts of
Heidegger. Indeed, theologians will only ever obfuscate the trauma and
transferability of, precisely, the Christian problem in culture the more
they act as if Heidegger’s anti-Judaisms are able to be naturalized, so to
speak, safely in a disavowable past or safely outside the domain of the-
ology. Instead of spiritually investing yet again this gesture of a step
outside (the very definition of the Christian problem, of its very auto-
mation), theology could realize that it must take sides or articulate soli-
darities on the inside, within the texts of Heidegger, precisely because
his texts were clearly enacted within a larger Christian problem in cul-
ture which, despite himself, Heidegger did not escape any more than we
will. No doubt this will be a disconcerting way to articulate the catas-
trophe of Heidegger’s anti-Judaism for some theologians. Read this way,
both Heidegger and the Christian problem must be judged, and both
transformed, otherwise than by the step outside. I have suggested that

we orient ourselves rather by exploring our capacities within this prob-
lem on behalf of anarchic self-grounding over against a supersession-
ist and persecutorial sacrifice of the same. The partisan struggle for the
anarchic against the persecutorial state is not an easy one. Therefore, any
such interventions within the Christian problem, whether inflected theo-
logically or philosophically, will no doubt greatly benefit from the theo-
logical archive’s long story of sporadic experimentation with the spiritual
exercise of an-archic self-grounding or freely offered solidarities. Perhaps
the archivist activists of the world should unite.
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), GA
95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 38; Eng. trans.: Ponderings II–VI:
Black Notebooks 1931–1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2016), 29. In what follows I do not alter the
excellent translation of Richard Rojcewicz, though as I do here I will
continue to note the page number of the German edition alongside the
English translation. References to the German edition will be given as GA
(Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume number.
2. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Frisch
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 48.
3. Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy
of Undying Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
4. A Materialism for the Masses was a title marking a way in which, to coun-
ter the persecutorial and foundational ‘Platonism’ of influential early
Christian writers, we need to recast Christian origin stories through phi-
losophies of difference and singularity.
5. I very much admire the work of someone like Marlène Zarader (The
Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage Heritage, trans.
Bettina Bergo [Stanford: Stanford University Press]). My own work is
generally more wrapped up in the question of how an originarily polemi-
cal differentiation of Christianity and Judaism—the testamentary divide
she seems to take more seriously than I do—returns with such ferocity in
Heidegger’s modern philosophical struggles.
6. Heidegger, GA 94, 31; Eng. trans., 24.
7. Karsten Harries, ‘Nostalgia, Spite, and the Truth of Being’, in Ingo Farin
and Jeff Malpas (eds), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941
(Boston: MIT Press, 2016), 207. This essay is for me more than usu-
ally punctuated with a sense of indebtedness. I note here that Karsten
126 W. Blanton
Harries’s graduate courses on Heidegger at Yale University, focused on

Being and Time and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ respectively, are
among the most important events in my own intellectual formation.
8. It isn’t the time to explore the fascinating rhetoric of energetics as they
slide across the pages of Heidegger’s notebooks, even though the entire
question of singularity or post-metaphysical difference rests in them.
There would be much to discuss, and I hope to return to it. As that great
Heideggerian media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, writes of Heidegger’s
fascination with the radio and its buzzy tunings: ‘Heidegger’s “turn” is
the insight that all modes of transcendental philosophy—whether they
take their point of departure in the subject or Dasein—founder upon
the facticity of high-tech media. Modernity turns out to be a destiny or
fate which determines what is absolutely closest from its greatest point
of removal—that is, the turn of the hand to the tuning capacitor which,
at the time, given the analog state of radio, could for millions of listen-
ers establish their Cartesian repraesentationes before (not even fourteen
months later) the worst-case scenario occurred: the battle of world pic-
tures that with greater precision we call “World War II”. “What pres-
ences does not hold sway; but rather, assault rules”.’ Idem, The Truth of
the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2013), 296.
10. See e.g. ibid., 142, Eng. trans., 104.
11. Ibid., 142–145; Eng. trans., 106–107.
12. Ibid., 148; Eng. trans., 109.
13. Ibid., 150–151; Eng. trans., 110.
14. Ibid., 168; Eng. trans., 123.
15. Ibid., 169; Eng. trans., 124.
16. One sees this motif often enough in Peter Sloterdijk’s writings, though
see specifically his Nietzsche Apostle (Boston: Semiotext(e), 2013).
17. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans.
Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 60–61.
18. Note, for example, how well the diagnoses of Rage and Time cohere with
Sloterdijk’s praise of Nietzsche’s efforts to outdo Christianity precisely by
overcoming persecutorial resentment in his Nietzsche, Apostle.
19. Heidegger, GA 463, Eng. trans., 336.
20. I explore some of the intriguing links between this tradition and the artic-
ulation of phenomenology in some of Heidegger’s early writings in Ward
Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the
New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); see Chap.
3, ‘Pauls Secretary: Heidegger’s Apostolic Light from the Ancient Near
East’, 105–128.
21. Heidegger, GA 94, 180; Eng. trans., 131–132.

22. Ibid., 184; Eng. trans., 135.
23. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 48.
24. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to
Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 277.
25. Ibid., 278.
26. Ibid.
27. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3–4.
28. See the very nice discussion of this trope in Derrida’s work on and around
religion in Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the
Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2011), 125–130.
29. Derrida, Of Spirit, 5.
30. Ibid., 31.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 12.
33. Ibid., 39.
34. Cf. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
35. Derrida, Of Spirit, 5.
36. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 66.
37. Two important discussions of Heidegger and formal indication are to
be found in Michael Fagenblat, ‘Levinas, Judaism, Heidegger’, in Agata
Bielik-Robson and Adam Lipszyc (eds), Judaism in Contemporary
Thought: Traces and Influence (London and New York: Routledge,
2014), 51–63, and Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical
Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001).
38. R yan Coyne’s work on formal indication—Heidegger’s Confessions: The
Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015)—is also welcome, but for me it tends
to remain (in this respect and others) a reception of Paul which tends
to naturalize some of the anti-Judaisms which later thinkers (included
Augustine) did so much to install in the cultural memory. Here, to repeat
a mantra from both Displacing Christian Origins and A Materialism
for the Masses, what is remarkable is not just that in Paul we find a pre-
metaphysical Christianity. We find in it rather also a pre-supersessionist
Christianity which would not even recognize itself in that name. That is,
the relationship between the rise of ‘metaphysics’ and the rise of narrative
anti-Judaism is the crucial link to make.
128 W. Blanton
39. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: from

Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 75.
40. Ibid., 81–84.
41. Ibid., 111–112.
42. I have explored some of the questions of Heideggerian ‘divinity’ in
Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses.
43. Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism, 116.
44. Ibid.
45. Gianni Vattimo, ‘How to Become and Anti-Zionist’, in Gianni Vattimo
and Michael Marder (eds), Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political
Metaphysics (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 15–22.
46. Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place
of Thought, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (New York: Fordham University Press,
2015).
47. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter
to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005).
48. Vattimo, ‘How to Become and Anti-Zionist’
49. Ibid., 20–21.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005.
———. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford
Blanton, Ward. Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New
Testament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
———. Blanton, Ward. A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the
Philosophy of Undying Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Blanton, Ward; Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey W. Robbins and Noelle Vahanian. An
Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016.
Coyne, Ryan. Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being
and Time and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey
Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
de Vries, Hent. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to
Derrida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Esposito, Roberto. Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of
Thought. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. New York: Fordham University Press,
2015.
Fagenblat, Michael. ‘Levinas, Judaism, Heidegger’. In Judaism in Contemporary
Thought: Traces and Influence. Edited by Agata Bielik-Robson and Adam
Lipszyc. London and New York: Routledge, 2014, 51–63.
Harries, Karsten. ‘Nostalgia, Spite, and the Truth of Being’. In Reading
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941. Edited by Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas.
Boston: MIT Press, 2016, 207–222.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996.
———. Heidegger, Martin. Phenomenology of Religious Life. Translated by
Matthias Frisch. Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 2010.
———. Ponderings II–IV (Black Notebooks 1931–1938). Translated by Richard
Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Kittler, Friedrich. The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of
Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Naas, Michael. Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of
Religion, Science, and the Media. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.
Schürmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Nietzsche Apostle. Boston: Semiotext(e), 2013.
———. Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation. Translated by Mario
Wenning. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2004.
Trawny, Peter. Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy. Translated by Alexander
Moore and Christopher Turner. London: Polity Press, 2015.
———. Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Vattimo, Gianni. ‘How to Become and Anti-Zionist’. In Deconstructing Zionism:
A Critique of Political Metaphysics. Edited by Gianni Vattimo and Michael
Marder. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 15–22.
Vattimo, Gianni and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger
to Marx. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Zarader, Marlène. The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage.
Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
CHAPTER 6
Monotheism as a Metapolitical Problem:

Heidegger’s War Against Jewish Christian
Monotheism
Christoph Schmidt
When Heidegger’s eschatology of tragic being led in 1933 to a short

circuit with the National Socialist revolution, his detachment from

immediate political involvement following the years after 1935 culmi-
nated in the metaphysical confrontation between Greek theopolitics and
Jewish-Christian monotheism.1 In search of the true German revolu-
tion of being, he identifies the metaphysics of the ground from now on
with ‘monotheism’, i.e., with the God/Creator as the principle of power,
representation and production (technology), with whom man subjects
the earth. Against this form of violent domination, the Greek gods of
Hölderlin’s poetry, and of the pre-Socratic philosophers, are supposed
to represent the theomythical model of another, non-violent attitude of
man towards being and nature. Heidegger subsumes this political theol-
ogy of anti-monotheism under the concept of ‘metapolitics.’2
C. Schmidt (*) 
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

132 C. Schmidt
Monotheism as a metapolitical problem?

Where the Catholic theologian Erik Peterson, in his famous essay
‘Monotheism as a political problem,’3 sought to ‘eliminate’ Carl
Schmitt’s political theology of sovereign power4 as National Socialist ide-
ology through the dogma of trinity, Heidegger attacks Jewish-Christian
monotheism as a political system of sovereign power based on the meta-
physical–technological subject from the perspective of a mythotheology
of Greek and poetical polytheism of being.
In lectures from these years, as well as in the Black Notebooks, one can
observe an intensification of this antithesis, which Heidegger summarizes
as the political theological project of a necessary substitution of mono-
theism through the Greek gods in the following words: ‘Europe, this is
the modern figure of forgetfulness, in which the Occident is withhold.
Christianity, i.e., the Pauline, Gnostic, Roman Hellenistic organization of
the evangelical life of Jesus, is the prefiguration of Europe. It has nothing
to do with the Occident, because it denies “Greekness”, in the insidious
mode of a re-interpreting exploitation for its purposes.’5
This onto-historical opposition between monotheism and Greek poly-
theism finds its metapolitical codification and definition of the theolog-
ical fronts in the contrast between the Parmenidian goddess of Truth,
Aletheia, and her monotheistic antagonist Jesus Christ, who says of him-
self that he is the truth. Heidegger’s later explicit attacks against ‘World
Jewry’ presupposes already this political theology of anti-monotheism,
as they receive their last metaphysical ‘meaning’ in the apocalyptical sce-
nario of self-destruction of this Jewish-Christian power of monotheism.
Heidegger’s metapolitics in fact opposes the idea of a peaceful vicin-
ity of a being beyond domination represented by the Greek gods to the
apocalyptic tendency of this monotheism of power and violence. Man
has not to resist this system of power then, precisely because mono-
theism develops itself in an immanent logic of self-empowerment and
self-destruction. According to the madness of this method, National
Socialism and World Jewry are defined both as metaphysical powers
which can only destroy themselves in order to open the horizon of the
peaceful vicinity of the Greek gods in a last occidental dawn of the idols.
Heidegger’s political theology leads in a last step to a Gnosis of two
different temporalities and eschatologies. The first eschatology repre-
sents the monotheism which culminates in Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s
metaphysics of the subject as perfect knowledge and absolute will lead-
ing to the final self-destruction of the modern age. This eschatology
6 MONOTHEISM AS A METAPOLITICAL PROBLEM: HEIDEGGER’S … 133
basically coincides with Heidegger’s idea of Seinsgeschichte. From this

monotheistic eschatology Heidegger differentiates the cyclic eschatology
of true being which realizes itself with the return of the Greek gods and
the establishment of the idyllic vicinity of being.
This eschatological double structure finds its last articulation in
Heidegger’s philosophy of language, when the creative word of God
and the Logos Christi in John’s Gospel as transcendental speakers of lan-
guage are eliminated by the abyss of the anonymous ‘speaking language,’
opening a space for the appearance of the Greek gods. The open sign
beyond interpretation becomes the apparently neutral symptom of this
elimination.
In what follows, I want to give a short account of the different stages
of intensification and dramatization of Heidegger’s political eschatology
of tragedy between 1920 and 1935, in order to reconstruct his later the-
opolitics in light of the contrast between Greek polytheism and Jewish-
Christian monotheism, between the goddess of Aletheia and the Logos
Christi. The resulting Gnostic dissociation of the gods and their escha-
tological epiphanies at the end of times I want to interpret as an effort
to turn Jewish-Christian apocalypse against itself, in order to enable the
return of the Greek gods. The reconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophy
of language will serve as a summary to this theopolitical dramaturgy, as
it will lead to a series of delicate questions about the possibly hidden and
unspoken agenda of many of the positions in the present debate.
The Birth of the Tragedy Out of the Eschatological

Problem: From the Face of Christ to the Face of Being
From its inception, Heidegger’s thought moves towards an eschatologi-
cal telos which in fact represents the reverse of the Christian eschatol-
ogy of the Parousia. On the one hand, Heidegger’s early lectures on
Paul6 develop a phenomenological perspective of apostolic life in light
of the distress and emergency in the face of the temporal nearness of the
Parousia. On the other, it turns this Christian eschatology against itself,
when it radicalizes the apostolic liberation from all idols and strategies
of security as a necessary liberation from Parousia through an uncondi-
tioned exposure of the self to the experience of time and temporality.7
The distress caused by temporality and death opens the way to an under-
standing of the inner connection between being and time and to what
134 C. Schmidt
Heidegger calls the practical fulfilment of life, i.e., to a first indication

of the tragic form of life. The Kairos of being fulfils itself with the radi-
cal temporalization of being and existence as a final emancipation from
all the securities of Christian theology as an experience of the tragedy
of life. Heidegger’s demand, to recover the time of factual life from the
actual enactment of life itself, leads him to a reconstruction of Paul’s the-
ology as an ‘absolute transformation’ and more concretely as a turning to
God and a ‘turning away from idol images,’8 but this absolute transfor-
mation is described in terms of an absolute affliction through the experi-
ence of time, which Heidegger himself wishes to intensify to the ultimate
extreme. Man has to expose himself to this affliction and distress and this
means he has to decide between a life of peace, security and tranquil-
lity, and a confrontation with finitude, temporality and the suddenness
of death.9 If Christian religiosity represents a life of exposure to temporal
experience, Heidegger’s analysis announces a fundamental substitution,
which plays this temporality off against the Christian hope for redemp-
tion. In a cryptic notice to this lecture, Heidegger creates an interesting
term adding a question mark to it: ‘Christlessness (?) constitutive for the
decisive element of the Christian way.’10 The critique of all metaphysical
idols seizes the theological framework itself, if the eschatological problem
is thought to its end. Even if Heidegger insists at that stage with Luther
on a non-objectifying conception of God which is reflected in life, the
radicalization of temporal experience bursts this ultimate fundament of
belief too, and opens the horizon for the uncanny abyss of Being, the
sudden interruption in which the self finds itself exposed to herself and
to a tragic existence without God. Now the Antichrist, who according
to tradition appears in divine disguise, becomes Christ himself, who
wishes to redeem man from temporality and death. Christian eschatology
turned against itself becomes transformed into an eschatology of radical
time experience fulfilling itself as tragedy. Christian Parousia is replaced
by Greek tragedy.
Life is thus prefigured in an immanent eschatological tension between
the flight to the idols of metaphysics and theology and the heroic refusal
to give in to the seductions of theology. The transformation of the face
of Christ into the anonymous face of being will determine the decisive
and formative years of Heidegger’s phenomenology but it will lead, in
the years later, to a remarkable restitution of the face of being by the
face of the Greek gods. This face will be opposed then to the face of its
enemy, the Christ.
From the Eschatology of Being to the Tragedy

of Sovereign Politics: Oedipus Against Christ
This eschatological constellation of the tragedy of existence deter-

mines the different dramaturgies of the truth of being and the self from
Heidegger’s lectures on his differences with Husserl (1923/1925),
through Being and Time (1927) until ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’
(1930/1931). In these dramaturgies the reader can witness an intensi-
fication, which aims with growing urgency at the moment and Kairos
of this existence in time as a tragic existence. In all of these dramatur-
gies the self (Dasein) reveals being in its constitutive difference from
entities against all concealments, suppressions and exchanges of being
with an essence, i.e., a ground of being as idea, substance, God, sub-
ject. The self exposes itself to being in a heroic readiness to enter anxiety
and is thus determined to open itself to the original abyss and ground-
lessness of the ontological tragedy of being and temporality. The idea of
the original truth, the Greek Aletheia, as un-concealment of being and
self, bursts the traditional form of truth as adequacy between thinking
and being, the very paradigm of the subject which wishes to secure
itself through the accord with essence and ground against Being, i.e.,
truth as adequacy conceals truth as un-concealment. While the classical
subject from Descartes until Husserl is fleeing from the tragic abyss of
this being in a rational construct of the accessible and identical form or
essence of being by securing itself against all self-scepticism and despera-
tion through science, law and culture, the determined self, focusing on
uncanny being, appears as an ‘attack upon man,’ ‘driven out of everyday-
ness and driven back to the ground of things.’11
The early version of eschatology, developed against Paul as the folia
for an eschatology of the Kairos of tragic being, proves to be the first
effort to inscribe Nietzsche’s overcoming of metaphysics and theology
through Greek tragedy and pre-Socratic thinking in a phenomenology
of being and a dramaturgy of the self. At the same time this effort has
the tendency to unfold itself in the political dimension of this uncanni-
ness and freedom of the determined self as a tragedy against the idea of a
modern universal culture of demythologized technical rationality.
It is not entirely insignificant that the tragic self ‘attacks’ everyday
existence and expels it into the ground of beings on the one hand, while
on the other hand this everyday existence becomes entangled in a pro-
cess of alienation and desperation from itself, culminating in a ‘crash’ of
136 C. Schmidt
this self: ‘Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness
and nullity of inauthentic everydayness.’12 The return to tragedy aims
thus at a last eschatological dramaturgy, which either has to be fought
through in a fight and attack, or it will unfold itself from itself in a tragic
endgame of self-destruction. Similar to Nietzsche the main point is now
to differentiate between the dramaturgy which is conscious and the one
which is unconscious of itself. While the ‘subject’ suppresses the dimen-
sion of its tragic being, Dasein exposes itself to it consciously and is pre-
pared to be overwhelmed by the powers of Being.
The peak of this eschatology of tragic being occurs in the infamous
‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ from 1935, in which Heidegger has
embraced the National Socialist revolution as the Kairos of this tragic
ontology through the tragedy of Oedipus, while indulging in a rather
unprecedented rhetoric of violence. The historical moment of self-
empowerment of the Reich’s chancellor is identified here with the onto-
historical arrival and political fulfilment of Heidegger’s eschatology of
tragic being.
The heroically self-determined self exposes itself to the violent uncan-
niness and overwhelming power of being in order to conquer this vio-
lence with its own violent powers. The first Chorus from Sophocles’s
Antigone serves Heidegger as an example of the tragic uncanniness of
human existence itself, which marches out in order to overrun all bor-
ders, norms and forms of culture in a terrible single-handed effort.
But man is the strangest of all, not only because he passes his life amid
the strange understood in this sense but because he departs from his cus-
tomary, familiar limits, because he is the violent one, who, tending toward
the strange in the sense of the overpowering, surpasses the limit of the
familiar.13
We cannot develop here the context of the concepts of Physis, Logos

and Aletheia emerging from Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus
and Parmenides. The self is defined now as the very uncanny being
which responds to Physis as the ‘emerging presence’ and the appear-
ance of being, which reveals itself in an act of disclosure by the self as
Aletheia, i.e., as an uncovering of the concealed (= being). The politi-
cal translation of this uncanny Physis appears in the very ‘place’ of its
un-concealment, i.e., the Polis, in which the leader, together with the
thinker, the poet and the priest use violence and become the first order
of historical being as creator and as actors/perpetrators; ‘violent men’

who ‘use power, to become preeminent in historical being as creators,
as men of action. Preeminent in the historical place, they become at the
same time apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, and alien, with-
out issue amid the essent as a whole, at the same time without statute
and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as crea-
tors must first create all this.’14
Heidegger here demonstrates this tragic dimension of Greek being,
which leaves no doubt about its analogy with the Führer’s sovereign act
of self-empowerment, with the example of the tragedy of King Oedipus.
This hero serves as the paradigm for a radical passion of the disclosure
of truth and the self, which does not shrink back from the most horrible
truth. Here the self is determined to reveal truth and Aletheia against all
suppressions and concealments:
At the beginning Oedipus is the savior and lord of the state, living in an
aura of glory and divine favor. He is hurled out of his appearance, which
is not merely his subjective view of himself but the medium in which his
being there appears; his being as murderer of his father and desecrator of
his mother is raised to un-concealment. The way from the radiant begin-
ning to the gruesome end is one struggle between appearance (conceal-
ment and distortion) and concealment (being). The city is beset by the
secret of the murderer of Laius, the former king. With the passion of a
man who stands in the manifestness of glory and is a Greek, Oedipus sets
out to reveal this secret. Step by step, he must move into un-concealment,
which in the end, he can bear only by putting out his own eyes, i.e. by
removing himself from all light, by letting the cloak of night fall around
him, and, blind, crying out to the people to open all doors in order that a
man may be made manifest to them as what he is.15
The eschatology of being is accomplished here in the pre-Socratic trag-

edy of political existence as the full exodus from metaphysics and theol-
ogy. Heidegger deepens here the contrast between tragic existence and
the subject which searches for ontological shelter and security, when
he inscribes this contrast in a new register. The contrast appears now
between the Greek being of tragic uncanniness and the Jewish-Christian
tradition of monotheism, which refers being to a last ground and source,
the God of creation who is perceived now as the paradigm for all meta-
physics of the ground and security.16
138 C. Schmidt
‘Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth has the
answer to the question “Why are there essents rather than nothing?”
even before it is asked: everything that is, except God himself, has been
created by Him. God himself, the increate creator, “is”.’17 At the sum-
mit of tragic experience as the antithesis to biblical revelation, Heidegger
introduces the Greek gods who, like the Greek concept of logos, are
opposed to the monotheistic logos, the Logos Christi.
Logos in the New Testament does not, as in Heraclitus, mean the being
of the essent …; it means one particular essent, namely the son of God.
And specifically it refers to him in the role of mediator between God and
men. … How so? Because in the Greek translation of the Old Testament
(Septuagint) logos signifies the word, and what is more in the definite
meaning of command and commandment.18
With this opposition between the pre-Socratic and the Christian logos,
the points are moved for Heidegger’s political theology.
The Goddess of Aletheia against Christ—Heidegger’s

Theopolitics of Anti-Monotheism
The Oedipus tragedy represents the summit of eschatological fulfil-
ment, as it points already to the fall of tyranny and as such to the essen-
tial tragedy of all power. This tragedy of power becomes a metonymy
for Heidegger’s turn to a radical critique of all metaphysics as the ulti-
mate thinking of the ground for all power and violence. The heroic
attack against all forms and norms of metaphysical security serving as a
shelter for the subject of modernity leads now to a radical new insight
into the inner connection between power and metaphysics. It leads
to an ‘Oedipal’ self-disclosure: the sovereign self, as it has determined
Heidegger’s earlier thought against traditional metaphysics, is nothing
but the continuation of this very principle of metaphysics itself, which
intends to secure itself in an absolute and undoubtable ground.
It is the moment of his refrain from the real existing National
Socialism, which is reflected in his radical critique of Nietzsche’s will to
power and nihilism as the last configuration of metaphysics. Heidegger
will get engaged from now on in an effort to reformulate Nietzsche’s
program of overcoming metaphysics and theology through the true pre-
Socratic art of thinking against Nietzsche’s own conviction that he has
overcome nihilism and metaphysics. Heidegger counts Hitler’s regime

from now on to what he calls ‘vulgar national socialism,’ in order to
transfer the idea of the German revolution into another place, the vicin-
ity of idyllic being, coexistence and dialog which he wants to rethink
with the help of Hölderlin’s poetry.
Heidegger’s lecture on Schiller’s aesthetic theory from 1937/1938
appears in many aspects as the turning point to an aesthetical change of
course in his thinking.19 Now he demands, that ‘the extreme of think-
ing, the domination through pure reason should be ended.’20 Heidegger
takes a run with Schiller for a ‘strike against the (French) revolution,’ in
order to announce from here the ‘aesthetical condition’ as an ideal of
the ‘true mankind,’21 i.e., of the man who has overcome power and vio-
lence as they burst out in the revolution. Schiller’s critique of the French
Revolution is now the model for Heidegger’s overcoming of the German
Revolution, which the philosopher summarizes in the monologue of
Schiller’s dramatic hero Wallenstein (Scene 4) in the following words:
Is it possible?
It’s so? I could no longer what I would?
No longer draw back at my linking?
Must do the deed, because I thought of it?
And fed this heart here with a dream?
Because I did not scowl temptation from presence,
Dallied with thoughts of possible fulfillment
Commenced to movement, left all time uncertain,
And only kept the road, the access open?
By the great God of Heaven!
My serious meaning, it was ne’er resolved.
I but amused myself with thinking of it.
The free will tempted me, the great power to do,
Or not to do it. Was it criminal
To make the fancy minister to hope?
From the Oedipal self-disclosure to Wallenstein’s insight into the catas-

trophe of sovereign power, Heidegger’s thinking unfolds itself now in
light of his famous ‘turn’ to the radical critique of the will to power and
sovereignty as the fundamental motivation for all metaphysical think-
ing of the ground. This is the very moment where the Greek gods enter
Heidegger’s thought as the messengers of another advent of being
beyond power and violence. Heidegger’s exposition of Hölderlin’s
140 C. Schmidt
poetry signifies at the same time already the dissociation of the onto-
historical eschatology into an eschatology of power and violence and an
eschatology of the peaceful arrival of the gods. ‘Hölderlin shows, how
the event of the revolution, which one calls the French revolution, sinks
into the night and the true overcoming of the French revolution, the
true step “back” has begun.’22
Heidegger is in fact interested in saving what he conceives of as the
original idea of the German Revolution, whose actual eschatology he
now associates with the metaphysics of ground and power, i.e., with
monotheism. Heidegger’s turn is thus a turn to a theopolitics based on
two rather simple analogies. Different from the monotheistic God, who
through his calculating reason represents nature in its objectivity and
who is the model of man’s own sovereign power, the gods of the Physis
are names for a non-instrumental relation between man and nature.
Monotheism is the ground of sovereignty and of the Polis as power sys-
tem; poetic polytheism is the point of departure for the pacified man and
his other vicinity of undistorted human—divine communication.23
Leibnitz’s famous formula of the metaphysical god who, when calcu-
lating, creates the world, becomes an allegory for the technical rationality
which reveals the meaning of monotheism as a whole as the mecha-
nism which has to develop into a system of technological domination.
Nietzsche’s superman and the paradigm of will to power prove them-
selves to be the direct continuations of this monotheistic reason of tech-
nology and as such the last metamorphosis of God’s word and logos.
This word or logos Heidegger contrasts with the peaceful address of
Hölderlin’s gods and later of Parmenides’ goddess of truth, Aletheia.
Men have experienced much

And called many gods my name
Since we are an exchange of words
And can hear one from another
In the commentary to these verses of an unaccomplished poem from

Hölderlin, Heidegger contends: ‘Since language happens poetically
as dialog, the gods get a hearing and the world appears.’24 Against the
word as command and order, with which God creates the world and
places it to man’s disposal, the dialogical word represents the other onto-
logical word of the gods corresponding to the very Being and presence
of the world as it reveals itself.
This schematic opposition of (1) monotheism/metaphysics of

ground/power/technology against (2) polytheism/metaphysics of being
as being/the dismantling of power/poetry, corresponds to two different
concepts of truth; on the one hand (1) metaphysical truth as adequacy
and identity, which forces being into the categorical system of thinking,
on the other hand (2) Aletheia, which lets being be, so that it can arise
in its appearance and difference between being and presence. These two
modes of truth serve in Heidegger’s lecture on Parmenides (1942)25
as an occasion for a double deepening of the contrast between mono-
theism and polytheism, in so far as they not only represent two forms
of politics, but also two modes of the appearance of the face of being.
The modern sovereign state corresponds thus to the principle of sover-
eign self-assertion, which constitutes itself through the truth as certainty
and adequacy. The utopian vicinity presupposes the dismantling of the
sovereign subject, which does not resist the address of being and its
gods. Heidegger identifies this vicinity with what he terms now as the
‘demonic’ and in another German wording as the Un-geheures, usually
translated as ‘monstrous’ and ‘uncanny.’ But he attaches a quite different
meaning to this German word by reading it as the privation of geheuer,
meaning the usual and the common design of things in everyday life. So
the demonic as the Un-geheures becomes a synonym for the appearance
and the face of the gods who are supposed to open the eyes of man stuck
and lost in everyday life for being and otherness. Being is now thought
of in terms of the face of the other who reveals him / herself against
the will to power of the self, thus dismantling the self by turning his eye
towards her or him. Heidegger attaches the meaning of Un-geheures as
monstrous to the Christian ideas of demon and devil, while he identi-
fies this specific Un-geheures now with the un-perceptible and un-notice-
able being which hides and reveals itself always already in the realm of
the common and usual (the Geheures). The Un-geheures is read then as
the appearance of the face of the other, be it god or man, enraptured by
being.
The uncanny, as the Being that shines into everything ordinary, i.e. into
beings, and that in its shining often gazes beings like the shadow of a
cloud silently passing, has nothing in common with the monstrous or the
alarming. The uncanny is the simple, the insignificant, ungraspable by the
fangs of the will, withdrawing itself from all artifices of calculation, because
it surpasses all planning.26
142 C. Schmidt
The face of god who removes himself from the reach of manipulation,
represents a unique relation between the glance (Greek: Theao) and the
divine (Greek Theion) which opens the original but hidden being of the
space of undistorted communication. ‘The look, in unreflected letting
be encountered’27 reveals the person we encounter in his/her ground of
essence, only in order to let be simultaneously present in this disclosure
the very concealment and the abyss of this essence. Against the look of
the subject who, corresponding to the modern sovereign superman, con-
quers, overruns and attacks the face of the other, the original glance of
the divine human or the human god is a reverse of this look. By turning
his/her eyes towards the subject of power, it dismantles his/her will to
conquer the other and being:
Insofar as, in Nietzsche’s terms, man is the animal identified as the super-
man, the animal that has its essence in the will to power, the look of the
subject is the look of a being that advances by calculating, i.e. by con-
quering, outwitting, and attacking. The look of the modern subject is,
as Spengler said, following Nietzsche, the look of the predatory animal:
glaring.28
This phenomenology of the face, which in fact anticipates in many

ways Levinas’s phenomenology, culminated in the encounter with
Parmenides’s goddess Aletheia who reaches out for the philosopher, in
order to introduce him into the secrets of the truth of being. ‘And the
goddess received me with sympathy; she took my right hand in her hand;
then she spoke the word and addressed me…’29 The goddess of truth
who addresses the philosopher here, is, as Heidegger declares, truth
itself.
As divine Aletheia this goddess does not only represent the antithesis
to the modern subject to power, which affirms itself in the truth of the
identity of thinking and being, but Heidegger confronts this goddess of
dialogical encounter with the monotheistic counter-principle of truth as
adequacy and power, namely with the logos of Christ:
For Christian faith is proclaimed, in its totality, as ‘the’ veritas, ‘the’ verum,
‘the true’, since Christ says of himself: ego eimi me odos kai me aletheia
kai me zoon (John 14:6). Only the sound of this phrase is Greek. That is
why it could pass forthwith into the Latin language of the Vulgate: Ego
sum via, et veritas, et vita. Our words ‘truth’ and ‘true’ take their mean-
ing from verum and veritas as these prevail in the Latin language of the
Church.30
This Christ is in fact the master of truth, the Kyrios Christos and thus
the ultimate metaphysical opponent and eschatological adversary of the
goddess Aletheia:
Truth is, in the West, veritas. The true is that which, on various grounds,
is self-asserting, remains above, and comes from above; i.e. it is the com-
mand. But the ‘above’, the ‘highest’, and the ‘lord’ of lordship may appear
in different forms. For Christianity, the ‘Lord’ is God. ‘The Lord’ is also
reason. ‘The Lord’ is the ‘world spirit’. The Lord is ‘the will to power’.31
The monotheism of the Kyrios Christos accomplished itself in

Nietzsche’s sovereign principle of power and the statehood of sover-
eign self-affirmation, while Greek polytheism realizes itself in the vicin-
ity of being as dialog beyond domination. The former antithesis between
Oedipus and Christ of the first political dramaturgy is now replaced by
the theopolitical antithesis between the goddess Aletheia and the Kyrios
Christos, in whom the principle of command and order figure as the
principles of totalitarian dictatorship. ‘The modern systems of total dicta-
torship stem from Jewish Christian monotheism.’32
At the same time these theologies and eschatologies stand for the final
return of the face, which as the face of Christ has been extinguished by
the anonymous face of Being. The face of the divine Aletheia now repre-
sents the true face of being which will once reappear with the final decline
of the historical paradigm of Kyrios Christos and monotheistic rule in the
occident in a Kairos of the return of being and the Greek gods.
At the same time this dramaturgy imagines a restitution of the flown
gods, which presupposes the destruction of the Kyrios of monothe-
ism. But since the Greek gods have renounced the principle of power
and domination—they are metonyms of a radical pacifism—they can-
not become subjects of a revolutionary resistance against the totalitar-
ian regime of monotheism or be mobilized to actively help the victims
of this regime. They would, according to Heidegger, only submit them-
selves to the principle of power and repeat its nihilism. Instead the self
prepares for an exodus from the regime of metaphysics.
144 C. Schmidt
So how does Heidegger actually think the end of this eschatology of

totalitarian power and monotheism will come? How are the Greek gods
of art and poetry supposed to de-activate the principle of sovereignty?
The Apocalypse of Political Monotheism

The answers to these questions can be found in Heidegger’s analysis of
Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power, which is supposed to be the
secularization of the monotheistic logos as command. The will to power
has to intensify to the utmost possible in an eschatology of destruction
and extermination, in order finally to destroy itself in an apocalypse of
the monotheism of command. In other words: the will to power devel-
ops its specific logic of permanent growth which cannot but lead to self-
destruction. The metapolitical problem of monotheism proves to be in
its final essence the principle of exterminating self-extermination which,
with the Greek exodus from metaphysics, has to be left over to itself, so
that any intervention is meaningless and aimless. In the same way the
early Heidegger turns Christian eschatology against itself, in order to
break it with the Kairos of the advent of tragic being, the late Heidegger
aims at the solution of the problem of metaphysics, by turning monothe-
ism against itself in an apocalyptic gesture. The apocalypse of monothe-
ism fulfils itself at the moment that the tragedy of power fulfils itself.
Let us recapitulate the single steps of this last, immanent eschatol-
ogy of the metaphysics of power as the condition of the possibility of
this ‘liberation theology’ of the Greek Occident. This process of liber-
ation coincides with the dramaturgies of Oedipus and Wallenstein and
belongs to the critical exposition of Nietzsche and the problem of power,
which in fact leads to the identification of God’s logos as command
and Nietzsche’s will to power. This identification will lead later to the
new astonishing definition of monotheism as an atheism which actually
aims at the destruction of Greek theopoetics. Nietzsche’s metaphysics
only reveals the last secret, the hidden motivation of all metaphysics as
monotheism and the principle of permanent accumulation of power and
command:
The will is not a desire and not a simple striving for something, rather will
is in itself command … command has its essence in that fact that the com-
manding master in conscious that he has at his disposal the possibilities of
effecting action.33
Precisely because the self commands itself but has to obey the c ommand
at the same time, the commanding self is always already ahead of itself
and on the way to overcome itself. Thus, the will is the principle of per-
manent intensification, since it wills itself as will: ‘Will has already what
it wills. For will wills its willing. Its will is what it has willed…. Will
wills itself. It exceeds itself.’34 The will aims at a becoming stronger and
this means to ever more power: ‘Power is only then and only as long
power, as it remains an accumulation of power and commands a “more
than power”.’ By this logic, the will to power does not only unfold itself
in a permanent increase of power but it aims at the destruction of all
other powers, since it cannot tolerate any external power. Where the
essence of power consists in the overcoming of itself, there is no external
power anymore. ‘Power aims at the most extreme Either Or … The One
(power) has to destroy the Other.’35 In his treatise about the ‘essence
of power’ (1938–1940),36 Heidegger deepens this immanent eschatol-
ogy of power, doubtless in light of his more and more critical perspective
on National Socialism, too. The logic of power, like the Nazi regime, is
heading towards the ‘highest and essential stage of power,’ when power
alone determines ‘what is right’ and reduces its claim to power on pure
biological racism, which is in no need of any justification, but rather
empowers itself to absolute violence and destruction. The age of power
according Heidegger has to unfold itself in monstrous crimes and a pro-
cess of annihilation. Thus, this kind of regime has to turn to a permanent
terror of devastation and a final extermination of all political fundaments,
in order to annihilate itself with this total devastation. The essence of
power is self-annihilating annihilation.37
Power is inseparable from its claim to exclusiveness, it is in its essence
‘monistic’ and ‘monological,’ it is monotheistic by nature and realizes
itself as sovereign monarchy. Like God, who produces the world with
his logos, i.e., through his clear and distinct idea and representation of
the world, the sovereign power of the subject aims at a full manipula-
tion of its objects through their clear representation. Through will and
representation it represents reality in the mode of pure objectivity, in
order to represent, produce and reproduce these objects with technol-
ogy. The machinery of this power as the principle of total disposal over
the world seized, subdues and destroys everything that does not obey
its principle and rule of a forced identity between thought and being.
Man who himself has become a function of the will to power, is already
146 C. Schmidt
radically functionalized in his individuality and potentiality before he is

annihilated physically in this process of objectification.
The gigantic machinery of power and permanent augmentation of
power unfolds itself in the same process of self-annihilation as the mon-
otheism which reveals its inner essence in the apocalypse. Heidegger
constructs the very end of metaphysics in a last constellation of will and
representation, in which man, defined by metaphysics as the ‘animal
rationale,’ is projected onto the absolute subject of Nietzsche’s will and
Hegel’s absolute consciousness as the apocalyptical beast, the Leviathan,
who emerges from the abyss of chaos and carries out his work of destruc-
tion of the world. The National Socialist activism as ‘total,’ ‘imperial’
and ‘planetarian’ technology is the last onto-historical appearance of this
apocalyptic configuration and final dramaturgy. The apocalyptical animal
rationale, the double essence of Nietzsche’s will and Hegel’s conscious-
ness is now glorified and celebrated as the ultimate ‘beast of prey,’ and
appears in Nazi art as ‘the manhood of the man with gigantic muscles,
monstrous sexual organs and empty brutal faces.’ The apocalypse fulfils
itself at this moment when it turns against itself and is doomed to perish.
Apocalypse and World Jewry

In the Black Notebooks Heidegger deepens his critique of monotheism
through a radical anti-Judaism, unheard of until now. There can be no
doubt, this anti-Judaism, however disgusting and horrifying, is a direct
continuation of Heidegger’s critique of monotheism and the Christian
logos as the principle of power, production and command.38 But pre-
cisely because Judaism is the source of monotheism and its logos, it
can only be another aspect of the tendency of power to destroy itself.
According to this logic Heidegger suggested the perverted idea, that,
since monotheism is the source of National Socialism, Judaism and
World Jewry are identical to the National Socialist system!
Judaism is thus another part of the apocalyptic dramaturgy of power,
it belongs to the realm of the apocalyptical animal rationale, the absolute
beast indulging in destruction and self-destruction. ‘The temporal power
accumulation of Judaism has its reason in the fact, that occidental meta-
physics, especially in its modern configuration, offered a place of attach-
ment for the extension of a rather empty rationality and the capacity of
calculation, which arranged shelter of spirit for itself.’39 The Jews are in
this sense the more shrewd monotheists because they seem—in some
mysterious way—to have come from outside and because they are not
engaged in an open activity of their power. ‘World Jewry rather keeps in
the background and remains untouchable,’40 as the Jews represent the
paradigmatic people of the principle of race, the complementary to the
National Socialist principle of race. ‘The Jews live with their excellency in
calculation according to the principle of race for the longest time, which
is the reason for their heavy resistance against its unlimited application.’41
At the climax of this systematic logic of madness the National Socialist
self-empowerment proves to be ‘only’ the other side of a supposed self-
empowerment of World Jewry. Both are the logical deployments of the
same principle of power of monotheism, as the National Socialist poli-
tics of exclusion, persecution and extermination of the Jews receives
its onto-historical legitimization here. Christianity, as the prefigura-
tion of National Socialist technology and violence, is grounded in the
other power of monotheism of Judaism as the ultimate enemy. Both
Christianity and Judaism are the powers of evil monotheism culminating
in National Socialist racist technology. If the Nazis strive for the extermi-
nation of the Jews, they in fact represent the same principle of monothe-
ism, and in this sense their war can only be a war of self-destruction. Still,
Heidegger seems to attach to the Jews another sociological status as out-
siders who come from outside, in order to take over the rule in techno-
logical manipulation of modern subjectivity. Although originating from
the same monotheistic source they can thus appear as ultimate enemies,
confronting themselves in an apocalyptic battle, aiming at the destruc-
tion of each other.
Precisely because annihilation is essentially self-annihilation, this
dramaturgy does not allow for any differentiation between perpetrator
and victim: the victims are the secret perpetrators, as the perpetrators are
the true victims. The logic of power unfolds itself in the differentiation
between power and powerlessness, which can be nothing else but pre-
vented power and thus can be itself only an annihilating self-annihilation.
In this (perverted) sense National Socialism and World Jewry are syn-
onyms of the same machinery of violence and destruction and can be
exchanged. ‘When the essential Jewish principle in the metaphysical
sense fights against the Jewish principle, the climax of self destruction in
history is reached.’42
From the perspective of this Gnostic configuration of the depraved
Jewish-Christian God of power and of technological action, and the
Greek gods of the peaceful vicinity of being, the collapse of the Third
148 C. Schmidt
Reich symbolizes only another chapter in the final chapters of the escha-
tology of modernity. Heidegger indeed describes the liberation through
the allied forces as the last act of terror against the German people. To be
sure, in the Black Notebooks, Heidegger defines the concentration camp
as the place of ultimate terror and extermination but he recognizes, at
the same time, in the camp a kind of ‘paradigm of modernity’ on the
whole.43 The true terror unfolds now in Germany, ‘in the occupied
Germany with the newly activated death machine … That this machin-
ery should be the punishment for national socialism, or just the result of
the will to revenge, this only a few stupid people will believe for a longer
time.’44
The central point here is that, in light of this last apocalyptical con-
frontation between the peaceful Greek gods and the ‘animal rationale’
from the abyss, any resistance of the victim and of the persons, who with
their civil courage come to the help of the victims, would only lead back
into the realm of darkness and its eternal cyclic destiny. It could only ini-
tiate a new action of power or another act of senseless self-destruction.
Even the enormous suffering of the victims is not meant to lead to any
resistance, ‘because as suffering, it is passive and as such a counter situa-
tion to action and thus it is experienced together with the same essential
area of the will to will.’45
The Gnostic dissociation of the times is not only the last configura-
tion of Heidegger’s eschatology, it points to the supplementation of the
Jewish-Christian canon of monotheism by a new Greek–German canon
of theopolitics. Where Christianity understands itself as the fulfilment
and realization of Judaism, Heidegger appoints the German Volk as the
true community for the realization of Greek theopoetics. The German
people become the subject of the suppressed ontological redemption, in
fact they become the newly chosen people and finally the messianic ‘rest,’
which should bring the Greek light of redemption to them.
Transitions Between Modernity and Postmodernity, or:

The Concealed Revelation of the Scandal
The apocalypse is, on the one hand, the last chapter of a quite excep-
tional critique of metaphysics and the National Socialist regime. From
here Heidegger develops his countermove of a peaceful vicinity for dia-
logical encounter from face to face as a trans-metaphysical dialogism
reminding us of Martin Buber’s dialogical thinking and Emanuel

Levinas’s phenomenology of the face.
But at the same time Heidegger translates this radical detachment
from Nazism, power,violence and biological racism into a theopoliti-
cal legitimization of the National Socialist obsession with the chosen
German people and the destruction of World Jewry as the associate of
the National Socialist politics of destruction.
This sharp anti-Judaism appears especially after Heidegger’s dis-
sociation from a direct engagement with the party. It becomes intensi-
fied with the theopoetic transformation of his political eschatology.
After the war this anti-Judaism becomes replaced by anti-Bolshevism,
anti-Americanism and other pre-war forms of his anti–liberalism, all of
them configurations of the technological framework of the epoch, the
Gestell. But the basic anti-monotheism is preserved, if sometimes rather
beneath the surface of discourse. Although unnoticed it is conclusively
introduced into his later philosophy of language. Here Heidegger con-
trasts the Geviert, the Fourfold of world, heaven, gods and mortals,
with the Gestell (the technological ‘frame’), the vicinity of the Greek
gods with the technological system of domination, in order to concre-
tize this contrast in two basic attitudes towards language. ‘Language
speaks,’ Heidegger writes, and is thus in no need of any ground, ori-
gin or beginning which would explain its existence. This speaking lan-
guage is the bringing into presence of the pure and anonymous ‘There
is’ (Es gibt)46—it corresponds with the liberation from ground, ori-
gin and foundation. This language is to be differentiated from the lan-
guage grounded in the word of God, as it would be an error to think
that ‘the word of language is of a divine origin. According to the Gospel
of John, the word was at the beginning with God.’47 Speaking language
leads to the experience of ‘departing the ground’, i.e., man, who listens
to language, exposes himself to the experience of a dispossession of the
ground, and the concept of a god of creation, so that the ‘self enters a
condition of floating above the abyss.’ This abyss reminds the reader of
the condition before the actual creation in the Bible, the Tohu wa Bohu:
‘When we enter the abyss, which this sentence names, we do not tum-
ble down into the void. We fall into the height, whose highness opens a
depth.’48 Here the space of the divine vicinity opens itself for an encoun-
ter with the Greek gods. ‘In speaking itself, the nearing of the gods
occurs. Speaking is the letting appear of that which the speakers view,
because they have already seen it.’49
150 C. Schmidt
The liberated sign, the signifier emancipated from the transcendental

speaker, the pure and meaningless sign, they have become the groundless
indication for the last theopolitical difference between monotheism and
theopoetics, Christianity and Greek Polytheism, the God of violence and
the gods of peaceful plurality. This is Heidegger’s codified and encoded
signal, which will announce the turn of the paradigm from modernity to
postmodernity—the final emancipation from the power of monotheism
and monological modernity—by suppressing the apocalyptic dramaturgy
that made it possible.
Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism has laid bare the
antisemitic abyss of his anti-monotheism. It is difficult to understand
what Heidegger wanted to achieve with the publication of the Black
Notebooks. To be sure, even the most loyal disciples of Heidegger will
have a hard time coping with the new picture that emerges, namely that
Heidegger’s farewell to metaphysics was not the final departure from
National Socialism, but only the prolog to his theopolitics of anti-mon-
otheism and radical anti-Judaism. What message did Heidegger want to
send the generations after him from his grave? Did he really believe that
over time, there would be a kind of verification of his agenda, that he,
after all, would have been right?
The new edition of the Heidegger scandal basically reproduces the
pattern of the previous scandals, delivering additional reasons for rejec-
tion to those who were already convinced about the scandal, and driv-
ing the adherents into an ever more complicated position of defence and
apologetics, albeit accompanied by a clear rejection of Heidegger’s poli-
tics and antisemitism. Although Heidegger’s utterances about Jews were
known previously, the publication of Heidegger’s openly antisemitic
invectives makes any full-fledged apologetics absolutely impossible. One
of the consequences of Heidegger’s blatant anti-Judaism is that it closes
the door for one of the established paths of defence, namely to main-
tain the value of Heidegger’s critique of technology and the systems of
power which was directed against the National Socialist regime. Even the
last resort, to separate the philosopher from his philosophy, has become
impossible after the publication of the Black Notebooks. Is this then the
final chapter of the affair?
Perhaps not. There is another intriguing aspect to the affair, which
is hardly mentioned. It concerns Heidegger’s anti-monotheism and
his idea of an innocent community based on polytheistic aesthetics,
which both are necessarily based on the missing link of anti-Judaism.

Heidegger’s anti-Catholicism and anti-monotheism themselves, before
they revealed their immanent anti-Judaism, were no public issue, if they
were noticed at all in public debates on Heidegger. They were basically
considered legitimate, and, in any case monotheism had become, in wide
circles of the European intelligentsia, a synonym for archaic violence and
domination. Therefore, one could presuppose only a clear public consent
with this position without Heidegger’s name being associated with it.
Similarly, the aesthetical counter-discourse on power and violent
monotheism, which adopts a kind of absolute pacified aesthetical con-
sciousness in a possible coalition with polytheism as the ideal form for
pluralistic liberalism, can be seen in line with Heidegger’s theopoetics,
as a kind of late descendant, too. Monotheism, in this formation of dis-
course and intellectual mentality, carries the entire guilt for all evil and
violence, a criticism that does not affect the aesthetical innocence of the
radical anti-monotheist. Both anti-monotheism and aesthetical innocence
adapt themselves to the new realm of the sign and its structural differ-
ence, with which the victory of postmodern thinking seemed to have
rehabilitated Heidegger’s thinking for some time, without, of course,
mentioning the abyss of the apocalyptic conditions of the possibility of
this coalition.
And is anti-Judaism itself, the thesis that Jewish monotheism is basi-
cally a genuine system of violence, such a strange element in this con-
figuration? Has not anti-Judaism established itself silently and underhand
in this holy–unholy alliance between anti-monotheism and the innocent
aestheticism of a certain liberal average consciousness nowadays on the
way to declare the concentration camp as the ‘paradigm of modernity’?
Is it necessary to develop an explicit theory of the ‘Mosaic distinction’50
or to celebrate the hymn of pluralistic political polytheism,51 in order to
recognize this clandestine element as the hidden missing link and back-
ground of these two tendencies?
Could it be then, that the Heidegger scandal is only the surface of
another scandal, which is concealed? Is there a kind of true scandal
underneath, a scandal which reveals and hides itself as the ‘event’ of pre-
sent everyday metaphysics—the advent of a radical aestheticism of inno-
cence in coalition with pitiless anti-monotheism which basically accuses
monotheism as being the source of all evil, while still being cautious to
talk about the Jewish origins of this monotheism?
152 C. Schmidt
Notes
1. Cf. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press 1968). Among the numer-
ous accounts on Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism and the rela-
tion to his philosophy, see Victor Farias, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Paris:
Verdics, 1987), Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu einer
Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus Verla, 1988), and Pierre Bourdieu, The
Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991). Considering directly the publication
of the Black Notebooks, see Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der
Jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014).
I continue a line which was developed by Hugo Ott, who stressed
Heidegger’s growing radical opposition to Catholicism and Christianity
as one of the main components of his philosophy and politics leading to
his turn to Nazism, and culminating in radical anti-monotheism, part of
which was his open and hidden anti-Judaism. This line of reading seems
to be able to produce an astonishing coherence in Heidegger’s agenda,
through the concept of ‘metapolitics’ which Heidegger employs as the
direct consequence of his metaphysics.
GA 94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 116. References to Heidegger’s
work will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume num-
ber. Translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.
3. Cf. Erik Peterson, ‘Monotheism as a Political Problem,’ in Theological
Tractates (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 105–142. In the
same book and in the same year (1935), Peterson published his ‘Book
on the Angels,’ which is the complementary to his critique of Schmitt’s
political theology.
4. Cf. Carl Schmitt: Political Theology. Four Chapters on Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005).
6. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias
Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010).
7. Cf. Ben Vedder, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion. From God to the Gods
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 268–270, and Judith
Wolff, Heidegger’s Eschatology. Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s
Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84, which endeav-
ours to read Heidegger’s early thought as an ‘eschatology without escha-
ton.’ This coincides with my reading, but while Wolff develops this idea
in the context of Heidegger’s early thought, I try to reconstruct this

figure of thought in much of his later thinking.
8. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 66.
9. Ibid., 73.
10. Ibid., 138. The question mark appears in the text itself, probably indi-
cating either that the person who reproduced the lecture was not sure
whether this was what Heidegger actually said or that the text of this lec-
ture is not entirely clear here.
11. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans.
William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995), 21.
12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 223.
13. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 151.
14. Ibid., 152–153.
15. Ibid., 106–107.
16. Hugo Ott, in Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu einer Biographie, 258–262,
reports a revealing incident which is directly connected to Heidegger’s
An Introduction to Metaphysics, where the philosopher criticizes a book
entitled ‘What is man?’ and concerned with Catholic Christian anthro-
pology (cf. An Introduction to Metaphysics, 142). Heidegger does not
mention the name. The author’s name is Theodor Haecker, a Catholic
essayist who opposed Nazism from the beginning and later became
one of the inspiring figures for the resistance group ‘White Rose’ from
Munich. Haecker’s book was published in Leipzig in 1933 and repub-
lished in 1935. In the same year, Theodor Haecker gave a lecture at the
University of Freiburg and was expelled by Nazi students who shouted:
‘Down with the Black dogs! Hang the Jews!’ In an article published
shortly after this event in the Nazi student organ, one can read: ‘We
fight against political Catholicism, Jesuitism, against Judaism and the
Freemasons.’ Heidegger’s anonymous mentioning of the book is all the
more revealing since Haecker in fact attacks—among the philosophies
he identifies with Nazi anti-Humanism—Oswald Spengler’s book Der
Mensch und die Technik in order to demonstrate the inner connection
between totalitarian politics and Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to
power and technology. In the following years, Heidegger would organize
his thought precisely along these parameters. Cf. Theodor Haecker, Was
ist der Mensch? (Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1933) and Oswald Spengler, Der
Mensch und die Technik (Munchen: CH Beck, 1931).
17. Heidegger, An Introduction into Metaphysics, 6–7.
18. Ibid., 134.
154 C. Schmidt
19. See Odo Marquard, ‘Der Schritt in die Kunst. Über Schiller und
Heidegger,’ which is the afterword to Martin Heidegger, Übungen für
Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen
(Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2005) 191–206. Marquard sug-
gests a nearly perfect analogy between Schiller’s disappointment of the
French Revolution and Heidegger’s retreat form the Nazi regime. Both
turn to the arts and aesthetics in order to at once retreat from, and pre-
pare for, a revolution of another kind, purportedly loyal to the original
agenda. Marquard himself repudiates both revolution and aesthetical
retreat from politics to an anti-politics. Against both he argues in favor of
a political attitude of ‘civil courage’ within liberal democracy, an attitude
which does not let itself be seduced by eschatological promises.
20. Martin Heidegger, Übungen für Anfänger. Schillers Briefe über die ästhe-
tische Erziehung des Menschen, 66.
21. Ibid., 67.
22. Ibid., 133.
23. Otto Pöggeler, in Neue Wege mit Heidegger (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1992),
stresses again and again the inner connection between Heidegger’s trans-
formation after his direct engagement with Nazi politics and the turn
to the Greek gods, possibly suggesting that one could read the ‘turn’
in terms of a political theology. He does not forget to demonstrate that
Heidegger’s famous last God ‘is the totally other God’ who has to be
understood as against ‘the former, especially the Christian God’ (ibid.,
403). The strong opposition to Catholic Christianity might explain, at
least partly, that Heidegger hardly mentions Judaism except as the foun-
dation of monotheism. The repression of Judaism should thus be seen
as part of an intentional dismissal of Catholicism. In this sense Marlène
Zarader’s The Unthought Debt—Heidegger and the Hebraic Tradition
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) is based on a problematic
hermeneutics which reduces Heidegger’s move towards the Greek gods
to an intentional ‘effacement of the Hebrew’ (202), and thus tends to
neglect the clear line of Heidegger’s offensive opposition to Catholic
Christianity. Although his antisemitism certainly has other social and cul-
tural sources, his anti-Judaism seems to be a direct consequence of his
anti-Christianity.
24. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936–1968),
GA 4 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2012), 40.
25. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
26. Ibid., 101.
27. Ibid., 103.
28. Ibid., 108. Heidegger mentions here the predatory animal that Spengler
defines as the essence of technological humanity in his Der Mensch und
die Technik (1931). It was actually Theodor Haecker, the Catholic essay-
ist, who in his ‘What is man?’ (1933) recognized in Spengler’s concept of
this animal the quintessence of the National Socialist revolution which he
opposed to absolutely.
29. Heidegger, Parmenides, 4.
30. Ibid., 46.
31. Ibid., 53.
33. Martin Heidegger, ‘Nietzsche’s word God is dead,’ in Off the Beaten
Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Heyns (Cambridge: Cambridge
34. Ibid.
35. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seins, GA 69 (Frankfurt: Vittorio
36. Ibid., 62–66.
37. Ibid., 76–77.
38. The Black Notebooks repeatedly lump together Catholic Christianity
and Judaism as the agents of monotheistic totalitarianism. Compare
Heidegger, GA 94, 184, and Heidegger, GA 97, 438: ‘The modern sys-
tems of totalitarian dictatorship stem from Jewish Christian Monotheism.’
39. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941),
40. Ibid., 262.
41. Ibid., 56.
43. See Heidegger, GA 97, 99 and especially 89: ‘The self-eliminating nihilism
becomes final only, when it has reached the security of deception, which
allows it, to take advantage of belief, moral and Christianity…. The terror
of this final nihilism is even more uncanny than all the monstrosity of the
hangmen and the servants of the concentration camps.’
45. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, GA 67 (Frankfurt:
46. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language,’ in On the way to language,
trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), 88.
47. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Sprache’, in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt:
48. Ibid., 13.
49. Ibid., 219.
156 C. Schmidt
50. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western

Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Assmann fol-
lows Freud’s speculation about Moses’s Egyptian background, in order to
point to the violent aspects of the monotheism of the pharaoh Echnaton.
To be sure, Assmann is certainly no antisemite in the manner of Michail
Bakunin and Heidegger, who created an inherent connection between
Jewish monotheism and violence.
51. See, e.g., Odo Marquardt, ‘Polytheismus—auch eine politische
Theologie,’ in Jacob Taubes (ed.), Der Fürst dieser Welt—Carl Schmitt
und die Folgen (Paderborn: Verlag Schöningh, 1985), 77–89. The post-
Nietzschean climate of postmodern critique associates itself easily with
polytheism and re-appreciations of mythology, like in Paul Veyne, Did the
Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Works Cited
Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Translated by Peter
Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Fariás, Victor. Heidegger et le Nazisme. Paris: Verdics, 1987.
Haecker, Theodor. Was ist der Mensch? Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1933.
———. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967.
———. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936–1968). GA 4. Edited by
Friedrich-Wilhelm v. Herrmann. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012.
———. The Fundamental Conceps of Metaphysics. Translated by William McNeill
and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
———. Die Geschichte des Seins. GA 69 Edited by Peter Trawny. Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1998.
———. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
———. Metaphysik und Nihilismus. GA 67. Edited by Hans-Joachum Friedrich.
———. ‘The Nature of Language.’ In On the way to language. Translated by
Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971, pp. 57–108.
———. ‘Nietzsche’s word God is dead.’ In Off the beaten track. Translated by
Julian Young and Kenneth Heyns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2002, pp. 157–199.
———. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz.

———. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Translated by Matthias Fritsch
and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010.
———. ‘Die Sprache.’ In Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1959,
pp. 9–34.
Peter Trawny. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 2014.
———. Überlegungen XII–XV: (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941). GA 96. Edited by
———. Übungen für Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die ästhtische Erziehung des
Menschen. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2005.
Marquard, Odo. ‘Der Schritt in die Kunst. Über Schiller und Heidegger.’ In
Martin Heidegger, Übungen für Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die ästh-
tische Erziehung des Menschen. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2005,
pp. 191–206.
———. ‘Polytheismus—auch eine politische Theologie.’ In Der Fürst dieser
Welt—Carl Schmitt und die Folgen. Edited by Jacob Taubes. Paderborn:
Verlag Schöningh, 1985, pp. 77–89.
Ott, Hugo. Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu einer Biographie. Frankfurt: Campus
Verlag, 1988.
Peterson, Erik. ‘Monotheism as a Political Problem.’ In Theological Tractates,
Stanford University Press, 2014, pp. 105–142.
Pöggeler, Otto. Neue Wege mit Heidegger. Freiburg Breisgau: K. Alber, cop.
1992.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on Sovereignty. Translated by
George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Spengler, Oswald. Der Mensch und die Technik. München: CH Beck, 1931.
Trawny, Peter. Heidegger und der Mythos der Jüdischen Weltverschwörung.
Frankfurt: Klostermann 2014.
Vedder, Ben. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion. From God to the Gods. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2007.
Veyne, Paul. Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive
Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Wolff, Judith. Heidegger’s Eschatology. Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s
Early Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Zarader, Marlène. The Unthought Debt—Heidegger and the Hebraic Tradition.
CHAPTER 7
Love Strong as Death: Jews Against

Heidegger (On the Issue of Finitude)
Agata Bielik-Robson
In his critique of Heidegger in Entre Nous, Levinas complains that in his

death-dominated and death-oriented vision of the finite life there is no
place for being-with-the-other. Sein-zum-Tode, being-unto-death, is a
solitary enterprise, and the only Mitsein (being-with) which Heidegger
envisages boils down in the end, as Levinas maliciously remarks, to
Zusammenmarchieren, marching-with: an army of isolated Daseins exer-
cising their authenticity in their totally mobilised Todesbereitschaft, ‘readi-
ness for death.’1
Levinas could not have known Heidegger’s private notes, which he
began to compose in the early 1930s, but his intuition turned out to
be right. His finely tuned philosophical ear let him hear, under the sur-
face of seemingly innocent phenomenological description of Dasein,
the thundering rhythm of marching steps: Heidegger’s own war against
Jews, waged in the name of the purity of being. He would thus most
probably have no doubts, while reading Heidegger’s remark from
1942—‘Within the time-space of the Christian West, that is, metaphys-
ics, Jewry is the principle of destruction’2—that Heidegger offers here
A. Bielik-Robson (*) 
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

160 A. Bielik-Robson
nothing short of a philosophical justification for the Holocaust. To

define it as Selbstvernichtung der Juden, a ‘self-destruction of the Jews’,
implies that the Shoah is self-inflicted: it is the principle of metaphysical
violence which, inevitably, must turn against itself and end in an ‘onto-
logical massacre’.
Is this accusation too swift? Some say it is, pointing to the fact that
Heidegger’s Antisemitism was of a cultural, spiritual, even metaphysi-
cal type, which could not have condoned the racial extermination of
the Jews undertaken on purely biological basis.3 But this excuse is
a poor one. Even after his disillusion with the Nazi movement, which
turned out to be more dependent on the modern power of technol-
ogy and calculation than Heidegger initially expected, he still observes
the destruction of the world-Jewry with a vengeful Schadenfreude—
precisely because it is self-destruction: done if not directly with Jewish
‘hands’, then at least by the Jewish ‘spirit’, which infected the Western
Seinsdenken with its violent principle of ‘machination’. Already the last
pages of the 1941 notebook, which state that ‘the question concern-
ing the role of world Jewry is not a racial but a metaphysical question’,4
announce that his disappointment with the Nazi politics derives from it
not being radical enough: its crude biologism can itself be accused of too
much contamination with the Jewish ‘principle of destruction’ which
stands behind the scientific manipulation of beings. But the fragment
from 1942, which talks openly about Selbsvernichtung der Juden, leaves
no doubts: even if the extermination of the Jews may itself be a wrong
answer to the ‘metaphysical question’ posed by the existence of the
Jews, it is, in the end, their own fault.5 The Judaic spirit of violence and
revenge finally turns on itself—and if it is one of the ways in which being
achieves purification (Reinigung des Seins), so be it. What needs to be
destroyed is not the ‘Jewish race’, but the spiritual principle of Judaism
with its infectious influence on Western modernity. Yet, if this adversarial
principle goes down together with the race—then, all the better.6
There is nothing new or original in this position of deep cultural, spir-
itual, metaphysical or seinsgeschichtlich type of Antisemitism.7 Already
Hegel, in his early-theological essay, ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its
Fate’, prophesized the self-inflicted demise of the principle of ‘Jewish
antithesis’ embodied by Abraham: the stubborn ugly and unloving man
who challenges the great immanent powers of earth, nature, and fate
in the name of his distant and transcendent God, and who will one day
bring just retribution of these powers on his progeny.8 Also Nietzsche,
7 LOVE STRONG AS DEATH: JEWS AGAINST HEIDEGGER … 161
who attributed to the Jews the priestly-ascetic ‘spirit of revenge’, antic-

ipated, more or less impatiently, the apocalyptic moment in which the
negation will turn upon itself.9 Heidegger, who never stopped perceiving
the ‘metaphysical Jew’ as a virulent agent disturbing the balance of the
fourfold, merely treads in the footsteps of his mighty precursors—and if
he criticizes them, it is always in the name of them not yet being pure
enough, still too verjudet in their infatuation with the ‘gigantism’ of the
infinite power of negation, cultivated by the Jews.10 He is convinced that
only his new philosophy of finitude (Endlichkeit), which curtails the fan-
tasy of subjective omnipotence by setting the firm limit in the form of
Sein-zum-Tode, will pave the way to the truly entjudet, ‘Jew-free’, medi-
tation on being that will teach us how to build, dwell and think in the
harmony with being’s ‘gentle sway’: without violence deriving from the
hubristic negation of the finite life.
Heidegger stated in his decree concerning publication of the Black
Notebooks that the times were still not ready to understand him. But
the future—so Heidegger hopes—may see his efforts differently: the dis-
appearance of the Jews, together with their violent principle of destruc-
tion directed against being, will spell the coming of a new era in which
Sein will reign purified as a Walten ohne Gewalt, gentle sway without vio-
lence. If the ‘new god’, which Contributions to Philosophy announces, is
to come, the Jewish paradigm of Gewalt—violence, power, abstraction,
and machination—must vanish first. The Nazi apocalypse, therefore, is
a war against war: a destruction of the principle of destruction. Even if it
is too overtaken by the militant machination itself, it is still doing some-
thing very right and proving the essential ‘inner truth and greatness’ of
the Nazi movement, eternally valid despite its shortcomings.11
And if Heidegger’s thought continues to inspire today, after all the
revelations of his unabashed Nazi involvement, it is precisely because of
what appears as his valid diagnosis of the technological abuses of moder-
nity and his even more valid promise of der neue Anfang, the ‘new
beginning’: the new thinking of finitude which will overcome the hubris-
tic ‘gigantism’ of modern Machenschaft, supposedly represented by the
‘metaphysical Jew’, and return to ‘the blessing of limits’. Late-modern
thought wants to think a ‘finite thinking’ and the only possibility of
doing so appears to be offered by Heidegger’s firm and decisive return
to Endlichkeit: life mortal and because of that limited in all its aspira-
tions, no longer wishing to ‘step out of nature’, and reconciled with its
immanent conditioning.
It is precisely this promise and hope that goes with it, which I want to
challenge in this essay. As long as it is not counteracted by an alternative
philosophy of finitude, Heidegger’s name will persist as a major inspi-
ration for all late modern thought wishing to get beyond the crisis of
modernity, caused by the disembodied subject thinking of himself as infi-
nite, omnipotent, and ‘beyond harm’. I thus want to present a possibility
of a different thinking of finitude, which—by the twist of irony—derives
directly ‘out of the sources of Judaism’. Heidegger had been writing
against Jews with a vicious consequence, presenting them as agents of
machinating ‘gigantism’—but Jews have been writing against Heidegger
too, by attempting to fight him on his own grounds: the philosophy
of the finite condition. Contrary to the cliché Heidegger believed in,
Jewish thought does not foster the idea of man’s infinite power over
nature, given by God to his absolute disposal; it is not about ruthless and
detached calculation based on what Hegel called Abraham’s incapability
to love. Quite to the contrary: it is all about setting the limits, but not by
the regressive recourse to the natural boundary in the form of death. If
the limits prove to be a blessing, it is not because man is forced to return
meekly to the totality of being, by becoming its obedient shepherd who
hearkens to its call in the humble posture of Seinsgehören.
Levinas is not the first and not the only Jewish philosopher who
uttered his objection to Heidegger’s vision of the finite life issuing
towards death, by drawing ‘out of the sources of Judaism’. In fact, there
is a whole secret alliance of thinkers more or less explicitly inspired by
this alternative tradition, which can be opposed to what Harold Bloom,
himself a member of the group, called somewhat derisively ‘Heidegger
and his French flock’.12 Despite all the differences between them, Franz
Rosenzweig, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and
Harold Bloom form an unofficial coalition of thinkers firmly opposed to
the Heideggerian mode of thinking about the finitude solely under the
auspices of death.
There is also one further feature which they share: the importance
of the heritage of the Song of Songs, particularly its most famous line—
‘love as strong as death’ (azzah kamavet ahava). Pace the clichéd
prejudice, both Christian and Romantic, which perceives Judaism as a
mechanical—and thus also machinating—religion of the law, Shir ha-
shirim proves that indeed, this has never been anything but a preju-
dice. Hegel could not have been more wrong when he famously stated
that ‘Abraham wanted not to love, wanted to be free by not loving’.13
Love which is strong as death—this, as Levinas says, ‘privileged

formulation’14—sheds light on a completely different vision of the finite
life in which love, not death, becomes the defining marker of the fini-
tude. Here, the sought-after limit reveals itself through the neighbourly
love—and it is the other.
All the members of the anti-Heideggerian coalition reached for this
‘privileged formulation’. Rosenzweig based the whole second part of The
Star of Redemption, devoted to revelation, on the grammar of the Song
of Songs. Hannah Arendt, while writing on Augustine and seeking ways
to distance herself from Heidegger, was inspired by the Song’s praise of
love as counterpoised to death. Levinas borrowed from the Song the
notion of radical asymmetry between the subject and the Other, which
became for him a model of a living ethical relation. Bloom, by fusing it
with Shakespeare’s sonnets, turned the Song into a dramatic canvas of his
poetic love-hate relationship between the precursor and the ephebe. And
Derrida (not such a devoted member of the Heideggerian ‘French flock’
as it is often assumed) transformed the antagonism between death and
love into the opposition of Sovereignty and Khora: the legal ‘scaffold-
ing’ of power manifesting itself always as a power over death versus the
messianic horizontal vision of the community of the living, gathered only
through love and friendship.
In all these approaches, Shir ha-Shirim lends itself to a philosophi-
cal speculation which offers a different conception of the finite exist-
ence, destined to die but by no means exhausted by its lethal destiny;
determined to resist the final verdict and gain an intense ‘life before
death’, marked by passionate relations with others; limited, yet not by
the inner peras of death, but by the existence of those we love. While,
as Rosenzweig claims, the whole Western philosophical thought ‘from
Ionia to Jena’ (and beyond), is incurably infected with the thanatic ten-
dency which perceives human finitude only through the negative lenses
of death—Hebrew thought offers a positive alternative which substitutes
love for death and makes it equally strong.
Life Before Death: New Thinking

Rosenzweig was never properly exposed to Heidegger’s own thought,
but nonetheless reacted to the general thanatic climate of his epoch,
by trying to resist it. Rosenzweig’s main question, especially in his later
period, is: Is it possible at all to think about our finitude differently, not
under the auspices of death—the end, the goal, the final destiny, the
ultimate verdict? The whole stake of Rosenzweig’s Neues Denken is to
venture precisely such an endeavour: to try to think finitude positively.
Although often seen as a parallel to Heidegger’s analytics of Dasein,
Rosenzweig’s New Thinking is actually the very opposite: despite
many deceptively similar formulations, which also portray life as issuing
towards death, it is uniquely concerned with the question which could
never be properly answered by Heidegger, namely—Is life before death
possible? Can living assert itself as such, positively, and not be immedi-
ately identified with passing away, ‘dying’? The seeming paradox, there-
fore, consists in the defence of life as finite and as life: not the privative
shadow of death which informs and paralyses the vital forces at the
moment of their inception, but a full ‘healthy’ life which affirms itself
as a separate category and simultaneously recognizes ‘sovereignty of
death’.15 The little book of Rosenzweig called Understanding the Sick
and the Healthy endeavours to teach life the lesson of maintaining itself
in the paradox without solving or sublating it:
By teaching man to live again, we have taught him to move towards death;
we have taught him to live, though each step he takes brings him closer to
death … There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man,
however, has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man
invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear. In health,
even death comes at the ‘proper’ time.16
All appearances to the contrary, this is not Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode.

The little, yet decisive, difference lies in the emphasis Rosenzweig puts
on the active resistance of life against death’s ‘chilling’ influence: on the
way the ‘healthy’ subject moves or continues towards death, despite the
constant danger of ‘the paralysis of artificial death’, or the ‘death in life’
which stops him from moving on. Despite death’s declared sovereignty,
life, which eventually succumbs to death, is not to learn anything from
his ‘absolute Master’: it is to accept its overruling presence, but not to
allow itself to be overwhelmed by it. Accept the verdict, but not the
authority; take on the sentence, but not the wisdom which underlies it.
Death may thus be an end, even goal, but it is pictured here as a limit,
which is not invited to the centre of life, in Mitte des Lebens, but del-
egated outside, only to intervene in its own ‘proper’ time.
In Heidegger’s original construction of ‘being-towards-death’, by

contrast, death penetrates into the very midst of Dasein; it is the very
motor of its self-transcending ex-sistence, the teacher of the heroic deci-
sion-making which is as groundless, abyssal and pervaded by nothingness
as death itself. Here, death is indeed a telos of life which runs its course
according to this lofty submission, or as Jean-Luc Nancy calls it aptly,
‘sublime self-offering’.17 Death is let in in the middle of life as its than-
atic guide; either in the existential function of catalysing heroic decision,
or, after Heidegger’s Kehre, as the demobilizing event-horizon which
works through the Gelassenheit, the quietistic anti-force of appeasement.
None of it figures in Rosenzweig’s project of New Thinking which wants
to give death its proper due, but absolutely nothing more: it wants to
acknowledge the fact of the finite life without overestimating its impact
on the process of living. Finding the right measure, the right ratio
in death’s relationship with life, is the sole purpose here, which makes
Rosenzweig’s endeavour opposite to Heidegger’s one which, from the
perspective of Neues Denken, may indeed by characterised as a systematic
overestimation of death.18
But before I proceed any further into the difference between
Heidegger and Rosenzweig, I have to dispel one objection: that it is not
Heidegger who systematically overestimates death, but rather all those
commentators of his project (me included), who fail to see the vital func-
tion of Todesbewusstsein, which, in fact, has nothing to do with any exis-
tential paralysis. According to this line of thought, death in Heidegger’s
Being and Time is just a neutral marker of finitude, while finitude as such
works as a catalysing and intensifying factor; all that passes through this
narrow ‘opening’, which is Dasein aware of its finite existence, acquires
infinite urgency and pathos of absolute intensity. As if in the revised
reading of Paul, whom Heidegger studied assiduously, this ‘opening’
is indeed a kind of a Pauline ‘glass’, but not ‘darkly’, not distorted by
the finitude; on the contrary, it is a magnifying glass, or a slit in the
camera obscura which condenses and refracts the dispersed light, thus
forming a microcosmic image of the world. The Heideggerian ‘being-
towards-death’, is thus not about negativity of ‘dying’: it is, just like in
Rosenzweig, all about intense living, conditioned into the existential
intensity by the awareness of its finite limits.
Among many followers of Heidegger, who remain loyal to the posi-
tive account of the death-driven finitude, there is certainly Jean-Luc
Nancy who sees his own project of ‘finite thinking’ as the direct continu-
ation of Heidegger’s original idea. In ‘Infinite Finitude’, Nancy writes:
Finitude is not the being-finished-off of an existent … butting up against

and stumbling over its own limit (its contingency, error, imperfection, or
fault). Finitude is not privation. There is perhaps no proposition it is more
necessary to articulate today, to scrutinize and test in all ways. Everything
at stake at the end of philosophy comes together there: in the need of
having to open the thought of finitude, that is, to reopen to itself this
thought, which haunts and mesmerizes our entire tradition.19
There is, therefore, nothing privative or negative in Heidegger’s pres-

entation of Dasein as a finite ‘access’ to the world, thanks to which the
world can ‘originate’ in all its infinite singularity. The slit of the ‘finite
thinking’, precisely because of its ‘narrowing’, is also an ‘opening’,
always new and original, of the countless multitude of beings. In Being
Singular Plural, he thus defines the Heideggerian notion of finitude
solely in terms of ‘access’: origin rather than end–
We only have access to ourselves—and to the world. It is only ever a ques-

tion of the following: full access is there, access to the whole of the origin.
This is called ‘finitude’ in Heideggerian terminology. But it has become
clear since then that ‘finitude’ signifies the infinite singularity of meaning,
the infinite singularity of access to truth. Finitude is the origin; that is, it is
an infinity of origins. ‘Origin’ does not signify that from which the world
comes, but rather the coming of each presence of the world, each time
singular.20
This interpretation may indeed be in harmony with Heidegger’s own

declarations—according to which death is the fundamental possibility of
human Dasein, intensifying the modal dimension of freedom, resolute-
ness, and inventiveness—but it is incapable of reading Heidegger criti-
cally, against the grain. The question—can we have a truly positive and
non-privative concept of finitude with death in its centre?—still remains as
a serious doubt. The opposite interpretation, giving to this question a
decided No, is offered by Maurice Blanchot, who rereads Heidegger’s
‘being-towards-death’ in a different—non-German and proto-decon-
structive—context. In consequence, the whole mobilizing effect of death
immediately evaporates, together with its alleged highest ‘possibility’,
giving way to impossibility and incapacitation. What primarily appeared
as a Lichtung—a ‘narrowing’ still capable of an intensified ‘opening’ and

‘access’—now turns into closure, aporia, blockage. What was meant as a
slit, transposing extension into intensity, becomes yet another reiteration
of the arch-old topos of death as the seal. What promised the authentic-
ity of ‘living’, ultimately ends up as—‘dying’.
Blanchot’s deconstruction consists in reversing the original Being and
Time formula of death as the ‘possibility of impossibility’ into its very
opposite: the ‘impossibility of possibility’. Heidegger writes on the ulti-
mate Möglichkeit:
The more unveiledly this possibility gets understood – the more purely
does the understanding penetrate into Dasein as the possibility of the impos-
sibility of any existence at all. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to
be ‘actualized’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be … Being-
toward-death, as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes this possibil-
ity possible, and sets it free as possibility.21
Prima facie, it would indeed appear that death works here as a posi-
tive and catalysing factor. Death, the paradigmatic possibility defying
any actualization, lies at the core of all other possibilities as possibili-
ties: Dasein learns what it means to be able to become this or that by
understanding the ability as such, the pure modal dimension of being.
Yet Blanchot insists on inverting the Heideggerian formula to show
the essential ungroundedness of its heroic resoluteness. The necessity
of death cuts through all of Dasein’s projects and reveals their truth, as
mere possibilities, as something possessing only a passing kind of being
that pales in comparison to what is truly unconditional. Death, therefore,
is not something possible. It is instead a primordial necessity that mani-
fests itself as the impossibility of any possibility. For, if possibility is a pos-
sibility-to-actualization, then death, defying all actualization, negates also
possibility. As such, death signals an altogether different way of existing,
an alternative side of existence, which Blanchot designates in Space of
Literature as a nunc stans of ‘dying’, captured in the never-ending pre-
sent continuous:
It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which the
death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what
loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power to begin
and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to
me, without power over me – that which is stripped of all possibility – the
unreality of the indefinite. I cannot represent this reversal to myself, I can-
not even conceive of it as definitive. It is not the irreversible step beyond
which there would be no return, for it is that which is not accomplished,
the interminable and the incessant … It is inevitable but inaccessible death;
it is the abyss of the present, time without a present, with which I have no
relationships; it is that toward which I cannot go forth for in it I do not
die, I have fallen from the power to die. In it they die; they do not cease,
and they do not finish dying.22
In Blanchot, already influenced by Heidegger’s Kehre, death becomes a

factor that is decidedly not enabling: it is disempowering, arresting, par-
alyzing, privative through and through. The impossibility of possibility
announces from the start that all projects-actualizations undertaken by
Dasein are futile; the (non)presence of death discloses the fundamen-
tal impossibility of the moment of decision in which Dasein resolves to
be rather something than nothing. Any resolution appears insignificant
when confronted with the verdict of finitude; death, instead of mobiliz-
ing Dasein to activity, reveals the irremovable Nichtigkeit that pervades
and therefore nichtet, annihilates, its inner possibilities. Hence the step
Dasein takes to make its decision to be something rather than nothing is,
in fact, impossible: it is a pas, a ‘non-step’. Overshadowed by the higher
truth of death, every step emerges as false, as an error in the need of cor-
rection. By problematizing every decision as decision, death invalidates
every possibility as possibility, and, above all else, it negates the basic
ambition of Dasein to lead its own, truly authentic existence. ‘Dying’ is
an abyss of anonymity, in which it becomes impossible to say ‘I’. This
very step, the most fundamental among Dasein’s projects, which strives
to confirm the Jemeinigkeit of its Angst und Sorge, meets the strictest
prohibition. There is no escape from the verdict of anonymity, from the
‘unreality of the indefinite’: ‘I never die but one dies’, says Blanchot.23
Blanchot’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode is based
on one fundamental suspicion: that Heidegger, despite all the declara-
tions to the contrary, cannot leave the Dasein’s ‘opening’ truly open
and indefinite, and, driven by his philosophical instinct, presses towards
the closure; that he, although ready to redefine human existence as an
‘open question’, nonetheless cannot tolerate philosophically its indefi-
niteness and surreptitiously substitutes death for the missing essence of
Dasein, which is now identified as ‘dying’. Blanchot’s reading is thus
faithful to the arcana of the deconstructive art, as formulated by Paul de

Man; Heidegger’s text as performance does precisely the opposite to its
intended and stated meaning, while death becomes the crux of the major
aporia. Death is meant to open Dasein and maintain it in its indefinite
realm of possibilities, whereas in fact it closes and reduces its indefin-
ity, by submitting Dasein to the impending necessity of dying, its ‘apo-
dictic evidence’24—‘Dasein, as thrown Being-in-the-world, has in every
case already been delivered over to its death. In being towards its death,
Dasein is dying factically and indeed constantly, as long as it has not yet
come to its demise’;25 ‘… “ending”, as dying, is constitutive for Dasein’s
totality’;26 ‘Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood
existentially …’;27 ‘Factically, Dasein is dying as long as it exists …’28
The indefinite living cannot be authentic: in order to become eigentlich,
it must first gain essence. But then it appears that the essence of life is
nothing but death: Aber das Sein des Lebens ist zugleich Tod.29 There is no
such thing as an authentic life; it is either-or.
Blanchot, therefore, does not buy into Heidegger’s praise of the
authentic life spent as Sein-zum-Tode. In fact, what Heidegger seems to
advocate is the very opposite: a life neither authentic (i.e. living accord-
ing to its essence) nor death-oriented. It is rather the description of
Sein-gegen-Tode, in which Dasein not so much adopts the death-domi-
nated mode of being (which would be ‘dying’) as defends itself against
the verdict, by resolutely trying to become something against the tide of
the overwhelming abyssal nothingness. This aporia comes to the fore in
many fragments of Being and Time, for instance:
Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’, nothing

which Dasein, as actual, could itself be. It is the possibility of impossibil-
ity of every way of comporting oneself toward anything, of every way
of existing. In the anticipation of this possibility it becomes ‘greater and
greater’; that is to say, the possibility reveals itself to be such that it knows
no measure at all, no more or less, but signifies the possibility of the meas-
ureless impossibility of existence. In accordance with its essence, this pos-
sibility offers no support for becoming intent on something, ‘picturing’
to oneself the actuality which is possible, and so forgetting its possibility.
Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes this
possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility.30
This is Heidegger’s own emphasis, enhancing the active and the posi-
tive: being, making, possibility, which can never be forgotten as such
and thus open Dasein ‘measurelessly’ to ever ‘greater and greater’ tasks.
But for Blanchot, the emphasis lies elsewhere, on the silenced negativ-
ity and closure: nothing, impossibility, non-actualization. The ‘impend-
ing’ and ‘measureless’31 impossibility of existence, which is forbidden
to be pictured in any actualized shape (all affinities with the ‘jealous
God’ of the Second Commandment non-accidental!), immediately dis-
solves any actuality Dasein has happened to assume into nothing. Having
been ‘delivered over’ to this new deadly divine, Dasein can never assert
itself in what it actually is, but is always forced to be-no-longer, to
undergo constant and constitutive ‘dying’ in the service of this unpic-
turable and measureless abyss that defies any actualization. Thus, when
read ‘theologically’ (and this is certainly Blanchot’s critical perspective),
Heidegger’s death steps into the traditional role of the deity in relation
to which no other being can assert itself in existence and has to sacri-
fice its actuality; the possibility so immense and infinite that it excludes
any finite actualization. And if Dasein asserts itself nonetheless, it does
so against its nihilizing essence. If it wants to be proper, authentic, and
heroic—it must betray its inner calling, and thus fall into inauthenticity.
And, indeed, Heidegger says himself, against his own belief in death-
inspired positive resoluteness: ‘Anticipation discloses to existence that its
uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one’s
tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached.’32 Therefore, if
Dasein decides on becoming something, the intimation formed in face
of the impending certainty of death immediately ‘takes it back’, because
death, as ‘taking back’ everything, is not just an end of the process,
but its very medium, the constant and constitutive ‘dying’: ‘The cer-
tainty of resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility
of taking it back—a possibility which is factically necessary.’33 And even
if Heidegger adds immediately that such certitude of ‘taking back’ and
‘shattering’ only strengthens the resolute will to repeat itself, Blanchot
will treat it merely as a defensive evasion of what to him seems inevita-
ble, namely the dissolution into ‘irresoluteness.’ To be ‘authentic’, for
Blanchot, is not to leap into decisions resulting in passing actualizations,
but to stay ‘dying’ and ‘irresolute’, to let death truly take power over
life—again, according to Heidegger’s own letter: ‘Anticipatory resolute-
ness is not a way of escape, fabricated for the “overcoming” of death;
it is rather that understanding which follows the call of conscience and
which frees for death the possibility of acquiring power over Dasein’s
existence and of basically dispersing all fugitive Self-concealments.’34
For Blanchot, however, all decisions to be rather something than noth-
ing belong to the realm of ‘fugitive Self-concealments’, fabricated not
zum but gegen Tode. If there is an ‘unshakable joy’ in serving ‘Death, the
absolute Master’ (we have to remember that in his reading of Heidegger,
Blanchot already fuses him with Hegel whom he learnt through Kojève),
then it consists in staying rather nothing than something. And again,
Heidegger provides the textual evidence:
The ecstatical character of the primordial future lies precisely in the fact
that the future closes one’s potentiality-for-Being … Primordial and authen-
tic coming-towards-oneself is the meaning of existing in one’s ownmost
nullity.35
In the end, it is precisely this ‘ownmost nullity’ which substitutes for the
initially open indefinity of Dasein: death, far from opening and enabling,
becomes the negative essence of human finitude. The thanatic vision of
the finite life ineluctably bears the stigma of privation.
Rosenzweig Versus Heidegger: Another Finitude

Thus, even if not completely in accord with Heidegger’s letter,
Blanchot’s deconstructive reading allows to see the shadow thrown by
his thanatic spirit: in Derrida’s words, death, instead of forming Dasein’s
‘most proper possibility’, turns into an absolute aporia: ‘the most
improper possibility and the most ex-propriating, the most inauthenticat-
ing one.’36
This aporetic tendency is precisely the reason why Rosenzweig’s pro-
ject appears more promising. It liberates the notion of positive finitude
from the dubious supremacy of death and focuses instead on love. This
instead is the clue of the whole operation: while love bears some affin-
ities to death, it also brings an irreducible difference. While it may be
as indefinite as the Blanchotian ‘dying’, it is also ‘hard as Sheol’, which
protects it from dissolving into abyssal and measureless ‘unreality’; it
may not have a well-defined essence, but it remains in its open indefin-
ity and does not slide back into ‘nothingness’ or ‘nullity’. As such, love
works better as the ‘mobilizing’ factor in the conditions of finitude;
instead of sealing the finite life with the non-negotiable arrêt, which,
as Blanchot had demonstrated, is always its latent potency, love actually

offers an ‘opening’ in the form of an affective mood that opens ‘access’
to as many beings as possible, knowing that there will be no infinite
time given for their contemplation. Thus, if finitude exerts a pressure
on the subject who then simply must make a decision, this ‘narrowing’
expresses itself better in the decisionism of love.37 While for Heidegger,
the role of death will always be central—whether as the ‘mobilizing’
factor of Entschlossenheit or the ‘appeasing’ factor of Gelassenheit—for
Rosenzweig, to the contrary, it will always be downplayed, almost to the
point of indifference. This confrontation never took place in reality, but
we can nonetheless attempt to stage it retrospectively.
First, enter Heidegger. In the series of lectures composed in 1935 and
then edited under the title Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger indeed
confirms Blanchot’s diagnosis of the aporetic nature of death within the
Heideggerian system. Here, he openly presents death as the ultimate apo-
ria, by drawing on the original Greek meaning of the word as ‘no way-out’,
‘no exit’, the unsurpassable ‘blocking of the passage’. Man, who likes to see
himself as pantoporos, the most resourceful creature which ‘begets in itself its
own un-essence, the versatility (Vielwendigkeit) of many twists and turns’,38
deep down appears to be, in fact, aporos: a priori blocked and thwarted—
There is only one thing against which all violence-doing [of the panto-
poros hubristic human Dasein] directly shatters. That is death. It is an end
beyond all completion, a limit beyond all limits. Here there is no breaking
forth and breaking up, no capturing and subjugating. But this un-canny
thing, which sets us simply and suddenly out from everything homely once
and for all, is not a special event that must also be mentioned among oth-
ers, because it, too, ultimately does occur. The human being has no way out
in the face of death, not only when it is time to die, but constantly and essen-
tially. Insofar as humans are, the stand in the no-exit of death.39
For Heidegger, the aporia of death is not something to be deplored:

by setting ‘a limit beyond all limits’, death curtails the hubris of human
Dasein who—just as Odysseus, to whom this fragment actually refers—
perceives itself as indefinite and, because of that, capable of becoming
anything and everything; of conceiving of every possible ruse in order
to bend the fate and adjust the world to its needs. Thus, even the most
pantoporos Odysseus must eventually meet the aporos death which will
end his clever subterfuges. It is not an accident that Heidegger applies
exactly the same characteristics—cunning, limitless resourcefulness, lack

of essence, versatility, intermixing, cleverness of calculation—to Odysseus
and to the ‘world-Jewry’. Among the Hellenists of Heidegger’s time,
Odysseus, this least tragic of all Greek heroes, was widely assumed to be
a late Semitic import to the Greek mythology: an alien influence which
soiled its purity, best represented by the most tragic of all Greek heroes,
the beautiful Achilles who, despite all the efforts to make him immune to
death, proved nonetheless to be mortal—as everything else.40
This is precisely the moment when Rosenzweig enters into this
debate. For Rosenzweig, just as for Heidegger, human life is also with-
out pre-established essence: indefinite, open, question-like. The latter, in
the Introduction to Metaphysics, states firmly that ‘the determination of
the essence of the human being is never an answer, but is essentially a
question.’41 Yet the two thinkers play it out very differently. Heidegger
dismisses Odysseus’s ‘un-essential’ use of the indefinity and gravitates
towards the closure, the seal, the dead-assuredness of death, which then
substitutes for the missing essence of the Dasein: in the end, Seinsdenken
and Todesdenken become undistinguishable synonyms. It is, after all,
death which tears away man from the familiar homeliness of the world
of seeming and throws him in the nearness of being, the most un-
canny—un-heimlich—of all thoughts. It is the annihilating, nichtende,
power of death, which puts man in touch with the Nichts des Seins, the
nothingness of being’s pure potentiality, which underlies the realm of
actualized beings. Death, therefore, becomes the vehicle of the high-
est spiritual transport which defines the destiny of human Dasein. The
human being has no way out in the face of death, not only when it is time
to die, but constantly and essentially; this, for Rosenzweig, is precisely the
sickness—‘sickness unto death’—which pushes death into the very cen-
tre of human life, as its defining moment, giving it fake constancy and
essence. In Heidegger, no being, no positive content can ever fill the gap
of nothingness which constitutes human being and thus offer an answer
to its glaring questioning abyss; this Nichts can only be matched by the
Nichts of death which helps to disclose the abyssal Nichts of being.
Rosenzweig’s intention is precisely to counteract the mastery of this
deadly triad which turns the ordinary ‘un-essence’ of human life into a
hypostatized sublime ‘Nothing’. In order to avoid this hypostasis, life
must agree to be the thing of ‘un-essence’, a flow without form, a mean-
dering story with many twists and turns, precisely the way it is described
by the Odyssey: a ‘life which is content to be an in-between state,
merely a transition from one thing to another.’42 Rosenzweig explores

the essential Nichts of human life in the form of a horizontal narrative
which evolves only thanks to its indefiniteness; by refusing to turn the
singular life into something easily definable, he lets it assume a meander-
ing structure, containing many peripeteias, the resourceful (pantoporos)
twists and turns, which postpone the final verdict; here the erzählendes
Sprachdenken becomes a synonym of Lebensdenken, life-thinking. As in
Heidegger, the human life emerges here as open, indefinite, with no
pregiven essence, but all this seemingly negative characteristic merely
serves as the canvas for a new narrative philosophy, the new drama of
time and its unpredictability, which can only evolve in the living dialogue
between a human being and his neighbours.
There is a clear parallel between Rosenzweig’s interest in the nar-
rative form and Walter Benjamin’s essay entitled ‘Storyteller’, where
Sherezade’s thousand and one tales becomes the paradigm of the story-
telling practice which not only postpones, but also complicates the death
sentence: the main function of this narrative is to create a ‘middle’ space
of deferment which makes room for the living unpredictability despite
the inevitable finale in the dead-assuredness of death.43 The complica-
tion of this dead-simple sentence consists in the way in which the story
includes the finale on its own right and terms, and appropriates it to such
extent that it indeed comes in the ‘proper’ time, so that the singular life
may end up by ‘dying in its own fashion’.44
In the end, therefore—for this is the end, yet no longer so adversar-
ial and necessitarian—death approaches life as life’s brother, as the last
line of the Büchlein declares. For many commentators, this conclusion
sounds terribly disappointing and indeed very Heideggerian, if not sim-
ply lebensphilosophisch Schopenhauerian.45 But one can also interpret this
brotherhood of death as the sign of the confrontation with the Hegelian-
Heideggerian line of thinking which elevated death to the highest sta-
tus of Meisterschaft with its unquestioned dominion over human life,
the ‘death, the Absolute Master’ syndrome, so succinctly summed up
by Paul Celan in his ominous phrase from Todesfuge: Tod is ein Meister
aus Deutschland. When Rosenzweig says—‘Life’s eloquent lips are put to
silence and the eternally Taciturn One will speak: “Do you finally rec-
ognize me? I am your brother”’46—he not only distances himself from
Hegel, but also enjoins death in the dialogic practice and drags it onto
the side of life, by letting it speak, which here is not just a metaphor.
While in the metaphysical night of the Heideggerian Todesdenken, the
dead-mute silence reigns—in Rosenzweig’s living day the dialogue never

ceases; once life is unable to talk, the death takes over the ‘flickering
torch’ of speech in the neighbourly-brotherly fashion.
When commenting on affinities and divergences between Rosenzweig
and Heidegger, Karl Löwith, who actually argues that they have much
more in common than I want to claim, spots one crucial difference:
while they both emphasize the Endlichkeit of human life, Heidegger
dissolves it all into immanent temporality, offering no resistance to
transience, yet Rosenzweig insists on the infinite moment: the perfect
fulfilment of life which truly and finally comes to be and thus eternalizes
itself.47 True, but this eternal completion (which can never be attained
by man, the self-contradicting pantoporos aporos, in Heidegger) is possi-
ble only on the grounds of the more fundamental form of infinity which
plays itself out in human life, despite its finitude. We may call it in/de/
finity or even infinitiveness (deriving from the grammatical concept of
the infinitive which alludes to the potentially infinite uses into which the
verb may be put): the peculiar condition of human life which refuses the
be concrete ‘something’ without actually slipping into a privative and
negative ‘nullity’ or ‘unreality’–
… we must daringly seize upon a life which is content to be an in-between

state, merely a transition from one thing to another. Let us reject the ever-
present answer, ‘Life is’, ‘Man is’ – and let us become part of the onward-
moving life of man. Here life ‘is’ not, it simply occurs [geshieht].48
This is an outright apology of the inessential and indefinite life: some-

thing very adversarial to Heidegger, who called it a wrong type of
‘un-essence’, superficial and resourceful as the Semitic Odysseus and
as such incapable to plunge metaphysically into the abysses of being.
But with this apology, we are immediately reminded that, in The Star
of Redemption, this seemingly derogatory characteristic was given to
what Rosenzweig regards as the highest and most valuable content of
the revelation, that is, love. For it is love which goes from one neigh-
bour to another and paces restlessly the whole world in the constant
transition, oblivious to its own ‘essence’ and not at all interested in the
centering self-reflection. It is love which, in Goethe’s words, ‘connects
all’ without creating a hypostatic Allheit, totality, itself indefinite and
because of that infinitely open to embrace each being, one after another,
nominally and nominalistically—just like God himself who knows every
creature by name as a unique singularity. For Rosenzweig, therefore, the

life-in-transition, life-in-between, does not indicate anything privative—
dispersion, impurity, incompleteness, fall—as it does for Heidegger: it
is inessential so it can fill itself with intense neighbourly relations; it is
lacking essence, so it can be full of love. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in
his Finite Thinking, in a fragment inspired more by Rosenzweig than
Heidegger: ‘Love cuts across finitude, always from the other to the
other, which never returns to the same—and all loves, so humbly alike,
are superbly singular. Love offers finitude in its truth; it is finitude’s daz-
zling presentation.’49
We could thus sum up the difference between Rosenzweig and
Heidegger by evoking the biblical line which is also the guiding motif of
The Star of Redemption: azzah hamavet ahavah, love strong as death: the
vital, incomplete, exposed in/de/finity of love versus the definite clo-
sure, sealed by the verdict of death. Both these visions of life are finite,
but while the Heideggerian one overestimates the defining moment of
the ending as ‘constant and essential’, the Rosenzweigian one evades it
as merely secondary, because Rosenzweig is not looking for any defini-
tion of human life. Agreeing that human life must remain a ‘thing of
un-essence’, he rather goes for love which thrives on everything non-
essential: strictly singular, transitory and transient, non-identitarian,
exposed. Here, human being is not a death-bound ‘nothing’, collaps-
ing into his inner nothingness, but a lively bundle of energy which eas-
ily flows into ‘the energies of the world.’50 Love turns the negativity of
‘un-essence’ into positivity of intense singular relations. This is what
Rosenzweig calls die Umkehr: the ‘turn’, but also, more theologically—a
‘conversion’.
In the Beginning Is My End: Arendt, Bloom,

and the Finitude of Origins
Philosophy is indeed a deadly discipline: in Hegel, Rosenzweig’s main

adversary, as well as in Heidegger, the later enemy of Levinas, human
finite life is spent under the solitary auspices of death. Jean-Luc Nancy,
who follows the analytics of Dasein only to a certain point, knows it
well and for this very reason enlists for his ‘finite thinking’ another
ally, coming from the opposite corner to Heidegger: Hannah Arendt.
As he rightly points out, Arendt is the first thinker to consciously and
deliberately move away from Heidegger without, at the same time,

regressing into an idealistic illusion of the Husserlian ‘transcenden-
tal life’: the first thinker to elaborate a parallel project of another fini-
tude which does not focus on death but on the original plurality of love
relations, ‘the infinite singularity among others’. Thus, in the footnote
explaining the idea of his essay, Being Singular Plural, Nancy announces
that his ‘finite thinking’ is not going to be just a commentary on
Heidegger but also a ‘move on from him’: ‘in the relation to Heidegger,
one must remember the singular role played by Hannah Arendt and her
reflection on “human plurality”.’51 This singular role comes to the fore
most spectacularly in Hannah Arendt’s doctoral dissertation, Augustins
Liebesbegriff, ‘On the Concept of Love in Saint Augustine’, written in
the 1920s under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, but deeply influenced
and shaped by her teacher and lover, Martin Heidegger.
The first part of Arendt’s dissertation is devoted to the critique of
Augustine’s idea of love which, in her interpretation, turns out to be
merely Thanatos in disguise: it is hard not to see that this is, in fact, a
veiled critique of Heidegger himself. Arendt shows how Augustine,
caught in the terminological web of Neoplatonic thought, which defines
love as craving (appetitus), runs into trouble with his account of the
concept coming from a different tradition: the neighbourly love (cari-
tas). Augustine’s thinking is thus wholly inscribed into a metaphysi-
cal craving for the eternal and the infinite, which completely disregards
the finite dimension of the creaturely life. In a passage which strongly
reminds of Blanchot’s analogical take on Heidegger, Arendt states that
for Augustine, ‘life on earth is a living death, mors vitalis, or vita morta-
lis. It is altogether determined by death; indeed it is more properly called
death.’52
But then, she also detects another stream of thought in Augustine—
less ‘Greek’ and more ‘Pauline’—which connects love not with the
Platonic lack of being and craving, but with a fullness of being as given by
the Maker in the moment of man’s birth. Says Arendt:
The decisive fact determining man as a conscious, remembering being is

birth or ‘natality’, that is, the fact that we have entered the world through
birth. The decisive fact determining man as a desiring being was death or
mortality, the fact that we shall leave the world in death. Fear of death and
inadequacy of life are the springs of desire. In contrast, gratitude for life
having been given at all is the spring of remembrance, for a life is cherished
even in misery: ‘Now you are miserable and still you do not want to die
for no other reason that you want to be’. What ultimately stills the fear of
death is not hope or desire, but remembrance and gratitude: ‘Give thanks
for wanting to be as you are that you may be delivered from an existence
that you do not want. For you are willing to be and unwilling to be mis-
erable’. This will to be under all circumstances is the hallmark of man’s
attachment to the transmundane source of his existence.53
It is precisely in this context that Augustine draws his distinction

between principium and initium: the beginning of the world and time
and the beginning of man. Arendt quotes the famous fragment from The
City of God (XII, 20): Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo
fuit: ‘That a beginning be made, man was created.’ Whereas principium
grounds the universe in the manner of the Greek arche, i.e. as the first
arch-principle of perpetual order of being, initium allows for a creative
disruption of the cosmic monotony, into which there suddenly enters a
novitas, something radically new: an open and indefinite human life.
But what is the role of remembrance and gratitude as opposed to
hope and desire? Arendt attempts an alternative anthropology of human
finitude, based not so much on the Heideggerian, thanatic recognition
of one’s inevitable end-in-death, as on the biophilic, life-loving recogni-
tion of one’s beginning-in-birth, here understood as the ‘gift-of-life’.54
The finite being does not have to think about itself as ‘running towards
its death’; it can also think about its moment of springing into being,
its ‘whence’, where it was bestowed with life, and revert the sequence
of expectation by substituting the beginning for the end; or, in other
words, by eliminating the obsessive thinking-of-death and replacing it
with the contemplating remembrance of one’s origin. Remembrance and
gratitude, therefore, engender their own hope and desire, this time not
driven by the recognition of death, but by the wish to cherish the origi-
nal gift of life, to intensify it, to hope for ‘more life’ yet to come–
Since our expectations and desires are prompted by what we remember

and guided by a previous knowledge, it is memory and not expectation
(for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger’s approach) that
gives unity and wholeness to human existence … Only man, but no other
mortal being, lives toward his ultimate origin while living toward the final
boundary of death … By virtue of man’s quest for his own being, the begin-
ning and end of his life become exchangeable.55
It is this fundamental reversal which makes human finite existence truly

human: Arendt’s notion of exchangeability between the beginning and
the end, structurally resembles the Rosenzweigian Umkehr where love,
given by the Maker, replaces death which seals the creaturely existence
with the heavy mark of mortality (given the fact that Arendt knew The
Star of Redemption at the time when she wrote about Augustine, her
natalism may in fact be derivative from Rosenzweig’s existential lesson
on the ‘conversion’).
We will find some later variants of this reversal in other thinkers also
inspired by the Jewish heritage. In Levinas, it is precisely this reversed
temporality which creates a counter-current against death, a human
life as Sein-gegen-Tode; instead of running straight towards its end, the
human life creates an ‘eddy’, or an ‘interiority’, in the stream of time,
which resists the flow of transience, and by reaching freely towards its
origins in memory, it separates itself from being’s general participation
in the flux, thus making itself free.56 Poising himself against Heidegger
even more explicitly, Harold Bloom argues that the poetic life (which
for him serves as the intensified pars pro toto of human life as such) is
structured according to the rhetorical trope of metalepsis or the ‘rever-
sal’: the substitution of an origin for an end, which allows for the eman-
cipation of a creative impulse from the thanatic repetition of ‘more of the
same’. Only when cause and effect are metaleptically reversed and the
poetic self, instead of going with the flow ‘unto-death’, works stubbornly
towards his own origins, a new creation can happen at all; only when
the poet dwells within and elaborates on the powers of origination, can
he hope to become truly original, not just a copy or replica of what was
before. The Arendtian-Levinasian-Bloomian focus on the origins is thus
the necessary precondition of freedom, creativity, and (why not) ‘reso-
luteness’, which, in Nietzsche’s words, rebel against the time’s ‘It was’,
that is, against the time’s empty accumulation and repetition.57
This is where, as it seems, Hegel, Heidegger, and Kojève, the three
masters of modern thanaticism, get it wrong: it is not just the conscious-
ness of death, which acts as an anthropogenic factor which makes human
being truly human. A mere consciousness of death only adds a reflex-
ive dimension to the animal way of living, which inevitably ends with
dying; as indeed in Hegel’s description of the Master who once chal-
lenged death fully consciously but then leads an idle life of a verblödet,
stupefied, beast. What truly constitutes the anthropogenic moment is the
reversal of temporality, which ignores the end for the sake of the doubled
origin: the renewal of the gift of being exercised in the spirit of biophilia,
or the Derridean synonimisation of ‘loving-living’, which affirms every
moment of life as a repetition of the beginning, the incessant birth. For
Augustine, due to this reversal-renewal, death as such completely dis-
solves by showing its true face of a rebirth into a truly eternal way of
living. But this is only an extreme, Neoplatonic-Christian, version of the
anthropogenic reversal, which goes as far as to annul altogether the lim-
its of finitude; by turning death simply into a new birth, this time giv-
ing life eternal and infinite, the Christian ‘impatient heart’ (Rosenzweig)
evacuates itself from the realm of creatureliness, inescapably marked with
death. What Arendt, but also Rosenzweig, Levinas and Bloom, have in
mind is more modest, and more in harmony with the limitations of finite
being: the reversal does not prolong the moment of ‘natality’ ad infini-
tum, offering a birth without death and life without loss, but compli-
cates the temporality of human finite existence by giving it a non-natural,
or reverse, causa finalis. It lets human origin shine on and organize the
whole of life by deprivileging the natural end. Contrary to the thanatic
condition, which indeed overestimates death as the ownmost, organiz-
ing and defining, goal-centre-essence of human life, this vision of fini-
tude, focused on natality, ignores the natural end by replacing it with
the counter-rhythm of a constant renewal, working on and through the
original ‘gift of life’: a gift not be defined, possessed and pinned down
to its ‘essence’, but to be lovingly shared and diffused, as a ‘thing of un-
essence’, in a constant ‘transition from one thing to another’. Thus, the
very idea of the gift itself immediately implies sociality inherent in the
moment of origin—versus the absence of others, obliterated in the soli-
tary (unbezüglich) moment of dying, so often emphasized and extolled
by Heidegger. The focus on the beginning of human life, rather than on
its end, brings in the original heterogeny of human existence: the con-
stant company of others who gave me life and sustained its precarious
growth with their love, the company summarized in the ideal image of
the Augustinian ‘God, who made me’. Seen from the perspective of its
beginning, the finite human life is immediately dialogic—while seen from
the perspective of its end it sinks into the soliloquy of death, always too
jemeinig and einzigst to be shared.
This is Arendt’s major piece de resistance against Heidegger’s influ-
ence: a resistance demonstrating an elective affinity with the one
offered first, half-unknowingly by Rosenzweig, and then, already fully
deliberately by Levinas and Bloom. Their new affirmation of finite life,

which can be put collectively under the Rosenzweigian heading of New
Thinking, takes roots in the united anti-Heideggerian impulse which
manages to mobilise latent reserves of alternative vitalist traditions,
among which the Jewish heritage, with its claim that love is strong as
death, cannot be ignored. Far from being obedient ‘Heidegger’s chil-
dren’,58 Rosenzweig, Arendt and Bloom offer instead a promise of
a different thinking about the finite life, which is not fated with the
Heideggerian thanatic closure: a truly non-privative, open and love-capa-
ble another finitude.
Can this alternative concept of the finite life replace Heidegger’s
Todesdenken as a source of late-modern inspirations? If what we are look-
ing for is a philosophy which could do away with the destructive hubris
of the solitary, infinite, and omnipotent subjectivity that knows no limits,
another finitude constitutes a solid answer. Here, however, the limit is
not the privative internalization of death; the limit is the other. Love as
the marker of finitude deprives it of the stigma of privation and negativ-
ity, always implicit in death: un-essence, transience, indefinity emerge no
longer as negative features of the finite being in passing, but as the con-
dition of love which finds ‘the blessing of limits’ in the intense relations
with others.
Notes
1. ‘In Heidegger, the ethical relation, the Miteinandersein, the being-with-
another-person, is only one moment of our presence in the world. It
does not have the central place. Mit is always being next to… it is not
in the first instance the Face, it is zusammensein [being-together], per-
haps zusammenmarschieren [marching-together]’: Emmanuel Levinas,
‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love’, in Entre Nous, Thinking of The Other,
trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia
97 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2015), 20. References to the German origi-
nal of Heidegger’s works will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed
by the volume number. Translations are by the author unless otherwise
stated.
3. There is a disagreement among the commentators whether Heidegger’s
‘metaphysical Antisemitism’ makes things even worse or whether it con-
stitutes an extenuating circumstance. The most pronounced partisan
of the former position is Donatella di Cesare, especially in her recent

Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2016), 9, where
she interprets Heidegger’s description of the Holocaust as the ‘onto-
logical massacre’. The latter, more numerous, group includes: Peter
Trawny who, in Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), claims that Heidegger’s case against
Jews is purely seinsgeschichtlich, i.e. belonging to the history of being;
Jesús Adrián Escudero, who in ‘Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the
Question of Anti-Semitism’ (Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual,
no 5, 2015, 40) says: ‘Does Heidegger exhibit anti-Judaism? Without a
doubt. Anti-Semitism? Yes, as long as it is not directly associated with the
racist interpretation of the Jewish people and National Socialism’s policy
of extermination’; and the main Polish Heideggerian, Cezary Wodziński,
who devoted a whole book—Metafizyka jako metapolityka. Czarne zeszyty
Heideggera (Gdańsk: słowo obraz – terytoria, 2015)—just to prove that
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks cannot be seen as delivering any philo-
sophical justification to the Shoah.
6. I agree here with Peter E. Gordon, who in his review of the Black
Notebooks (‘Heidegger in Black’, New York Review of Books, October
9, 2014) writes: ‘Hence the challenge of the black notebooks: even after
the “error” of the rectorship it turns out that Heidegger did not awaken
from his philosophical-political fantasies. They only grew more extreme
… To be sure, after 1934 Heidegger grew disenchanted with the Nazi
movement, and devoted himself with greater energy to new philosophical
concerns. But this was only because he felt that Nazism had betrayed its
own promise, and had succumbed to the technological fate that afflicted
the modern age overall.’
7. The continuity of the ‘metaphysical Antisemitism’ in German philosophy
is very well demonstrated by Donatella di Cesare in Heidegger, die Juden,
die Shoah, in the chapter ‘Die Philosophie und der Hass gegen Juden’,
47–110.
8. See G.W.F. Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans.
T.M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961), 204: ‘The fate of the
Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself,
clung to alien Beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay eve-
rything holy in human nature, had at last to be forsaken by his gods …
and be dashed to pieces on his faith itself.’ Here Abraham, the paradig-
matic Jew, is compared to a violent trespasser or a criminal, who, ‘in his
arrogance he has destroyed indeed, but only the friendliness of life; he has
perverted life into an enemy’ (ibid., 229; my emphasis).
9. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially the fragment
of the ‘First Essay’, 17–19.
10. See, e.g. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte
1938/39), GA 95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 97: ‘One of the
stealthiest forms of gigantism and perhaps the most ancient is the clev-
erness of calculation, pushiness, and intermixing whereby Jewry’s world-
lessness is established’; and GA 96, 46: ‘Contemporary Jewry’s increase
in power finds its basis in the fact that Western metaphysics—above all, in
its modern incarnation—offers fertile ground for the dissemination of an
empty rationality and calculability’.
11. This is Heidegger’s own description coming from his 1935 lecture
on metaphysics, which he did not remove from later editions: Martin
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard
Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 152. The concept of
Walten as ‘gentle sway’ which is free of violence also derives from this
work.
12. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (With a New
Preface on Shakespeare), (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), xxvii.
13. Hegel, On Christianity, 185.
14. ‘Is not death—though it is the strongest—necessary to the time whose
course it seems to halt? The love that is stronger than death—a privileged
formulation’: Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina
Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 200), 104.
15. Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of
World, Man, and God, trans. Nahum Glatzer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
16. Rosenzweig, Understanding, 102–103.
17. Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford:
Stanford University Press 2003), 75.
18. That this is the case may be well testified by Alphonso Lingis, who in his
Heidegger inspired book, Deathbound Subjectivity, sings an unceasing
praise of death: ‘That the human spirit is mortal, deathbound, that death
does not befall our existence by accident or as a catastrophe, but that
our existence, of its own nature, projects itself, with all its forces, unto
its death—this conviction is at the core of Heidegger’s thought. Death is
the law—the imperative—of our existence … that the deathbound pro-
pulsion of our existence is the spirit itself is what makes our movements
comprehending and our existence exultant, ecstatic … Death is the law—
the ordinance of our existence’: Alphonso Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity
19. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 29.
20. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and
Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 15.
21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 307.
221. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln &
London: Nebraska University Press, 1982), 106; 154–155, my emphasis.
Yet another version of the deconstructive interpretation of Heidegger’s
formula is offered by Giorgio Agamben in his reading of Melville’s
Bartleby, where it is the latter’s ‘formula’ (I’d prefer not to) which helps
to explain how death may indeed be a possibility of impossibility—that is,
only as ‘potentiality to not-be’. Only when possibility becomes separated
from the urge towards actualization, can ‘dying’ become the teacher
of the right kind of existing faithful to a pure potentiality. See Giorgio
Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or on Contingency’, in Potentialities, trans. Daniel
Heller-Rozen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–274.
23. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 241. In Aporias, a book explicitly
devoted to the raise of thanatology as a properly philosophical discipline,
Derrida comments on the significance of the ‘turn’ made by Blanchot:
‘When Blanchot constantly repeats—and it is a long complaint and not
a triumph of life—the impossible dying, the impossibility, alas, of dying,
he says at once the same thing and something completely different from
Heidegger. It is just a question of knowing in which sense (in the sense
of direction and trajectory) one reads the expression of the possibiliby of
impossibility. If death, the most proper possibility of Dasein, is the pos-
sibility of its impossibility, death becomes the most improper possibility
and the most ex-propriating, the most inauthenticating one’: Jacques
Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994), 77.
24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 309.
25. Ibid., 303.
26. Ibid., 284.
27. Ibid., 284.
28. Ibid., 295.
29. Ibid., 100.
30. Ibid., 307.
31. Ibid., 294.
32. Ibid., 308; my emphasis.
33. Ibid., 355.
34. Ibid., 357.
35. Ibid., 379; my emphasis.
36. Derrida, Aporias, 77. The same association of aporia with death and death
with aporia will return in Derrida’s penultimate seminar on death pen-
alty: ‘The aporia is what stops or arrests, often in the form of a judg-
ment or verdict. The aporia is what paralyzes, what blocks the exit, closes
the doors and seems to doom us to an impasse—to death, a dead end, a
deadlock’: Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. II, trans. Elizabeth
Rotenberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), 30.
37. This alternative form of ‘resoluteness’, playing itself out in Rosenzweig,
was well spotted by Levinas: ‘What interests Rosenzweig himself is the
discovery of being as life, of being as life-in-relation: the discovery of a
thought which is the very life of this being. The person no longer goes
back into the system he conceives, as in Hegel, in order to become fixed
and renounce his singularity. Singularity is necessary to the exercise of
this thought and this life precisely as an irreplaceable singularity, the only
one capable of love, the only one that can be loved, that knows how to
love, that can form a religious community’: Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Between
Two Worlds (The Way of Franz Rosenzweig)’, in Difficult Freedom, trans.
Sean Hand (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 192.
38. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 168.
39. Ibid., 168–169; my emphasis.
40. The Hellenist most responsible for this Verjudung of Odysseus was
Victor Bérard who, in the chapter on ‘Le Phéniciens et l’Odysée’ in his
Resurrection d’Homere (published in Paris in 1930), claimed that the
prototype of Odyssey was a Phenician myth dealing with sailors and
merchants—a topic rather unusual for Greek mythology. Heidegger is
not the only one who used the topos of the Jewish Ulysses; in the same
time James Joyce, having read Bérard, composes his Ulysses with Leopold
Bloom in the leading role, and a decade later Adorno and Horkheimer,
explicitly referring to Bérard, will present Odysseus as the Semitic proto-
type of the modern bourgeois in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
Edmund Jephcott, ed. G. Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002), 61. In order to understand the complex context of the
judaisation of Odysseus, see my ‘Jewish Ulysses. Post-Secular Meditation
on the Loss of Hope’, in Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity.
Philosophical Marranos, London: Routledge, 2014, 292–318.
41. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 149.
42. Rosenzweig, Understanding, 80.
43. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of
Nikolai Leskov’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 154.
44. One can also read Freud’s conclusion of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’
in such life-affirming manner: ‘What we are left with is the fact that the
organism wishes to die only in its own fashion’: Sigmund Freud, On

Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Strachey (London:
Penguin Books, 1965), 312.
45. See Hans Ehrenberg, ‘New Philosophy’, in Alan Udoff and Barbara E.
Galli (eds), Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘New Thinking’ (New York: Syracuse
University Press, 1999), 119: ‘The only thing I regret about the book …
is the unnecessary last word with which the author, who surely does not
need to speak in this way, concludes, paying tribute to our times by sud-
denly joining in the call: from philosophy to life.’
47. See Karl Löwith, ‘M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig. Or Temporality and
Eternity’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 3 (1/1942), 53–77.
49. Nancy, A Finite Thinking, 264; my emphasis.
51. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 194.
52. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, trans. Joanna Vecchiarelli
Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 11.
53. Ibid., 52.
54. The idea that biophilia—love of life—is an essential mode of finite life
as such, i.e. of living life as life and not as a death-issuing vita morta-
lis comes also very strongly to the fore in the penultimate seminar of
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, which can best be summed up as one
big elaboration on the ‘privileged formulation’ of ‘love strong as death’:
‘Loving-living. Loving: living. When we say that a living being loves life,
this statement is not the same as saying X loves something called “life”, a
thing, a thing other than X that is called life. When we say “a living being
loves life” (and only a living being can in fact love life, it seems; a dead
being cannot), we are saying that this living being loves its life, its “being-
in-life” or even “life loves the life-of-life”. Life loves itself in the living
being, life loves itself, period, it loves to live, it loves itself in living for life
[elle s’aime à vivre]. This love is its relation to itself, its self-intimacy, its
ineluctable self-intimacy, before any other supposed interiority.’: Derrida
(83, my emphasis).
55. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 56–57; my emphasis.
56. See most of all Emmanuel Levinas’s openly anti-Heideggerian discussion
on death in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluver Academic Publishers, 1991), where he defends
human life’s own dimension of delaying death: ‘This is why the life
between birth and death is neither folly nor absurdity nor flight nor cow-
ardice. It flows on in a dimension of its own where it has meaning, and
where the triumph over death can have meaning’ (56). And further: ‘The
postponement of death in a mortal will—time—is the mode of existence
and reality of a separated being that has entered in the relation with the
Other. This space of time has to be taken as the point of departure. In
it is enacted a meaningful life which one must not measure against the
ideal of eternity, taking its duration and its interests to be absurd or illu-
sory’ (232). In Levinas, human life is consciously finite, not aspiring to
eternity, yet its finitude is not determined solely by mortality, but also
by a resistance against death, drawn from the sources of memory which
pulls against the time’s seemingly irreversible ‘it was’. His vision of the
triumph over death (ultimately exercised in the love of the neighbour)
remains strictly within the confines of the finite life.
57. The natalistic structure of reversal or metalepsis allows for the fruitful
‘revenge against time’, which, according to Nietzsche, is impossible and,
precisely as such, characteristic of the Semitic resentment towards being;
see e.g. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (New York:
Modern Library, 1917): ‘Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even
the liberator himself in fetters? “It was”—that is the name of the will’s
gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has
been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot
will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness,
that is the will’s loneliest melancholy … This, indeed this alone, is what
revenge is: the will’s resentment against time and time’s “it was”’ (53;
my emphasis). For Nietzsche, the only way of ‘willing backwards’ is the
consensual and conciliatory so wollte Ich: ‘To redeem those who lived in
the past and to recreate all “it was” into a “thus I willed it” –that alone
should I call redemption’ (ibid.). But for Bloom, who bases his whole
system on his polemic with Nietzsche, such resignation of will in face of
time’s transience would never do. In The Anxiety of Influence, he defines
creativity as a combination of repetition and memory, where the latter is
always a remembrance of one’s origins, pulling against the temporal flow:
‘Creativity is thus always the mode of repetition and of memory and also
of what Nietzsche called the will’s revenge against time and against time’s
statement of “It was”’ (98).
58. Cf. Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas,
and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
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———. The Death Penalty, Vol. II. Translated by Elizabeth Rotenberg. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2016.
Di Cesare, Donatella. Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah. Frankfurt: Klostermann,
2016.
Ehrenberg, Hans. ‘New Philosophy’. In Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘New Thinking’.
Edited by Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli. New York: Syracuse University
Press, 1999, 112–120.
Escudero, Jesús Adrián. ‘Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Question of
Anti-Semitism’. Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 5 (2015), 21–49.
Freud, Sigmund. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Translated by J.
Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1965.
Gordon, Peter E. ‘Heidegger in Black’. New York Review of Books, October
9 (2014). Accessed by 8 June 2017: http://www.nybooks.com/
articles/2014/10/09/heidegger-in-black/.
Hegel, G.W.F. On Christianity: Early Theological Writings. Translated by T. M.
Knox. New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961.
———. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
———. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard
Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical

Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by G. Schmid Noerr.
Levinas, Emmanuel. ‘Between Two Worlds (The Way of Franz Rosenzweig)’. In
Difficult Freedom. Translated by Sean Hand. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
———. ‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love’. In Entre Nous, Thinking of The Other.
Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia
———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso
Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluver Academic Publishers, 1991.
Lingis, Alphonso. Deathbound Subjectivity. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989.
Löwith, Karl. ‘M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig. Or Temporality and Eternity’.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 3 (1/1942), 53–77.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Translated by Simon Sparks. Stanford:
Stanford University Press 2003.
———. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E.
O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
———. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Common, New York:
Modern Library, 1917.
Rosenzweig, Franz. Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World,
Man, and God. Translated by Nahum Glatzer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Trawny, Peter. Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung.
Wodziński, Cezary. Metafizyka jako metapolityka. Czarne zeszyty Heideggera.
Gdańsk: słowo obraz—terytoria, 2015.
Wolin, Richard. Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Herbert
Marcuse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
CHAPTER 8
Apocalypse and the History of Being
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback
In a passage from the Black Notebooks written between 1938 and 1939,1
Heidegger ponders Pascal. He reacts—reaction is indeed a main pathos
in the Black Notebooks—against the understanding of Pascal current at
that moment of history. He considers Pascal to be the ‘first great mod-
ern “Christian” thinker,’2 emphasizing the word modern and putting
‘Christian’ in inverted commas. According to Heidegger, the interest
that this moment of history devotes to Pascal is due to a need to respond
to ‘urgencies’ and aporias that are decisively distinct from what he calls
‘the essential distress [Not],’ a central trope of his thoughts in this
period, one that is framed as the need of the needless, the plight of a lack
of a sense of plight (Not der Notlosigkeit).3 Already in his early writings
and lectures, Heidegger considers the concept of ‘Christian thought,’
of ‘philosophical theology,’ or of a ‘Christian thinker’ to be a contradic-
tion in terms, a ‘wooden iron.’4 Here too, then, the idea of a ‘Christian
thinker’ is described as ‘originary brittleness’ (ursprüngliche Brüchigkeit)
and as ‘mendacity’ (Verlogenheit), because it covers over and disguises its
proper essence.5 How, then, is it possible that ‘thought’ and ‘faith’ pre-
sent themselves, on the one hand, as incompatible, and yet, on the other,
are ‘demonstrated’ by Pascal to be in need of one another? Heidegger
M. Sá Cavalcante Schuback (*) 
Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden

192 M. SÁ CAVALCANTE SCHUBACK
admits that Pascal differs from all other modern ‘Christian’ philosophers
from Descartes to Hegel, including even Nietzsche, not insofar as he is
a ‘Christian thinker’ but as a believer. For Heidegger, modern Christian
thought comprehends the ideas of man as ‘subject,’ of the world as ‘cos-
mos,’ and of God as ground and cause of all that is. Pascal, however,
represents something apart because, as a believer, he ‘created the basic
form of modern Christian apologetics,’6 something which the Church
was no longer able to do. What Pascal rendered possible, according to
Heidegger, was allowing Christianity to continue to exist in the midst
of modernity while being against it. Christianity enforces and endorses
modernity precisely in being against it. Pascal was the creator of what
Heidegger called ‘cultural Christianity’ (Kulturchristentum). Pascal’s
‘logic of the heart’ made it possible for modern man to find a language
for ‘subjective experience’ (Erlebnis) in the midst of a world grounded
anew through technology and the mathematical that is, a world
grounded anew upon the lack of experience (Erfahrung). Heidegger’s
earlier opposition between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, subjective or inte-
rior ‘experience’ and experience, is developed here in the assumption
that ‘the logic of the heart’ is the logic of a substitution of experience by
interiority, as the logic of subjectivity as the other side of the same coin
of modern machination (Machenschaft) and calculation (Verrechnung).
If Descartes’s philosophy represents, for Heidegger, the logic of mach-
ination and calculation, the logic of the ‘unleashing of all beings from
Being,’ Pascal’s heart-filled logic is considered the ‘most profound res-
cuing [Rettung] of Cartesianism through Christianity,’7 It is Pascal who
‘saves’ Descartes and modernity, safeguarding them through the cre-
ation of a form of sensibility that is indeed insensible to the ‘essential
distress’ (wesentliche Not), a form of insensible sensibility demanded by
modern machination and calculation of all beings. Pascal renders possi-
ble a cultural Christianity by which modernity becomes entirely a pris-
oner within itself, trapped inside its interiority by the logic of an interior
faith, that is, by the logic of the heart. Heidegger describes the Pascalian
‘order’ as an order of appearance. It presents the logic of ‘subjective
or interior experience’ (Erlebnis) appearing to be a search for truth in
a world that is already totally sure and certain about the meaning of
truth as certainty. This logic is mendacious because it pretends to cor-
respond to a feeling of groundlessness that would be proper to a man-
kind sure about its ground in groundlessness. The transformation into
the taste and style of modernity that takes place in this ‘modern rescuing
8 APOCALYPSE AND THE HISTORY OF BEING 193
of cultural Christianity’ is made possible by means of endless imitation

(Nachahmung), performed with a proficiency acquired through a thou-
sand years of Christian exercises. For Heidegger, this modern ‘salvation’
corresponds, or better, responds to empty enlightened scientificism,
even to a superficial Nietzscheanism that attempts to struggle against
and to overcome Christianity, but in the end does nothing but repeat
Christianity in an inverted form. Hence, cultural Christianity assumes the
role to save Christianity from Christianity, preserving the motive of ‘sal-
vation.’ The way cultural Christianity gears the times is for Heidegger
what makes possible ‘the triumphant parade of technology’ (Siegeszug
der Technik),8 thus it is ‘the sign that the conscious and unconditional
instituting of the modern anthropomorphizing of the human being
[Vermenschung des Menschen] has started as a closed process.’9 What ties
together so tightly Christianity and modernity in the concept of cul-
tural Christianity is for Heidegger the certainty of both the modern idea
of truth and of the interior ‘experience’ (Erlebnis) of faith. At stake in
Heidegger’s ponderings on these black years of Western history is the
‘terror’ (Schrecken) before the possibility that modernity, which is for him
the epoch of the unfolding of the annihilation of Being by the suprem-
acy and hegemony of machination and calculation of beings, will not
end but remain endlessly ending. Heidegger’s ponderings are not really
on the end of the world, but on the endless end of the world, of the
West, on its ending, showing thereby the risk of the end of Being itself.
His search is for a break (Bruch) with the history of the West, accom-
plished through its metaphysical determination—a history that shows the
struggle between Being and the beings—and the appearing of another
beginning (anderer Anfang) of the History of Beyng (Seyn). This break
cannot, however, be accomplished by any act of human will, thus it is a
break within and of Beyng itself. The ‘other beginning’ remains ‘invis-
ible,’ Heidegger will insist throughout these years of black ponderings,
because it can only appear in a certain way of questioning, in the experi-
ence (Erfahrung) of what is most questionable, and when this question-
ing becomes itself the only ground of Da-sein, drawing man back to his
belonging to Beyng. Questioning and problematizing, is however what
cultural Christianity and anti-Christianity—that is, modern forms of in-
sensible sensibility—most hate. Thus, what they both promote is ‘faith in
faith’ (Glauben an den Glauben). Faith in faith is here stated as the tes-
timony of truth as certainty and ‘where there is faith in faith, one day it
becomes indifferent (gleichgültig) what one still has faith in.’10 Instead of
facing a nothingness that is more and more formless, less and less under-
standable, the one who has faith in faith is only capable to stand before
the totality of ‘life’ without knowing how to begin with it, because he/
she lives in the total forgetfulness of the inceptual, being only suited to
‘making interior experiences’ (erleben) of his/her boredom.
In these lines of ‘ponderings,’ we find some motives which tie
together Heidegger’s lifelong struggle with Christianity,11 a strug-
gle that can hardly be dissociated from Heidegger’s intensive read-
ings of Nietzsche, nor from his anti-Semitic statements in the Black
Notebooks. Heidegger’s anti-Semitic statements can hardly be separated
from his anti-Christian statements insofar as both are articulated from
Heidegger’s struggle against faith and knowledge as two sides of the
same coin. In this struggle, Heidegger distrusts narratives of ‘salvation,’
either through rational enlightenment or by means of religious belief,
substituting these narratives with those from the ‘history of Beyng’ and
the ‘other beginning’ (anderer Anfang). Thus, indeed at stake in the
Black Notebooks is a huge ‘querelle of narratives.’ The Heideggerian nar-
rative of the ‘history of Beyng’ and of the ‘other beginning’ belongs to
an apocalyptic narrative of Beyng, to a narrative about the end of a civi-
lizational world, a civilization concerned with its own universalization
and universalism, both as philosophical and Judeo-Christian culture. This
apocalyptic narrative of Beyng is constructed in terms of a History of
Beyng, a Geschichte des Seyns, and has as its central argument the transi-
tion from the first beginning of the West to ‘the other beginning’ (der
andere Anfang). To this apocalyptic narrative belongs the idea of a need
for salvation from salvation and salvific narratives, which can explain why
Heidegger in late statements and thoughts retains the expression ‘salva-
tion,’ either in claiming that ‘only a God can save us’ or else in his fre-
quent citing of Hölderlin’s famous verses from Patmos, ‘where danger
is, grows the saving power also.’12 Heidegger’s anti-Semitic statements
in the Black Notebooks are neither accidental nor marginal, but belong
to the narrative of the ‘history of Beyng,’ and can thereby be termed,
as Peter Trawny has proposed, an ‘onto-historical anti-Semitism’ (seynge-
schichtliches Anti-semitismus).13 They belong to the apocalyptic narrative
of Beyng and the question about the ‘other beginning’, of inceptuality as
such. They belong indeed to Heidegger’s concept of history (Geschichte)
and of historicality (Geschichtlichkeit). Heidegger himself affirmed to Karl
Löwith during their meeting in Rome 1936 that his engagement with
National Socialism was grounded on his concept of ‘historicity.’14 In

order to read Heidegger’s anti-Semitic and anti-Christian statements in
the context of the Black Notebooks and of Heidegger’s thought, it is nec-
essary to reach more clarity about the ‘apocalyptic tone,’ recalling Kant’s
expression,15 and the apocalyptic strand in the narrative of the ‘history
of Beyng’ and of the ‘other beginning.’ This is the main purpose of this
chapter. The way to proceed will be to follow Heidegger’s text closely in
order to decipher its apocalyptic logic.
*
In the Black Notebooks Heidegger scribbles down ‘Ponderings,’
Überlegungen, that attest and bear witness to the ending of the world.
It is important to emphasize that, for Heidegger, the question is not
really about the end of the world, but about its ending, about the end
without end of the world. In this, let us say, ‘final difference’ between
a narrative about the end and one about ending, that is, about the end
while ending, a central distinction between religious apocalyptic narra-
tives and Heidegger’s apocalyptic narrative of Beyng can be made.16 In
his endeavour to write down the ending of the world within the world,
Heidegger is committed to accomplishing what writing inexhaustibly
attempts to do, namely to fix what is intrinsically fugitive, what is con-
tinuously withdrawing. If Christianity is ‘life in the world outside of the
world,’ following here Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on ‘Why deconstruct
Christianity in the midst of the world?,’17 Heidegger’s anti-Christian
and anti-Semitic narrative is one of the ending of the world within the
world. This defines the kind of writing we call ‘testament’ or ‘will’ and it
is in this sense that I have suggested before that Heidegger’s writing in
the Black Notebooks is a testamentary writing.18 This is also what inher-
ently links writing to history (as Geschehen) rather than to historiography.
Thus, as the gesture of fixing the withdrawing, writing is seized from the
happening itself and not merely in relation to what has occurred, that is
to the facts of historiography. Indeed, what Heidegger calls the ‘history
of Beyng’ (Geschichte des Seyns) is the testament of Beyng itself. He is
obsessed with writing down the testament of Beyng, making it the very
testament of philosophy, i.e philosophy writing down its legacy before its
ending, without being sure if the future itself could have a legacy. In this
sense, the Black Notebooks could be read as the testimony of an attempt
to register the un-registrable, to build a register of the falling down of all
registers, regimes and systems, not only of thought, of praxis and of the
world, but above all of life and death.19
As testamentary writing of the ending of the world, the Black

Notebooks are dealing with an afterness that is still not there, that is still
not in the after. They are dealing with an end that is and is not at the
end. Because the world is ending the beginning of another world cannot
begin. The ending is at once the end of a beginning that does not end to
end and the beginning of a beginning that has not yet begun. In fact, the
testamentary writing of the Black Notebooks pretends to write an epochal
transition (Übergang). Epoch has here the sense of suspension rather
than of a chronological interval between civilizational events. Indeed,
the Black Notebooks are an attempt to write down a transition between
two suspensions: the suspension of what has begun and the suspen-
sion of what has not begun. They pretend to write down the transition
between the ending of the ‘first beginning’—what Heidegger also called
the Occidental revolution (die abendländische Revolution),20 that is, the
Greek philosophical civilizational revolution—and ‘the other beginning.’
This transition is also formulated in terms of the transition from
Europe and the West to another inception of Beyng, which grounds
another topo- and chrono-graphy. Heidegger insists that this other
inception is not another beginning in a series of beginnings follow-
ing the movement of time and history, but the inception of another
inceptuality. It is the ‘Anfägnis des Anfangs,’21 Heidegger writes. This
may explain the sense in which he affirms that the ‘other beginning’ is
older than the first.22 At stake is the thought of the era—to come or
not—of the other Beyng of being. At stake is the foreseeing of an ‘era
of Beyng’ (Zeitalter des Seyns),23 he also remarks. The other inception
of the inceptuality is ‘other,’ but not in the sense of another, in a series of
successions, but as ‘the ultimate unique’ (das Einzigsten). The core of
Heidegger’s struggle against Christianity and against Jewry is indeed his
struggle against ‘universality,’ his struggle for the ‘utmost uniqueness of
Beyng.’ In its utmost uniqueness, Beyng is the other of other: ‘Beyng is
the most unique’ (Das Seyn ist das Einzigste)—this is perhaps the most
difficult philosophical thought ever formulated. The question is thus
how to think and say the ultimately unique, das Einzigste, how to think
the ‘uniqueness of Beyng’ (Einzigkeit des Seyns),24 since, as most unique,
it cannot be related to any ‘before.’ Without any relation to a before,
it can only be foreboded (ahnet) in relation to a before. This is why
Heidegger insists that ‘An initial agreement concerning what is wholly
other can be achieved only through an assimilation [Angleichung] of the
past—whereby to be sure the danger is increased that what is genuinely
and uniquely questioned will become lost through the facile calculation
of the past, especially if the interpretation attributes to the past a more
originary “dimension”.’25
From where is it possible to think and to say beforehand (vordenken
und vorsagen) the other beginning of the beginning, the most un-pre-
thinkable (unvordenklich), insofar as it is the ultimate unique beginning,
irreducible to any other, impossible to imitate any other? ‘In-between,’
Heidegger writes, meaning both meanwhile and being in the middle of
it, ‘another History of Beyng has already begun; for when beings are
essentially drifting towards their end (the here and now being that of
machination), there must be a beginning of Beyng, even if only the rare
and the future ones may think and poeticize [dichten] it in an unknown
knowledge.’26 How is it possible to gain knowledge of the ‘other his-
tory of Beyng?’ Heidegger’s answer is that only by ‘questioning’ and
‘indicating’ (andeuten) ‘in-between’ (inzwischen), is it possible to know,
in unknown ways, something of the other beginning. But ‘where’ is
this ‘in-between?’ From which standpoint is it possible to think and say
beforehand the ‘other history of Beyng?’ Heidegger responds with a tau-
tology: only from onto-historical thinking (seyngeschichtliches Denken) it
is possible to gain knowledge of the other history of Beyng. But where
can one find this ‘in-between’ or standpoint to think onto-historically?
‘The thinking that is heedful of the history of beyng neither “has” a
standpoint nor is free of standpoints—if standpoints is supposed to
mean that from which beings are viewed and from which a regard is
taken toward beingness,’27 we can read in the Notebooks. Neither to have
nor not to have—this formula aims to present the ‘point’ from which
the onto-historical thinking (seyngeschichtliche Denken) is to be written.
This point is itself neither a point nor a non-point, for it is a ‘between,’ a
transition while transiting, indeed, the trance of transition. This thought
from Beyng, onto-historical thinking, does not have standpoints, because
it pretends to be a thought confronted not with beings but with the
event of Being. Onto-historical thinking is also presented as a thinking
of many traces or vestiges (vielspuriges Denken),28 a thinking that does
not ‘see’ oppositions, a before and an after, a here and a there. Onto-
historical thinking is therefore not theoretical; its central dimension is
the ‘far away’ (Ferne), from which the movement from the first begin-
ning to the other beginning can be heard in every thinking word. This
thought ‘configures itself in the figureless, for there is no form assured
in any “image” and in any explained “thing”—its word is naked and
courageous.’29 The other beginning cannot be thought beforehand

(vorausgedacht), it can only be thought without figures of thought and
almost said without words or Figures.30 The difficulty that this testamen-
tary writing has to deal with is the one of passing from a thinking that
is nothing but a draft into writing, and no longer from a thought into a
text. What Heidegger proposes is the figureless and imageless thought
from within a transition, in which there is no possible ‘perspective’ or
‘distance’ from which differences could be defined and distinguished.
From within transition—that is, transition while transiting—from within
the trance of transition, ‘transition itself is the most transitionless’ (Der
Übergang selbst – ist das Übergangloseste),31 as it can be read in the
Notebooks. In transition, in this time-space that presents itself as Zwischen-
raum (in-between space) rather than a Lebensraum (living space), and
that is also written in terms of ‘undergoing’ (unterdessen) and ‘between-
ness,’ what appears is indeed the ending (die Endung) in which the end
is without an end and the beginning begins before the beginning. In its
‘meanwhile,’ transition cannot step out of itself, since it is the ‘most tran-
sitionless’ (das Übergangloseste) within which one is completely besieged.
One of the Latin words for besiegement is obsessio. Heidegger’s writing
in the Black Notebooks is the writing of the obsession of transition.
In the trance of transition, in transition while transiting, the same
is at once ‘other.’ Heidegger contends that ‘in the transition from the
first beginning and its history to the other beginning and its prepara-
tion, all thinking of being, the more decisively it presses on to clarity,
becomes all the more ambiguous.’32 Onto-historical thinking is thinking
through ambiguity, a thinking through ambiguous words and catego-
ries that assumes ambiguity as the clarity of transition while in transi-
tion. Heidegger writes about ‘the ambiguity of transitional thinking’
(die Zweideutigkeit des übergänglichen Denkens).33 Long before the pub-
lication of the Black Notebooks, Reiner Schürmann captured the transi-
tional meaning of this meaning of transition in Heidegger’s Beiträge
and his discussion is here clarifying.34 The trance of transition, tran-
sition in its transit, is the trance of ambiguity, the impossibility to dis-
tinguish and differentiate, either as opposites or as paradoxes. It is the
trance of an ambiguity that cannot be solved by any dialectics, but that
nonetheless exposes—as the acid of a photographic negative—the deci-
siveness (Entscheidenheit) of Beyng itself. ‘This ambiguity is not a lack
of decisiveness; instead, it is the unavoidable consequence of decisive-
ness,’ Heidegger insists.35 In the trance of the ambiguity of times of
transition, ‘the real—what common sense assumes as such and the essen-
tializing of Beyng in its highest amplitude—up to the forgotten aliena-
tion [are already] intertwined.’36 Ambiguity is the language of transition
while transiting, the language of a meta-metaphysics.37 In this language,
not only are Being und Nothingness the same, not only is ‘the abyssal
refusal’ already the ‘essentializing of Beyng,’38 but Being is also Beyng
(Sein ist Seyn). ‘Being’ as it is misunderstood in the first beginning as
the ground of beings is already ‘Beyng’ understood onto-historically in
the other beginning in its ungraspability. The madness of this onto-his-
torical thinking is due to this ‘sameotherness’ (Selbander)—a word that
Heidegger uses in some fragments of the 1970s, in which Sein with ‘i’
is already being spelled Seyn with ‘y’—as much as the other beginning
of inceptuality can be foreboded in the first beginning, when the move-
ment of its own withdrawal is followed in its vestigious way of appear-
ing while disappearing. Maybe onto-historical thinking cannot be said,
but only written. And if heard, it can perhaps only be heard as written
words are heard in silent reading. The difference between metaphysical
and onto-historical thinking is in a certain sense neither an ontological
nor a phenomenological difference, but a written difference, a difference
that could be ventured. In the already mentioned volume Besinnung,
Heidegger writes: ‘The metaphysical saying: “Being is” [Being with “i”]
aims to save Being as the foremost being and the first of all beings. The
onto-historical saying: “Beyng is” [Beyng with “y”] thinks of something
else, not of the foremost Being as the first of all beings, but rather of
Beyng—despite the saying of the “is”—and not as beings; (it) says the
pure presencing of Beyng, the allowance of decisiveness and at the same
time the retraction of Beyng in the quietness of the abyss.’39 Insofar
as in the most transitionless transition there is only ending, Heidegger
writes about the tension between ‘ending’ (Verendung) and ‘endless-
ness’ (Endlosigkeit).40 To this distinction corresponds another one,
namely the tension between ‘destruction’ (Zerstörung) und ‘devastation’
(Verwüstung): ‘Destruction is the forbiddance of a concealed begin-
ning’ (Zerstörung ist der Verbote eines verborgenen Anfangs).41 What
remains after destruction, the ruins of Zerstörung is, in its turn, devasta-
tion, Verwüstung as ‘… the lingering of the already decided end’ (der
Nachschlag des bereits entschiedenen Endes).42 In this tension, the follow-
ing question arises: ‘Are these the times before the decision between
destruction and devastation? The other beginning we know of solely by
questioning.’43 The most questionable appears indeed to be whether
Being (the civilizatory word grounded by the first beginning) will decide
to end or not, and whether it will decide to withdraw without return
so that inceptuality as such can be other, so that Being can be other,
namely, Beyng, and thereby ground another humanity, another Da-sein
of Beyng.
*
Heidegger is obsessed with how the first beginning, ‘the great begin-
ning of Western man’ coincides with the inception of philosophy with
the ancient Greeks. Inception, arche in Greek, means both inception and
power. The power of the narrative of beginnings and ends is the power
of philosophical narratives of grounds, foundations, causes and prin-
ciples, as well as of ends, goals and purposes. Indeed, for Heidegger,
the power of the inceptive narrative of philosophy presents philosophy
as a narrative of power. Heidegger conceives of the inceptive force of
philosophy as emanating from the destructive force of this first begin-
ning, which is the force of seizing only the singularity and uniqueness
of Being, losing it in its quest for the Being of all beings, formulated
by Plato as the quest for what is ‘common’ to all beings, for the to
koinon, the koinonia and for the totality or totalitarianism of the mean-
ing of Being qua beings, to katholon. This is why Heidegger considers
Plato’s concept of truth as the one in which the truth of truth was for-
mulated–namely the truth of what shows itself in its own withdrawal. It
is not an accident that the only texts that Heidegger published between
1930 and 1947 are ‘Platos Lehre von der Wahrheit’ (1942) and ‘Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit’ (1943), both conceived, as he insists, in the years
of 1930/1931.44 The foundation of philosophy, in which the light of
Beyng is seized while being lost in the meaning of Being as the ground
of all beings, is the foundation of a public eye, a third eye, a commu-
nizing and totalizing eye. And this eye of universal striving becomes,
through modernity, total, planetary and global. The consolidation of
philosophy as the ‘destiny’ of the West, as ‘Western revolution’, is the
birth of Communism (to koinon) and Catholicism (to katholon), which
to Heidegger means a metaphysical politics of universalization. Since
both entail operations in which the singularity and uniqueness of Beyng
appear only while disappearing in the totality and commonality of the
beings, truth is seized philosophically by the Greeks in an apocalyptic
manner. The Greek word ‘apocalypse’ means revelation (apo + kalyptein),
i.e., what appears at the end, when everything has definitively ended.
In question here is the apocalyptic structure of aletheia, of ‘truth.’
From the viewpoint of the history of Being, which is the viewpoint of

the ending of the world, the truth of the first beginning can only appear
in its own disappearing. Heidegger is obsessed with the vision of this
foreboding vision, of this presentiment of Beyng, which can only be
envisioned as the shadow of the loss that permeates the first beginning of
Being as the philosophical West. Heidegger’s obsession is with the truth
of truth seized as aletheia, as appearing in its own withdrawal.
The ending of the first beginning—and not its end—is described by
Heidegger as the ‘epoch of the finalization or completion of moder-
nity’ (Zeitalter der Vollendung der Neuzeit) and modernity as ‘the
époque of the finalization or completion of technology’ (die Zeitalter
der Vollendung der Technik).45 It is the époque that necessarily follows
the abandonment and refusal of Being when the supremacy and hegem-
ony of beings disfigure Being. The époque of the completion or fina-
lization (Voll-endung) of modernity, as the époque of technology, is
understood by Heidegger as the epoch of the ‘unleashing of machina-
tion’ (Entfesselung der Machenschaft) that accomplishes the ‘complete
uprootedness of all beings from Being.’46 Heidegger contends that in
this epoch ‘there can only be two possibilities: either the violent and fast
end (which looks like “catastrophe”), … or the endless degeneracy of
the actual condition of unconditional machination.’47 The choice is pre-
sented as one between a total destruction that sets an end to Being and
even to the end, on the one hand, and an endless destruction of Being
under the hegemony of beings, on the other. Accordingly, the ‘unleash-
ing of machination’ and the ‘uprootedness of beings from Being’ are in
their very essence directed towards the whole planet. In their essence,
the degeneracy of Being and the supremacy of beings are planetarian
and characterized by what Ernst Jünger termed ‘total mobilization’: ‘All
western people are according to their historically determined essence
involved in this occurrence.’48 In Heidegger’s apocalyptic narrative, the
end appears in the form of a decided indecision of whether the earth
and humanity will disappear completely or whether the end will remain
ending all over the earth and humanity. In this total and planetary—in
today’s vocabulary ‘global’—decided indecision between an ended end
and an endless end, between the end and the ending, between destruc-
tion and devastation, between ‘final annihilation’ and the ending without
end of modernity, Heidegger affirms the possibility to forebode another
‘history of Beyng’. The agony of an end without end, of an ending of the
world and of Being, is so hard to endure that Heidegger confesses in the
Notebooks his desire that the end comes as fast as possible: ‘if the earth
would explode in the air and the present humanness [Menschentum]
would disappear, this would not be a misfortune, but indeed the first
purification before the most profound disfiguration of Being through
the supremacy of beings.’49 In the final annihilation of the first inception
of the Western world, Heidegger purports to see, as in a photographic
negative, the traces of the movement towards a great inception; not an
image of a great beginning, origin or inception, but rather the vestiges
of the ‘moving towards an inception.’ He seems obsessed not only with
a ‘becoming in dissolution’ (Werden im Vergehen), in the sense given by
Hölderlin when he chose this expression as a title,50 but also with vislum-
brating the interstices and meanders of the moving towards a beginning
that can only show itself in its ‘final annihilation.’ Heidegger is obsessed
with the need of revolutionizing the Western philosophical revolution,
with the need of revolutionizing the revolution of the spheres. He aims
for a total revolution and not only a ‘permanent revolution.’ Because of
his obsession with the need for total change, for mutation, in a world
totally devastated by the imperative of transformation, he seems obliged
to revert the reversion of the ‘great inception’ presented and represented
by the Greek philosophy of Being, which is for him the civilizational
ground of the West. As already indicated, the fatal and lethal reversion
of this great inception is for Heidegger modernity. Modernity appears
in this apocalyptic narrative of the other inception of inceptuality as
the instance of fatal and lethal internal reversion of Western humanness
(Menschentum). In this sense, modernity is assumed to be the beginning
of the self-annihilation of the great Western inception. Self-annihilation
means here not the annihilation of what has begun in this beginning,
not the annihilation of the deeds of this great first beginning of Western
civilization, but the annihilation of inceptuality as such. The danger and
threat of the times of the ‘unleashing of machination’ and of the plane-
tary ‘uprootedness of all beings from Being,’ is the threat of annihilation
of what is indestructible, namely inceptuality as such (das Anfängliche).
If Greece is described as the Raum-Zeit of the great first inception of the
West, the inception that is ‘now’ at its end, modernity is for Heidegger
the place and time, indeed, the time-place, Zeit-raum, of the beginning
of the self-annihilation of the great first inception.
To each of these concepts, Raum-Zeit and Zeit-raum (the lat-
ter mirroring the first as its reversal), corresponds a mode of humanity
(Menschentümlichkeit). Heidegger suggests that the great first beginning
was given to men as the gift of its ‘uniqueness’ (Einzigkeit).51 Whereas

the gift of uniqueness was given to a unique ‘people’—the Greeks—in
such a way that from them a civilization could begin and end by means
of its totalization, the Jews are for Heidegger the people—the other peo-
ple—in which the ‘unleashing of machination’ and the ‘uprootedness
of beings from Being’ is realized. The Jews accomplish the exclusion
of the ‘uniqueness of Beyng.’ These ‘nomadic Semites,’ in Heidegger’s
own terminology,52 this other people, or in Lyotard’s words, this ‘peo-
ple of the other,’53 are the ones that for Heidegger have taken the ‘uni-
versal historical task’ (die weltgeschichtliche Ausgabe) of uprootedness
upon themselves.54 Heidegger insists in the Notebooks that ‘the question
of the role of Jewry is not racial, but a metaphysical question about the
mode of humanity [Art von Menschentümlichkeit] that has undertaken
the absolute uprootedness of all beings from Being as a world histori-
cal “task”.’55 The Jews and Jewry are not the cause of planetary evil,
but its agents, considered to have assumed the ‘task’ of accomplish-
ing it insofar as they are a people without a place, a placeless self and
a groundless (Bodenlose) people. The Jews present ‘the greater ground-
lessness that, not being bound to anything, avails itself of everything.’56
‘International Jewry’ (das internationale Judentum), or ‘world-Jewry’
(das Weltjudentum), disseminates this ‘greater groundlessness,’ mani-
fested in the Jews’ own scattering throughout the world, through which
they become themselves ‘ungraspable’ (unfaßbar).57 Because of their
ability to calculate and to unfold the ‘empty rationality and calculabil-
ity,’ the Jews could increase their power and become the ‘place’ and ‘the
kind of people’ that assumed the task of unfolding Western metaphys-
ics in its modern configuration. They assumed the task of the ‘anthro-
pomorphizing of the human being’ (Vermenschung des Menschen), a task
that accomplishes and extends what Heidegger calls ‘the historical ani-
mal’ (historisches Tier), the animal that knows everything by means of
reducing everything to nothing and thereby making use of it to whatever
purposes. In a different vocabulary, Heidegger describes the groundless
worldliness of Jewry as a ‘process of nivellation’ (Ausgleich),58 in Max
Scheler’s expression, in which everything loses its being when surren-
dered to the supremacy and hegemony of beings.
*
But what is this ‘world-historical task’ assumed by the ‘nomadic
Semites’ in modern times? In Heidegger’s narrative it is the task of
unfolding the ‘unleashing of machination and uprootedness,’ which
from the lack of standpoint of the onto-historical transitory thinking is

the task of self-annihilation (Selbst-Vernichtung) of Western metaphysics.
‘The power of machination,’ Heidegger writes, ‘has reached the point of
total annihilation even of godlessness, the point of anthropomorphizing
of the human, of depletion of the earth, of miscalculation of the world.
It has come to the extreme situation of final conclusion; differences
between people, states, cultures are only facades. No measure is capable
to hinder or repress machination.’59 These lines belong to Heidegger’s
obsessed and obsessional logic of annihilation (Vernichtung): ‘Hard by
the edge of nihilation runs the way indicated by beyng for thinking.’60
Heidegger’s logic of annihilation is one that acknowledges the histori-
cal event of total annihilation. It is a logic that recognizes, before the
‘evidences’ of absolute annihilation and total destruction (the twentieth
century is not only the century of war, as Jan Patočka suggested,61 but
also the century of the realization of the reality of total destruction),
that there is no other possibility to escape from total annihilation than
to mobilize everything for the sake of annihilating annihilation. Self-
annihilation is hence not only annihilation of beings inside the sphere
that can be called a ‘self’ and considered as belonging to oneself. This
can be, as Heidegger will remark in one of the darkest passages of the
Notebooks, ‘the highest kind and the highest act of politics’ (die höch-
ste Art und der höchste Akt der Politik) insofar as ‘the highest kind and
act of politics consists in pushing the adversary to a situation in which
he is forced to step into his own self-annihilation. At this point, poli-
tics needs a long breath and a long arm for the sake of being capable to
endure blows and defeats for a long time.’62 The terror of this political
‘strategy’ of self-annihilation to oblige the enemy to step into his own
self-annihilation does not ‘end’ with the monstrous attempt to disguise
the extermination—of the Jews and other peoples—with a narrative of
self-annihilation; it unfolds its terror in horrifying modes also in attempts
to annihilate annihilation. Thus, self-annihilation is also annihilation of
annihilation, which means, on the one hand, annihilation without an
end of both the other and of oneself (what Achille Mbembe has termed
‘necro-politics’63), but, on the other hand, also the appropriation of the
other’s own annihilation.
Heidegger’s anti-Semitic statements in the Black Notebooks are not
many, but many enough to indicate how anti-Semitism is inscribed in
the apocalyptic tone and ‘logic’ of the West. It is inscribed as the flipside
of the apocalyptic narrative of a radical other inception that would no
longer refer to any past or to any before. It belongs to a narrative of rev-

olution of revolution. In this respect, Heidegger’s apocalyptic narrative
in the Black Notebooks is not too far from certain apocalyptic narratives
and tones in our present time.64 Also in our time, there is a sentiment
of finding ourselves in the middle of a race speeding to its end: not only
the end of art, of history, of philosophy and of man, but of all resources
pertaining to the world, to the earth and to the planet. In all these dis-
courses of the end, the ‘logic’ of apocalypse is enforced and enhanced in
repetitions and reinventions of former apocalyptic narratives. The read-
ing of Heidegger’s testamentary writing in the Black Notebooks can be
a way to further scrutinize this dangerous logic that seems to leave no
other alternative than a total end as the only path into a ‘new’ era. This
problematic philosophical testament challenges us to think beyond the
alternative of uniqueness and universalism, to recognize the apocalyp-
tic logic operating since the very beginning of the Western philosophi-
cal tradition, to think in other terms what it means to begin, and, last
but not least, to venture to think an ‘outside of the world in the world,’
beyond ideologies and theologies of salvation. Thereby it would be pos-
sible to discover a path of thinking capable to ‘salute,’ reminding our-
selves, with Derrida,65 that the word ‘salvation’ originally derives from
the Latin salve, an opening that belongs to the world, and recalling the
beautiful words by Paul Celan: Das Endliche sang, das Stete (‘The Finite
sang there, the Constant’).66
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39), GA
95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 342–346; Eng. trans.: Ponderings
VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939, trans. Richard Rojcewicz
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 267–270. References
to the German original of Heidegger’s works will be given as GA
(Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume number. Translations are by the
author unless otherwise stated.
3. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA 65 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1989), 11; Eng. trans.: Contributions to Philosophy (Of the
Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2012), 99.
4. Heidegger, ‘Phänomenologie und Theologie,’ in Wegmarken, GA 9
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979), 6.

6. Ibid., 343; Eng. trans., 267.
7. Ibid., 344; Eng. trans., 268.
8. Ibid., 345; Eng. trans., 269.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 346; Eng. trans., 269 (trans. modified by the author).
11. See, e.g., the discussion by Didier Franck in Heidegger et le Christianisme.
L’explication silencieuse (Paris: Epiméthée, 2004).
12. See, e.g., Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays, trans. William Lowitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 28.
13. Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der judischen Weltverschworung,
1st ed., (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014). Eng. trans.: Heidegger and the
Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
14. Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart:
Metzler Verlag, 1986), 56–58. See also Löwith’s account in ‘My Last
Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936,’ in New German Critique, No.
45, Special Issue on Bloch and Heidegger (Autumn, 1988), 115–116.
15. Immanuel Kant, Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in
der Philosophie (1786), Eng. trans. ‘On a Recently Prominent Tone
of Superiority in Philosophy,’ trans. Peter Heath, in Immanuel Kant,
Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, eds Henry Allison and Peter Heath
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 425–447.
16. It wouldn’t be without interest to compare Heidegger’s writing in
the Black Notebooks with the writings of Roman historians bearing tes-
timony to the end of the Roman civilization, see Paul Veyne, When
our World Became Christian: 312–394, (Cambridge: Polity, 2010)
and Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Flavius, Josephus: Eyewitness to Rome’s First
Century Conquest of Judea, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1993).
17. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘In the Midst of the World; or, Why Deconstruct
Christianity?’ in Alena Alexandrova et al., (eds), Re-treating Religion:
Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Fordham
18. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, ‘Heidegger, die Juden, Heute’ in Peter
Trawny and Andrew J. Mitchell (eds), Heidegger, die Juden, noch einmal
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2015), 117–144.
19. Heidegger, GA 65, 5: ‘The time of systems is behind us.’
21. Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang (1941), GA 70 (Frankfurt:
22. Cf. Heidegger, GA 95, 213.

24. Ibid., 286; Eng. trans., 223.
25. Ibid., 337; Eng. trans., 263.
28. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938/40), GA 69 (Frankfurt:
29. Ibid., 87.
34. See Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles
to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and Broken
Hegemonies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
36. Heidegger, GA 96, 93. Already in Being and Time, a discussion about
‘ambiguity’ as a figure of the Verfallenheit des Mannes can be found
in §37, 173. Also in the Black Notebooks, thoughts on ambiguity can
be found in GA 94, 479. See also the later essay ‘Die Frage nach der
Technik’ in Die Technik und die Kehre (Stuttgart: Neske, 1996), 33.
37. Heidegger, Besinnung, GA 66 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997), 376–377.
40. The Black Notebooks are perhaps nothing but the testamentary writing of a
trance, in a trance; cf. Heidegger, GA 96, 139.
41. Ibid., 3.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Heidegger, Nietzsche I (1936–1939), GA 6.1 (Frankfurt: Klostermann,
1996), 10.
46. Ibid., 243.
47. Ibid., 138–139.
48. Ibid., 155.
49. Ibid., 238.
50. Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Werden im Vergehen,’ in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe
(Munich: Hanser, 1970), 282–287.
52. Martin Heidegger, ‘Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und
Staat. Übung aus dem Wintersemester 1933/34,’ in Heidegger und der
Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente, Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4 (2009), 82.
53. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the Jews,’ trans. Andreas Michel
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 22.
55. Ibid.
58. See Max Scheler, ‘Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs’ (1927), in
Gesammelte Werke, Vol. IX (Bern: Franck, 1976), 145–170.
59. Heidegger, GA 96, 52–53.
61. Cf. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim
Kohác (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).
63. See Achilles Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics,’ in Public Culture 15: 1 (2003),
Duke University Press, 11–40.
64. See, e.g., Jayne Svenungsson’s critical readings of the apocalyptic strand
in the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek in idem, Divining
History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit, trans.
Stephen Donovan (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).
65. See Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine
Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). In French salut can
mean both ‘greeting’ or ‘salutation’ and ‘salvation.’
66. Paul Celan, from the poem ‘Nachmittag mit Zirkus und Zitadelle’ in ‘Die
Niemandsrose,’ in: Gedichte I (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1983), 261.
Works Cited
Celan, Paul. Gedichte I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine
Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Franck, Didier. Heidegger et le Christianisme. L’explication silencieuse. Paris:
Epiméthée, 2004.
Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. Flavius, Josephus: Eyewitness to Rome’s First Century
Conquest of Judea. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1993.
Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938). GA
65. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 3rd ed. GA 65. Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2003.

———. Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938/40). GA 69. Edited by Peter Trawny.
———. Nietzsche I (1936–1939). GA 6.1. Edited by Brigitte Schillbach.
———. Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939. Translated by Richard
———. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by
William Lowitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
———. Über den Anfang (1941). GA 70. Edited by Coriando Paola-Ludovika.
———. ‘Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat. Übung aus
dem Wintersemester 1933/34’, in Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus:
Dokumente, Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4, 2009, 53–88.
———. Wegmarken (1919–1961). GA 9. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Munich: Hanser, 1970.
Kant, Immanuel, ‘On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy’.
In Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Edited and translated
by Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002, 425–447.
Löwith, Karl. Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933. Stuttgart: Metzler
Verlag, 1986.
———. ‘My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936.’ Translated by
Richard Wolin. In New German Critique, No. 45, Special Issue on Bloch and
Heidegger (Autumn, 1988), 115–116.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Heidegger and ‘the Jews.’ Translated by Andreas Michel.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Mbembe, Achilles. ‘Necropolitics.’ Public Culture 15: 1 (2003). Duke University
Press, 11–40.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘In the Midst of the World; or, Why Deconstruct Christianity?’
In Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy.
Edited by Alena Alexandrova et al. New York: Fordham University Press,
2012, 1–21.
Patočka, Jan. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Translated by Erazim

Kohác. Chicago: Open Court, 1996.
Scheler, Max. ‘Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs’ (1927). In Gesammelte
Werke, Vol. IX. Bern: Franck, 1976, 145–170.
Schuback, Marcia Sá Cavalcante. ‘Heidegger, die Juden, Heute.’ Heidegger, die
Juden, noch einmal. Edited by Peter Trawny and Andrew Mitchell. Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2015, 117–144.
Schürmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy.
———. Broken Hegemonies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Development of the Spirit. Translated by Stephen Donovan. New York and
Oxford: Berghahn, 2016.
Trawny, Peter. Heidegger und der Mythos der judischen Weltverschworung.
———. Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy. Translated by
Andrew J. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Trawny, Peter and Andrew Mitchell (eds). Heidegger, die Juden, noch einmal.
Veyne, Paul. When our World Became Christian. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.
CHAPTER 9
Gottwesen and the De-Divinization

of the Last God: Heidegger’s Meditation
on the Strange and Incalculable
Elliot R. Wolfson
A critical component of Heidegger’s Denkweg after the Kehre of the

1930s was his speculation about the last god.1 Heideggerian scholars
have duly noted the importance of this motif, which marks the transition
from the end of metaphysics to the other beginning through the twofold
movement of beyng’s bestowing withdrawal, the self-concealment that is
the unconcealment of the refusal.2 It has even been suggested, correctly
in my view, that the sending of beyng, which heralds the advent of this
new beginning, bears the imprint of Heidegger’s religious upbringing
and, in particular, an earlier phenomenological interest in the theological
belief in the second coming of Christ.3 In the Contributions to Philosophy
(Of the Event), composed between 1936–1938, Heidegger delineated
six junctures—the echo (Anklang), the playing-forth (Zuspiel), the leap
(Sprung), the grounding (Gründung), the ones to come (Zukünftigen),
and the last god (letzte Gott)—that express the essential congruence of
what is thought without being compressed systematically into a unifying
whole. The six junctures disjunctively convey the unity of the sovereignty
of the questioning way of belonging by reverberating the same about
the same out of distinct and dissonant domains, each one a disclosure
of the ‘sheltering truth of the event’, a truth—identified by Heidegger
E.R. Wolfson (*) 
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

212 E.R. Wolfson
as the strife (Streit) of world and earth—that is the ‘grounded structure

(joining) of the “there”, a structure of transport-captivation [gegründete
Entrückungs-Berückungsgefüge (Fügung) des Da]’.4 My aim in this chap-
ter is to shed light on the last of these junctures by a close reading of
passages from the recently published Black Notebooks, which preserve
Heidegger’s private meditations covering the years 1931–1948.
To set the analysis, let me begin with a passage from the
Contributions, in which Heidegger writes about the fissure (Zerklüftung)
‘in virtue of which beyng is the realm of decision for the battle among
the gods. This battle is waged over their advent [Ankunft] and abscond-
ing [Flucht]; it is the battle in which the gods first divinize and bring
their god into decision. Beyng is the trembling of this divinization [die
Erzitterung dieses Götterns]’.5 Elsewhere in the Contributions, Heidegger
writes that the refusal ‘is the highest nobility of bestowal and is the
basic trait of the self-concealment whose manifestness constitutes the
originary essence of the truth of beyng. Only in this way does beyng
become estrangement [Befremdung] itself, the stillness of the passing by
of the last god’.6 From this we may deduce that the bestowal itself is
a refusal to bestow; what is bequeathed must be held in reserve to be
bequeathed—the concealment of the concealment cannot be revealed
unless it is revealed as that which is concealed. Heidegger’s insist-
ence that ‘as refusal, beyng is not mere withholding and seclusion’, and
hence the ‘refusal is the intimacy of an allocation’,7 well expresses the
fundamental paradox that informed the path of his thinking focused on
the self-refusing appropriation of beyng, the ‘still illumination of self-
concealment [Sichverbergens], which liberates the human being from the
mere rational animal into the grounder of Da-sein’.8
In the same tenor, Heidegger wrote in the notebooks, ‘Beyng
– self-refusal as the trembling of the divinizing of the last god [die
Verweigerung als die Erzitterung des Götterns des letzten Gottes]. The
trembling is a keeping open – indeed even the openness of the spati-
otemporal field [Zeit-Spiel-Raums] of the “there” [des Da] for Da-sein’.9
The portrait of being placed before us by Heidegger is decidedly bel-
ligerent: the primordial fissure inflames the spirit of struggle (Kampf)
among the gods in which they divinize and bring their god into decision,
that is, the self-refusal of being mythologized—or anthropomorphized—
as the trembling of the divinizing of the last god.10 On the surface, the
word ‘divinizing’ seems redundant, but the redundancy underscores that
the combat itself is essential to the act of decision, which results in the
9 GOTTWESEN AND THE DE-DIVINIZATION OF THE LAST GOD … 213
flight of the calculable gods (Götter) and the dawning of the inestimable
essence of divinity (Gottwesen),11 a double concealment in virtue of
which the nonbeing of beyng dissembles as the being of nonbeing—an
effect of the metaphysical effacing of the ontological difference between
beings and beyng, which is the nothingness (das Nichts) that is higher
and deeper than nonbeings (Un-seiende).12 As a consequence of the
dissimulation of the nullity (Nichtiges) of beyng as something nega-
tive, apparent divinities become indistinguishable from true divinities,
the one as the other are present only in the absence of their presence—
in the vacuity, or literally the spiritlessness (Geistlosigkeit), that is the
flight of the gods (Flucht der Götter)13—and thus are manifest in the
nonappearance of their appearance.14 The trembling results, moreover,
in the openness of the spatiotemporal field—the abyss as timespace—that
makes possible the ‘appropriating event’ (das Ereignis) that ‘destines the
human being to be the property [Eigentum] of beyng’.15
The last god, I propose, is the semiotic marker of that which is always
subject to being surpassed and therefore can never be last chrono-
logically; as such, it is ‘the inceptual one in the essencing of beyng’.16
Temporally, the notion of the last god is an instantiation of Heidegger’s
open circle, the return to the beginning that never was, the genuine
iteration of the again that is altogether otherwise.17 The last, Heidegger
informs us in the Contributions, ‘is what not only needs the longest
ante-cedence [Vor-läuferschaft] but what itself is the most profound
beginning rather than a cessation, the beginning which reaches out the
furthest and catches up to itself with the greatest difficulty. What is last
is therefore withdrawn from all calculation and for that reason must be
able to bear the burden of the loudest and most repeated misinterpreta-
tion’.18 The most conspicuous misinterpretation, I submit, is to under-
stand the last god theistically.
We can infer from Heidegger’s elucidation that the idea of the last
god entails an unambiguous rejection of teleology and eschatology:
The last god – is not the end – but is instead the other beginning of the
immeasurable possibilities of our history. For the sake of that beginning,
the previous history must not perish but must indeed be brought to its
end; i.e., its transfiguration [Verklärung] must be set into the transition
[Übergang] and into preparedness [Bereitschaft]. The last god – the prepa-
ration of his appearance is the extreme venture of the truth of beyng; only
in virtue of this truth can the retrieval of beings succeed for humanity.19
214 E.R. Wolfson
Rather than viewing the last god as the end, Heidegger asserts that it
signals the other beginning, the ‘oscillation of the beginning in itself’
and thus ‘the highest form of refusal, since what is inceptual eludes every
attempt to grasp onto it and essentially occurs only in protruding beyond
all things that, as futural, are already incorporated into it and are deliv-
ered over to its determining power’.20 The end and the last are sharply
distinguished: the last, as the most primordial, withdraws unremittingly
from the end. The last can appropriate its inceptuality, however, only by
transfiguring the first beginning and bringing it to its end. The realiza-
tion of the beginning in the end does not presume that the end is naught
but the rotation back to the beginning. The beginning whither one
returns in the end is not the beginning whence one set forth towards
the end. From the beginning, then, we can discern the end, albeit from
an inverse perspective. That is, the end can only be imagined as the ter-
minus that can never be terminated. In this sense, the preparation of the
appearance of the last god is branded the extreme venture of the truth of
beyng, a venture prompted by the appearance of what cannot appear but
as nonapparent.
Expressed in a different terminological register, the ‘nearness of the
last god eventuates when the event, as the hesitant self-withholding
[das zögernde Sichversagen], is elevated into refusal [Verweigerung].’
The latter, however, is not ‘sheer absence’ (die bloße Abwesenheit), that
is, the renunciation of presence; it is rather the absence of absence and
presence, the nihilating nihilation—the concealing self-concealment—
that belongs to the ‘originary essence of beyng as lit up in the think-
ing constitutive of the other beginning.’21 The breach of beyng—the
resonating of the event as refusal linked to the grounding of the truth
of beyng as the timespace of the stillness of the passing by of the last
god22 in the nearness of its extreme remoteness, ‘a relation that must
not be deformed or eliminated by any “dialectics”’23—intimates a form
of alienation of the same in the guise of the other that is, in truth,
the other arrayed in the guise of the same. The last god, accordingly,
is ‘wholly other than past ones and especially other than the Christian
one’.24 Replying to the question whether speaking of the last god is
not a degradation of God or even blasphemy, Heidegger writes that
the ‘last god must be so named, because the decision about the gods
ultimately leads under and among them and so raises to the highest the
essence of the uniqueness of the divine being [das Wesen der Einzigkeit
des Gottwesens]’.25 What is implied by the term Gottwesen? A clue is
offered by Heidegger’s contention that the notion of last should not be

understood as ‘sheer stoppage and ending’, but rather in the ‘sense of
the most extreme and most compendious decision about what is high-
est’; that is, the connotation of the term ‘last’ is ultimate, the paramount
aspect that is impossible to comprehend and for which it is impossible to
wait, since the finality of this last god cannot be calibrated by a chrono-
logical sequence of gods. Indeed, the last god is the god that can never
arrive, the end that can never stop ending, the endless end, the future
that is perpetually impending.26 As Heidegger put it in the draft for
Κοινόν: Zur Geschichte des Seyns (1939–1940):
Yet the god – how so, the god? Ask beyng! And in its silence, in the incep-
tual essence of the word, the god answers. You may wander through each
and every being. Nowhere does the trace of the god [die Spur des Gottes]
show itself. You can arrange all beings, never will you encounter a free place
for housing the god. You may go beyond your beings and will find only the
beingness once more of that which already counted as beings for you. …
Yet how are you to become a questioner who asks beyng rather than inves-
tigating a being? Only through the voice of silence that tunes [anstimmt]
your essence to steadfast insistence within Da-sein and raises what has been
attuned to a hearkening to the coming. For the coming alone is capable of
fulfilling the essence of godship [Gottschaft] in an inceptual manner.27
Heidegger instructs the reader to ask beyng in order to discern the

nature of god. The response will be heard in silence, which is the incep-
tual essence of language. What does one hear in that silence? That god
can be grasped only from within the ontological difference: god is not
to be found in beings but only in the beyng. Heidegger thereby under-
mines the theistic idea of the immanence of the divine in the world: the
trace of god shows itself nowhere. But it is precisely in the nonshowing that
the essence of the godship shows itself. In a way intriguingly reminis-
cent of the Jewish belief that the possibility of the Messiah’s coming is
predicated on the impossibility of the Messiah’s arrival, the hope in the
return of what is interminably still to come, the quintessential event of
the nonevent,28 Heidegger maintains that the lastness of the last god
consists of the fact that the god is constantly coming, which engenders
a state of continual waiting. ‘He brings nothing, unless himself; yet even
then only as the most coming of that which comes. Ahead of himself, he
bears the to-come of the future [Zu-kunft], his time-play-space is beyng,
216 E.R. Wolfson
a time-play-space that itself waits for the god, in coming, to fulfill it and
in coming to come. Thus is the god, of his necessity choosing beyng, the
most extreme god, who knows no making or providence’.29
The god affirmed by Heidegger is neither the creator nor the one
who exercises providential care over history. Thinking about Gottwesen,
literally, the being or essencing of the divine, is thus not a ‘matter of cal-
culation’, but ‘an attempt at meditation [umzubesinnen] on the danger
of something strange and incalculable’.30 But what is the strange and
incalculable something? This should not be construed ontotheologically
as if Heidegger was reverting to the apophatic source of the kataphatic
God of Christian faith, a God beyond God à la Eckhart, the Godhead
(Gottheit) through which the divinizing of gods is accomplished,31 the
primal experience of theos that precedes translation into the theologi-
cal criteria of specific religiosities.32 Nor, in my judgment, is there jus-
tification to implant in Heidegger ‘the seeds for a postmodern theology
which can restore a sense of the divine mystery, or reaffirm the religious
experience of the “wholly other”. By taking Heidegger’s lead, we can
determine that there is more than a superficial resemblance between the
thought of being and the mystery of God. Indeed, his thought enables us
to address what is distinctive of the divinities as much through the modality
of their absence as through their presence’.33
I concur with the final sentence, but I would argue that the modal-
ity of absence is not akin to a mystery of God linked to an inscrutable
transcendence, whether understood ontologically as the transcendental or
theologically as the transcendent34; the mystery avowed by Heidegger is
the mystery of being (Geheimnis des Seins)35; that is, the essence of the
absent (das Ab-wesende) that is the ‘unpresently present’ (ungegenwärtig
Anwesende), which is to say, the presencing in unconcealment (anwesend
in die Unverborgenheit) of the present that can never be represented as
presence.36 Thus, Heidegger comments on the alienation and the essence
of history, an affiliation that can be experienced when historiology is dis-
missed as a mode of calculative thinking: ‘What always remains absent
[Ausbleibende] – is not, however, something emptily selfsame – but is
instead what is unfathomable [Unergründliche] of the richest ground
of beyng, in the midst of which beings are struck and abandoned by
the divinization of the god [der Götterung des Gottes]’.37 According
to Heidegger, history can be understood in one of two ways: either as
‘that which is still unfathomed and still entirely strange to us and as the
abyss of the rarest and most unique divinization of the still undecided
god of gods [unentschiedenen Gottes der Götter]’, or as the ‘complete

overturning [Umsturz] of beings and the transformation [Verwandlung]
of beyng’.38 In my judgment, the second possibility explicates what
is insinuated by the former: the divinization of the still undecided god
occasions and is occasioned by the overturning of beings and the trans-
formation of beyng, which would render erroneous the reversion into
traditional theology:
We need a new god! No! This ‘no’ is not because the old god would still
suffice and could still be a god – but because this god is not at all the one
that is in need of us. The other god needs us. That is not a simple reversal
[Umdrehung] of the previous relation – instead, it is the sign of something
completely strange [Befremdlichen], a divinization, for whose articulated
domain the past gods – the ‘ancient’ ones as well as the Christian one – are
of no help, especially if we take them as ordinarily interpreted.39
The new god needs humanity, not in a theurgical sense of unifying or

enhancing the divine nature, but insofar as the future ones (Künftigen)
‘hold beyng open and urgent and developed in the truth of its essence’,
and beyng, consequently, ‘discloses itself as the appropriating event
of Da-sein, whereby the latter is then appropriated and its truth (the
“there”) is itself grounded’.40 That the god needs us does not refer to
‘some sort of unification and improvement’ of the divine on the part of
human beings; it relates rather to the grounding of Dasein related to
‘the pursuit of the truth of beyng on the basis of beyng’, that is, reacting
to the abyssal character (Ab-gründigkeit) of beyng rather than entreat-
ing the transcendence of god as the supreme being or the immanence of
that transcendence in beings. Hence, the statement that ‘the other god
needs us’ can be reformulated as ‘beyng, moving out into its truth as the
event of appropriation, and as the “between” for the divinization [das
Zwischen für die Götterung] and so for “beings”, compels humans to a
displacement into Da-sein and into its stewardship. … In this regard, to
be needed is higher than “needing” (requiring). The other god needs
us – requires the grounding of Da-sein and dispenses this grounding
into the shortest path of a sheltering of beings in the simplicity of their
structure’.41
It is in ‘the simplest stillness in the “between” of world and earth’—
not some transcendental city of God or kingdom of heaven—that ‘beyng
might tremble in its clearest intimacy and, as the event, might appropriate
218 E.R. Wolfson
all beings and thus the god. … For this, however, the decisiveness of
the repudiation of everything halfway and leveled off must also be hard
enough and must not shirk from intensity and rage, due to a false concern
with a long-since-empty “superiority” in every usual “treatment” of the
“spiritual”.’42 The authentic spiritual goal, for Heidegger, is the downgo-
ing (Untergang) that ‘can be endured only on the basis of decisiveness
toward the mystery of being itself, i.e., on the basis of restraint and diffi-
dence toward the essence of beyng’.43 The ‘intimation [Wink] of the god’
will come to the ‘waiting ones’ when there is a cessation of the idolization
of the antidivine (Widergöttliche), that is, the sway of technological machi-
nation, but such a cessation seemingly is dependent on the appearance of
that very god. Responding to this dilemma, Heidegger exposes more of
the secret of his atheology as it relates to the quandary of the between:
‘Both – the god and the confusedness – must break forth and appear –
and for that to happen the field of such appearance must have previously
acquired a unique breadth and depth of openness – i.e., the truth of beyng
must be experienced and the preparedness for that truth awakened. We
must enter into the unique plight of that between for the god and the con-
fusedness – indeed must first open up the plight and ground it’.44
To be awakened to the truth of beyng requires that one is conscious of
the coexistence—that is, a mutual belongingness (Aufeinanderzukommen)
that is the source of the strife without dialectical resolution of the antino-
mies45—of god and the confusion in the openness of the between, a state
of affairs that Heidegger illustrates by citing an older maxim, ‘one must
be a god in order to know who is the devil [ein Gott muß einer sein, um zu
wissen, wer der Teufel ist].’46 Conversely, the ‘verge of extreme despair’ is
the site for ‘the full light of the beacon of beyng, the light in which the last
god is concealed’.47 The tarrying and passing by, the flight and absence
of the gods in the open realm, occurs in one stroke.48 Analogously, in the
Contributions, Heidegger comments on how the ‘intimation as intima-
tion is preserved in restrained reticence, and how such preservation always
stands at the same time in departure and in arrival, in sorrow and in joy, in
that basic disposition of those who practice restraint, to whom alone the
fissure of beyng opens and closes itself’.49 This concurrence—as opposed
to coincidence—is the distinctive plight of the between, the centre (Mitte)
‘in which the discord [Zwietracht] of the god and of confusedness stand
in and against each other’,50 and in that respect, the intimation of the god
is concealed and therefore revealed in the abyss of the between (Abgrund
des Zwischen).51 Heidegger demarcates the centre of that abyss—obviously

a self-subverting metaphor insofar as the abyss can have no midpoint—as
the place where the trembling of beyng transpires. This trembling is iden-
tified as the passing by of the last god. However, since, as we noted, the
last god is continually on the way to coming, the passing, too, must be
ongoing; a god that passes is not the god that is passing.
Karl Löwith astutely noted with respect to what he calls the exis-
tential ontology of Being and Time that Heidegger was undoubtedly
impacted by the rhetoric and symbols of his religious upbringing, but
he translated the theological into a godless theology.52 In a similar vein,
Hans Jonas argued that the fact that the ‘secular thinking’ in Being and
Time embodies elements from Christianity does not justify postulating
an ‘autonomous parallel’ between Heidegger and Christian theology.
The real challenge, therefore, is not to find validation or corrobora-
tion in what Heidegger has borrowed from his Christian heritage, but
to examine the philosophical validity of this secularized appropriation.53
Summarizing his critique, Jonas wrote, ‘The being whose fate Heidegger
ponders is the quintessence of this world, it is saeculum. Against this,
theology should guard the radical transcendence of its God, whose voice
comes not out of being but breaks into the kingdom of being from with-
out’.54 Jonas does not disavow that the gods reappear in Heidegger’s
thought; he contends nonetheless that where the gods are, God cannot
be.55 If this is true about the early Heidegger, how much more so is it
applicable to the contemplation of the later Heidegger, which is fuelled
by an atheological pathos to transcend theology, even the idolatry
of natural theology,56 or as George Steiner put it, ‘Heidegger’s poetics of
pure immanence are yet one more attempt to liberate our experience of
sense and of form from the grip of the theophanic’.57 In the final analy-
sis, for Heidegger, the sanctioning of scientific knowledge by faith is the
very opposite of philosophical overcoming (Überwindung) and transfor-
mation (Verwandlung).58 The overcoming and transformation would
induce undermining the theological to the point that the unconcealment
of the gods is disclosive of the concealment of God in the same man-
ner that beyng withdraws as it is disclosed in beings. Rendered phenom-
enologically, the possibility of the appearance of the inapparent coincides
with the horizon of the nonphenomenolizable, the givenness that can be
given only as ungiven.
220 E.R. Wolfson
It is apposite to note as well the hypothesis of Susan Taubes that there

are suppressed currents of Christian theology—and, more specifically,
currents of a gnostic nature—that come to expression in Heidegger’s
antitheology:
The suggestion is not so strange if we consider that his attack on Christian

theology is not at all on naturalistic grounds. … Heidegger’s antitheologi-
cal polemic is thus directed from a more radical theological position. We
must recall that Christian theology is syncretistic. We are confronted with a
tradition originating in a (gnostic) Jewish heresy which not only absorbed
in itself the heterogeneous elements of Hellenistic mystery cults but had
to reconcile itself with systems as incompatible with each other as they
were alien to itself, first with the Old Testament and then with Aristotelian
metaphysics. Heidegger’s polemic is directed against the biblical and meta-
physical compromise of Christian theology and is thus carrying on a secret,
esoteric, heretical, ‘Christian’ tradition.59
Although Jonas does not express his views in precisely these terms, he
did independently note the residual of gnostic elements incorporated
into Heidegger’s atheistic thinking.60 Most importantly, from Jonas’s
standpoint, an unbridgeable gulf separates Heidegger’s thinking and the
faith of theology inasmuch as the biblical conception of God as the self-
revealing being obstructs the unveiling of beyng as that which cannot
be hypostasized ontically in compliance with the ontological difference.
Since the thinking of beyng transcends all particular beings, including
the transcendence of the divine being understood as the ultimate real-
ity or supernatural agent, the primal thinking is emphatically a ‘thinking
away from God’ or at the very least a ‘thinking beyond God’,61 expres-
sions that should not be misconstrued as articulations of an apophatic
theology that posits a being that transcends predication except for the
predicate of being beyond predication, which implicates one in a form
of metaphysical speculation envisioning the impersonal ground of being
as the personal being that exercises purposeful and providential agency
in the world. The last god—the god that may save us—will not appear
in the ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis) of either a ‘personal’ or a ‘massively
shared’ nature; the god ‘appears uniquely in the abyssal “space” of beyng
itself. All previous “creeds”, “churches”, and the like cannot in the
least become the essential preparation for the encounter of god and the
human being in the midst of beyng’.62
But what does Heidegger mean when he says that god will appear
in the abyss of beyng? Consider this statement in the Black Notebooks,
‘Clearer: not “origin”, but instead happening of being and happening
of truth [Sein- und Wahrheit-geschehnis] – not “transcendence” only,
but the world’s becoming world [Ver-welten der Welt], its beginning and
existence’.63 What is the clarity that Heidegger attained in this moment?
That he is not seeking a transcendental origin (Ursprung)—or an origin
that, metaphysically conceived, is transcendent—but rather the begin-
ning (Anfang) and existence (Existenz) of the world; that is, there is no
appeal to any metaphysical ground but only attending to the happening
of being and the happening of truth, the event that is the world becom-
ing world. As he reiterated in another passage from the notebooks with
the heading ‘The concept of the world’: ‘To bring the world as a world
to a worlding [Welten] is to venture the gods once again. Yet this ven-
turing must conceal itself as a venture and long be silent “about” the
gods—the bringing to a worlding, as an act of violence, is simply a deed
to do’.64 What is it to venture the gods once again, a venturing that
must conceal itself as a venture and maintain the silence about the gods?
The second beginning of which Heidegger speaks provokes an obfusca-
tion of god—a gesture that is referred to as violence (Gewalt)—so that
there should be no confusion about escaping the finitude and imma-
nence that is part and parcel of bringing the world as a world to a world-
ing. ‘The age is not without gods because we are too “worldly” and so
have become godless [gottlos]; on the contrary, it is because we have no
world and only a confused understanding of beyng’.65 Godlessness is not
the privation of gods but the absence of world. The matter is expressed
linguistically as well: the deed of worlding ‘must be the demolitional,
interrogative, thoughtful swing into an apprehending discourse – the lat-
ter as a bursting in [Einbruch] and a bursting forth [Ausbruch] placed
into language [Sprache] – the Grounding jointure of the “there” [die
Gründende Fügung des Da] – everything in a simple – hard – strange –
reticent consummation [Vollzug]. The capacity to forgo much that could
be said; a reticent discourse which silences a surrounding world still in its
twilight’.66
The accomplishment of this apophatic unsaying—the reticent dis-
course that foregoes what can be said and silences the encompassing
world—is possible only when one can properly discern the absence of
affliction through being: ‘The distorted essence [Unwesen] of being has
rubbed away all being. What has remained: the transience of all beings
222 E.R. Wolfson
and, in correspondence, this easiest capacity to get hold of the most arbi-
trary things. – Nothing stays, but also nothing escapes’.67 The relevance
of this radical finitude to theology is made explicit in several other entries
to the notebooks: ‘We first find God again when we lose the world no
longer and truly exist in the power of world-formation [Weltbildung]’.68
Similarly, ‘The world must first world as the partitioning of the “there”
[Zerklüftung des Da] – only in that way is prepared the hour of the sud-
denness of the unascertainable overfissure [Über-Klüftung] – the tearing
away into the proximity of the gods’.69 Or again, ‘Experience the over-
whelming power of this assignment! And thus keep open for the gods a
spatiotemporal field!’70 These dicta should not be interpreted pantheisti-
cally or panentheistically, as if Heidegger were affirming either that divin-
ity is nature or that nature is divinity. To speak meaningfully of God, one
must fully embrace the worldhood of the world without any recourse to
transcendence, and this alone allows one to exist in the power of world-
formation, the being-there, which, for Heidegger, is primarily an act of
poiēsis conferred upon the there-being of Dasein, a gesticulation that
manifests the world through the occlusion of its manifestation.71
But there is also another aspect to the reclaiming of the world from
the perspective of the inceptual thinking to be achieved by Dasein
in the new beginning, and that is the surpassing (Übersteigung) of
beings, which does not presuppose divine transcendence, itself a con-
sequence of experiencing beings as present at hand (Vorhandenen), but
rather a leap (Einsprung) into the truth of beyng as the event.72 ‘This
truth’, muses Heidegger, ‘so little is a god, or even only vouches for a
god, that precisely the essential occurrence of beyng must become
and must long remain the site of the decision regarding the absence
[Ausbleib] or advent [Anfall] of gods’.73 As we see in the following pas-
sage, Heidegger’s casting of this motif assumes an unmistakably gnos-
tic tone with his portrayal of the thrownness (Geworfenheit) of human
beings, who break into world against which they must do battle,74 a
theme we have already encountered: ‘The world as the abyssal ground
and the grounding of what is ungrounded [der abgründige Grund und
Gründung des Ungrundes]. Dasein inhuman [unmenschlich] – as the
thrown breaking in [der geworfene Einbruch], which quarrels with –
beings (partitioning)’.75 The unexpected juxtaposition of the terms
unmenschlich and Dasein highlights the antagonism that Heidegger
attributes to the human being confronting the beings of the world. To
embrace the world as the abyssal ground, the human being must become
inhuman, that is, disaffected from the commonplace disposition of being

human. The degree to which Heidegger was informed by the gnos-
tic myth of estrangement—at least as it was formulated by the German
Religionsgeschichtliche Schule and particularly Richard Reitzenstein,76
whose perspective was utilized by Rudolf Bultmann in his presentation
of the unfolding of Hellenistic Christianity by means of gnostic termi-
nology,77 and continued by his students, including Hans Jonas in his
portrayal of the image of the alien78—is made even more explicit in the
subsequent entry in the notebooks:
The alien (the human being) and the great fortuitiveness (being). The
throwing into being and the trembling of the thrownness into the essence
as language. Language: the hearth of the world …. Here the uniqueness
of the revealing-concealing isolation in the simplicity of the aloneness of
Dasein. (The unison.)79
In Heidegger’s philosophical translation of the gnostic myth, the human

being is labelled the alien (der Fremdling) vis-à-vis the great fortuitive-
ness (der große Zufall) of being (das Sein). The existential state of this
alienation is further described as the ‘throwing into being’ (der Wurf
in das Sein) and as ‘the trembling of the thrownness into the essence as
language’ (das Erzittern der Geworfenheit in das Wesen als Sprache).80
Language is the hearth of the world wherein one finds ‘the unique-
ness of the revealing-concealing isolation [entbergend-verbergenden
Vereinzelung] in the simplicity of the aloneness of Dasein’. Paradoxically,
language is the home that is the place of isolation and aloneness but also
the place of unison (Ein-klang), the haven of solitude and the womb of
relationality.
The underlying triangulation of god, world, and human is reiterated
in another aphorism: ‘Along with losing the gods, we have lost the world;
the world must first be erected in order to create space for the gods in
this work; yet such an opening of the world cannot proceed from, or be
carried out by, the currently extant humanity – instead, it can be accom-
plished only if what basically grounds and disposes the opening of the
world is itself acquired – for Da-sein and for the restoration of humanity
to Da-sein’.81 The dwelling of divinity is emphatically the world, not in
the mystical sense of God being present in the world from which God is
absent, but as the place of conflict between the showing of the nonshow-
ing and the nonshowing of the showing, the clash between the visibility
224 E.R. Wolfson
of the invisible and the invisibility of the visible, an opening that is dis-
closed through the self-revealing concealment of the language of Dasein.
Heidegger, I surmise, had this in mind when he wrote in the notebooks,
‘The attaining of the god by way of struggle – the preparation of his
abode – in the existence of poetizing and thinking. In this way, truth
first happens, as a lonely forest ridge sweeping through the valleys of
humans’.82
Heidegger touches on the same point in another passage in which
he opines that the entanglement ‘in the massiveness, boundlessness,
and hastiness of what is present at hand and in its operative coherence
… is not supposed to be unravelled—instead, the god requires that the
basic happening [Grundgeschehnis] be opposed to it—while increasing
and exaggerating the entanglement—toward a downgoing [Untergang]
or a complete inversion [Umkehr]; but as usual … need to place into
Dasein the knowledgeable questioning of reticent waiting and the world-
configuring thinking of the basic happening’.83 The god has no ontic ref-
erentiality, let alone ontological substantiality; it is rather a mythopoetic
marking of the tension between the entanglement with beings present
at hand and the basic happening of beyng; that is, the god signifies the
chasm or the space of the ontological difference, the clearing in which
beyng is concealed in the disclosure of its being. To humanity is assigned
the specific roles of the knowledgeable questioning, which depends
on a reticent waiting, and the world-configuring of the rudimentary
event. By fulfilling this mission, Dasein augments and amplifies the very
entanglement he is supposed to oppose.
Here it is worth recalling Heidegger’s statement concerning the god
of philosophy understood as the generative ground of being or as the
causa sui:
Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man
can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before
this god. The god-less thinking [gott-lose Denken] which must abandon the
god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine
God [göttlichen Gott]. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more
open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.84
The passage reads like an Eckhartian interpretation of Nietzsche’s state-

ment regarding the death of the God of Western metaphysics; that is to
say, the atheistic thinking of Nietzsche’s madman, predicated on denying
the ontotheological conception of the deity, affords one an opportunity

to have a closer connection with the ‘divine God’.85 The import of this
oddly redundant locution may be gleaned from what Heidegger writes
elsewhere, ‘All metaphysics and every art that is grounded in metaphys-
ics … poeticized and thought gods as beings, at most as being itself.
However, those who prepare must first come—those who, after all, are
capable of thinking be-ing [Seyn] and this alone as the distressing need of
the godhood of gods. How undisturbed and owned will be then the path
of the futural man to the last god; how completely devoid of all detours
into the escape routes of the transformation of the hitherto will this path
be, and how unconfined will it be by the prospects of the calculated?’86
The path of futural thinking culminates with the last god; indeed,
the future human being is identified as ‘the steward of the stillness of
the passing by of the last god – the grounding preserver of the truth of
beyng’.87 The passing over ‘eventuates in that space-time which deter-
mines the clearing of the “there”. And it can eventuate only if the event
prevails as the essence of beyng – which in turn happens when the truth
of beyng is grounded inceptually, and it comes to that only if truth
itself and its essence have become a plight and the oblivion of beyng is
shaken’.88 However, this leap of the future human being into Da-sein
can be attained only when one is liberated from the distressing need of
the godhood of the gods (die Not der Gottschaft der Götter), a theo-
logical necessity that has triumphed in traditional Western metaphysical
speculation with its contemplation and poeticizing of the gods as beings
and the eternal creator-God as being.89 In the future, by contrast, exem-
plified by giving oneself up to the distant injunction to relate to the
thoughtful poetizing of the beginning,90 we will be capable of thinking
Seyn without concealing everything essential by unconcealing nothing
essential.91 Thus, as Heidegger ruminated in another notebook entry,
the forgottenness of beyng (Seynsvergessenheit) is overcome through the
question of beyng (Seynsfrage), a questioning that ‘concerns the essential
truth of beyng – concerns that origin [Ursprung] which is, and alone can
be, the pre-playing of beyng [Vor-spiel des Seyns] in our all-knowing god-
lessness [alleskennenden Gott-losigkeit]: art – which means: knowledge of
the necessity of art’.92
It is beyond our interest to make explicit all that is implied here,
but suffice it to underline the connection between Ursprung and the
Vorspiel of beyng, which is further linked to our all-knowing godlessness
enacted in the knowledge of the necessity of art. The aesthetic process,
226 E.R. Wolfson
it seems, is the means by which we emulate the foreplay of the origin,

the prelude overshadowed by godlessness, which, as we already noted,
means the state of the worldlessness. From the reference to art, which
Heidegger understands in a Nietzschean sense as a perspectival letting
radiate or bringing forward into appearance, a domain, that is, in which
semblance is reality,93 I suggest that the Vorspiel may be illumined from
the following annotated gloss of Heidegger on his referring to ‘an origin
[Herkunft] of what is present from out of presencing [des Anwesenden
aus dem Anwesen]’: ‘In the radiance of presencing, that which presences
appears, comes forth. The radiance itself never appears!’94 The foreplay,
the playing before, figuratively alludes to this radiance of presencing that
brings forth all that appears but itself can never appear, the nonphenom-
enalizability that is the epis-temic condition of all phenomenality, the
unseeing that enframes every act of seeing.
The Seynsfrage, which gives us access to this foreplay, is not restricted
by previous diverting paths of transformation or by the prospects of what
can be calculated. One is, in fact, nearer to the ‘en-opening of the most
remote’ in the ‘hardly revealed “time-space” of the truth of be-ing’, that
is, the last god, when the ‘gods will be more difficult and more rare, but
therein more in sway, and yet thereby nearer in their swaying remoteness ....
The last god is inflamed to the highest distress by be-ing as the abysmal
“in-between” [abgründige Inzwischen] of beings’.95 If we attend carefully
to these words, we can discern with clarity that Heidegger’s last god is not
a god in a theological sense—not even in a post-theological sense—but the
abyss that is the between, the clearing or the opening, the beyng that is
the empty nothing that bestows and withholds all beings, ‘the “unblend-
edness” and the “stillness” out of which all things proceed together in
their most intimate self-belonging’.96 Heidegger’s intention is expressed
straightforwardly in the following comment in the Contributions:
The most intrinsic finitude of beyng reveals itself here: in the intimation
of the last god. … The last god has his own most unique uniqueness and
stands outside of the calculative determination expressed in the labels
‘mono-theism’, ‘pan-theism’, and ‘a-theism’. There has been ‘monothe-
ism’, and every other sort of ‘theism’, only since the emergence of Judeo-
Christian ‘apologetics’, whose thinking presupposes ‘metaphysics’. With
the death of this God, all theisms wither away. The multiplicity of gods
is not subject to enumeration but, instead, to the inner richness of the
grounds and abysses in the site of the moment for the lighting up and con-
cealment of the intimation of the last god.97
Those who would use Heidegger as a foundation to construct a new

theological edifice have not grasped the collapse of the polarity of theism
and atheism intimated by the intimation of the last god and thus they
have not taken to heart the deep-rooted and far-reaching finitude dis-
closed by this god, an epiphany of nothing to see that imparts knowl-
edge of ‘the most concealed essence of the “not” [Nicht], as the “not yet”
[Noch-nicht] and the “not any longer” [Nicht-mehr],’ the site of the
moment that bespeaks the concealing-revealing of the ‘intimacy and per-
vasiveness of the negative [Nichthaften] in beyng’, the ‘truth of the not
itself, and consequently also of nothingness [Nichts]’.98
Needless to say, Heidegger on occasion uses language that could
easily mislead one into thinking that he was advocating for something
akin to a postmetaphysical theology. Thus, in one passage in the Black
Notebooks in which Heidegger distinguishes ‘the many’, who identify the
beyng (Seyn) beyond beings as a nonbeing (Unseienden), and the ‘cre-
ative ones’, who know that beyng is not a nonbeing but the nothing,
he concludes: ‘Consequently, for the many, there must always be “reli-
gions” – but, for the individuals, there is God [für die Einzelnen aber ist
der Gott]’.99 Allegedly, Heidegger is attributing to the elite belief in God
and to the masses conformity to institutional religions. A careful glance
at the context, however, reveals the insurgent implication of Heidegger’s
words: der Gott is synonymous with das Seyn, and the latter is placed
‘under beings’ (unter das Seiende), which is to say, god is the beyng that
is the strange and incalculable surplus, the event that is neither being nor
nonbeing.
Another striking example is in the passage from the notebooks in
which Heidegger reflects on the meaning of culture as it relates to the
idea of struggle (πόλεμος): ‘The struggling structure [kämpferische
Gefüge] of the historical Dasein of a people and its destiny, a Dasein
exposed to the gods [gottausgesetzten]’.100 The nexus between history,
peoplehood, god, and world is expanded in another passage in the note-
books: ‘The concept of world – a questioning that pushes itself to its lim-
its, where it experiences itself exposed to what is most question-worthy:
where the “there” opens up abyssally [abgründig], where the need of
preservational disputation necessitates the “there” (constancy), and his-
tory [Geschichte], i.e., a people [ein Volk], becomes itself; history is the
venturing of the gods [das Gewagtwerden der Götter] out of a world and
for a world [aus einer Welt für sie]; this happening [Geschehnis] is intrinsi-
cally individuation [Vereinzigung]’.101 What constitutes the worldhood
228 E.R. Wolfson
of the world is that which is most worthy of questioning, the ‘there’

of Dasein that opens up abyssally, that is, opens up to the abyss of the
groundless ground, the ground that is ground by pulling away from the
ground (Ab-grund). In and through that clearing, the concealment-
exposure of language, a people becomes itself and professes its place in
history, which is further described as a venturing of the gods that are,
paradoxically, both out of and for the world; that is to say, the happening
of the historical partitioning, the individuating event that is the essence
of beyng,102 is completely immanent and without any transcendental
Archimedean frame of reference. As the venturing of the gods, history
discloses the ‘abyssal character of the gaining through strife – sacrifice
and consecration’.103 Through an ‘act of violence of the creating per-
son’, the gods ‘are compelled to their individuation – and a people is
– as history. The gods indeed only those of a people: no general god
for everyone, i.e., for no one’.104 For Heidegger, the gods are not tran-
scendental beings outside of history; they are historical forces individu-
alistically apportioned to a particular people in the struggle to ground
beyng in the truth of beings.105 This is the import of the directive: ‘Need
to create (the event) of those gods with whom we can be friends and
to whom we need not be slaves’.106 Most significantly, there is no gen-
eral god for everyone and therefore there is no general god for anyone. The
meaningfulness of the concept of godhood is dependent on the correla-
tion of the god and a particular ethno-nationalist community active in
the plane of history. The matter is elaborated in the Contributions:
A people is a people only if it receives its history as allotted to it through

finding its god, the god that compels this people beyond itself and thus
places the people back amid beings. Only then does a people escape the
danger of circling around itself and of idolizing, as its unconditioned, what
are merely conditions of its subsistence. … The essence of a people is
grounded in the historicality of those who belong themselves through their
belonging to the god.107
The nature of Dasein is linked to the essence of a people, which is deter-

mined by the god allocated to that people. Only by finding that god can
a people flee the danger of a solipsistic self-encircling and the consequent
idolization of the conditional as unconditioned. Heidegger’s elitism
comes to the fore when he asserts that a people finds its god through
the few seekers, the future ones of the last god, ‘who in reticence seek on
behalf of this people and who … must apparently even stand against a
“people” that is not yet properly a people’.108
It would take us too far afield to unpack this statement and to delve
into Heidegger’s discussion of the strife that is essential to the future
ones in particular and to the people guided by them more generally.
What is of most concern for our immediate discussion is the comment
posed as a question:
Will the time of the gods then be over and done and a relapse into the
mere life of world-poor creatures commence, ones for whom the earth
has always remained only something to be exploited? Restraint and reti-
cence will be the most intimate celebration of the last god and will attain
for themselves the proper mode of confidence in the simplicity of things
and the proper stream of the intimacy of the captivating transport of their
works. Furthermore, the sheltering of truth will leave concealed what is
most concealed and will thus lend it a unique presence.109
Through the contestation that arises from the strife, the future ones
become cognizant of the ‘most diffident and most distant intimation
of the last god’ by means of which they have access to the incursion of
the event of beyng wherein truth assumes presence in its remaining con-
cealed. This mindfulness creates the unrest that is ‘the restful enduring
of the fissure’.110 The last god signifies this fissure of beyng—the space
of oscillation—that opens and closes itself in relation to those who prac-
tice restraint. Most notably, the epoch of the last god signifies the time
when the gods will be over and done, which does not, however, justify the
exploitation of the earth, since the primary characteristics of this last god
and its seekers are restraint and reticence.
With this in mind, we better understand the following observa-
tion in the notebooks: ‘It is now coming to light that we have already
long been living, and will still long live, in the age of the departing gods
[Weltalter der scheidenden Götter]. The question is whether we will expe-
rience in this departure the course of the gods and thus their nearness,
one that moves us while escaping from us’.111 To be in the age of the
departing gods—the period between the termination of the first begin-
ning and the commencement of the second beginning, ‘the abode of the
plight – in which the flight of the gods can be experienced and the wait-
ing for the ones who will come can be carried out’112—means to expe-
rience the nearness of the gods as they are passing and becoming ever
230 E.R. Wolfson
more remote. ‘World – the opening up of the counterplay [Widerspiels]

between remoteness and nearness, beenness and future: the gods’.113
The term ‘god’, for Heidegger, is a mythopoetic way of naming both
the spatial void marked by the vacillation between proximity and aloof-
ness and the temporal expanse marked by the fluctuation between past
and future. Those who would try to elicit from Heidegger an argument
for the revitalization of theology are at an even greater distance from the
gods to whom one can be attached only by being detached. Heidegger
categorizes the philosopher as the ‘questioner exposed to the tumult of
the nearness of the gods’.114 To be sure, there is the risk that the phi-
losopher ‘can still misinterpret everything, and make everything empty
… But one can also possess the vocation of bearing the actual tradition
of philosophy from peak to peak and of preparing the trembling of the
future through one’s divinely compelled work [götterhaft erzwungenes
Werk]’.115 The divinely compelled work is ascribed to the philosopher,
who interrogates every presupposition, a questioning that is fuelled by
the tumult of the nearness of the gods. What is the clamour caused by
this contiguity? The expiring beliefs in whose wake our knowledge of the
world is severely destabilized.
The interpretation is corroborated by the following passage that
delimits the philosophical calling: ‘Philosophy – will not deliver, will
not discover things (through research), will not (after the fact) raise
any worldview to concepts – instead, philosophy will again know the
πόλεμος – the event – and will fathom the ground [Grund] and the
abyss [Abgrund] and the nonground [Ungrund]116 and thus will
become a plight and the necessity – to seize what has been given as
task [Aufgegebene] and to conquer what has been given as endowment
[Mitgegebene] – to bring history to a happening = to venture the gods
once again’.117 The gods to whom Heidegger refers are not to be inter-
preted theistically but as a component of the relational fabric of beings,
the emptiness within which the conflictual event that brings about the
historical happening takes place. The task to appropriate the endow-
ment of the relationality of all being receives its fullest formulation in
Heidegger’s notion of the fourfold (das Geviert), which consists of the
earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. Consider Andrew J. Mitchell’s succinct
account of this theme:
The fourfold provides an account of the thing that is inherently rela-

tional. Thanks to the fourfold, these things unfold themselves ecstatically,
opening relations with the world beyond them. Unlike the self-enclosed
object of modern metaphysics, the thing is utterly worldly, its essence lying
in the relations it maintains throughout the world around it, the world
to which it is inextricably bound. The world becomes the medium of the
thing’s relations. The fourfold is the key to understanding this streaming,
mediated, relationality of finite, worldly existence.118
The emphasis on the correlationality of the worldly existence provides

the critical element to understand Heidegger’s invocation of the gods
prior to his articulation of the fourfold as a means to get beyond the the-
opoetic confabulation of an anthropomorphic and anthropopathic deity.
In a stark and evidently Nietzschean assessment, Heidegger writes, ‘God
is gone; things are used up; knowledge is in ruins; action has become
blind. In short: beyng is forgotten – and a semblance of beings is raging
or is fleeing into what was hitherto’.119 The Christian God does not exist
and it is only the idols, which are constructed by our calculating ratioci-
nation, that allows us to continue to attribute activity to that God.120 On
this score, Heidegger juxtaposes the ‘Godlessness of Bolshevism’ (Gott-
losigkeit des Bolschewismus) with the ‘moribund state of Christianity’
(Abgestorbenheit des Christentums), since both are ‘great signs that we
have actually and wittingly entered the epoch of the abandonment by
being’.121 In another passage, he goes further and labels the ‘forms of
modern Christianity’ as ‘the genuine configurations of Godlessness [die
eigentlichen Gestalten der Gott-losigkeit]’.122 Even Nietzsche’s celebrated
proclamation that ‘God is dead’ is, according to Heidegger, ‘spoken in
the Christian manner, precisely because it is un-Christian. And that is
why the “eternal recurrence” is merely a Christian expedient – to give
the inconsequential “life” once again the possibility of importance.
And this remains an attempt at salvation in “beings” versus nihilism of
beings’.123
Heidegger’s intent can be illumined from a passage in Schelling’s
Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, where he noted that the term
‘theology’ first evolves within philosophy and not ‘in the framework and
service of an ecclesiastical system of faith’. From that standpoint, every
philosophy ‘is theology in the primordial and essential sense that com-
prehension (logos) of beings as a whole asks about the ground of Being,
and this ground is called theos, God’. In that context, Heidegger reit-
erates his view that Nietzsche’s philosophy, too, is to be considered
theological in spite of his declaration of the death of God. Rather than
232 E.R. Wolfson
viewing modern philosophy as a ‘secularization of Christian theology’,

it is more accurate to characterize the latter as the ‘Christianization of
an extra-Christian philosophy’. All theology is possible only on the basis
of philosophy, even if the latter is identified as the work of the devil.
Heidegger concludes, therefore, that the questioning of philosophy ‘is
always and in itself both onto-logical and theological in the very broad
sense. Philosophy is Ontotheology. The more originally it is both in one,
the more truly it is philosophy’.124
Heidegger’s last god is his way of coming to terms with Nietzsche’s
death of god, which signifies ‘the abandonment of being in the current
appearance of beings’125; that is, the last god is the god after there are
no more gods,126 the god depleted of godhood, the god that signals the
overcoming of ontotheology and hence the setting of philosophy on the
new course of thinking about the open concealedness of the essential
occurrence of beyng, a mode of contemplation that is positioned in con-
trast to calculative reasoning and to which he refers by various names,
to wit, ‘originary meditation’ (ursprünglichen Besinnung),127 ‘thoughtful
meditation’ (denkerische Besinnung),128 and ‘thoughtful configuration’
(denkerische Gestaltung).129 In a liminal epoch between the presence of
what is absent and the absence of what is present, Heidegger saw his
task as preparing the ‘future ones’ to stand in the ‘remotest proximity
of the last god’ by remaining silent about what is essential,130 but the
last god is, as I noted above, the god that is always to come, and there-
fore can be proximate only by being infinitely remote. In that respect,
the last god is the symbolic enactment of the demise of god. Hence, as
Heidegger observes in another passage, the ‘advancing secularism’ of the
‘disempowerment of the beginning’, which proceeds from the inceptual
entanglement in beyng, requires the ‘pushing away of beings’ and this
‘will then carry over even to God – as the creator’.131 The god is mani-
fest when what is manifest is no longer a god. One is curiously reminded
of Gershom Scholem’s quip that the atheistic religion brought forth
by the secular world endorses the ironic belief that God will appear as
non-God.132
The implications of the last god as an overcoming of the Christian
God, and by extension all theistic representations of divinity, are fur-
ther clarified by this description: ‘A god who would like to raise him-
self beyond being, or indeed is thus raised and made into the source
(cause) of being (not simply of beings) “is” no god and can be no god
[» ist « kein Gott und kann kein Gott sein]. More inceptual than every
god is beyng [Anfänglicher denn jeder Gott ist das Seyn]’.133 The last god
is so called because it is no god at all, the god released from being godly;
it thus names the beyng that is beyond being, the source or cause of
being that is more inceptual than any god. Seyn, therefore, is no longer
thinkable as the otherwise than being either as the transcendental or
as the transcendent. The use of the term Gottwesen is meant to subvert
the positing of an alterity understood in this manner. What Heidegger
intends is something far more radical and paradoxical: the absence of the
gods is not to be interpreted either as the absence of presence or as the
presence of absence. The absence, in other words, does not mean that
the once visible gods are now hidden and therefore invisible; it suggests
rather that the unconcealment of the concealment is itself concealed by
the unconcealment. There is no reality beneath the veneer of appearance;
being is nothing but the appearance behind which there is nothing but
the appearance of being.
The force of the last god as ultimate, therefore, insinuates an atheo-
logical surpassing of the ontotheological demarcation by attributing to
this being the sense of being that is separate from any being and hence
from any nonbeing that would simply be the negation of being. In one
passage, after depicting Seyn as the trembling of divinization, Heidegger
notes that the ‘trembling expands the temporal-spatial playing field in
which the trembling itself comes into the open as refusal. … Beyng must
be thought out to this extremity. It thereby illuminates itself as the most
finite and richest, the most abyssal of its own intimacy. For beyng is never
a determination of the god as god; rather, beyng is that which the divi-
nization of the god needs so as to remain nevertheless completely dis-
tinct from it’.134 Heidegger’s rejection of the theological determination
of theīon/deus could not be clearer: the divinization of the god needs the
very beyng—to be distinguished from the beingness of metaphysics—
whence it must remain completely distinct! The refusal of beyng—the
trembling that comes into the open of the spatiotemporal field—is thus
designated as the ‘most intimate compelling of the most originary and
ever-inceptual plight, a compelling into the necessity of defense against
the plight. The essential defense is not supposed to ward off the plight
so as to get rid of it. In resisting it, the defense must instead precisely
preserve the plight and extend it into its being carried out in accord
with the diffusion of the trembling’.135 In the same manner that the
ever-inceptual plight coerces the necessity of defense against the plight
by preserving the plight, the divinization of the god dictates the evasion
234 E.R. Wolfson
of godliness through the enowning of the trembling of divinization that

necessitates the temporal-spatial playing field for its own decision.136
By Gottwesen, Heidegger intends this refusal linked to the mystery
of appropriation (Geheimnis der Ereignung) that is inexplicable and
immeasurable, the sheltering-clearing that grants the open to the time-
space wherein the being of truth is manifestly concealed as the truth of
being. Heidegger’s statement that the ‘most extreme god needs beyng’
(der äußerste Gott bedarf des Seyns) implies that this beyng is nothingness,
not because it is emptied of beings but because it is the delimitation of
the withholding that makes possible the bestowal of beingness from the
beyng that is the consummate threshold crossed by the constant turning
(Kehre) that is invariably a counter-turning (Wider-kehre), the event that
is ‘the highest reign over the advent and absconding of past gods’.137
The same point regarding the apposition of Seyn and Nichts is made with
respect to the transformation of the relation of the human being to the
truth of beyng: ‘Beyng as the innermost “between” is then akin to noth-
ingness for this moment; the god overpowers the human being, and the
latter surpasses the god …. Yet both are only in the event, and the truth
of beyng itself is as this event’.138 The intimation of the last god thus
beckons the ‘law of the great individuation in Da-sein, of the solitude
of the sacrifice, and of the uniqueness of the choice regarding the short-
est and steepest path’.139 The last god portends—allusively rather than
representationally—the sense of individuation of the self as long as the
latter is understood as the solitude of sacrifice by which one embarks on
the path wherein ‘lies the mystery of the unity of the innermost near-
ing in the most extreme distance, the traversal of the broadest temporal-
spatial playing field of beyng. This extremity of the essential occurrence
of beyng requires what is most intrinsic in the plight of the abandonment
by being’.140
In another passage from the Black Notebooks, Heidegger insists that
the questioning appropriate to the second beginning is not the meta-
physical query par excellence, ‘Why is there at all something rather than
nothing?’ The posing of the question in this way blurs the difference
between beyng and beings. What is most egregious is to advance a theo-
logical response to this imprudent inquiry:
Not to give a reassuring-theological ‘proof’ that explains God—not to

eliminate the alienation as something extraneous—instead, to make even
everything familiar seem alien. Where is God? The prior and more proper
question: do we have a ‘where’? And do we stand within it, such that we

can ask about God? The alien character of the ‘there’ as perseverance of
the ‘where’.141
The text confirms that the theological—or even the post-theological—

arrogation of Heidegger’s language about the godhood, the gods, or
the last god, is misguided. Discourse about God’s existence or the seek-
ing for a proof thereof—a proposition that Heidegger considers to be
absurd142—remains bound to the metaphysical worldview that has
dominated thinking since the first beginning, a pathway predicated on
estranging that which is estranged, that is, alienating the alienation,
instead of discerning the familiar in the unfamiliar, the ordinary in the
extraordinary, the habitual in the mysterious.143 As we noted above, it is
specifically the stillness of the passing by of the last god that Heidegger
identified as the beyng that is foreign and potentially discordant. The use
of the theistic term is meant to render the homely as eccentric, the mun-
dane as holy, not in an otherworldly sense, but as deterring the lure of
the customary (Gewohnheit) so that one might ‘transform everything dif-
ficult into an impelling and thus into a repelling toward the uncustomary
[Ungewöhnliche]. The latter is the space for the nearness and remoteness
of the god’.144
Inasmuch as the other beginning is ‘the opening for the time of the
last god’,145 the future history of humankind is delegated as ‘the con-
cealed history of the great stillness in which the sovereignty of the last
god opens up beings and configures them [das Seiende eröffnet und
gestaltet]’.146 The last god is thus functionally on a par with Heidegger’s
Lichtung, the clearing in which beings are disclosed in the concealment
of their being:
Beyng – the trace of the divinization of the absconded gods [der Götterung
der entflohenen Götter], a trace that broadens a clearing. This clearing
sets free the self-refusal [die Verweigerung] as an assignment of Da-sein,
whereby the clearing is grounded [gegründet], humans are transformed
[gewandelt], and beings come to be more fully. That tracing of the divini-
zation [Spuren der Götterung], the tracing that in itself is this assignment,
may be grasped as the appropriation. – To name beyng means to ‘think’
the event of appropriation.147
In place of the metaphysical conception of being as a durable and self-

subsisting substance, and nonbeing as the lack thereof, Heidegger
236 E.R. Wolfson
portrays beyng as the trace of the divinization of the gods that have fled.
This originary trace presumes that the origin is an event or happening of
beyng, a presence that can never be present and therefore is erroneously
described as absent.
What Heidegger intended here is developed at greater length in his
argument in ‘Anaximander’s Saying’ (1946) that not only does the ori-
gin remain hidden, ‘but even the relation between presence [Anwesen]
and what presences [Anwesendem] is still unthought. … Unintentionally,
presence itself became something present. … It is taken to be only the
most universal and highest of present beings and hence as one of them.
The essence of presence together with the difference between presence
and what is present remains forgotten. The oblivion of being is oblivion
to the difference between being and the being’.148 Heidegger goes on to
say, ‘Oblivion of being belongs to that essence of being which it itself
conceals. It belongs so essentially to the destiny of being that the dawn
of this destiny begins as the unveiling of what presences in its presence’.
The beginning is an unveiling of what has been veiled in what Heidegger
calls the event of metaphysics, that is, the self-veiling essence of being, the
forgetting of what has been forgotten, the critical difference between
presencing and that which has been present. Indeed, Heidegger goes
so far as to say, ‘even the early trace of the difference is extinguished
through presencing, appearing as something present and emerging as the
highest of beings that are present. … The difference between being and
the being, however, can be experienced as something forgotten only if it
is unveiled along with the presencing of what is present; only if it has left
a trace, which remains preserved in the language to which being comes.
… Illumination of the difference, therefore, cannot mean that the differ-
ence appears as the difference’.149
Just as in the notebooks Heidegger referred to beyng as the trace
of the divinization of the absconded gods, so in this later essay on
Anaximander, he speaks of the origin of being as a trace of the presenc-
ing occluded in what is present, the oblivion of being that forgets the
ontological difference between being and beings, an obfuscating of the
obfuscation that can be uncovered through the recovery of language,
that is, the naming of the being that is nameless. Derrida thus com-
mented on the aforecited Heideggerian text:
What Heidegger wants to mark is this: the difference between Being and
beings, the forgotten of metaphysics, has disappeared without leaving
a trace. The very trace of difference has been submerged. If we maintain
that différance (is) (itself) other than absence and presence, if it traces,
then when it is a matter of the forgetting of the difference (between Being
and beings), we would have to speak of a disappearance of the trace of the
trace. … Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence
that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site –
erasure belongs to its structure. … The paradox of such a structure, in the
language of metaphysics, is an inversion of metaphysical concepts, which
produces the following effect: the present becomes the sign of the sign, the
trace of the trace. … It is a trace, and a trace of the erasure of the trace.150
Derrida’s deconstructionist reading of Heidegger sheds light on the

latter’s depiction in the Black Notebooks of Seyn as the trace of the divi-
nization of the gods who have fled. The gods of which the clearing is
the trace are neither present nor absent, neither being nor nonbeing;
the trace is a trace of the erasure of the trace—what Derrida elsewhere
calls the arche-trace151—that disappears in its appearance and appears
in its disappearance. The trace of the origin that Heidegger placed at
the beginning is not a phenomenal trace of a plenary presence, but a
nonphenomenal trace of what can never be present, a trace of a trace
of the being that is otherwise than being, the erasure that is the incep-
tion of writing, not as a token of difference but as a stroke of différance,
the originary repetition of the non-self-identical other that cannot be
reduced to the same.152 Moreover, as we noted above, the tracing opens
the clearing that endows Dasein with its assignment, the self-refusal
that is expressed in the naming of beyng or contemplating the event
of appropriation. This self-refusal mimics the dynamic that Heidegger
attributes to the truth of being as unconcealment:
But this concealing of its essence and essential origin is the trait in which
being’s primordial self-illumination occurs … so that thinking can precisely
not pursue it. The being itself does not step into the light of being. … By
revealing itself in the being, being withdraws. … In this way being, with its
truth, keeps to itself. This keeping to itself is the way it discloses itself early
on. … By bringing the being’s unconcealment, it founds, for the first time,
the concealment of being. Concealment remains, however, the c haracteristic
of the refusal that keeps to itself.153
238 E.R. Wolfson
The elusive nature of the trace of divinization calls attention to the

fact that the gods cannot be reified as objective beings ascertainable by
thought or classifiable by language; at best, they are disappropriated
in the appropriation of the timespace of the world as vestiges of what
is most proximate because most remote. Rather than focusing on the
whereabouts of the divine, therefore, it is necessary to ascertain the con-
tours of the world within which we stand as the ‘there’, the open place
of nature (ϕύσις),154 within which we are destined to ask the question
of the ‘where’, the unconcealment (ἀλήθεια) that grounds the origin
beyond—and occluded by—the beginning. Dasein is most question-wor-
thy, but this status is determined in relation to the domain of nature,
‘the genesis of the gods, this genesis [Entstehung] not meant as produc-
tion – rather, to come into position [Stand] as to emerge and to rise up
[Aufstehen]; not causal derivation; nor out of misconstrued “affects” and
their impact’.155 Nature is aligned with the genesis of the gods, which
does not imply causal production but the coming into position, emerg-
ing and rising up from the state of concealment.
What is foreshadowed in Heidegger’s notebooks is developed fur-
ther in the essay ‘Why Poets?’ (1946), where he elicits from Hölderlin’s
elegy ‘Brod und Wein’ that to be a poet in a desolate time is ‘to attend
to the track of the fugitive gods [die Spur der entflohenen Götter]. This
is why the poet, at the time of the world’s night, utters the sacred’.156
The uttering of the sacred is proportionate to the augmentation of
nocturnality—symbolized by midnight—to the point that the desolation
has become so desolate that it hides its own essence as desolation. ‘It
is not only that the sacred is vanishing as the track of the godhead [die
Spur zur Gottheit], but that even the tracks to this lost track are almost
erased. The more the tracks are effaced, the less an individual mortal
who reaches into the abyss can still attend to a hint [Wink] or instruc-
tion [Weisung]’.157 The overpowering of technology, and the privileging
of self-assertion in a world that is allowed to be only will—in my opin-
ion, we can detect in these words an implicit critique of Nazi Germany—
has triggered the withdrawal of the whole (das Heile) and the world
has become hopeless (heil-los). ‘As a result, not only does the holy [das
Heilige] remain hidden as the track to the godhead, but even what is
whole, the track to the holy, appears to be extinguished. Unless there are
still mortals capable of seeing what is unwhole and unhealing threaten as
unwhole and unhealing [das Heillose als das Heillose]’.158
A proper attunement to Heidegger’s words intones that the gods

are no gods at all, at least not in any conventional connotation. What
is lost is not only the trace to the godhead, but the trace of the trace
that is lost. Heidegger thus depicts the ‘basic movement of beyng (a
movement which trembles qua modernity)’ as a process of ‘de-divini-
zation’ (Entgötterung), which comprises ‘the unfolding all the way to
the end and the entrenchment of decisionlessness about the god’.159
De-divinization is a process of suspended belief in which one remains
decisionless about god. But this decisionlessness is what opens the door
to the atheological beckoning of the future:
A god is only the one and the ones that tear humans away from ‘beings’
and that compel beyng as the ‘between’ for themselves and for humans –
those gods that must have first arrived if a people is to find its essence. But
the god is never an ‘object’ of Christian tactics or of political expedients or
of ‘incantations’ drunk on ‘lived experiences’, incantations in which such
‘objects’ could perhaps become ‘perceptible’.160
The gods are not transcendent to the world, but they are rather the
dimensions of the world that create the space between beings and
beyng; it is in this sense that the arrival of the gods facilitates the people
finding its essence, since the latter is not possible unless there is the
willingness to question the truth of being in the pursuit of the being
of truth. To interpret the arrival of the gods theistically is to obscure
Heidegger’s resolve that god is not an object that we perceive through a
lived experience of a theological, political, or magical nature.
What Heidegger wished to communicate is clarified by a comment in
the Contributions, ‘The inventive thinking [Er-denken] of beyng leaps
into beyng as the “between” in whose self-clearing essential occurrence
the gods and humans come to mutual recognition, i.e., decide about
their mutual belonging. As this “between”, beyng “is” not a supple-
ment to beings, but is what essentially occurs such that in its truth they
(beings) can first attain the preservation proper to beings’.161 Heidegger
thus emphatically denies that the notion of god should be understood
metaphysically or equated with the nonmetaphysical event of beyng:
‘The god is neither a “being” [seiend] nor a “nonbeing” [unseiend]
and is also not to be identified with beyng. Instead, beyng essentially
occurs in the manner of time-space as that “between” which can never
be grounded in the god and also not in the human being (as some
240 E.R. Wolfson
objectively present, living thing) but only in Da-sein’.162 The between

into which the thinking of beyng leaps is the clearing wherein humans
and gods abide in the distance of their intimacy.163 The juxtaposition of
this mutuality in the space of difference is what makes possible the atheo-
logical exceeding of the theological:
Deliverance [Erlösung] from the ‘gods’ [Göttern] means: from the idols
[Götzen] to whom belong all ‘purposes’ and ‘causations’ and ‘causes,’ all
forms and ‘goals’ of machination: ‘the’ science, ‘the’ technology, ‘the’
common usefulness, ‘the’ people – ‘the’ culture. Why this deliverance,
and whence the demand for it? From the truth of beyng – so that every
being might again find its way back into its simple ground and manifest
in all this the abysses of beyng, which alone suffice as sites of the decision
on whether beyng merely bestows beingness to beings or surmounts itself
toward the trembling of that which is most uncertain: the advent or flight
of the last god.164
In contrast to the divinization of theopoiesis, which is a circling around

god (ein Kreisen um ‘Gott’) that arises from a technological utility,165 the
decision of de-divinization is the final iconoclastic gesture, the destruc-
tion of all the forms of objectification presupposed by the doctrines of
causality, teleology, utilitarianism, pragmatism, machination, technology,
science, peoplehood, and culture.
Here it is pertinent to recall Heidegger’s explication in ‘The Age of
the World Picture’, a lecture delivered on June 9, 1938, of the loss of
gods (Entgötterung) as the fifth phenomenon of modernity. This expres-
sion is not to be understood as the ‘mere elimination of the gods, crude
atheism’. The loss of the gods is a twofold process intimately related to
Christianity: ‘On the one hand, the world picture Christianizes itself [sich
verchristlicht] inasmuch as the ground of the world is posited as infinite
and unconditioned, as the absolute. On the other hand, Christendom
reinterprets its Christianity as a world view (the Christian world view)
and thus makes itself modern and up to date’. Contrary to what one
might assume, the loss of the gods does not imply an atheistic aboli-
tion of the gods. In a far more complicated and sophisticated way, the
loss of the gods is related to the Christianization of the world picture
(Weltbild), which posits the ground of the world (Weltgrund) as the
infinite and unconditioned absolute. The shift in orientation results in
Christianity becoming a worldview (Weltanschauung) that reflects the
‘condition of indecision about God and the gods’. Heidegger is quick to

point out, however, that the loss of the gods does not exclude religiosity.
Rather, the relation to the gods, which ensues from the loss of the gods,
‘is transformed into a religious experience [Erleben]. When this happens,
the gods have fled. The resulting void is filled by the historical and psy-
chological investigation of myth’.166
Heidegger offers a shrewd analysis of the modern predicament and
the role played by Christianity in fostering the religious experience that is
centred on the flight of the gods that results from a worldview that posits
God as the absolute that supplants the theistic image. As he enunciated
in the notebooks, the release from idolatry, which is demanded by the
truth of beyng and the need for every being to be restored to the ground
that manifests the abysses of beyng, culminates in the removal of the final
idol, the idol of the god personified as the deity that must be worshipped
without being idolized. For Heidegger, moreover, the monotheistic
iconoclasm is transposed philosophically into the assumption that beyng
itself will no longer be apprehended ontologically as that which bestows
beingness on beings, but will transcend itself toward the trembling, the
decision that comports the indecision of whether the last god is arriving
or departing. In this matter, there is no intention or will; it is simply the
consequence of the es gibt, the giving that gives with no will to give and
no desire to be given, an idea that is far removed from the postmodern
theological efforts to salvage the nature of being as a miraculous gift.167
As Heidegger put it in another passage from the notebooks, ‘To be in the
proximity of the gods – even if this proximity is the remotest remoteness
of the undecidability regarding their flight or advent – that cannot be
charged to “good fortune” or to “misfortune”. The constancy of beyng
bears its own measure in itself, provided it at all requires a measure’.168
The measure, as we have seen, is immeasurable, which is not to say a
being of immeasurable proportions, but rather the immeasurability of
beyng that is commensurate to the between, the interlude wherein god is
present as the excess (Übermaß) of the surpassing of all beings that is yet
to come and therefore must always be not present.169 As the presence of
nonpresence, the last god is the signpost of the khoric abyss of the ‘con-
cealment of that self-concealment which radiates as beyng’, the space of
‘great solitude’, wherein one can heed the ‘uncanny silence which indeed
still devours the thunder of the passing by of the god’.170
242 E.R. Wolfson
Notes
1. For an extensive analysis of this motif, especially as it relates to
Heidegger’s notion of timespace, see Paola-Ludovica Coriando,
Der letzte Gott als Anfang: Zur ab-gründigen Zeit-Räumlichkeit des
Übergangs in Heideggers’s “Beiträgen zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)”
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998). See also the analysis of the ‘last
god’s beginning’ in Frank Schallow, Heidegger and the Quest for the
Sacred: From Thought to the Sanctuary of Faith (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2001), 131–162, and compare Ben Vedder,
Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From God to the Gods (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2007), 157–187; Andrew J. Mitchell,
The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern
2. Schallow, Heidegger, 106–109.
3. John D. Caputo, ‘People of God, People of Being: The Theological
Presuppositions of Heidegger’s Path of Thought’, in James E. Faulconer
and Mark A. Wrathall (eds), Appropriating Heidegger (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 87. For a list of relevant sources
that discuss Heidegger’s thought, religious phenomenology, and the-
ology, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and
Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014),
352–353 n. 391, 364 n. 89.
4. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA 65
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), 371; Eng. trans.: Contributions to
Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-
Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), § 238, 293.
References to the German original of Heidegger’s works will be given as
GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume number.
5. Heidegger, GA 65, 244; Eng. trans., § 127, 192.
6. Ibid., 406; Eng. trans., § 254 (emphasis in original), 321.
7. Ibid., 240; Eng. trans., § 123, 189.
GA 94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 410–411; Eng. trans.:
Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz
10. See John D. Caputo, ‘Toward a Postmodern Theology of the Cross’, in
Merold Westphal (ed.), Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 203–204; idem,
Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993), 57.

13. Heidegger, GA 94, 185; Eng. trans., 35. I have modified the translation
of Geistlosigkeit as ‘Godlessness’ to ‘spiritlessness’. In the previous para-
graph of this aphorism, Heidegger does use the term Gott-losigkeit.
14. Gregory Tropea, Religion, Ideology, and Heidegger’s Concept of Falling
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 126–127.
16. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, GA 69 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1998), 73; Eng. trans.: The History of Beyng, trans.
William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2015), 114.
17. Heidegger, GA 65, 406; Eng. trans., § 33, 58. See the analysis in
Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift, 243–244; and, in more detail, idem,
‘Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality’, in
Brian Ogren (ed.), Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is
Before and That Which is After (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 33–37.
19. Heidegger, GA 94, 314; Eng. trans., 228 (emphasis in original). The pas-
sage is repeated almost verbatim in GA 65, 411; Eng. trans., § 256, 326.
21. Ibid., 411; Eng. trans., § 256, 326 (emphasis in original).
22. Ibid., 412; Eng. trans., § 256, 327.
23. Ibid., 412; Eng. trans., § 256, 326.
24. The passage occurs as the epigraph to the seventh section of the Beiträge
on Der Letzte Gott. See ibid., 403; Eng. trans., 319.
25. Ibid., 406; Eng. trans., § 254, 323. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu ren-
der Gottwesen as ‘Godhead’, but in order to avoid the peril of lapsing
into an ontotheology, I have followed the more literal translation as
‘divine being’ in Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From
Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), § 254, 286. This is the only section in
the Beiträge where the expression appears.
26. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 170–171.
27. Heidegger, GA 69, 211; Eng. trans., 178–179.
28. I have explored this in more detail in the chapter ‘Jewish Time and the
Historiographical Eclipse of Historical Destiny’ in Elliot R. Wolfson,
The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish
Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Many Jewish
thinkers have affirmed some form of this paradox of the messianic future
as that which comes by not coming, but the two that bear the most
affinity to Heidegger are Levinas and Derrida. See Elliot R. Wolfson,
244 E.R. Wolfson
‘Not Yet Now: Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking’, in Hava
Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes (eds), Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic
Thinking (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 127–193, esp. 142–156.
30. Heidegger, GA 65, 406–407; Eng. trans., § 254, 22.
31. Paul Murphy Higgins, ‘Speaking and Thinking about God in
Rosenzweig and Heidegger’, Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University
of America, 2013, 93. But see 95, 104. Joan Stambaugh, The Finitude
of Being (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 91, also
assumes that the meaning of ‘godhead’ in Heidegger is identical to
the use of the term in Eckhart ‘to designate the transpersonal ultimacy
of the divine’. The two passages to which she refers in support of her
contention are from Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought,
translation and introduction by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper
& Row, 1971), 150, 178; Vorträge und Aufsätze, GA 7 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2000), 151, 180. In both contexts, Heidegger is explain-
ing the nature of divinity, which together with sky, earth, and mortals,
constitutes his notion of the fourfold. Mention here should be made
of the innovative analysis of Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and
Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, ed. and intro-
duction by Andrew Louth, trans., Haralambos Ventis (London: T &
T Clark International, 2005). The author accepts Heidegger’s criti-
cism of Western metaphysics, but turns to apophatic theology, especially
culled from the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, to adduce
an alternative explanation such that nothingness is not construed, in the
wake of Nietzsche, as the absence of God conceived ontotheologically
as the supreme being—a position that ends in nihilism—but as the
unknowable God to whom neither being nor nonbeing can be applied,
and not merely, as Derrida famously argued, as the hyperessential being
that is the being beyond being.
32. Higgins, ‘Speaking and Thinking about God’, 112.
33. Schallow, Heidegger, 131 (emphasis in original).
34. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Zweiter Band, GA 6.2 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1997), 349; Eng. trans.: Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism,
trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 211.
36. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, GA 5 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003),
347; Eng. trans.: Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth
Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 261.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 448; Eng. trans., 325.
40. Ibid., 448; Eng. trans., 325 (emphasis in original).

41. Ibid., 449; Eng. trans., 325–326 (emphasis in original).
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 318; Eng. trans., 231.
46. Ibid., 352; Eng. trans., 257.
47. Ibid., 316; Eng. trans., 230.
48. Ibid., 386; Eng. trans., 281.
49. Heidegger, GA 65, 400; Eng. trans., § 252, 317 (emphasis in original).
51. Ibid., 344; Eng. trans., 250.
52. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans.
Elizabeth King (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 31. See also István M. Fehér,
‘Heidegger’s Understanding of the Atheism of Philosophy: Philosophy,
Theology, and Religion in His Early Lecture Courses up to Being and Time’,
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 189–228.
53. Hans Jonas, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, The Review of Metaphysics 18
(1964): 211–214; idem, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical
Biology, with a foreword by Lawrence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern
54. Jonas, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, 219; idem, The Phenomenon of Life, 248.
55. Jonas, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, 219–220 (emphasis added); idem, The
Phenomenon of Life, 248.
56. George Connell, ‘Against Idolatry: Heidegger and Natural Theology’,
in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, 144–168. Consider the
revealing remark of Heidegger, GA 94, 320 (Eng. trans., 232): ‘Mother
– my untainted memory of this pious woman – without bitterness, and
in a surmising prescience, she countenanced the itinerary of a son who
had apparently turned away from God’ (emphasis in original).
57. George Steiner, Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford
Lectures for 1990 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 68. See
ibid., 19 n. 1: ‘Heidegger’s ontology is grounded in a constant “keep-
ing at bay” of the theological’.
58. Heidegger, GA 94, 44; Eng. trans., 33–34. On the Heideggerian
distinction between overcoming (Überwindung) and surpassing
(Verwindung), see discussion and sources cited in Wolfson, Giving
beyond the Gift, 100, 361–362 nn. 77–78.
59. Susan A. Taubes, ‘The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism’,
The Journal of Religion 34 (1954), 157.
60. Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Erster Teil: Die mythologische
Gnosis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 90–91, 107–108;
246 E.R. Wolfson
idem, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Zweiter Teil: Von der Mythologie zur
mystischen Philosophie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993),
7, 359–379; idem, ‘Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism’, Social Research
19 (1952): 430–452, esp. 441–442, 445, 449–450; idem, The Gnostic
Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 62–65, 320–340; and see analysis
of David J. Levy, Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2002), 25–30; Wolfgang Baum, Gnostische
Elemente im Denken Martin Heideggers? Eine Studie auf der Grundlage
der Religionsphilosophie von Hans Jonas (Neuried: Ars Una, 1997).
61. Jonas, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, 221; idem, The Phenomenon of Life, 250.
64. Ibid., 209: Eng. trans., 153.
65. Ibid., 218: Eng. trans., 159 (emphasis in original).
66. Ibid., 209: Eng. trans., 153.
67. Ibid., 76: Eng. trans., 58.
68. Ibid., 30: Eng. trans., 24.
69. Ibid., 213: Eng. trans., 156 (emphasis in original).
70. Ibid., 410: Eng. trans., 299.
71. Compare ibid., 301; Eng. trans., 220.
72. Ibid., 341: Eng. trans., 249 (emphasis in original). Compare ibid.,
338–339; Eng. trans., 246.
73. Ibid., 341–342; Eng. trans., 248–249. Compare Heidegger, GA 65,
397; Eng. trans., § 250, 314.
74. Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Erster Teil, 106–109, mentioned
Heidegger in his discussion of the motif of thrownness (Geworfensein)
in gnostic sources.
75. Heidegger, GA 94, 213; Eng. trans., 156 (emphasis in original).
76. Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery-Religions: Their Basic Idea and
Significance, trans. John E. Steely (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1978),
354; Walter Schmithals, Die Gnosis in Korinth: Eine Untersuchung zu
den Korintherbriefen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956),
82–134; Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism,
trans. Robert McLachlan Wilson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983),
121–122, 131–132.
77. Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 volumes, trans.
Kendrick Grobel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 1:166–167,
175–177.
78. Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Erster Teil, 96–98; idem, The Gnostic
Religion, 49–51, 75–80.
80. See above, n. 74.

82. Ibid., 167; Eng. trans., 122.
84. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New
York: Harper & Row, 1969), 72; German text: 140–141.
85. Yannaras, On the Absence, 51.
86. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, GA 66 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997),
255–256; Eng. trans.: Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas
Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), 225.
89. Ibid., 49; Eng. trans., 37.
90. Ibid., 87; Eng. trans., 66.
91. Ibid., 53; Eng. trans., 40.
93. See citation and analysis in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being:
Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2005), 14–16, 409–10 nn. 123–124.
95. Heidegger, GA 66, 256; Eng. trans., 225. I have slightly modified the
translation.
96. Ibid., 256; Eng. trans., 225.
97. Heidegger, GA 65, 410–411; Eng. trans., § 256, 325–326.
99. Heidegger, GA 94, 398; Eng. trans, 290 (emphasis in original).
100. Ibid., 172; Eng. trans., 126. Compare ibid., 183; Eng. trans., 134.
102. Ibid., 215; Eng. trans., 157.
103. Ibid., 214; Eng. trans., 157.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid., 318; Eng. trans., 231.
106. Ibid., 242; Eng. trans., 177.
107. Heidegger, GA 65, 398; Eng. trans., § 251, 316 (emphasis in original).
108. Ibid., 398–399; Eng. trans., § 251, 316 (emphasis in original).
109. Ibid., 399–400; Eng. trans., § 252, 317 (emphasis in original).
110. Ibid., 400; Eng. trans., § 252, 317.
112. Ibid., 223; Eng. trans., 163.
114. Ibid., 172; Eng. trans., 125.
115. Ibid., 172; Eng. trans., 125–126.
248 E.R. Wolfson
116. I have modified the translation of Ungrund by Rojcewicz (see following

note) as ‘deformed ground’.
118. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 3. See also Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods:
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 224–237; Robert S. Gall, Beyond Theism and
Atheism: Heidegger’s Significance for Religious Thinking (Dordrecht:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 74–95.
120. Ibid., 457; Eng. trans., 331.
121. Ibid., 351; Eng. trans., 255–256.
122. Ibid., 522; Eng. trans., 380.
123. Ibid., 76; Eng. trans., 58. Compare the aphorism ‘On clandestine ways
to God who is“dead”,’ in ibid., 73; Eng. trans., 55–56. See also ibid.,
329; Eng. trans., 239, where Heidegger criticizes the effort of those
overflowing with ‘Christian humility’, who explain Nietzsche’s madness
as an ‘instance of the Christian God punishing and striking down the
arrogant’. See the discussion of Nietzsche’s aphorism and Heidegger’s
destruction of ontotheology in Gall, Beyond Theism and Atheism, 14–38.
124. Martin Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809),
GA 42 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988), 87–88; Eng. trans.: Schelling’s
Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 50–51 (emphasis in original);
I have taken the liberty to amend Stambaugh’s translation based on
the original German text. For discussion of Heidegger’s deconstruc-
tion of metaphysics as ontotheology, see Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger
on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7–43.
127. Ibid., 250; Eng. trans., 183.
128. Ibid., 333; Eng. trans., 242.
129. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39),
GA 95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 75–76. Eng. trans.: Ponderings
VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939, trans. Richard Rojcewicz
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 57–58.
131. Ibid., 90; Eng. trans., 68.
132. In the interview with Gershom Scholem, ‘Zionism – Dialectic of
Continuity and Rebellion’, in Ehud Ben Ezer (ed.), Unease in Zion
(New York: Quadrangle, 1974), 292. Scholem’s statement is noted
and briefly analyzed by Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion After

Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 79. See also Ronny
Miron, The Angel of Jewish History: The Image of the Jewish Past in the
Twentieth Century (Boston: Academic Studies Press 2014), 160. In
n. 38 ad locum, Miron asserts that the concept of nothing implicit in
Scholem’s comment ‘is similar to that of Heidegger’.
135. Ibid., 240; Eng. trans., § 123, 189.
136. For a different interpretation that extracts from Heidegger’s comments
an idea of the holy as neither a being nor being, see Peter S. Dillard,
Non-Metaphysical Theology After Heidegger (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016), 23–26.
139. Ibid., 408; Eng. trans., § 255, 323.
140. Ibid.
141. Heidegger, GA 94, 239–240; Eng. trans., 175.
142. Ibid., 457; Eng. trans., 331.
144. Ibid., 356; Eng. trans., 259.
145. Ibid., 262; Eng. trans., 192.
146. Ibid., 274; Eng. trans., 201.
148. Heidegger, GA 5, 364; Eng. trans., 274–275 (emphasis in original).
149. Ibid., 364–365; Eng. trans., 275 (translation slightly modified).
150. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans., with additional notes,
by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 23–24
(emphasis in original). See my previous analysis of Derrida’s commen-
tary on this Heideggerian passage in Wolfson Giving beyond the gift,
195–196, 425–426, n. 271. Compare the discussion of the Derridean
trace against the background of Heidegger’s thinking in Paola Marrati,
Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 87–176.
151. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s
Theory of Signs, trans., with an introduction, by David B. Allison, pref-
ace by Newton Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973), 156; idem, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, corrected
edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 61; idem,
Margins of Philosophy, 65–67. See also Jacques Derrida, Spurs/Nietzsche’s
250 E.R. Wolfson
Styles, introduction by Stefano Agosti, trans. Barbara Harlow, drawings

by François Loubrieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
20–23. Regarding the philosopher’s constriction to following the trace
of truth, see ibid., 86–87. On the Derridean trace and arche-writing, see
Tom Conley, ‘A Trace of Style’, in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed.
Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 74–92;
Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy
of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 157,
186–194, 277–278, 289–293; idem, Inventions of Difference: On
Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 25,
40–42, 44–49, 158, 160–170; John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears
of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997), 57–61, 319–320; Christina Howells, Derrida:
Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1999), 50–52, 74, 134–135; Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting
Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 12, 15, 28, 35, 169–171,
178, 196; Irene E. Harvey, Derrida and the Economy of Différance
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 153–181; David Farrell
Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 165–204. On the possible kabbalistic nuance
of the Derridean arche-trace and the gesture of writing, see the views of
Habermas, Bloom, and Handelman discussed in Wolfson, Giving beyond
the Gift, 155–156, 177–178, 180, 182, 184–186. See ibid., 161, where
I note the thematic link between time as the originary iterability, the
non-identical identity of the Jew, and the trace as the repetition of the
same that is always different.
152. On this account, there is affinity between Heidegger’s Spur and
Levinas’s notion of the other as the trace of illeity. See Emmanuel
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 106–107; idem, Otherwise Than
Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1991), 12, 94; and see the analysis in Edith
Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics,
2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 158–164, 224;
Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift, 98–99, 142, 144–148.
153. Heidegger, GA 5, 336–337; Eng. trans., 253–254 (emphasis in original).
154. Heidegger, GA 94, 241; Eng. trans., 176. See the analysis in Vycinas,
Earth and Gods, 174–223.
155. Ibid., 245; Eng. trans., 179.
157. Ibid., 272; Eng. trans., 203.
158. Ibid., 295; Eng. trans., 221. See Mitchell, The Fourfold, 197–201, esp.
199–200.

160. Ibid., 25; Eng. trans., 20.
162. Ibid., 263; Eng. trans., § 143, 207.
164. Heidegger, GA 94, 426; Eng. trans., 305. Compare Heidegger, GA 94,
456; Eng. trans., 331: ‘The twilight of the idols is drawing near. … It
is not yet the evening twilight; coming first is the morning one. The
assembling of the idols is the sign of a long and conclusive flight of the
gods’ (emphasis in original).
166. Heidegger, GA 5, 76; Eng. trans., 58. On the atheological and non-
metaphysical import of Heidegger’s embrace of atheism, compare the
passage in Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte
1939–1941) GA 96 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 23–24; Ponderings
XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941, translated by Richard Rojcewicz
167. Wolfson Giving beyond the Gift, 227–260, esp. 236–246.
169. Ibid., 347; Eng. trans., 253.
170. Ibid., 412; Eng. trans., 300.
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International, 2005.
CHAPTER 10
Confessions and Considerations:
Heidegger’s Early Black Notebooks and His
Lecture on Augustine’s Theory of Time
Marius Timmann Mjaaland
The oldest of the Black Notebooks we still have, Heidegger’s

Considerations II from 1931/1932, is introduced with a programmatic
quotation: ‘The Considerations of the Black Notebooks are essentially
attempts at simple naming—no claims or even notes for a planned sys-
tem.’1 As scholars have pointed out, there are numerous references to
Nietzsche and Plato in style and content, but when I first read these
notebooks, I was struck by their confessional style. The author wants to
describe some of his deepest concerns, and the tone is not only descrip-
tive, it is personally engaged. Heidegger raises questions, he confesses his
beliefs, he identifies heretics and false prophets; he is driven by the desire
to describe, as precisely and in as much detail as possible, everything that
has been revealed to him.
‘What shall we do? Who are we? Why shall we be?’ the first entry
begins.2 Despite the lack of direct references, these questions remind
M.T. Mjaaland (*) 
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

258 M.T. MJAALAND
me of Augustine. In their simplicity these introductory questions are

existentially concerned and essential for any human being as someone
being there. I read them as an echo of Augustine’s Confessions, which
Heidegger obviously has read and re-read in this period. We know this
due to his careful analysis of Augustine’s theory of time in a lecture
given in August 1930 at St. Martin’s Archabbey in Beuron.3 The
Confesssions were highly appreciated by Heidegger, as he makes clear
in this lecture to the Benedictine friars. He points at the significance
of the Confessions for his own philosophical project up to Being and
Time, with emphasis on Augustine’s theory of time. In this essay, I
will read Heidegger’s first notebook, covering the time from October
1931 to the autumn of 1932, as an expression of his own confessions,
in the philosophical sense of that term, which neither excludes the
personal, religious, political nor erotic uses of the word ‘confession’.
This represents a deliberate choice of perspective highlighting some of
the theological aspects of his Black Notebooks, in past and future.
In his lecture Quid est tempus from 1930, Heidegger argued that
‘in their considerations of time, the Confessions arrive at their genu-
ine goal, i.e. their very own metaphysical grounding’.4 It is this
metaphysical grounding of the discussions on time and being which
has dominated Heidegger’s philosophy up to the publishing of Being
and Time (1927). However, in this lecture, we can also see the begin-
nings of a re-orientation of his thought, later known as the ‘turn’
(Kehre). Heidegger proceeds from the question of time as a famil-
iar form of speech to time as calculation, time as a form of being-in-
the-world, as a way of questioning Dasein, and finally to the Da-Bild
as a discussion of the relationship between image and imagination.
Towards the end of the lecture it is the problem of the future and the
unity of time which makes him take refuge in poetry and imagina-
tion. The transition here points from time to space, from temporality
to spatiality, which is indicative of Heidegger’s subsequent philosophy.
Theologically, this turn implies a more mystical tendency in his think-
ing, with speculations about being and God that are explicitly post-
Christian and post-monotheistic and yet confessional and prophetic
in style and content. I will therefore also discuss the significance of
Augustine’s Confessions for this turn in his philosophy and its relation
to the early Black Notebooks.
10 CONFESSIONS AND CONSIDERATIONS: HEIDEGGER’S EARLY BLACK … 259
The Most Questionable

Heidegger’s lecture at the Archabbey of Beuron gives access to his
thoughts from a personal and yet philosophical point of view: he is inter-
rogating time, while reading the confessions of Augustine, and he thereby
comes close to a personal confession—a confession that leaves the ques-
tion open before God, for further consideration. Heidegger gives this
lecture in the library at Beuron, in a relatively informal atmosphere, as
a sign of gratitude for the hospitality of the monks. This monastery has
been his refugium for many years. He also brought some of his most
dedicated and talented students to this silent place, including Ingeborg
Blochmann and Hannah Arendt, whose dedication transcended a merely
theoretical love of wisdom. At this place, Heidegger chooses to focus
on the location of the problem of time, in ‘immediate proximity to the
problem of the limitless/immeasurable (Grenzenlosen), the place (Ort),
the Void (Leere)’.5
The Archabbey of St Martin was founded as an Augustinian monas-
tery as early as 1055, hence the lecture on Augustine was delivered in a
fitting place. Since 1863 it hosted a community of Benedictine monks
in the Danube Valley, close to the Black Forest and the Bodensee.6 The
lecture was given on 26 October 1930, three years after Being and Time
was published and three years before Heidegger’s infamous inaugural
speech as rector at the University of Freiburg, in which he proclaimed
his support of the Nazi regime and of Adolf Hitler as Führer. In this
turbulent period for Heidegger—personally, intellectually, religiously,
and politically—Beuron became an ‘ex-static’ place of withdrawal and
reflection.7
One of the debates surrounding the Black Notebooks has been
whether they represent Heidegger’s political thoughts and personal
reflections as separate from his philosophy or rather, on the contrary,
demonstrate the connection between his philosophy and politics, and
thus presumably the ultimate failure of both.8 Jeff Malpas argues that the
two perspectives should not be too easily mixed, and that political fail-
ure of a philosopher does not necessarily imply philosophical failure or
vice versa.9 Still, the ambiguity of Heidegger’s notebooks is palpable, in
particular when it comes to short, programmatic statements about the
‘essence’ of time. The entry #26 of the Considerations II is a good exam-
ple: ‘Interrogating the essence of time, in order to find oneself in our
260 M.T. MJAALAND
instant.’10 The assertion follows seamlessly in the line of thought pre-

sented in Quid est tempus. It is a question about the essence of time, a
question that points towards the present, towards the instant, towards
the one who perceives time as past, present, and future. And yet, in
1931/1932, there is also a political issue at stake in this text: the fateful
question of ‘our’ instant.
What happened in Germany during these years (1931–1933) turned
out to be decisive for the course of events that came to dominate the
history of the twentieth century. Heidegger repeatedly discusses the role
of ‘the philosopher’ in a particular historical situation, and since most
other philosophers are considered useless and shallow, this is basically
a discussion of his own role in society and academia.11 As ‘the philoso-
pher’, there is little doubt that Heidegger considers it a key philosophical
task to interpret and respond to the sign of the times: not only from
the perspective of ‘the situation’ but uncovering, tirelessly, the ‘essence’
of time and the truth of being, raising the questions that deserve being
asked.12 He is asking from the perspective of being, concerning the sense
of being, and this perspective causes a series of critical remarks when it
comes to other philosophers, the hasty political ‘situation’, and the
superficial public opinion.13 None of them are able to look through the
illusions, they are unwilling to do the hard work, they lack the courage
to take the big risk of erring (in die Irre gehen) in order to dwell on the
deeper problems of being, i.e. let the language ‘speak’ to the philosopher
in his being-there (Dasein).14
Heidegger is extremely critical of his contemporaries. He despises fel-
low philosophers like Karl Jaspers, while seeing himself as one of the few
elect who are able to hear the calling of being, to enter the poetry/den-
sification of being, the ‘eruption of being in the density of its poetry’.15
This intensification of being is the essential question unavoidably leading
to the interrogation of time.16 Hence, all these questions and even the
quest for questioning the most questionable (fragwürdige) lead us back
to Heidegger’s lecture on Augustine: Quid est tempus?
What is Time?
‘What is time, then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to
explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.’17 Thus the
problem of time is raised by Augustine in Book XI of the Confessions.
It is raised as a question of language, of precise description. Through
linguistic analysis he makes us aware of the difficulties of defining what

we speak of, what we measure, when we measure time. It is a problem of
words, of finding appropriate words or any words at all.
As such it is a problem that calls on Martin Heidegger’s interest and,
as it seems, goes to the core of his philosophical concern, viz. how the
problem of time disturbs and destructs the question of being and of
Dasein. It occurs as a linguistic problem, since it is impossible to delimit
the question of time from the common usage of language. Heidegger
quotes the following question by Augustine: ‘quid autem familiarius
et notius in loquendo commemoramus quam tempus?’18 Hence, what is
mentioned more familiarly and well-known in common discourse than
time? Without even becoming aware of it, we continuously refer to it by
using the different temporal forms of the verb, the so-called Zeitwörter.
Whenever we speak of that which is, was, have been, or will be, we refer
to time as something we take for granted. But how can we be so sure
that there is such a thing as time in the first place?
Augustine’s approach is phenomenological in the sense in which
Heidegger applies this word in Being and Time: time is normally
applied pre-reflectively and simply taken for granted as Vor-Griff or
Vorverständnis. In order to enable the phenomenological analysis, this
understanding needs to be questioned, however, and thus existence may
be disclosed, opened up, according to its metaphysical constitution.
Hence, Heidegger claims that through the analysis of time, the previous
books (I–X) of the Confessions approach their original goal, since they are
brought back to their metaphysical grounding.19
Heidegger argues that there are three significant analyses of time in
the history of philosophy, the first written by Aristotle in the Physics, the
second by Augustine, and the third by Kant. In Aristotle, the question of
time is connected to movement, and thus to the measurability of time.
This question is taken up by Augustine, but he proceeds from the merely
external question of movement and measuring to the place of perceiv-
ing time, viz. human consciousness. Although it is impossible to identify
time as such, as being, it is perceived in terms of memory and expecta-
tion. Heidegger thus sets out from a textual analysis of Augustine’s
Confessions XI before he discusses its significance and consequences.
Finally, he turns to the relationship between book XI and the previous
autobiographical books of the Confessions.
With Heidegger’s essay on Augustine, the problem of time is given
priority over against the question of being, thus I see it is a displacement
262 M.T. MJAALAND
of the problem of Being and Time. The lecture continues where that
work—which remained unfinished—ends with the analysis of tempo-
rality as Innerzeitlichkeit and criticism of the so-called ‘vulgar’ concep-
tion of time.20 Although Heidegger here criticized Hegel for remaining
within the Aristotelian conception of time, he is not able to demonstrate
an alternative. In the following years he acknowledges the study’s sig-
nificance, but concludes that the investigation was unsuccessful and
therefore remains unfulfilled, indeed a ‘failure’ in certain respects. The
question it raised, the question of being, remains a challenge, however:
‘There remains no other choice than writing this book again and again,
and only this one. At the risk of remaining a homo unius libri. Over this
unum there is no aliud.’21
In the lecture from 1930, the problem of being is raised as a prob-
lem of time. Hence, Heidegger gradually proceeds from Aristotle
to Augustine’s analysis of time. He focuses on the different modes
of approaching the aporia of time in order to arrive at a more proper
understanding. The first mode is linguistic, concerned with the Word
(verbum). The second approach is connected to the common praxis of
measuring time, and thus he proceeds from words to numbers. From
numbers he then moves on to the question of being qua being, and then
to image and narration as re-presentations of being. Finally, Heidegger
turns to the essence of time, which he sees as the essence of human exist-
ence. This leads him to the question that remains hidden within the
entire consideration on time: the question of God—and the interroga-
tion of God—in the time when Hegel and Nietzsche have declared that
‘God is dead’.22
Measurable Time
According to Heidegger, Aristotle’s major contribution to the philoso-
phy of time is his ability to present a phenomenological analysis of time
insofar as it is measurable:
The seminal significance of Aristotle’s dissertation on time lies in the fact

that for the first time, the metrological daily experience of time and the
way we are counting on it—the time that we are counting on, that we find
when we look at the watch—is subjected to a phenomenological interpre-
tation and thus conceptually permeated.23
What comes out of this investigation is the ‘measurable’ time, the time
on which we may count. There is a profound ambiguity in Heidegger’s
praise of Aristotle, which is connected to the character of this analy-
sis, insofar as it gives the impression of a philosopher being able to
understand time in terms of its calculability. But what kind of under-
standing is that? Is time as such measurable or is it rather beyond every
measure? Is the understanding and perception of time based in the
exterior or the interior? Aristotle’s focus on metrology and being is
acknowledged by Heidegger because he displays the irresolvable apo-
ria of time; that the concept of time remains problematic as long as we
measure time, and the phenomenological interpretation therefore illus-
trates its insufficiency. According to Heidegger, it remains, after all, a
‘vulgar’ conception of time.
Even Augustine emphasizes this measureable and accountable aspect
of temporality as the basis for a philosophical analysis of time: we do
measure time; we speak of long time and short time, past and future,
but how, and in which medium, in relation to what, are we able to meas-
ure time? By raising this question, Heidegger points out that Augustine
proceeds beyond Aristotle. He asks for the conditions of measuring in
the first place. He accepts the basic experience of measuring time, of its
calculability, and still, the question whereby do we measure time, remains
concealed and obscure: ‘What is this that we measure when we measure
time?’24
When following this path of questioning, the expected unity of time
dissolves. Time is splitting up into three times: past time, present time,
and future time. And none of them is really there in any constant or
stable sense. Augustine thus discusses the future and observes that
when we think of the next hundred years, the next year, the next week,
the next hour, even the next moment, we have to conclude that it is
not. It is not present. The problem is, as Augustine concludes, that the
present has no space at all (praesens autem nullum habet spatium).25
What we measure as future or past, is not. What is (presence) cannot
be measured.26 The best answer he is able to give, is therefore the fol-
lowing: ‘We measure time by time in time.’27 The sentence is not only
circular, it sounds enigmatic. What would the conclusion to this first
circle of argument be; that time ‘is’ and remains obscure and enig-
matic, even in its past, its present and its future tense? Indeed, that may
be the case.
264 M.T. MJAALAND
The Being of Time

With this preliminary conclusion, we approach the question of being.
Yet this question is discussed from a different angle by Augustine than
by Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle pointed at the problem of defining time
in relation to exterior movement, Augustine is focusing on the percep-
tion of time within the soul. The being of time is therefore connected to
presence, to the immediate perception of something which is being-there
or becoming-present (anwesend) and yet passing by. If time were simply
present, it would not be temporal but eternal, like the nunc stans. Yet in
passing by, it cannot be fully present, since the present continuously col-
lapses into the past. If time ‘is’, it appears to be an extremely volatile and
transient being. Time cannot simply be grounded in the present; it must
also be ascribed to a future and a past being. Still, where is this future and
past time, and whereby are we able to measure it and compare it to other
times, i.e. as long and short time?
Augustine points out that the future proceeds into something
obscure, whereas the past recedes into something equally obscure. Thus
we relate to what is ‘passed’ (or past) and ‘coming’ (future) as if they
were existing (Seiende), and yet they are not. The problem is, Heidegger
concludes, that they must be and yet they ‘are’ not; at the most they
‘have been’ or ‘will be’; yet where are they, and how may they be at all?28
‘Basically observe this ambiguity’, is Heidegger’s commentary.29 He
is thinking of the linguistic ambiguity which is characteristic of narra-
tive, which recalls the past or prefigures the future. This past is not sim-
ply non-existent (Nichts), but it is only available in the reconfiguration
that follows a narrative structure. Narrative is the form of its re-presen-
tation, hence it is there, present, as not-there, in the memory. Similarly,
the structure of narrative makes the future possible, not as present but
in future, as expectation. In order to understand it properly, it is neces-
sary to exclude it from present-time and represent it as future-time. It is
necessary for Augustine to keep them apart in the dis-tentio of the soul
in order to avoid the collapse of temporal structure. Hence, there are
three times or temporalities, and each temporality is characterised by such
ambiguity.
According to Heidegger, this ambiguous temporal structure can
nevertheless be called the original expression of the human sense of
temporality, viz. the narrative, the story, and the work of imagination.30
Which role does the image play? In what respect may the work of
imagination condition the measuring of time, indeed the question of

temporality as such? This becomes a key issue in Heidegger’s lecture on
time. For Heidegger, this is the point where Augustine’s consideration
of time breaks apart and thus proceeds beyond the question of measur-
ing towards the questioning of the most questionable: what is a human
being, qua temporal existence (Da-Sein)? Is it a transitory being? Is it
a being which after all ‘is’ more absent than present? Is it de-composit-
ing in distention and distraction? Does it simply reproduce this image of
itself according to its own ability to imagine itself as itself? Is the Dasein
of temporal existence reducible to a Da-Bild, to fiction?31
This is the deeper ambiguity of the problem of time: the perceived
‘reality’ (res) is continuously followed by the shadow of imagination,
until the image of reality ‘as such’, objective, measurable, and calculable,
collapses under the careful consideration of how it comes into being. In
order to be perceived as real, or realistic, it depends on the work of imag-
ination, of fiction, in terms of memory and expectation. It is produced
by the gaze (Blick) itself, in the moment (Augenblick) of its production
(poiesis). The image, the Da-Bild, even replaces objective, measurable
reality in order to make it measurable within consciousness. Any other
being of time is evaporating under the careful questioning of its ‘where’
and ‘when’. Hence, any questioning of the temporality of being points in
direction of a deeper questioning of being as such: why there is being at
all and not rather nothing, nihil.32
Image and Imagination
The typescript of Heidegger’s lecture sets out from a rather detailed
elaboration of the problem of time, with numerous handwritten com-
ments in Greek and Latin. Towards the end of the text, the syntax dis-
solves and Heidegger lectures on the basis of notes and keywords:
‘Narrative—truth reported; not the things, the being in itself is re-called
[wird wieder geholt], not the res ipsae, but imaginem intuere.’33 The
being thus mediated in language is a narrated being. It is facts and states
of affairs that have been and thus need to be recalled. The ambiguity he
emphasizes in Augustine’s Confessions concerns the need for imagination,
and thus poetry (Greek poiesis) and fiction (Latin fictio) in order to pro-
duce time, even when it comes to the problem of measuring it.34
Heidegger notes that Augustine elaborates two different approaches to
the same phenomenon through two sets of arguments (Book XI, 14–21
266 M.T. MJAALAND
and Book XI, 22–30): The first is instrumental, intuitive, and simply tak-
ing for granted that there ‘is’ such a thing as future, past and present
which we are able to measure by looking at the sun, the clock, etc., and
yet still concluding negatively that there is no such ‘thing’ as time and no
‘place’ to measure it, unless you simply presuppose time as self-referen-
tial (measuring time in time through time). The second approach is con-
cerned with the relationship between the soul and time, although not as
a secondary consequence but rather prior to the former, as condition for
the external measuring of time.
The latter argument depends on poetry and narrative in order to pro-
ceed towards a more comprehensive understanding of where time is per-
ceived and what we measure when we measure time. In the expectation
of a verse which is ‘long’ or ‘short’, in expecting the aurora or expecting
other events to come, the mind stretches out and perceives the future in
terms of the present. Similarly, the mind recalls things that happened in
the past, rephrases these events and thus orders them within a tempo-
ral structure, a narrative. Curiously enough, the words thus order time
according to a particular structure, a plot, and yet, time as such with-
draws from the definitions and structures thus established.
Augustine thus orders time according to the threefold structure which
is based on the intuitive perception of past, future, and present, but he
does so in a gesture of repetition and reduplication: the presence of the
past, the presence of the future, and even the presence of the present.
Hence, Augustine does not claim that memory is based on past events;
rather on the contrary, he claims that past events are based on the work
of memory. The mind stretches out towards the past, a reconstruction
based on consciousness within the present. Such a repetition of the past
in terms of memory works through the formation of images (Bilder) and
Heidegger emphasizes that it is not a simple re-production of the original
image (Abbild), but a look, a gaze (Lat. species) which is constituted, pro-
duced, in retrospect: ‘The visible “image” in retrospect constructed.’35
Neither past nor future are simply there, as res ipsae of the past or
res ipsae of the future; they come-into-existence in the expectation or
memory of the rising sun, the aurora; they are produced by the imagi-
nation in anticipation or memorization. Heidegger even goes one step
further and suggests that this coming-into-existence of the past and the
presence indeed is the coming-into-existence of the self, in terms of a
‘stretching beyond itself’: distentio ergo sum. This is the temporalization
of the Dasein as Da-Bild, in a process of imagination; the self is formed
(gebildet) by its translation and repetition in imagination. He expresses it

pointedly as follows: ‘This distentio forms [bildet] itself, it forms [bildet]
the tensio. This formation of itself [ihr Bilden] is its essence.’36
It is a radical consideration concerning the coming-into-existence of
a self which is conscious of itself, not by the pure process of thinking as
such (cogitare), but the continuous production of images in the imagi-
nation (imaginare), whereby the self gives an account of itself, narrates
itself, gives a confession. Without such narration, without such imagina-
tion based on the memory of the past and expectations of the future,
there is no existence to speak of, there is no being-there, no Dasein.
Hence, one of the key terms in Heidegger’s philosophical endeavour is
redefined in its representation as Da-Bild.
Yet what is measured when time is represented in the distention of
the soul? What do I measure when I measure time? I can only measure
time with the help of others; comparing and subjugating this other to
careful examination. Hence, the complex structure of time—although
shaping and forming the image—always remains dependant on others,
on that which is measured, perceived, and thus passively received. This is
the point in Augustine’s investigation where the unity of time threatens
to collapse into three separate times—or the arbitrary reconstruction of
the mind. How does Heidegger respond to this problem? He remains
extremely close to the text: The self stretches out between this and that,
he notes, between actively imagining and passively perceiving, and it is
impossible to separate the one from the other. This is indeed the pro-
found ambiguity of any theory of time that deserves the name. Hence,
the two analyses, of time as measurable and time as distention of the
soul, remain equally significant, gleichursprünglich, for the constitution
of temporality.
Paul Ricœur sees this as a deficiency of Augustine’s theory of time
in the Confessions. He argues that Augustine tries to solve the problem of
time by grounding it within the self rather than in the external definition
given by Aristotle: ‘Where Augustine fails is precisely where he attempts
to derive from the dimension of the mind alone the very principle of the
extension and measurement of time.’37 Whether Augustine fails or not
depends on what we are looking for. I think Ricœur’s conclusion is a bit
hasty here: does Augustine try to ground temporality in the mind at all?
Is not his theory of time, even his theory of the self, a bit more com-
plex than that? Ricœur has received much praise for his extensive and
creative theory of time and narrative, yet as a reading of the Confessions, I
268 M.T. MJAALAND
am tempted to follow Heidegger’s judgment on his contemporaries, that

he is still quite ‘far away from a true exhaustion of the basic content’ of
Augustine’s conception of time.38
Transitions and Confessions
Heidegger is an extremely careful and rigorous reader of texts, yet at
the same time he displays an intensive drive towards a different under-
standing of the text. He draws the attention of the listener closer to the
text, to the significant details of that text, and yet transcends the vari-
ous aspects of the Confessions by drawing them back to the big under-
lying question: the original grounding of time. It is the questioning of
time in Confessions XI that points back to the first ten books of this work,
where Augustine tells the story of his life, constantly questioning the
‘self’ while ‘stretching out’ towards an understanding of its memories
and its hopes. Through a reconsideration of its memories and expecta-
tions, the soul may discover its own story, the narrative which constitutes
this person as someone particular, a single individual, or, more precisely,
a subject, subjecting or subduing to a unity which is absolutely other than
itself. Except for this other, the unity of the self actually is in danger of
collapsing—indeed, in some passages Augustine even seems to endorse
and amplify this collapse.
The narrative thus constituted does not simply draw future and past
back to the present; on the contrary, there is a continuous work of
stretching out, and thus opening up the space between past and future,
between memories and expectations, which is the space of the self, of this
singular human being. This stretching-out (dis-tentio) is the basic charac-
ter of a vita actionis, Heidegger comments, the human being as such is a
‘threefold stretched stretching-oneself-out’.39 Still, it remains uncontrol-
lable, non-calculable, as long as this space remains open in the tension
between keeping—and forgetting, expecting—and renouncing, making-
present—and letting pass.40 In all the three modes we find these curious
alterations (Ab-wandlungen) which are beyond our control.
In these alterations, Heidegger sees the possibilities of a transforma-
tion, of becoming otherwise; through some kind of gathering, in ex-ten-
sion as ex-sistere, existence. This option remains prior to calculable time,
in the double sense: (1) by simply becoming present, internally, in the
face; (2) by being there prior to all times, externally and beyond—eter-
nity—praessentissimum, nunc stans.41
According to Heidegger, it does not seem like eternity qua nunc stans
is able to solve the enigma of time. On the contrary, the question of time
is raised in its absolute difference from this presence. Hence, the question
makes us aware of the absence, of the need to continue measuring time.
In the face of this absolute difference, the question ‘what is time’ points
back at the question: quid est homo?
Ignorance, Expectation, and Imagination

Quid est homo—quid est deus? After Hegel and Nietzsche, Heidegger
sees these two questions as inseparable, and yet the supposed absence of
God, or the ‘death of God’, points towards a collapse of the question
for the former, i.e. towards a post-human age. In reading the Confessions
once more, Heidegger seeks to let the question of time reopen the
question of humanity. He points at a different option than the simple
rejection of God as ‘non-existent’: approaching God in confessing one’s
ignorance, in confessing what you really do not know and are unable to
conceive. He thus expresses his ignorance by a repetition of the Socratic
ignorance, in a negative theology even less confident than Cusanus’s
docta ignorantia: ‘I don’t even know what I don’t know, what I am sup-
posed to ask for.’42 Heidegger describes this ignorance as a basic and
unsettling questionability, where you have to begin by asking what is
worth asking for.
There is some kind of absolute resignation taking place here, in
Heidegger’s lecture on Augustine. I think we observe the confession of a
conversion, in the religious sense, and yet it is the con-version away from
the traditional God towards the absolutely other God, the God whom
we still do not know except for the expectation of his coming. In his
religious and philosophical refugium at Beuron Heidegger confesses his
faith in the God who is absolutely other, and yet encounters the philoso-
pher who is questioning his own existence in the very depth of his exist-
ence. Reflecting on the problem of time draws the philosopher and the
believer towards the questioning of existence, in ‘immediate proximity
to the problem of the limitless/immeasurable (Grenzenlosen), the place
(Ort), the Void (Leere)’.43
As soon as he arrives at this place, we may observe a reduction of the
phenomenal world to a question for its ultimate precondition. There
is a desertification of language taking place—in terms of questioning,
searching, even praying, for the Unconcealment of Being. Heidegger
270 M.T. MJAALAND
is continuously searching for the unconcealment of that which is worth

asking for, and in this questioning he sees the possibility of letting one-
self, indeed the existential possession of and calculation with oneself, pass
away. In receiving a gift, a gift of stretching out towards that which you
do not know, this stretching out beyond yourself is already a gift, an act
of love, of leaving yourself behind, he writes, in a language getting more
and more desertified…
This is reading between gathering and asking: What is time? Still, it is
only a preparation for a repetition, of letting memories speak, of reading
as disclosure and questioning oneself. This is reading while listening to
the Word. Listening, questioning, and not knowing.44
Heidegger and the Future of Theology

If we take a closer look at the early Black Notebooks and their scattered
references to theological questions, including the questioning of what
(quid) God is and thus what a human being may be, they continue along
this path of confessions in the form of questions to an unknown other.
In entry #36 (presumably from 1931), Heidegger raises a number of
questions concerning the role and responsibility of the single individual,
who is able to uncover the fateful depth of the question of being. He is
called to stand up for this question and sacrifice himself. This ideal fol-
lows a Christological pattern of imitatio Christi, and yet Heidegger asks:
‘Where [Wohin] to go with this question? To the И.’45 The passage ends
with a mystical confession to the silenced И, which by this very question-
ing is transformed into grace.
The passage requires careful interpretation, and it is not easy to
decipher, but I see it as symptomatic for Heidegger’s crisis of faith,
which lingers on throughout the 1930s.46 In structure, it is similar to
Augustine’s crisis, and yet it turns out to be an inversion of Augustine’s
conversion. Where Augustine turned from gnostic despair and hope
in a foreign saviour towards the Christian confession of a triune God,
Heidegger has lost his faith in the Christian God and seeks refuge in his
own version of post-monotheist Gnosticism. He reiterates Nietzsche’s
claim that ‘God is dead’; an event that according to Heidegger under-
mines the Western metaphysical tradition and renders any religious cer-
tainty impossible. Hence, the unknown letter И becomes a symbol for
the absolutely unknowable. This enigmatic symbol plays a key role in
Heidegger’s theological reflection, as placeholder for the unknown God.
Under the gaze of И it apparently makes sense to sacrifice oneself, to

experience the questioning of being, and finally to surrender to grace.
It seems like Heidegger needs this placeholder in the major transitions
of his philosophical thought during these years, following after the pub-
lication of Being and Time. It is occasionally described in the notebooks
as a transition from time to space, i.e. into a ‘time-space’ (Zeit-Raum),
a stretch of time or ‘space-time’, a spatialized time. This spatialized time
follows the pattern of distentio in Augustine’s Confessions. However,
where Augustine is forced to raise the question of time as the
metaphysical grounding of his confessions, Heidegger argues for a transi-
tion of framework from temporal analysis of being towards a spatial and
thus topological approach. Thereby, the notion of God is questioned once
more, as the unknowable and foreign God, and Heidegger recurs to
imagination in order to reconstruct and thus keep up the expectation of
a future God, ‘the last God’.
Where is this God? What kind of God are we speaking of? Heidegger
poses this question a couple of years later, in contrast to the reassuring
explanations of God which he finds among theologians. In contrast, he
seeks to alienate everything that is domestic and familiar about God.
Even this ‘where’: ‘Do we have a where? And do we stand in it, in order
to ask for the God?’47
However, this questioning of the place ends up with an emptying of
the place, a void. It becomes a place of mere expectation, to be filled
with the philosopher’s poetic imagination. Since the question is detached
from the Christian confession and scripture, it is emptied of any force of
resistance to the imagination and hubris of the philosopher. The enig-
matic sign И may refer to virtually anything, and as such it achieves a
specific meaning in Heidegger’s apocalyptic speculation about the des-
tiny of the people, indeed of humanity. The philosopher’s hubris on
behalf of his historical role comes to light in Heidegger’s fateful inau-
guration speech and his vision of a new inception, through the ‘meta-
physical poet’.48
At the end of the day, the God thus imagined bears the traits of a
gnostic figure, a saviour who will transform the world by his coming
at the end of time. Hence, whereas Augustine turns from Manicheism
to Christianity, Heidegger not only loses his Christian faith, but con-
verts it to a modern version of Gnosticism. This is also indicative of
the future imagined in Heidegger’s theology: the ambiguous expec-
tation of a tragedy and yet a hope of something completely different.
272 M.T. MJAALAND
The new era he proclaims, after the closure of metaphysics, seems to

require a new God, still hidden. However, as long as there are no cri-
teria for distinguishing between fiction and eschatological expecta-
tion, between the absolutely hidden God in his unknowability and the
expected appearance of a new inception, there is no space left for a God
outside of us, extra nos.
The early Heidegger’s critical use of theology for the sake of philoso-
phy in the 1920s thus recedes into mythical speculation about the des-
tiny of a people. Admittedly, his confession to a mystical И can be read as
an expression of Heidegger’s trembling hope, despite the despair domi-
nating his Black Notebooks. And yet, this theology gives no foothold or
guidance against political or quasi-religious movements such as the Nazi
regime, the ideology of the Führer, and the German Christians. It gives
no principal opposition to Antisemitism, and no grounding, comfort, or
resistance on the day of the Untergang, the day of collapse. Heidegger’s
confession to the final God, der letzte Gott, only gives concessions to the
questioning of the Unknown.
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, GA 94, 1. The quotation reflects Heidegger’s
thoughts about the books in retrospect, possibly forty years later. The
text of the first Black Notebook called ‘Winke X Überlegungen (II)
und Anweisungen’ is published in Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen
II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), GA 94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann,
2014), 3–106. References to the German original of Heidegger’s works
will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume number.
Translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.
3. The lecture Quid est tempus? has not yet been published in Heidegger’s
collected works, but is planned for volume 80 of the Gesamtausgabe.
I received a copy of Heidegger’s original typescript from Professor
Johannes Brachtendorf at the University of Tübingen. He had received
this copy directly from the library at Beuron, written on a typewriter
with a number of handwritten corrections, Greek and Latin additions,
deleted letters, and added pages. I will refer to Heidegger’s original pagi-
nation, which includes thirteen regular pages (numbered 1–13) and five
added pages: three pages added to page 3/4 (numbered 4a, 4b, 4c),
one page added to page 8/9 (numbered 8a), and one page added to
page 12 (numbered 12a). Let me express a word of thanks to Professor
Brachtendorf and the friars of Beuron who gave me access to this valuable
manuscript.
4. See Heidegger, Quid est tempus, 3.
5. Ibid., 2.
6. See my article ‘Questioning Time’ for further details concerning
Heidegger’s relationship to Beuron: Marius Timmann Mjaaland,
‘Questioning Time’ in idem, Ulrik Houlind Rasmussen and Philipp
Stoellger (eds), Impossible Time (Tübingen: Mohr, 2013), 14–15.
7. Cf. the term ‘ex-sistere’ discussed in Heidegger, Quid est tempus, 10.
8. See Jeff Malpas, ‘On the Philosophical Reading of Heidegger: Situating
the Black Notebooks’ in idem and Ingo Farin (eds), Reading Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 18.
9. Ibid., 10–14.
11. See e.g. GA 94, 13: ‘Only when we really err—enter into erring [in die
Irre gehen], can we encounter “truth”. /The profound, uncanny [unhe-
imliche] and that means great mood of the completely erring wayfarer:
the philosopher.’ Cf. also GA 94, 82 and GA 94, 56: ‘The philosopher as
solo runner; yet not only with his little “self”—but with the world and
the world prior to all “togetherness”’.
12. More philosophical, as in GA 94, 32: ‘Being of beings and the history of
“truth” have the same “time”. /The extinguishment of time as “anni-
hilation” of “beings”’; or more political as in GA 94, 18: ‘But “people
without space” and its most singular ones without time. /What is here
“space”? What is here “time”? Origin of И. Is that even space as the time
for a “people”?’ Words like space or Lebensraum of a Volk have undeni-
ably a political aspect in 1931/1932, but Heidegger emphasizes their
philosophical origin. The ‘annihilation’ in the former quote seems to be
more explicitly philosophical, but will acquire a more political sense in the
years to come. The letter И points in direction of Heidegger’s mysticism.
13. Cf. ibid., 8, 20.
14. Cf. ibid., 13, 51, 56.
15. Ibid., 15.
16. Cf. ibid., 12–13.
17. Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. by William Watts, Vol. 2
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), Book XI. 14,
238–39.
18. Heidegger, Quid est tempus, 4.
19. Ibid., 3.
20. Cf. the more detailed discussion of this problem in Mjaaland,
‘Questioning Time’, 22–23.
274 M.T. MJAALAND
22. Heidegger, Quid est tempus, 11–12.

23. Ibid., 3.
24. Ibid., 5.
25. Augustine, Confessions, XI. 15, 244.
26. Cf. Heidegger, Quid est tempus, 6.
27. Ibid., 8.
28. Cf. ibid., 7–8.
29. Ibid., 7.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Cf. the inaugural lecture delivered by Heidegger in July 1929, when he
took over the chair of Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg:
Heidegger, ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ (1929), Wegmarken, GA 9 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1976).
34. Ibid., 8a: ‘This tensioning stands by us; productius—correptius; that
means distentio; animi? nostra dimensio; nescio quid nesciam.’
35. Ibid., 7.
36. Ibid., 9.
37. Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, trans. Kathleen Blamey and
David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 12.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 10–11.
42. Ibid., 11.
43. Ibid., 2.
44. Ibid., 12.
46. See Holger Zaborowski, ‘Metaphysics, Christianity, and the “Death of
God” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks’, in Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas
(eds), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 196–197.
48. See GA 94, 248.
Works cited
Augustine. Confessions. Vol 2. Edited and translated by William Watts.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Heidegger, Martin. ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ (1929), Wegmarken. GA 9. Edited by
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976.
———. Quid est tempus? Unpublished typescript received from the Library at St
Martin’s Archabbey in Beuron. Dated 26. October 1930.
Malpas, Jeff. ‘On the Philosophical Reading of Heidegger: Situating the Black
Notebooks’. In Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941. Edited by
idem and Ingo Farin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016, 3–22.
Mjaaland, Marius Timmann. ‘Questioning Time’. In Impossible Time. Edited
by idem, Philipp Stoellger, and Ulrik Houlind Rasmussen. Tübingen: Mohr,
2013, 13–32.
Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. III. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and
David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Zaborowski, Holger. ‘Metaphysics, Christianity, and the “Death of God” in
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks’. In Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–
1941. Edited by Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2016, 195–204.
CHAPTER 11
The Irritability of Being: Martin Heidegger,

Hans Driesch and the Future of Theology
Mårten Björk
Martin Heidegger turned in the Black Notebooks to the symbols and

language of mythology and theology in order to redefine what the
human is, and even to ‘liberate the being-there [Da-sein] in contem-
porary humanity’.1 This liberation of Dasein was a deliverance of the
human from the metaphysical tradition that reduces humanity to a ‘his-
torical animal’ (historisches Tier).2 And since ‘[t]echnology [Technik] and
history [Historie] are the same thing’, and produced by ‘the anthropolog-
ical humanization of the human’, Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein was
nothing but a counter-anthropology to the notion of the human in the
tradition of Western metaphysics.3 This tradition describes the human as
a specific form of animal, such as a tool-making animal, a historical ani-
mal or a rational animal, rather than as the ‘clearing’ on which the light
of being might fall. The human, Heidegger argued, becomes an animal
when it is reduced to these ontic configurations and denied its role as
Dasein, the ‘being there’ of being.
In this essay, I will investigate the anthropology that underpinned
Heidegger’s quest for the liberation of Dasein from the animality of
M. Björk (*) 
Gothenburg University, Malmö, Sweden

278 M. Björk
humanity, and that prompted him to embrace Nazism and to develop

a theology of what he describes as the ‘last god’. I do this by contrast-
ing Heidegger’s description of the human as Dasein with the biologist
and neovitalist philosopher Hans Driesch’s philosophy of the organ-
ism, which Heidegger used in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:
World, Finitude, Solitude, a series of lectures which he ended in 1930,
only one year before he began writing his Black Notebooks.4 By con-
trasting Heidegger’s theology of the last god with Driesch’s specula-
tive philosophy, I hope to reveal why theology may find its future in the
neglected critical tradition that Driesch advocated, which perhaps today
can be liberated from its shortcomings. For Driesch, theology and phi-
losophy must begin in the common reality of all creatures, which he
found in the reduction of being to what Heidegger decried as irritabil-
ity (Reizbarkeit) and regarded as the ultimate consequence of the trans-
formation of the human to an animal. In contrast, Driesch affirmed the
notion of being as a form of ‘irritation’ that is revealed to humans and
other sentient beings through feelings such as suffering, joy and—for
him the most important—compassion. The irritability of being was for
Driesch not a reduction of the human to an animal, but a sign of the
common reality of everything which is and can be.
The European Civil War and the Struggle for Being

If we leave aside the disgust a reading of the many Antisemitic comments
in the Black Notebooks arouses, one can wonder why these volumes
have prompted such debate among academics who work on Heidegger.
His membership in the NSDAP has been known from the very begin-
ning, and the evidence of his sympathies for National Socialism has been
overwhelming. It suffices to look at Heidegger’s famous 1947 letter to
his former student Herbert Marcuse to see that he—like so many other
conservative academics in Germany—‘expected from National Socialism
a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antag-
onisms and a deliverance of western Dasein from the dangers of com-
munism’.5 Regarding the Shoah, Heidegger dismissively wrote in the
letter to Marcuse, who asked him about the atrocities against the Jews,
that if he ‘instead of “Jews” … had written “East Germans”, then the
same holds true for one of the Allies, with the difference that everything
that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the
bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from
the German people’.6 These are clearly not words of remorse, and they
11 THE IRRITABILITY OF BEING: MARTIN HEIDEGGER, HANS DRIESCH … 279
are evidence that Heidegger belonged to what Armin Mohler has called
the ‘Conservative Revolution’, a militant tendency of right wing think-
ers who hoped that some version of Fascism or Nazism could renew the
West in its fight against Communism.7
The Wirkungsgeschichte of Heidegger clearly shows that his philoso-
phy cannot be reduced to his own desperate attempt to save the West.
But his ponderings in the Black Notebooks are evidence that Heidegger
aimed to take sides in what his student and friend Ernst Nolte described
as the European civil war between 1914 and 1945.8 Nolte argued that
Nazism, and even the genocide of the Jews, must be seen as reactions
against the Russian Revolution, and critics have, for good reasons,
pointed out that his position implies the representation ‘of Nazi anti-
semitism in Germany as inherently discontinuous with the German past’
and thus something of a relativization of the long tradition of racism and
Antisemitism that made the Holocaust possible.9 But precisely because
of his problematic and unhistorical reduction of National Socialism to a
reaction against Communism, Nolte can help us reveal the political con-
tent of Heidegger’s ontology and why he came to see Adolf Hitler as a
defender of the Western Dasein.10
Pierre Bourdieu in a similar manner pointed to the political ontol-
ogy of Heidegger’s thinking, and like Nolte he related it to the faction
of conservative revolutionaries, whose reactionary ideas have resurfaced
in our own time of crises, heightened racism, and political turmoil.11
Bourdieu argued that the conservative revolutionaries, ‘whether they
were bourgeois who were excluded by the nobility from the prestigious
posts of State administration, or petty bourgeois who were frustrated
in the aspirations aroused by their educational success, found a magi-
cal solution to their contradictory expectations in the “spiritual renais-
sance” and the “German revolution” of Nazism’.12 What the notebooks
reveal to us is therefore not only a disarray of Antisemitic notes explain-
ing Heidegger’s entrance into NSDAP. They are unmistakable evidence
that his philosophical destruction of the history of metaphysics entailed
a political ontology that aimed to secure the life of the West from the
forces that purportedly threatened its survival. Heidegger is not an
exception but in a sense rather a test case for what can happen to con-
servatives, and certainly also to others, in a period when radical right-
wing tendencies become hegemonic and militant.
In 1931, Heidegger wrote in his notebooks, ‘[p]hilosophy is never
“about” … something—it is always for—the being.’13 To be ‘for being’
is to address the essence of humanity as Dasein, the being there of being,
280 M. Björk
and this militant understanding of philosophy leads him two years later
to join the NSDAP. What was unusual about Heidegger’s Antisemitism
and anti-Communism, was how the defence against what he in in a
Spenglerian manner called ‘the epoch of the declining history [das
Zeitalter der untergehenden Geschichte]’ motivated—and was motivated
by—an ontology of being that developed to a whole mythology, or even
theology, of the coming gods.14 His defence of the Western Dasein was,
from his perspective, a rejection of the theological and metaphysical tra-
dition of compassion, Mitleid, which he made clear in his notebooks in
a rather narcissistic manner: ‘Why do I have two “G” in my name? Why
else, except that I recognize what always matters: Goodness [Güte] (not
compassion [Mitleid]) and patience [Geduld] (i.e. the highest will)’.15
Goodness (Güte) is not compassion (Mitleid), a virtue that belongs to
the Abrahamic traditions which Heidegger holds in contempt. The good-
ness he patiently waited for, and whose future presence he suggested his
own name indicated, was something that would save the Occident from
the compassion that threatened its survival through a new beginning
of philosophy and Western life. For, as Heidegger wrote, ‘what comes,
no one knows. Yet one thing is sure … the calculation [Verrechnung] of
the “truth” in terms of the (Christian view of the) earthly and heavenly
must be broken off, if indeed the truth is once again supposed to become
the truth.’16 The Judeo-Christian virtue of compassion, as well as the
ideas of heaven and the earthly with their implicit economy of guilt and
redemption, are all connected to the matrix of calculation that Heidegger
attacked for distorting the concept of truth and being. It even leads, as
we will see, to the transformation of the human to a calculating animal.
The Uprooting of All Beings from Being and the

Menschentümlichkeit of the Jews
In his 1946 Letter on Humanism to Jean Beaufret, Heidegger wrote
that ‘[m]etaphysics does not ask about the truth of Being itself. Nor
does it therefore ask in what way the essence of man belongs to the
truth of Being. Metaphysics has not only failed up to now to ask this
question, the question is inaccessible to metaphysics as such. Being is
still waiting for the time when it will become thought-provoking to
man’.17 The reason why metaphysics cannot ask the question of being is
that even while it represents ‘beings in their Being, and so it thinks the
Being of beings … it does not think the difference of both. Metaphysics

does not ask about the truth of Being itself’.18 Metaphysics becomes,
as Heidegger wrote in his notebooks, a theory of ‘[t]he average
[Durschnitt] in all beings’ and is from his perspective a form of calculat-
ing thinking that defines being as equivalent to beings.19
Being, for metaphysics, is what is common to beings, such as they are
created by God, constituted as monads or by atoms, part of nature or the
spirit. It is, in short, an average or equivalent. By defining being as an
average of being, something common to all that is, metaphysics misun-
derstands the ontological difference between being and beings, and by
doing so it misinterprets the question of what the human is by seeking
a distinction in relation to a common average that binds our species to
other beings. Therefore, as Heidegger wrote in his Letter on Humanism,
the metaphysical tradition has described the human animal as a rational
animal, an animal rationale. But by seeking a difference in relation to
the average (Durchsnitt) of animality (animalitas), both the question of
being and the essence of humanity are misunderstood:
Are we really on the right track toward the essence of man as long as
we set him off as one living creature among others in contrast to plants,
beasts, and God? We can proceed in that way; we can in such fashion
locate man within being as one being among others. We will thereby
always be able to state something correct about man. But we must be clear
on this point, that when we do this we abandon man to the essential realm
of animalitas even if we do not equate him with beasts but attribute a spe-
cific difference to him … Metaphysics thinks of man on the basis of ani-
malitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas.20
Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and the rational animal is there-

fore not as innocent or quietist as it first may seem. It is a continuation
of the critique of the metaphysical tradition that made him embrace
Nazism. It is true that Heidegger became disappointed with the
German Revolution, and quite soon began to see National Socialism as
part of the movement of metaphysics that veiled the question of being.
And one only need to turn to Reiner Schürmann’s brilliant reading of
Heidegger to see that his destruction of metaphysics can be read against
his conservative if not outright racist politics.21 But Heidegger’s grow-
ing criticism of National Socialism, and his critique of the racialized
Weltanschauung which he saw as a reproduction of the metaphysics he
282 M. Björk
intended to overcome, did not led him to abandon racist and Antisemitic
clichés. Heidegger even argued that the NSDAP was too close to what
he in a typical Nazi manner termed Weltjudentum, since its race thinking
reproduced the uprootedness from being that the Jew incarnated accord-
ing to his bizarre line of thinking: ‘The question of the role of world
Jewry [Weltjudentums] is not racial, it is rather the metaphysical question
of the kind of humanity [Menschentümlichkeit], which, being absolutely
unbound, can undertake as a historical “task” the uprooting of all beings
from being.’22
What the Nazis did not understand because of their racial under-
standing of the so called Jewish question, was that the World-Jewry
(Weltjudentum) was a metaphysical problem that revealed why the
Menschentümlichkeit of the modern epoch was the uprootedness from
being. I here follow David Farell Krell and translate Heidegger’s neol-
ogism Menschentümlichkeit as ‘kind of human modality’, and as Krell
has pointed out, for Heidegger the Jew was not ‘racially but metaphysi-
cally … uprooted’ and therefore ‘suited to the eradication of all possible
well-rooted Seynsdenken’.23 And, as we remember, the mode of calcula-
tion (Verrechnung) that Heidegger in a Nietzschean manner argued was
the basis for the concept of compassion, as well as for the eschatological
ideas of heaven and hell, was for him an expression of the configuration
of Dasein to a rational or metaphysical animal. It was against this con-
figuration of the human that Being and Time was written, for with the
concept of Dasein Heidegger did not seek the notion of the human in
its relation to—or difference from—other animals, but from the ques-
tion of being itself.24 Rhetorically, Heidegger pondered in his notebooks,
‘[w]ho is the human being? Only an animal that posits values or only the
shell of a “soul” that will float away into eternity—or the unique place
of the truth of being and the connection to beings [die einzige Stätte
der Wahrheit des Seins und des Bezugs zum Seinenden]?’25 The answer was
clear for Heidegger: the human being is Dasein, the place of being.
The Menschentümlichkeit of the Jew was for Heidegger the clearest
expression of a humanity forsaken by being and alienated from its exist-
ence as Dasein. The Jew is, so to speak, a spectre, a soul that has lost
its body, a being no longer connected to being or to what Heidegger
with his jargon called beyng (Seyn). It is this uprootedness of being
that is the ‘“metaphysical” Menschentümlichkeit’ of the Jew in the
Diaspora and consequently of all of humanity that has lost its relation
to being. As Krell has written apropos the term Menschentümlichkeit,
this ‘German word is itself belittling in a troubling way: ostensibly not

a racial slur, it nevertheless evokes the squalid contribution to human-
kind by the rootless and calculating Jew.’26 But Krell does not trace the
word Menschentümlichkeit to what Heidegger called the organism’s
Eigen-tümlichkeit or ‘proper peculiarity’ in his lectures on the funda-
mental concepts of metaphysics in 1929 and 1930.27 These lectures were
completed only one year before he wrote in his notebooks that Dasein
must be liberated from the formation of contemporary humanity, and
he returned in his ponderings in the Black Notebooks to the difference
between humans and other organic life forms which he examined in the
lectures.28
In the lectures, Heidegger turned to the philosopher and biologist
Hans Driesch and to the work of Driesch’s friend and colleague, the
biologist Johan von Uexküll, in order to differentiate the human being
from the other regions of organic and inorganic nature.29 Driesch’s
philosophy of the organism made it possible for Heidegger to see that
all organisms are first of all totalities (Ganzheiten). And Uexküll, who
analysed the environment (Umwelt) of the animal, gave Heidegger the
insight that, in a certain sense, an animal is a specific capacity to live in
a certain habitat. The fundamental difference between an animal and
a human is that the animal through its proper peculiarity belongs to a
certain Umwelt: ‘Proper peculiarity [Eigen-tümlichkeit] is a fundamen-
tal character of every capacity. This peculiarity belongs to itself and is
absorbed [eingenommen] by itself. Proper peculiarity is not an isolated or
particular property but rather a specific manner of being, namely a way
of being proper to oneself [Sich-zu-eigen-sein].’30 The Eigen-tümlichkeit
is a drive or an instinct amongst animals to live in a specific Umwelt.
A humankind trapped in the Menschentümlichkeit of metaphysics is no
longer a species of humans, but rather a race of animals whose Umwelt is
the separation from being.
The reason why the metaphysical tradition ‘thinks of man on the basis
of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas’, is
because it reduces the human to a being that just like the animal is a
certain habitat.31 In a revealing comment in his notebooks, Heidegger
warns against the designation of ‘the human as animal rationale’ and
against ‘the domestication of the animal as the slave to this “reason”’,
since this leads to the animalization of both humanity and reason.32
Tellingly, he criticizes those conservative philosophers who affirm the
concept of the rational animal as a defence of Germany, and he asks
284 M. Björk
rhetorically: ‘shall the salvation of the West [Abendlandes] come’ from

this animal?33 This question reveals not only Heidegger’s closeness to
Oswald Spengler, the author of The Decline of the West, whom he repeat-
edly commented upon in his notebooks and discussed in his lectures
on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.34 It shows first of all that
Heidegger’s critique of the philosophical tradition was a political attempt
to renew and repeat the inception of Greek philosophy by cleansing it
from the American, Eastern and Judaic traditions that threatened the
Occident and reduced the human to an animal.
The Black Notebooks prove that Bourdieu was right when he
described Heidegger as ‘a conservative revolutionary in philoso-
phy’.35 This militant current’s desire for order in an unruly time after
the German uprisings in 1918 and the world depression in 1929, is a
key to Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘World-Jewry’ as the type of
Menschentümlichkeit that takes as its task the uprooting of all beings
from being. The Jew is for Heidegger not the cultural or biological
Jew, but a metaphysical representation of the form of human life Dasein
should be liberated from. The Menschentümlichkeit of the Jew is the
Eigen-tümlichkeit of the animal rationale: calculation and machination.
The Jews have, from Heidegger’s racist perspective, turned all beings to
Jews, spectres uprooted from being, or rather calculable animals incapa-
ble of understanding the greatness of the question of being qua being.
The Philosophy of the Organism

In 1930, one of Driesch’s most polemical books, Philosophische
Forschungswege, was published only three years before he was expelled
from his chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig because of his
anti-Fascism and radical pacifism.36 The book was an attack on the three
forms of philosophical trends threatening to legitimate irrationalism.37
The first danger was what Driesch called the popular philosophy of Max
Scheler, Eduard Spranger, Theodor Lessing and Theodor Litt, who
focused on the experience of life, history and culture.38 They reduced
philosophy to fashion and broke with the tradition from Descartes to
Kant, which Driesch himself defended in a rather idiosyncratic and spec-
ulative manner.
The second danger against which Driesch warned his readers was a
growing mysticism and desire for irrationality among modern phi-
losophers of life. He did not name any particular philosopher, but
a quasi-philosopher as Ludwig Klages is a good example of what he

criticized. Driesch made it clear that even if he thought it was necessary
to examine the unconscious life of the psyche, this must be done in what
he described as a critical and rational manner.39 A philosophy of these
forms of supposedly irrational phenomena must be systematized in a log-
ical manner on the basis of the Cartesian and Kantian traditions which
he cultivated in his Ordnungslehre.40 The third danger is, perhaps sur-
prisingly, what Driesch called the method of phenomenology: ‘This dan-
ger is the worst since it is the most secret.’41 He exemplified this menace
with Martin Heidegger and Günther Stern, better known as Günther
Anders, but he also criticized his own student, Helmuth Plessner, and
the founder of phenomenology itself, Edmund Husserl, for abandoning
the critical basis of modern philosophy.42
Phenomenology, or what Driesch called ‘unmetaphysical ontology’
(unmetaphysische Ontologie), has been transformed into a form of neo-
Romanticism (Neu-romantik), which conceals itself in the garbs of sci-
ence.43 The fundamental problem of this new Romanticism, implicitly
identified with Heidegger’s Being and Time, was to mistake different
psychological representations of the world, or what Heidegger called
Stimmungen, for ontological categories capable to reveal the structure
of being itself. By doing so, philosophy becomes all too human (eine
große Allzumenschlichkeit).44 It mistakes the human experience of the
world for the world itself. The attempt of this romantic philosophy to
distance itself from the Cartesian cogito (‘I think’) or for that matter the
Augustinian scio (‘I know’), which Driesch postulated as the necessary
beginning for philosophy in his Ordnungslehre, does not lead away from
but rather further into an anthropocentric perspective.45
Driesch’s attack on the Heideggerian phenomenology in
Philosophische Forschungswege was published the same year as the more
famous philosopher defended an ontology of feelings (Stimmungen) by
interpreting boredom, solitude and the experience of death as ontologi-
cal categories useful to differentiate human life from animal existence.46
The animal, Heidegger argued in his lectures, does not know bore-
dom, death, or solitude, and has no access to the passivity that unfolds
being as being. It is entrapped in its habitus and is its proper peculiarity.
The human is an organism, like every plant and animal. But an exami-
nation of the human as an animal, even if one qualifies it as a rational
or historical animal, conceals the ontological character of the human as
Dasein and thus also of the moods (Stimmungen) that attune humanity
286 M. Björk
to being. The Menschentümlichkeit of the Jews is according to Heidegger

precisely the kind of mood that unties humanity from being and turns
it to an animal no longer firmly placed on the earth as a bipedal crea-
ture: ‘Where do we stand? Do we stand at all—if “standing”, as an onto-
logical characterization of humanity, means more than being present at
hand? If “standing” means the carrying out and enduring of steadfast-
ness in Da-sein?—We do not yet stand but, instead, cling to the vital-
ity [Lebendigkeit] and rationality of the animal rationale.’47 This is the
destiny of a human separated from being—she is turned to an animal, no
longer standing firmly on earth.
In his lectures on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics,
Heidegger referred to two essential steps in biology; first, the investiga-
tion of Driesch on the concept of the organism, and second, Uexküll’s
examination of the milieus or life worlds (Umwelten) of animals: ‘The
first step grew out of the pioneering investigations of Driesch into the
embryos of sea urchins, which represent an exemplary object for experi-
mental embryology. Driesch elaborated the results from a fundamen-
tal angle in his investigation entitled The Localisation of Morphogenetic
Processes.’48 Heidegger neither mentioned the philosophical insights
Driesch drew from this, nor accepted his metaphysics. From Heidegger’s
perspective, it was Driesch’s idea of the whole (Ganzheit) which could be
a productive category for a new metaphysics that aimed to differentiate
the human from the animal: ‘the idea of the whole—wholeness as such
as the determining factor … is the principle result of Driesch’s investi-
gations, which was of decisive significance both for the problem of the
organism in general and also for the problem of development.’49 But,
Heidegger continued, ‘for all its significance for the general problems
of biology, this very insight of Driesch also represents a great danger …
Driesch was driven by his experiments to adopt his biological theory,
known as neovitalism, which is characterized by the appeal to a certain
force or entelechy’.50
Driesch had in the beginning of his career as an embryologist been
inspired by the Darwinian zoologist and embryologist Wilhelm Roux’s
so called Entwicklungsmechanik, a theory of the mechanisms of develop-
mental processes.51 But in 1891, his experiment with sea urchins made
him question Roux’s mechanical theories. Driesch separated sea urchin
blastomeres from each other during the so called two-cell stage by shak-
ing, and later by placing them in calcium-free seawater, and found to his
surprise that two complete, although smaller, sea urchins would develop.
He repeated the experiment at later stage of the cell development and

came to the same result. Roux had suggested that the fate of the cell
development was fixed at the two-cell stage, but Driesch’s experiment
revealed that this apparently was wrong. There seemingly existed a power
that regulated the development of the organism and that responded
to changing environmental conditions, and Driesch contended that
mechanical theories could not explain this process which the American
theoretical biologist Robert Rosen later would call an anticipatory
process.52
Driesch adopted the Aristotelian concept of entelechy, which can be
translated as being-at-an-end, to describe this process and saw it as a
metaphysical concept with far-reaching consequences for the theories of
life. For Driesch, the entelechy ‘though not material in itself, uses mate-
rial means in each individual morphogenesis, handed down by the mate-
rial continuity in heritance’.53 This idea of an immaterial force in life was,
of course, not accepted by many of his contemporaries, and as a biolo-
gist Driesch has been discarded.54 But it is important to note, as Thomas
Kessel has reminded us, that Driesch saw his so called neovitalist theo-
ries as a philosophical alternative to mechanism and classical vitalism.55
His neovitalism was a negative or Kantian vitalism positing the whole-
ness of life as something of a Ding an Sich, a noumenon which we can
never understand in itself, but whose existence we can try to understand
as a phenomenon, namely by describing how it appears to us.56 The aim
of Driesch’s philosophy of life was to liberate the concept of the organ-
ism from all pre-existing theories and develop an analytic theory of
the organism as a whole rather than as a composition of mechanical
and atomistic parts.57 The immaterial entelechy of the organism was a
hypothesis, and perhaps first and foremost a political hypothesis directed
against the Fascist reduction of life to a simple struggle for survival. As
Anne Harrington has pointed out, Driesch developed his philosophy of
the organism as an ‘emphatic opposition to the Nazi regime’ and hoped
that his language of wholeness and vitalism could ‘serve, not a fascist ide-
ology, but a pacifist, democratic, humanist politics’.58
Driesch was something of an anarchist cosmopolite who hoped explic-
itly for a human community beyond the nation and argued that it ‘would
be best for the state, and even for any empirical state, if it could tran-
scend itself, in conformity with its own concept, and if an-archy, that is,
the negation of Constitution could be its constitution’.59 Even if this,
as he continued, ‘assumes that men by nature never act otherwise than
288 M. Björk
well, and this unfortunately is not the case … it is the duty of all men to
make it the aim of their endeavour that there shall be one state only, and
that the state, as a conscious legal institution, shall become superfluous:
the ultimate end of the state is, that the state shall be transcended’.60
This anarchic theory of ethics and politics was for Driesch directly related
to his negative vitalism. The postulation of vitalism that not only human-
ity, but life itself, was a process, an entelechy, that could not be reduced
to its material, historical or cultural conditions even if it at the same time
was embedded in the materiality and temporality of existence, was a
political resistance against every attempt to reduce life to its natural and
historical conditions or even to being itself. It is therefore not a coinci-
dence that Heidegger, even though he affirmed Driesch’s concept of the
wholeness of the organism, argued that vitalism could not be used as a
critique of the reduction of Dasein to an animal existence.
Vitalism implied, Heidegger argued in his notebooks, a fetishization
of life. A philosophy of the organism, he wrote, is only possible when the
reduction of life to a mechanical process is a matter of fact: ‘“Organon”
means instrument … Perhaps is mechanism and organism the same thing
and perhaps it is the extreme exaggeration of modern technology—the
mechanism—which precisely shows that which is also suitable to the
organism, the irritability [reizbarkeit] through which it posits itself and
which determines the conditions of itself.’61 Irritability, Reizbarkeit,
should here not be understood as a pathological or abnormal sensitiv-
ity to a stimulus, but rather as the physiological term for a reaction to a
stimulus. And for Heidegger the real and conceptual reduction of human
life to a form of reaction to an underlining substratum—such as inner
drives or rationality, or something exterior, such as the surrounding
nature—is common to both vitalist and mechanist theories of life. Both
reduce the human to an animal adjusting itself to a specific environment,
and tellingly irritability is a fitting description of Driesch’s philosophy of
knowledge and experience in his Ordnungslehre.
Faithful to the Augustinian and Cartesian traditions, Driesch began
his Ordnungslehre with what he called the solipsistic postulation of the
cogito and the scio, namely, that I have experienced something or rather
know something; ‘I know, conscious of my knowledge, something. Or,
shorter. Knowing my knowledge, I know something.’62 This knowledge
is not, he stressed, a doing (Tun) or thinking (Denken).63 It is a form
of passivity that the I—which solely is the concept for the one know-
ing and thus not necessarily a human I—experiences when it experiences
something. If philosophy must begin with the solipsistic starting point of

the monadic I that has knowledge of something as something, philoso-
phy can be said to begin with irritability, since knowledge, for Driesch,
is not thinking per se. It is rather irritability in its physiological sense of
a reaction to a stimulus. Consequently, if we follow Heidegger we may
say that Driesch’s methodological solipsism reproduces the most prob-
lematic part of the metaphysical tradition. Driesch identified the rudi-
mentary basis of knowledge with the irritability of experience in order
to grasp the common reality of all animals, or rather, all existing beings
or creatures, as a part of a wider totality. Every being, be it a plant or
an animal, that can experience something as something grasps being
as that strange something which is the sign that something is: being is
irritability.
Driesch’s conceptualization of an immediate experience of some-
thing as something is from Heidegger’s perspective the definition par
excellence of the rational animal, since only an animal, be it rational or
not, can understand being as a form of irritability. Commenting upon
Nietzsche’s description of the human as the not yet posited animal (das
nocht nicht festgestellte Tier), Heidegger noted in his notebooks that with
the use of the word animal the essence of humanity is already decided:
‘the human animal is determined as the “historical” animal’, an animal
that can conceptualize its life as a history, or to be more exact, as what
he called ‘explaining representations’ (erklärenden Vorstellens).64 These
representations are not neutral; rather they are ‘moods’ (Stimmungen)
showing that humanity can only grasp the world as something instru-
mental, calculable, representable. And this is what Nazism can liberate
humanity from by annihilating the lives which no longer ‘stands … but,
instead, cling to the vitality [Lebendigkeit] and rationality of the ani-
mal rationale’.65 Heidegger hoped, at least for a period of his life, that
Nazism would become a movement that could liberate Dasein from the
animal existence of contemporary humanity. But what is an animal and
why does the metaphysical tradition treat the human being based on her
animalitas, rather than her humanitas?
The Stone Lacks a World but It Has Reality

The Black Notebooks reveal that Heidegger’s turn to Driesch and
Uexküll in order to differentiate the human from other organic life
forms was not only necessary for his understanding of what an animal is.
290 M. Björk
It also gave Heidegger the means to understand how humanity could be

liberated from its configuration as a rational or historical animal and be
turned into Dasein, the being there of being no longer clinging to its
animality. His destruction of the history of metaphysics was an anthro-
potechnical project aimed at designating the human as Dasein. It was
also a way to reveal that the transformation of humanity to a rational ani-
mal is not caused by ‘a particular political “worldview” or some sort of
“cultural politics”—but rather the total European situation in its move-
ments and countermovements. / And what is decisive here is that … the
human being is revived as animal rationale—as the rational animal (race
and reason)’.66 The European situation, or rather its alienation from its
Greek inception, creates the human as an animal rationale, a creature
that is more of an animal than a human.
As I pointed out in the previous section, the animal was for Heidegger
a proper peculiarity (Eigen-tümlichkeit) or what he also called an encir-
cling or disinhibiting ring, for in contrast to humans who are open to a
multitude of worlds and even produce their world, ‘the life of the ani-
mal is … the struggle [Ringen] to maintain this encircling ring or sphere
within which a quite specifically articulated manifold of disinhibitions
can arise’.67 The disinhibiting ring, or what Uexküll called Umwelt, is
the milieu that the organism is adapted to and this habitat belongs, as
its proper peculiarity, ‘to the innermost organization of the animal and
its fundamental morphological structure’.68 Heidegger meditated with
insight on the relation between the animal and its environment in his
ponderings and explained what the identification of the animal with
its habitat entailed when he wrote that ‘the animal is indeed sentiently
“related to …”—not only in the so-called sense-organs—but in and as an
entire corporeality—a surrounding field thus in a certain way “open”—
scent and colour, e.g., for bees—but we do not know what is open here
and how it is so—; we speak and question even here on the basis of our
own world’.69 The animal is this being ‘related to …’ which the human
lacks. The human, in contrast to animals, is a ‘being in the world’ (in-
der-Welt-sein), a creature in a world rather than in a habitat.
It is the relation between Dasein and in-der-Welt-sein, being and
world, which prompted Heidegger to famously contrast ‘man’s world-
forming’ with the animal’s ‘poverty in world’, but, he adds, ‘a poverty
which, roughly put, is nonetheless a … wealth … with which the human
world may have nothing to compare’.70 Like Driesch and Uexküll,
Heidegger accepted the richness of animal life. However, by moving
from Driesch’s speculation of the wholeness of the organism as the basis

of life to Uexküll’s theory of the animal Umwelt, he clearly showed that
his discussion with Driesch and Uexküll was a way to reveal the essence
of human life. This is evident in the beginning of the lecture series
on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, where Heidegger stated:
‘[w]e name the being of man being-there, Da-sein, in a sense yet to be deter-
mined and in distinction to the being at hand of the stone’.71 The stone is
without world, it is not there as Dasein is there, but neither is it related, like
the animal, to an environment: ‘[1.] the stone (material object) is world-
less; [2.] the animal is poor in world; [3.] man is world-forming.’72
The idea that the human is the world-forming being, whereas the
animal is world-poor, implies that Heidegger gives the human a habitat
which the animal lacks, and an existence which the stone can never have
in being itself. The human is a creature that potentially knows being as
being and thus, in contrast to the animal and the stone, can grasp death.
The human as Dasein knows that its existence is bound to nothingness,
just as being itself is related to finitude and death. The animal-human
binary is consequently ‘not simply a question of a qualitative otherness
of the animal world as compared with the human world, and is especially
not a question of quantitative distinctions in range, depth, and breadth—
not a question of whether or how the animal takes what is given to it in a
different way, but rather of whether the animal can apprehend something
as something, something as a being, at all’.73 And to grasp something as
something is to grasp the finitude of existence.
The animal cannot grasp the being of beings, for in order to grasp
being the animal must be the being there of being, Da-sein, because
‘Dasein means: comporting oneself in being toward beings as such, and
indeed doing so in such a way that this comportment also constitutes
Dasein’s being as being [das Seiend-sein des Daseins] … What Dasein is
consists in how it is, namely in how it exists’.74 The how to exist is the
world that the animal and the stone lack. But if the question of being
differentiates the human animal as Dasein from other forms of life,
Heidegger’s philosophy becomes, at least if we read it from Driesch’s per-
spective, a gated community where only humans are allowed entrance.
Philosophy, as the question of being, is the question that makes a
human a human and the human to a being that confronts death. And
if the human is the philosophizing human, in other words Dasein, then
the modes of human life that lack the ability to ask the question of
being are moved out of the world of humanity to the realm of animals.
292 M. Björk
The unphilosophical life is almost turned into what the Nazis called
‘life unworthy of life’, Lebensunwertes Leben. It is a life that does not
know death but cling to its existence as something that can last forever.
Commenting on Spengler’s prophecy of the decline of the West in his
notebooks, Heidegger could write: ‘The West will not go down, primar-
ily because it is too weak for that, not because it is still strong.’75 The
Platonic, Jewish and Christian traditions have made humanity unable to
accept the finitude of life and even more of being itself. They have turned
the human to a being so weak that it craves immortality and eternal life.
The Nazis could give Western Dasein the potentiality to die and thus
reveal what it means to produce a world, a world where the human is
not only the site of being but the being-towards-death, for only a being
that can die is human. ‘The animal’, Heidegger writes, ‘cannot die in
the sense in which dying is ascribed to human beings but can only come
to an end.’76 The essential difference between the human (which has a
world and can die), the animal (which is world-poor and passes away)
and the stone is not only that the stone lacks a world. It is also that it
cannot die. But even if the stone lacks a world, and thus is closed from
the domain of death, it still has existence. It has, as Driesch would say,
reality and perhaps even a form of eternal reality. For as Driesch insists in
his perhaps most fascinating book, Wirklichkeitslehre, reality includes that
which has knowledge (Wissen) as a part of itself, and if knowing is a part
of the reality, then there is a common reality of the stone and the sen-
tient life forms.77 The stone belongs to a reality that the sentient being
senses as a common reality, since the primordial knowledge (Wissen) of
the solipsistic monad obtains the empty ‘knowledge’, the pure experi-
ence of something, as a form of irritability, caused by the fact that it per-
ceives or knows something. However, to grasp the human in relation to
the irritability of being is for Heidegger to reduce it to a specific form of
animal, and thus to be unable to grasp humanity as Dasein. This is why
the only way to separate the human from animal existence, without suc-
cumbing to the devaluation of animal life, is to think the human in rela-
tion to being and to understand the human as a world-forming creature.
Consequently, a humanity marooned from being is a species that
lacks a world and mistakes a specific part of human existence, such as
language or culture, for the world as such. And, as Heidegger com-
menced his ponderings in 1931, ‘to bring the world as a world to a
worlding is to venture the gods once again. / Yet this venturing must
conceal itself as a venture and long be silent “about” the gods—the
bringing to a worlding, as an act of violence, is simply a deed to do’.78

This was the deed of violence, or worlding, that he two years later hoped
that Nazism would accomplish by saving the West from itself. The
German Revolution would open the world for the new gods, or what
he called the last god, by concluding the present history and commence
the beginning of Dasein, hence ‘[t]he last god—is not the end—but is
instead the other beginning of the immeasurable possibilities of our his-
tory. For the sake of that beginning, the previous history must not perish
but must indeed be brought to its end’.79 Nazism ultimately disclosed
the future for theology. It revealed that philosophy had to become a
myth of the last god.
The Future of Theology

Heidegger’s insistence on the coming gods and his eschatological idea of
the last god finds its clearest expression in what is his perhaps most sig-
nificant work apart from Being and Time, his Contributions to Philosophy
(Of the Event).80 This mythopoetical work, conjuring what he enigmati-
cally called the ‘future ones’ who prepare for the ‘coming of the last
god’, was composed between 1936 and 1938 and should be read in tan-
dem with the theology of the coming gods in the Black Notebooks.
Herman Philipse has read the Contributions to Philosophy as ‘a “Nazi
religion”, “an act of faith” which arises out of [Heidegger’s] disappoint-
ment with real existing National Socialism, inciting him to give Nazism,
its proper, anti-Christian, spiritual foundation’.81 But, as Bernhard
Radloff has argued, the myth of the last God is not a new religion. It is a
‘contribution to Da-sein’s historicity, and to our being-in-the-world, and
not the subject of a “faith” replacing Christianity’.82 Radloff correctly
insists that the last god cannot ‘signify the object of a new state cult, or
“religion”, for as such it would be entangled in the toils of our collective
subjectivity and lose any power to transform our being’.83
The Black Notebooks may not give proof to Philipse’s insistence that
Heidegger sought to overcome the limits of Nazism by developing a
new, more original Antisemitic religion, but they show that the transfor-
mation of being which he hoped for was an end to the calculation and
race thinking he absurdly rooted in the diasporic existence of the Jews:
‘Through race thinking “life” is brought into breedability [Züchtbarkeit],
which represents a form of calculability. With their typical calculative
skill, the Jews “live” already since long according to the race principle,
294 M. Björk
which is why they were most vehemently opposed to its unrestricted

application.’84 Nazism, for Heidegger, becomes nothing but the unre-
stricted application of a principle already lived by the Jews. And even if
this quote can be seen as a bizarre form of critique of racial thinking, he
still lamented the unfolding deracialization of humanity which he thinks
Americanism, Bolshevism and even Nazism are conducting by their uni-
versalization of what he describes as the Jewish transformation of race to
a form of calculability: ‘The deracialization is united with the self-aliena-
tion of the peoples—the loss of history [Geschichte]—that is the decision
making realms [Entscheidungsbezirke] for being.’85 This is also the reason
why Heidegger called the rational animal a historical animal (historisches
Tier) and described it as a creature with no real history (Geschichte), but
only a form of historicity (Historie).86 The historical animal is trapped
in the irritability of calculation and technology which it must die away
from in order to become Dasein, the being there of being and thus the
being-towards-death.
Reading Heidegger’s notebooks, we see that his philosophy is a search
for what he called the decision-making realms (Entscheidungsbezirke) for
a new form of humanity, just as Contributions to Philosophy reveals that
the shift of humanity from a historical animal to Dasein is an anthro-
potechnical and even mythological project, ultimately aiming for a new
understanding of life itself. In the short but important paragraph ‘Lived
experience’ in Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger writes: ‘To relate
beings as the represented to oneself as the relational centre and thus to
incorporate them into “life.” / Why the human being as “life” (animal
rationale) (ratio—representation!) / What can count as actually “being”
is only what is or can be the object of a lived experience, what presses
forth in the realm of lived experience, what humans can bring to them-
selves and before themselves.’87 This is nothing but a fundamental attack
on the Cartesian and Kantian notion of representation that Driesch
championed from the vantage point that representation turns being into
something representable by reducing it to an experience.
We can find a defence of the Cartesian position in Driesch’s impor-
tant essay ‘Das Sein’, published in 1939, and clearly written against
Heidegger’s mythological speculations of being, and where he wrote
‘[t]he being of a thing … is no perceived-being in the sense of an imme-
diate intuitive experience. But it is still a being of experience [Erlebtseins].
It is being of experience [Erlebtseins] in the sense of a “being of thought”
[Gedachtseins]. … Esse is in this sense therefore not, as Berkeley wants,
the same as percipi, but probably percipi et concipi’.88 Driesch argued

already in Philosophische Gegenwartsfragen that being is always an object
(Gegenstand) or what Descartes called a Cogitatum for an experiencing
monad: ‘That is the only possible genus-concept “being”; it is excep-
tionally empty and deformed and denotes only the aliquid, when we
grasp the Cogito … as ego cogito aliquid’.89 But this is not, as Heidegger
argued, a reduction of the world of beings to human experience or
human thought, for even if the givenness of being is only given ‘with
respect to the Ego’, it is never given ‘by or from the Ego’.90 The ego cogito
aliquid is only the acknowledgment that the concept of being, the simple
stipulation that something is, has to be either thought or experienced as
percipi or concipi by an experiencing or thinking monad.
Humans may, as Heidegger insisted, be the only creatures that can
think being as being, something as something, and thus grasp being as
concipi as Driesch would put it. However, all organic and sentient beings,
be they plants or animals, can from Driesch’s perspective experience the
aliquid of being. Being is nothing but the empty experience of some-
thing that is common to ants and humans, dolphins and trees, namely,
being as percipi, and it is perhaps even accessed by non-sentient beings
that process information, such as computers or thermostats. Driesch’s
theory of being could be read against his vitalism as a panpsychism or
what David Chalmers would call a ‘naturalistic dualism’, implying that
even if we cannot think and feel without our bodies, brains and nervous
systems, the potential to consciousness is a fundamental category of the
world—just like mass or energy—and as such it is not only given to what
we call living beings.91
From Heidegger’s perspective, the generalization of subjectivity and
representation that Driesch’s monadological and methodological solip-
sism entails is the evidence that modern philosophy reduces the world
to a simple appearance to the subject. It is leading to what he saw as
one of the worst menaces to philosophy, cybernetics, and understood as
a form of ontological subjectivism.92 From Driesch’s vantage point, this
is completely false, however. His solipsism was based on the postulation
that the monadological ‘I’ who knows that it knows something implies
the metaphysical hypothesis that what it knows is something given to and
not created by the experiencing monad.93
Driesch was a speculative Kantian and did not accept the insistence of
neo-Kantians like Hermann Cohen that ‘[t]here is nothing “beyond” the
experience’,94 since ‘experience includes in itself already the instruction
296 M. Björk
of something that is more than it’.95 But he acknowledged that the

reality of this ‘beyond experience’ is a hypothesis, and he described his
Wirklichkeitslehre as a metaphysical attempt to move thought beyond
experience.96 We cannot postulate an identity between our knowledge of
the world and reality through the conception of being, but we can trust
the experience of something as something, as an indication that reality
includes cognition and knowledge as part of its constitution, even if only
a failed and perhaps even distrustful cognition that needs to be criticized.
Referring to Nicolai Hartmann, Driesch postulated in Wirklichkeitslehre
that consciousness (Bewusstsein) is not only an experience but a ‘kind of
Being [art des Seins]’, the part of reality that knows something of real-
ity.97 But, as Driesch made clear in ‘Das Sein’, the part of reality that
knows that it knows something knows only being as that which it experi-
ences, and the only secure manner to construct the thing as it is in itself
is by accepting the hypothetical and experimental character of our con-
ceptual constructions. Consequently, it is our representations that lead
us to postulate that there is being. But since the existence of being in
and for itself can be asserted neither by experience nor by thought as
something else than an appearance, being as being itself is neither esse
nor percipi, and can thus only be understood negatively, as ‘an X’, or as
Driesch also wrote, ‘it is a “not” [ein “Nicht”], namely not-perceptum aut
conceptum’.98 Being is, in the end, what Driesch called a ‘fact of mean-
ing’ (Bedeutungssachverhalt), which is anything but a simple appearance.
It is the representation or meaning of being for the perceiver that points
to a reality beyond appearance.
In ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger argued that the ‘conse-
quence, in the course of Western thought, has been that the thing is rep-
resented as an unknown X to which perceptible properties are attached.
From this point of view, everything that already belongs to the gathering
nature of this thing … appears as something that is afterward read into
it. Yet the bridge would never be a mere bridge if it were not a thing’.99
For Driesch, however, this is an all too human perspective. The thing is
only a thing for a human. The bridge is more than a thing. The thing,
as he explained in his article ‘Das Ding’ from 1938, is nothing but a set
of characteristics with a specific duration that constitutes it as a whole
that can be experienced by a sentient being as a specific thing such as,
for example, a bridge for a human or a breeding place for birds.100 In
and for itself the thing is something else than a thing, since only humans
know that the mere bridge is also a thing.
In breaking with the Cartesian cogito—which according to Driesch

never implied the postulation that the world is created by the one who
thinks, but only that my experience is my representation of the world,
or at least a representation that constitutes an I that can experience the
world as its experience of a world—Heidegger misidentified the cogita-
tio for the field of reality or even for being itself. This is the danger of
modern phenomenology, and the reason why Driesch attacked it in his
Philosophische Forschungswege. Heidegger interpreted the affects, feel-
ings and moods of the human as being itself and concealed their rep-
resentative nature. It is true that Heidegger cannot be accused of a
simple humanism. He acknowledged the richness of the world-poverty
of the animal, and even grounded his views on the history of being on
a critique of contemporary humanity.101 However, from Driesch’s per-
spective, it is not difficult to view Heidegger’s history of being as a
‘humanization [Vermenschlichung]’ of thinking.102
By differentiating the animal from the stone, and Dasein from the
animal, Heidegger reduces not only philosophy but also theology to
the finite perspective of the human. His myth of the coming gods aims
ultimately and perhaps only to describe how Dasein can be attuned
to being. These gods never open the world of the creature to eter-
nity but only and fundamentally to a finite world. They reveal the fini-
tude of being and deny any idea of a world without end. To be sure,
Heidegger desubjectified human existence in a radical manner, but his
critique of the humanization of the world was essentially a postulation
that the animal, the stone and the human are separated through the
question of being. The humanization of thinking and the animal world
was for Heidegger at the same time the animalization of the human. In
his notebooks he made this clear by arguing that ‘[t]hought must stand
beyond all anthropology and psychology if it wants to be prepared for
the question of what the human is’.103 For anthropology and psychology
postulate, as Driesch argued, that ‘[m]an is a beast, but he is a human
beast—that is, a beast having knowledge: animal rationale.’104
The fact that humans can conceptualize being as being, and thus
understand the objecthood of beings, was for Driesch the essential mean-
ing of the description of the human animal as a rational creature; an ani-
mal that can understand the structure of reality and doubt its immediate
sense perceptions. This is why he stressed in ‘Das Sein’ that the Cartesian
method of doubt has to be the point of departure for all ‘critical philoso-
phy’: ‘The Ego cogito cogitatum is the only whole assured and therefore
298 M. Björk
the only indubitable opening of philosophy. Because even he who talks

as if “he” “knows” that he is part of a spiritual community—(the fam-
ily, the people, the humanity, the life)—has on the basis of the peculiar-
ity of the immediate “Cogitatum” first acquired the relations of meaning
posited here.’105 These words, published in 1939, are a critique of all
forms of racial and cultural thinking that view the human as first and
foremost a member of a collective such as the family, the people or the
race. However, it is also a critique of the notion of the human Dasein,
since her nature differs from being and even from what Heidegger called
the world. The human is, as Driesch insisted in Wirklichkeitslehre, not of
this world: ‘That the human kingdom [des Menschen Reich] is “not of
this world”, that is … what this work not only asserts as its highest out-
come, but also, in the context of what can be said to be “plausibility”
[Wahrscheinlichkeit] in a metaphysical sense, thinks it can make plausible
[wahrscheinlich].’106
Driesch’s use of Jesus’s saying that his kingdom is not of this world
(Joh 18:36) in order to explain the ecstatic character of humanity is a
radicalisation of the critical doubt he postulated as the beginning of
philosophy in the Ordnungslehre. Philosophy should never reduce the
human existence to the categories which structure her existence, such
as time and space, or—as Driesch argued as the proud idealist he was—
matter. Such a reduction would mistake the appearance of the world,
time, space and matter or being itself, for the world. The human, and
perhaps every being in the end, is, for Driesch, metaphysical. She is an
ecstatic and transcending creature.
Metaphysics was for Driesch a search for that which transcends
the categories that structure the human reality, or as he wrote in his
Wirklichkeitslehre, ‘we are searching for that which is superhuman, the
human is not enough for us, and beyond in the sense that we also know
that which is next to the human [das Nebenmenschliche], the animal in
the narrow sense … cannot be pushed aside as something indifferent’.107
The existence of other organic life forms, such as animals and plants—
the creatures next to (Neben) the human and not below her—was a key
to metaphysics for Driesch. All organic creatures reveal knowledge to be
a form of irritability. Each form of sensitiveness that makes a being expe-
rience something is a Wissen revealing the irritability of being, and this
explains why knowledge is seen by Driesch as a form of suffering (Leid)
and compassion (Mitleid) fettering the human animal to the domain of
the non-human, since we can see the pain of other creatures and long for
liberation from suffering.108
Heidegger’s rejection of metaphysics and his critique of ontotheol-
ogy was in the end not only a rejection of a common reality to stones,
animals and humans—the reality which Abrahamic theology calls ‘crea-
tion’ and which Driesch defended in his Wirklichkeitslehre as the field of
reality common to all beings. It was also a rejection of every construc-
tion of metaphysics based on the concepts of knowledge and compas-
sion, since that would reduce the human to an animal and the animal to
a stone, that is to creatures experiencing the irritability of being. Just as
Nietzsche before him, Heidegger contended that the ideal of compassion
and the hope for a world liberated from suffering—which is the essence
of the Abrahamic hope for eternal life—imply a devaluation of the world
as world and of the human as a human. To escape from this otherworldly
existence of a humanity severed from being is the goal of Heidegger’s
theology of the coming gods. And the only escape route is to ground
humanity in being and thereby bring the mode of humanity that takes
being to be a simple irritability (Reizbarkeit) to its end through the com-
ing of the last god which will give Dasein a world:
Along with losing the gods, we have lost the world; the world must first be
[seyn] erected in order to create space for the gods in this work; yet such
an opening of the world cannot … be carried out by … the currently
extant humanity—instead, it can be accomplished only if what basically
grounds and disposes the opening of the world is itself acquired—for
Da-sein and for the restoration of humanity to Da-sein.109
The restoration of humanity to Da-sein necessitates a break with Jewish

and Christian theology, since the Creator God is the ontotheological
God, the God to whom one ‘can neither pray nor sacrifice to … nor …
play music and dance before’, as Heidegger famously wrote in Identity
and Difference.110 Christianity—like the entire tradition of Abrahamic
religions—reduces God to an idea of causation, a principle constitut-
ing being as a reality, a simple effect of a cause. But to reject the onto-
theological God is to reject the irritability of being, the sensations,
passions and experiences that tie the human to the non-human world
and thus bind our existence to the whole dimension of the not-perceptum
aut conceptum which, as the rumour of God implies, has its cause in a
being beyond being itself.
300 M. Björk
The identification of being with meaning, that is with percipti et con-

cipi, was for Driesch not a sign that all the representations we have of
the world are mere projections or fantasies, but neither that every image
we have of the world is true. It is rather a sign that knowledge (Wissen)
is inherent to the reality that transcends it, and this potentiality of sense
is the fundamental key to an understanding of being as irritability. Alois
Dempf stressed this in his insightful reading of Driesch by stating that
‘knowledge is here intended in an objective manner, like that which
today is called information. Knowledge in its broadest sense realizes itself
in several parts of the reality, before it becomes knowledge of itself’.111
Being as information, or what we with Heidegger perhaps better should
call irritation, creates the possibility of sense as an ontological category
with its own consistency.
What Driesch termed being in and for itself is beyond every appear-
ance, it is the X which we cannot grasp—being in itself is not-perceptum
aut conceptum. But even if this being in and for itself is a mystery for
us there are, Driesch argued, three windows to the absolute, which can
be used as hypothetical proofs of the structure of being itself: moral-
ity, givenness and memory.112 Morality ‘towards phenomena to my
Ego exclusively would be absurd. Morality therefore implies absolute-
ness, independence of the Ego—though this independence is absolutely
unintelligible to me in any detail.’113 Ethics and consequently compas-
sion—the Judeo-Christian and Schopenhauerian virtue that Heidegger
detested—was for Driesch the essential proof of the absolute.
The second window to the absolute is, as Driesch explained, ‘the con-
tingency of immediate Givenness and the immanent coherence of the
single phase of Givenness in spite of its contingency’.114 The contingency
of the given indicates the existence of a world that can exist without me,
that has existed without me and that will exist without me, but it also
reveals that the only subject that can live as if the world had a meaning in
itself is the one that conform itself to the ethical demand that the given-
ness of being entails. The absolute character of the given is consequently
not only the simple fact that things happen contrary to my will. It is an
indication that the world can change and become a better place. It is a
sign of what Driesch called happiness and saw as the goal of his ethics.
The third window to the absolute is memory, since it suggests ‘the
fact that not only self-consciousness itself endures, but also something
that is presented to consciousness. This tends to prove the absolute exist-
ence of an unconscious or supraconscious basis of the conscious Ego.’115
A strict phenomenalism would only assert the existence of the I at each

moment and thus postulate that the subject is something of a bundle of
impressions in a Humean sense, but memory implies the continuity of
‘the whole of past experience in a partly latent state and therefore implies
absoluteness in general’.116 In his pamphlet Leib und Seele Driesch
described this strange capacity of memory to posit continuity as the soul
and defined it as ‘an unconscious, that is not conscious of the I [nicht-
ich-bewußter] … organism with an immanent law of action. It is preserver
(“memory”) and organizer’.117 In sharp contrast to Heidegger, who
aimed to move beyond the concepts of soul and self with his theory of
Dasein, Driesch defended a theory of the soul as the activity that makes
a whole (ganzmachende Tätigkeit) of the absolute spasmodic character
of the self.118 It is important to note that the concepts of the soul and
the self are epistemological concepts of order (Ordnungsbegriffe), used
by Driesch to explain the rise of subjectivity, rather than as ontological
concepts. But the soul becomes a metaphysical hypothesis for Driesch
through his notion of memory, even indicating the possibility of immor-
tality since our experience of remembrance implied for him an uncon-
scious substratum, an absolute, that makes it possible to see the past as
belonging to our contemporary and unfolding life and to wager that the
past is not exhausted in nothingness but embedded in eternity. Memory
is, hypothetically, a sign of the immortality of the past in the sense that
the preceding is not gone but lives on beyond life in the domain of eter-
nity. Driesch did not, therefore, describe the human as a being-towards-
death, but rather as an animal of eternity, a being that can hope for
survival after death and that can long for the resurrection of the dead.
It is the three windows of the absolute—morality, the givenness of
contingency and memory—that inspired Driesch to develop his doc-
trine of reality as a theology and even mythology.119 If we can remember
the dead and feel compassion for those who no longer are part of our
world, and if we can understand the contingent character of the absolute
itself, then we can hope that there is more than that which is given in
the present. When Heidegger wrote in his ponderings that ‘eternity is
the monopoly of Christianity’ and ‘“eternal” is the pretext of those who
cannot cope with time, i.e., have never grasped time’120 he was, from
Driesch’s perspective, revealing his fundamental blindness to what is the
essential value of theology: the hope for the resurrection of the dead and
the need of the living to act with compassion for the living and present as
well as for the dead and absent. Immortality, Driesch wrote in his book
302 M. Björk
Die Überwindung des Materialismus from 1935, is a practical postulate

in a Kantian sense, and given by the hypothesis that memory reveals time
to be an image of eternity, since it forces us to act as if our actions were
inscribed in the eternal life of that which once was.121
Driesch’s negative and Kantian vitalism leads him beyond life, since
it gives him the possibility to wager the possibility of immortality and
stipulate that it ‘is a fact that for those who absolutely deny immortality
all things are at bottom ethically indifferent … In fact, a man who denies
immortality cannot consistently be a consciously ethical person, and if
in practice he generally is an ethical being, this fortunate fact is due to
his theoretical inconsistency’.122 This is because immortality is tied
to the belief in an ethical intuition involving all life, even the past life
of the dead, since ‘the belief in immortality is more closely connected
with the concept of guilt than with that of reward’.123
If the idea of heaven and hell for Heidegger was the expression of
calculability and the hope for eternal life was regarded as an inability to
understand time, Driesch rather saw the inability to wager an existence
beyond the transcendental categories of time and space as something all
too human. Such a perspective in fact takes our representations of real-
ity to be reality itself. Theology is therefore a form of radical doubt,
which questions whether reality can be identified with the categories that
apparently structures it, such as time and space. But at the same time,
theology has to take its departure point in the experience and sense of
reality and here find its critical legitimacy as a hypothetical and—for bet-
ter or worse—highly speculative theory. Only a theology based on the
potentiality of sense itself can disclose how every human and perhaps
every organism—be they living or dead—are connected in a network of
responsibility. It was Driesch’s hope that this responsibility could free
humanity from the idols of nationalism, Nazism and Fascism, since it
wagered a fusion of time and eternity in the immortality of the past.
Heidegger’s apocalyptic attack on the tradition of Western philoso-
phy, from Plato to Descartes and onwards, was at the end of the day a
defence of Dasein from the American, Asian and Judaic cultures which
he thought had destroyed the inception of philosophy in ancient Greece
and turned the world, as he said in the 1950s, to another form of Sahara,
a new kind of African Wasteland: ‘The African Sahara is only one kind
of wasteland. The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand
with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as eas-
ily with the organized establishment of a uniformed state of happiness
for all men.’124 Heidegger’s fear that Europe would be transformed to

a form of Africa is another proof that his philosophy of being was a con-
servative defence of the West against the universalizing forces that aim,
as he lamented, to create happiness and joy for all men, which was the
explicit goal of Driesch’s philosophy.125 This is why Heidegger’s destruc-
tion of the metaphysical tradition was never radical or revolutionary as
such. He was, as both Bourdieu and Nolte argued, a philosopher of the
Conservative Revolution, and his ontology was the means by which he
took part in the war against those who hoped for a state of happiness
for all humans. In contrast, Driesch affirmed the tradition from Plato to
Kant as something potentially non-Western and understood that philoso-
phy as a systematized Wissen has only a correlative, and never a causal,
relation to the madness of the European civilization that he abhorred.
The calculability and machination of being that Heidegger examined in
a manner that makes his writings possible to read against his own conserv-
atism, do not have their roots in philosophy, not even in the modern phi-
losophy of representation which Descartes and Leibniz defended.126 These
forces have their roots in the rise and development of capital and pri-
vate property correlating to, but never caused by, the progress of human
thought.127 This is why Driesch could insist that the critical philosophy of
the West, even though it had developed in relation to the civilization he
saw as a threat to humanity as such, was essential in order to save our spe-
cies from the modern Occident. Theology and philosophy are essentially
means for a metaphysics of critique based on the immediate categories,
such as compassion and knowledge, which according to Heidegger reduce
the human to a rational animal. But the human is not Dasein. She is part
of the world of animals and plants, since they too are sentient, just as the
human species is part of, Driesch speculated, the superhuman world of the
dead and their ghostly presence amongst the living.128
What Driesch searched for in sharp contrast to Heidegger was the
condition of possibility of memory in the immortality of the past. This
is also why immortality for Driesch was more related to guilt than to
reward. Immortality was for him a responsibility for the dead, but not
in the sense which Adam Smith described the compensation of the loss
of the dead through acts of remembrance: ‘The tribute of our fellow-
feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of
being forgot by everybody; and, by the vain honours which we pay to
their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep
alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune.’129 This almost
304 M. Björk
Derridean mourning of the spectres of the dead is not wrong per se for
Driesch, but it tends to become a fetishizing of the dead in the name of
the nation or the people, since from this perspective it is only remem-
brance among the living that gives the dead an afterlife.130 By arguing
that memory entails a hypothetical indication that the dead are not gone
in the death of nothingness but embedded in the eternity of that which
was, Driesch could be said to be closer to a theory of what Quentin
Meillassoux has called the spectrality of the dead.131 Consequently, the
past is the strange land of the dead that, if we follow Driesch’s specula-
tion, can give the living the hope that the dead—even the dead whose
life we never can remember—will be resurrected, since the past is the
immortality of that which once was.
These two domains of the irritability of being, the living and the dead,
the existing and the non-existing, cause the sentient and living mon-
ads to sense being as being, since being is irritability, the feelings with
which both existent and non-existent beings interpellate all organic and
non-organic beings. Perhaps it is here, in the sensuous character of sense
itself, in the Reizbarkeit of being, that the future of theology can be
found. Sense gives us the ability to see the senselessness of suffering and
to hope for the redemption of the dead. And perhaps this is why the tra-
dition that Driesch instigated, despite its weaknesses, is still waiting to be
discovered by a generation tired of the Heideggerian dogma that makes
theology unable to do its most radical wager: to hope for the resurrec-
tion of the dead.132
Notes
GA 94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 45. References to the German
original of Heidegger’s works will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) fol-
lowed by the volume number. Translations are by the author unless oth-
erwise stated.
2. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/1939),
GA 95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 259. I would like to express
my gratitude to Bruce Rosenstock for commenting my many thoughts
on Hans Driesch, and also to Fabián Ludueña Romandini for our
ongoing discussion on immortality and eternal life. See his important
book on spectrology and the community of the dead: Fabián Ludueña
Romandini, Principios de Espectrología. La comunidad de los espectros II
(Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2016).
3. Ibid., 210.
4. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,
Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). For the German origi-
nal, see Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt –
Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, GA 29/30 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2010).
5. Martin Heidegger, ‘Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger: An
Exchange of Letters’, trans. Richard Wolin, New German Critique No.
53 (1991), 30.
6. Ibid., 31.
7. Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932:
ein Handbuch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994).
8. Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus
und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt: Herbig Verlag, 1989).
9. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds),
Antisemitism in Times of Crisis (New York: New York University Press,
1991), 3.
10. Heidegger, as Nolte argued, hoped that Hitler’s reign would save
Europe from Communism, and for Nolte that fear of change seem-
ingly legitimized the philosopher’s appraisal of Nazism as a defence of
Germany. See Ernst Nolte, ‘Martin Heidegger, die Weimar Republik
und die Konservative Revolution’, in Michael Grossheim and Hans
Joachim Waschkies (eds), Rehabilitierung des Subjektiven (Bouvier,
Bonn, 1993), 505–520.
11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter
Collier (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991).
12. Ibid., 25–26.
14. Ibid., 433.
15. Ibid., 273
16. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks, trans. by Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
2016), 320. Translation modified by author. Cf. the German original:
Heidegger, GA 94, 441.
17. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings: From Being
and Time (1927) to The task of Thinking (1964), trans. David Farrell
Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 226–227.
18. Ibid., 226.
20. Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 227.
306 M. Björk
21. See Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on being and acting: from principles

and anarchy, trans. Christine Marine-Gros in collaboration with Reiner
Schürmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
23. David Farrell Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time
to the Black (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 141.
24. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, GA 2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977);
Eng. trans.: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Malden: Blackwell, 2013).
26. Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe, 141.
27. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 233.
28. Cf. Heidegger, GA 94, 83–86.
29. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 261–267.
30. Ibid., 233.
31. Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 227.
33. Ibid.
34. See the discussion on Oswald Spengler in Heidegger, The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics, 69–72.
35. Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, 2.
36. Hans Driesch, Philosophische Forschungswege – Ratschläge und
Warnungen (Leipzig: Verlag von Emmanuel Reinicke, 1930).
37. Ibid., vi.
38. Ibid.
39. Hans Driesch, Philosophische Forschungswege – Ratschläge und
Warnungen, vii. One can compare Driesch’s interest in parapsychol-
ogy with Henri Bergson’s and William James’s discussions of the same
phenomenon. See Henri Bergson, ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and
“Psychical research”’, in Mind-energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 75–103. An apologetic introduction
to William James’s understanding of so called psychic phenomena can be
found in Alexandre Sech Junior, Saulo de Freitas Araujo and Alexander
Moreira-Almeida, ‘William James and Psychical Research: Towards a
Radical Science of Mind’, in History of Psychiatry 24 (1) 2012, 62–78.
40. Hans Driesch, Ordnungslehre – Ein System des Nichtmetaphysischen Teiles
der Philosophie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1925).
41. Driesch, Philosophische Forschungswege, vii.
42. Ibid., 100.
43. Ibid., vii.
44. Ibid., 102.
45. Driesch, Ordnungslehre, 20.

46. It should be noted that Driesch was one of Germany’s most celebrated
and known philosophers during his time. In 1951, ten years after his
death, Driesch’s important autobiography was published: Hans Driesch,
Lebenserinnerungen: Aufzeichnungen eines Forschers und Denkers in
entscheidender Zeit (Basel and München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1951).
47. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 323. Translation modified by author. Cf.
the German original: Heidegger, GA 94, 445.
48. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 261–262.
49. Ibid., 262.
50. Ibid.
51. See Wilhelm Roux, Gesammelte Abhandlungen über Entwicklungsmechanik
der Organismen (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1895).
52. See Charles T. Wolfe, ‘From Substantial to Functional Vitalism and
Beyond: Animas, Organisms and Attitudes’, Eidos 14 (2011), accessed
27 May 2017: http://rcientificas.uninorte.edu.co/index.php/eidos/
article/viewArticle/2144/html_209; and Robert Rosen, Anticipatory
Systems – Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations
(Berlin: Springer, 2012). Wolfe argues that one can accept the critique
directed against Driesch, but still accept what he calls a functionalist,
rather than substantialist, vitalism based on Driesch’s speculations of a
life force or entelechy.
53. Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism: Gifford
Lectures Delivered at Aberdeen University, 1907–1908 (London: Adam
and Charles Black, 1908), 295.
54. His colleague Jacques Loeb explained that Driesch’s experiments were
in no contradiction to a mechanistic theory of life and the biologist
Hans Spemann found an organicist but purely biological explanation
of the morphology of the organism. See Egil Asprem, The Problem of
Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900–1939
(Leiden: Brill, 2017), 164–165.
55. Thomas Kessel, Phänomenologie des Lebendigen: Heideggers Kritik an
den Leitbegriffen der neuzeitlichen biologie (München: Verlag Karl Alber,
2013), 112.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 113.
58. Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from
Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 190.
59. Hans Driesch, Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice, trans. W.H.
Johnston (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), 125. See also the
German original: Die Sittliche Tat. Ein moral-philosophischer Versuch
(Leipzig: E. Reinicke Verlag, 1927).
308 M. Björk
60. Driesch, Ethical Principles, 125.

61. Heidegger, GA 94, 477–478.
62. Driesch, Ordnungslehre, 19.
63. Ibid.
65. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 323. Translation modified by author. Cf.
the German original: Heidegger, GA 94, 445.
66. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 270. Cf. the German original: Heidegger,
GA 94, 370.
68. Ibid.
GA 94, 84.
71. Ibid., 63.
72. Ibid., 177.
73. Ibid., 264.
74. Ibid., 299.
75. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 64.
77. Hans Driesch, Wirklichkeitslehre: Ein Metaphysischer Versuch (Leipzig:
Verlag von Emmanuel Reinicke, 1922).
79. Ibid., 228.
80. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans.
Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2012).
81. Quoted in Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger and the Question of National
Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2007), 306. See also Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A
Critical Interpretation (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999).
82. Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism,
306.
83. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Martin Heidegger, GA 95, 259.
87. Heidegger, Contributions, 102.
88. Hans Driesch, ‘Das Sein’, Synthese, Vol. 4, No. 10/11 (1939), 471,
accessed 27 May 2017: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20113773.
89. Driesch, Philosophische Gegenwartsfragen, 157.
90. Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, 363.
91. David J. Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness (Oxford & New York:

Oxford University Press, 2010), 18.
92. On Heidegger’s critique of cybernetics, see Bret W. Davis, Heidegger
and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern
93. Driesch, Wirklichkeitslehre, 8.
94. Ibid., 48.
95. Ibid., 51.
96. Driesch, ‘Das Sein’, 473.
97. Driesch, Wirklichkeitslehre, 133. For an introduction to Hartmann, see
e.g. Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann (New York & London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2015).
99. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic writings: From
Being and Time (1927) to The task of Thinking (1964), 355.
100. Hans Driesch, ‘Das Ding’, Synthese, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1938) 276–279,
accessed 27 May 2017: doi:10.1007/BF00930248.
102. Driesch, Wirklichkeitslehre, 51.
104. Driesch, Ethical Principles, 118.
106. Hans Driesch, Wirklichkeitslehre, ix.
107. Ibid., vi–vii.
108. Ibid., 319–326.
110. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New
York & London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969), 72.
111. Alois Dempf, Metaphysik: Versuch einer problemgeschichtlichen Synthese
(Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1986), 157. Dempf also noticed what I
call a tendency to panpsychism in Driesch’s metaphysics and this is cer-
tainly an area worth to examine in more detail since it perhaps could
liberate Driesch’s many insights from his problematic vitalism.
112. Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, 361.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid., 362.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid.
117. Hans Driesch, Leib und Seele. Eine Prüfung des psycho-physischen
Grundproblems (Leipzig: Verlag von Emmanuel Reinicke, 1916), 98.
118. Ibid.
310 M. Björk
119. See Driesch, Wirklichkeitslehre, 5, 313.

GA 94, 478.
121. Driesch, Die Überwindung des Materialismus, (Leipzig: Verlag von
Emmanuel Reinicke, 1916), 114–118.
122. Driesch, Ethical Principles, 222–223.
123. Ibid., 222. It is important to note that Driesch related the concept of
guilt to what he calls war guilt and used it to develop a form of pacifism;
see the paragraph War Guilt in ibid. 155–159.
124. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New
York and London: Harper & Row, Publishers 1968), 30.
125. Driesch postulates happiness as the aim of his philosophy and even
argues that one can read Kant’s ethics as a form of hedonism. See
Driesch, Ethical Principles, 30.
126. For such a reading, see e.g. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting.
127. Two examples of the importance of Heidegger’s critique of technology
and Western philosophy and the possibility to read Heidegger together
with a more materialist understanding of the development of philosophy
and history are H.D. Kittsteiner, Mit Marx für Heidegger, mit Heidegger
für Marx (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004) and Laurence Paul
Hemming, Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language
of Humanism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013).
128. See Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Dilemme Spectrale’, Critique 704–705
(2006), 105–115.
129. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by Knud Haakonssen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 16.
130. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuff (New York
and London: Routledge, 1994).
131. See Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Dilemme Spectrale’, Critique 704–705
(2006), 105–115.
132. How immortality should be understood and what resurrection means
are of course another discussion. For an interesting but ultimately
egocentric conceptualisation of immortality as survival see Martin
Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008). Traces of a more promising view on
immortality can be found in Fabián Ludueña Romandini, Principios de
Espectrología. La comunidad de los espectros II. For a critical discussion
of different attempts to defend a contemporary theory of immortality
on the basis of cybernetics, such as for example Ray Kurzweil’s theory
of the singularity, see Nelson R. Kellogg, ‘Cybernetic Immortality and
its Discontents’ in Theology and Science Vol. 13 (2), 162–174. A more
speculative wager for immortality can be found in Quentin Meillassoux,

‘Dilemme Spectrale’. I should also mention my own forthcoming PhD-
dissertation on the relation between eternal life and politics amongst
German speaking philosophers and theologians in the period of the First
and Second World War.
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Index
A apocalypse, 35, 161

Absence, 39, 180, 213, 214, 216, end of the world, 35
218, 221, 222, 232, 233, 237, Arendt, Hannah, 14, 19, 44, 162,
244, 247, 269 163, 176, 177, 186, 187, 259
Affliction (Bedrängnins), 3, 24, 221 Aristotle, 2, 261–264, 267
Agamben, Giorgio, 70, 122, 128, 184 Augustine of Hipo, 15, 17, 50, 127,
Aletheia, 28, 132, 140, 142, 143, 200, 177, 186, 258, 259, 265, 271,
201. See also Truth 273, 274
Alienation, 102, 135, 199, 214, 216,
223, 234, 235, 290, 294
Anarchism, 103, 107, 122 B
Animality, 15, 277, 281, 290 Baeumler, Albert, 109
animal studies, 179, 281, 290–292 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 79, 80, 88,
Anti-Christian polemics, 12, 19, 25 96
Anti-Judaism (anti-Jewish), 19, Barth, Karl, 6, 18, 24, 29, 42
101, 124, 127, 182. See also Bauch, Bruno, 31, 32, 43
Antisemitism; Anti-Zionism Being and Time, 2–6, 17, 24, 25, 30,
Anti-modernism, 23, 26 34, 36, 38–41, 54, 57, 70, 71,
Antisemitism, 9, 14, 19, 25, 52, 64, 82, 86, 91, 102, 103, 106, 119,
150, 154, 160, 181, 182, 272, 126, 127, 133, 135, 153, 165,
279, 280, 305. See also Anti- 167, 169, 184, 207, 219, 245,
Judaism; Anti-Zionism 258, 259, 261, 262, 271, 282,
Anti-Zionism, 121, 122. See also 285, 293, 305, 306, 309
Antisemitism; Anti-Judaism Benjamin, Walter, 121, 122, 174, 185
Apocalypticism (apocalyptic), 14, 35, Bergoglio, Jorge Mario, 81
36, 103, 161, 271, 302 Between (zwischen), 217, 219
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 315

Future of Theology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64927-6
316 Index
Beyng (Seyn), 27, 193, 196, 199, 225, Care (Sorge), 3, 63, 168
227, 233, 234, 237, 282, 299 Catholicism, 9, 13, 23, 26–28, 77, 78,
Bible, 10, 27, 123, 138, 149 85, 87, 88, 151–154, 200
Galatians, 2, 49, 100, 110, 117, 118 Catholic Church, 25, 27, 29, 80, 91
Gospel of John, 133, 149 Christianity, 9, 10, 12–14, 23, 25–29,
New Testament, 2–5, 7, 35, 70, 31, 33–35, 39, 40, 50, 54,
106, 120, 121, 126, 59–61, 65, 68, 69, 71, 94–96,
138, 246 100, 101, 106–108, 110, 111,
Pauline epistles (letters), 2, 12, 51, 117–119, 124–127, 132, 143,
62, 69–71, 119 147, 148, 150, 152, 154, 155,
Thessalonians, 2, 3, 50, 117 160, 182, 183, 192–196, 206,
Birth, 35, 51, 62, 133, 177, 178, 180, 219, 223, 231, 240, 241, 246,
186, 200 271, 274, 293, 299, 301
natality, 177, 180 Christian culture, 24, 68, 69, 124,
Black Notebooks, 8, 9, 11–16, 18, 19, 194
25, 38–40, 51, 56, 59–61, 73, Christian tradition, 14, 35, 122,
77, 79, 81, 85, 88, 95, 97, 99, 124, 137, 220, 292, 299
101, 102, 111, 115, 118, 119, Concealment, 135–137, 142, 171,
125, 132, 146, 148, 150, 152, 211–214, 219, 224, 226, 228,
155, 161, 182, 191, 194–196, 233, 235, 237, 238, 241
198, 204–207, 212, 221, 227, Concordat, 26, 41, 42, 80, 81, 110
234, 237, 242, 248, 251, 257– Confessing Church (Die Bekennende
259, 270, 272–274, 277–279, Kirche), 29, 30, 32, 60, 91
283, 284, 289, 293, 305 Conservatism, 303
Blanchot, Maurice, 166–172, 177, conservative revolution, 279, 284,
184 303
Blochmann, Elisabeth, 26, 33, 41–43 Contributions to Philosophy, 40, 59,
Blood and soil (Blut und Boden), 9, 34 161, 205, 211, 242, 243, 293,
Bloom, Harold, 14, 162, 179, 183 294, 308
Bourdieu, Pierre, 152, 279, 284, 303,
305, 306
Bultmann, Rudolf, 4–7, 12, 18, 29, D
32, 42, 43, 51–58, 60–62, 65, Dasein, 3, 14, 15, 17, 25, 37, 55,
67, 69, 71, 72, 85, 223, 246 63, 93, 106, 107, 126, 135,
136, 159, 164–173, 176, 184,
217, 222–224, 227, 228, 237,
C 238, 258, 260, 261, 265–267,
Calculation, 107, 108, 118, 141, 146, 277–280, 282–285, 288–294,
147, 160, 162, 173, 183, 192, 297–299, 301–303
193, 197, 213, 216, 258, 270, Death, 3, 8, 14, 15, 24–26, 36–39,
280, 282, 284, 293, 294 51, 58, 60, 61, 66, 67, 80, 106,
Caputo, John D., 4, 6, 17–19, 242, 107, 112, 133, 134, 148, 159,
250 162–181, 183–187, 195, 224,
Index 317
226, 231, 232, 269, 274, 285, F

291, 292, 294, 301, 304, 307 Faith, 5, 27, 28, 30, 42, 52, 55, 57,
being-towards-death (being-unto- 58, 61, 68–70, 72, 73, 84, 85,
death, Sein-zum-Tode), 159, 87, 90, 124, 142, 182, 191–194,
161, 164–166, 169, 292, 294 216, 219, 220, 231, 242,
thanaticism, 179 269–271, 288, 293
Democracy (democratic), 120, 154, Farías, Victor, 1, 8, 16, 152
287 Fascism, 119, 121, 122, 279, 284,
Dempf, Alois, 300, 309 302
Derrida, Jacques, 4, 70, 73, 112–116, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 35
119, 127, 162, 163, 171, Finitude, 24, 54, 66, 134, 161–166,
184–186, 205, 208, 236, 237, 168, 171, 172, 175–178, 180,
243, 244, 249, 250, 310 181, 187, 221, 222, 226, 227,
Descartes, René, 135, 192, 284, 295, 244, 278, 291, 292, 297, 305
302, 303 finite existence, 163, 165, 180
Destiny, 11, 25, 34, 37, 39, 41, 56, Fiore, Joachim of, 35, 36
126, 148, 163, 164, 173, 200, Freiburg, 1, 2, 10, 26, 33, 41, 42, 45,
227, 236, 243, 271, 272, 286 56, 79, 80, 95, 103, 153, 154,
Destruction (Destruktion), 4, 54, 61, 274
70, 89, 113, 132, 136, 143–149, Early Freiburg lectures, 2
159–161, 199, 201, 204, 240, University of Freiburg, 1, 80, 103,
248, 279, 281, 290, 303. See also 259, 274
Critique of metaphysics Freud, Sigmund, 186
Divinization, 212, 216, 217, 233–240 Fuchs, Ernst, 7
Driesch, Hans, 15, 16, 278, 283–292,
294–304, 306–310
Dynamism, 83 G
Gelassenheit, 165, 172, 309
German Philosophical Society, 31, 32
E Germany, 31–33, 35, 36, 41, 43, 44,
Ebeling, Gerhard, 7 58, 61, 63, 79, 81, 88, 91, 94,
Enframing (Gestell), 39, 89, 149 104, 105, 108, 148, 238, 245,
Eschatology, 17, 23–25, 30, 35, 37, 260, 278, 279, 283, 305, 307
38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 131–137, German culture, 33, 39
140, 144, 145, 148, 149, 152, German people, 31, 37, 108, 148,
213 278. See also Volk
eschatological expectations, 3, 24, Gnosticism (gnostic), 52, 132, 133,
272. See also Parusia 147, 148, 220, 222, 223, 245,
Ethics, 2, 65, 250, 288, 300, 310 246, 270, 271
Europe, 120, 132, 196, 303, 305. See God, 4, 6–10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 23–25,
also Occident 27–30, 35, 39, 40, 51, 55, 57,
Existential analytic, 3, 6, 49, 55, 58, 58, 66, 84, 85, 87, 91, 93–95,
66, 69 102, 107, 108, 110, 117, 120,
318 Index
121, 131–135, 137–145, 147– I

150, 152, 154, 155, 160–162, Idealism, 31, 36, 59, 78
170, 175, 178, 180, 182, 183, Immanence, 122, 215, 217, 219, 221
192, 194, 211–242, 244–246, Immortality, 292, 301–304, 310, 311
248, 250, 251, 258, 259, 262, Introduction to Metaphysics, 27, 136,
269–272, 274, 278, 280, 281, 152, 153, 172, 173, 183, 185
292, 293, 297, 299
concept of God, 14, 228
the future god, 15, 271 J
Greek gods, 14 Jaspers, Karl, 18, 31, 42, 43, 85, 177,
the last god, 14, 15, 211–215, 260
218–220, 225–229, 232–235, Jews, Jewish, 10, 12, 14, 19, 50–52,
240, 241, 271, 278, 293, 299 59–62, 65–71, 100, 108–110,
Gottwesen, 213, 214, 216, 233, 234, 116, 117, 119, 124, 131–133,
243 143, 147, 148, 151, 160, 162,
Greece, 88, 91, 94, 202, 302 179, 181, 182, 185, 215, 220,
Greek culture, 302 243, 282, 292, 294, 299
Greek philosophy, 56, 59, 68, 284 Jonas, Hans, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 19, 51,
Hellenism, 173, 220 52, 58, 62–64, 72, 73, 187, 219,
Hellenophile, 60 223, 245, 246
Guardini, Romano, 13, 78–80, 96, 97 Judaism, 9, 13, 14, 19, 25, 29, 51,
52, 59–62, 65–67, 71, 100, 101,
110, 118, 119, 122, 124, 125,
H 127, 146–148, 151–155, 160,
Hegel, G.W.F., 43, 44, 182 162
Heidegger, Martin, 16–18, 40–43, 45, Jewish tradition, 14, 71
70, 72, 73, 96, 97, 99, 100, 125, Jüngel, Eberhard, 7
152–155, 177, 181–184, 205,
206, 208, 242–244, 246–248,
251, 261, 272, 277, 285, K
304–306, 308–310 Kerygma, 5, 56, 115
Hermeneutics of facticity, 2, 3 Kierkegaard, Søren, 24
Historicity, 5, 11, 23, 62, 195, 293, Krieck, Ernst, 109
294
History of being (Seinsgeschichte), 10,
28, 29, 52, 62, 69, 133, 182, L
201, 297 Language theory, 91, 103, 133, 149,
Hitler, Adolf, 44, 259, 279 192, 199, 223, 261, 277
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 24, 91, 207 Lebensphilosophie, 82
Honecker, Martin, 27, 80 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 303
Husserl, Edmund, 274, 285 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 162, 181, 183,
185, 186, 250
Index 319
Life, 2–5, 11, 14, 16, 17, 24, 25, 115, 123, 127, 128, 131, 132,
27, 30, 32, 33, 38, 42, 49, 50, 134–141, 143, 144, 146, 148,
52, 53, 55, 62, 70, 71, 79, 80, 150–153, 159, 172, 173, 183,
82–88, 90, 92, 93, 96, 100, 103, 185, 199, 203, 204, 211, 220,
104, 112, 114, 115, 120, 122, 224–226, 231, 233, 236, 237,
124, 125, 127, 132–134, 136, 244, 245, 248, 250, 272, 274,
141, 152, 153, 159, 161–165, 277–281, 283, 284, 286, 290,
169–171, 173–182, 184–187, 291, 298, 299, 303, 305–309
194, 195, 229, 231, 245, 246, critique of metaphysics, 4, 123, 148,
268, 278–280, 283–294, 298, 281. See also Destruction
299, 301, 302, 304, 307, 310, Metapolitics, 33, 131, 132, 152
311 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 36, 44
as eternal, 33, 174, 175, 180, 292, Mohler, Armin, 279, 305
299, 302 Monotheism, 14, 59, 131–133,
as finite, 14, 53, 161–165, 171, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144,
176, 181, 186 146–152, 154–156, 226
as indefinite, 171, 173, 175, 178 Mythology, 15, 67, 92, 156, 173, 185,
as resisting death, 163, 164, 179, 277, 280, 301
187
Love, 10, 58, 61, 120, 121, 162, 163,
171, 172, 175–177, 179–181, N
183, 185–187, 259, 270 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 165, 166, 176, 183,
strong as death, 162, 163, 176, 184, 195, 206, 208
181, 183, 186 National Socialism (Nazism), 1, 12,
Löwith, Karl, 19, 175, 186, 194, 206, 32–34, 41, 43–45, 57, 64, 72,
219, 245 77, 78, 115, 132, 138, 139,
Luther, Martin, 17, 120 145–148, 150, 182, 195, 278,
279, 281, 293, 308
Nazi Party (NSDAP), 9, 25
M Neo-Kantianism, 49, 50, 295
Machination (Machenschaft), 59, 60, Neoplatonism, 2
62, 66, 160, 161, 192, 193, 197, Neothomism, 82
201–204, 218, 240, 284, 303 Neovitalism, 16, 286, 287
Macquarrie, John, 6, 153, 184, 306 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 183
Marburg, 6, 7, 18, 26, 54, 68, 72 Nihilism, 59, 60, 65, 138, 139, 143,
Marburg theology (theologians), 155, 231, 244–246
6, 72 Nolte, Ernst, 279, 305
Marion, Jean-Luc, 8
Meditation, 107, 161, 185, 212, 216,
232 O
Meillassoux, Quentin, 304, 310, 311 Occident, 15, 132, 143, 144, 146,
Metaphysics, 4, 15, 19, 23, 27, 33, 196, 280, 284, 303. See also
35, 41, 54, 60, 61, 67, 73, 86, Europe
320 Index
Western tradition (culture), 81 R

Oedipus, 135–138, 143, 144 Rahner, Karl, 6, 79, 96
Ontology, 63, 69, 71, 103, 116, 119, Ratzinger, Joseph, 81
120, 123, 136, 152, 219, 245, Rectorate of Heidegger, 32, 33, 37,
279, 280, 285, 303, 305, 306 38, 42, 45, 56, 57, 64, 65, 103,
Ontotheology, 232, 243, 248, 299 108, 114, 115, 182, 259
Other beginning (inception). See Rectoral address, 32, 38, 56, 57,
Second beginning (inception) 65, 115
Ott, Heinrich, 6, 7, 18 Reitzenstein, Richard, 223, 246
Ott, Hugo, 1, 16, 42, 96, 152, 153 Religion, 12, 23, 33, 35, 44, 50, 61,
68, 71, 79–81, 90, 91, 100, 116,
119, 124, 127, 152, 162, 206,
P 227, 232, 242, 243, 245, 246,
Parmenides, 91, 136, 140–142, 154, 249, 250, 293, 299
155 Romanticism, 285
Parusia, 3. See also Eschatological Rosenberg, Alfred, 33, 44
expectations Rosenzweig, Franz, 14, 162, 183,
Pascal, Blaise, 80 185, 186
Paul, 2–4, 12, 16, 49–55, 61–67, 69–
71, 73, 100, 108, 110, 117–119,
125, 127, 133–135, 156, 165, S
169, 174, 205, 206, 208, 244, Schelling, F.W.J., 31, 231
267, 274, 310 Schiller, Friedrich, 139
Peterson, Erik, 132, 152 Schmitt, Carl, 115, 132, 152, 156
Peterson, Paul Silas, 80, 96 Scholasticism, 2, 27–29, 82
Phenomenology, 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 17, 18, Schürmann, Reiner, 107, 111, 121,
23, 24, 31, 36, 49, 55, 70, 100, 127, 198, 207, 281, 306
116, 117, 123, 125–127, 134, Scotus, Duns, 2, 17, 85
135, 142, 149, 152, 153, 242, Second beginning (inception), 39, 59,
250, 285, 297 60, 62, 67, 221, 229, 234
Plato, 81, 135, 200, 257, 302, 303 Secularization, 119, 144, 232
Platonism, 125 Singularity, 101, 102, 106, 107,
Polarities, 83, 84, 93 117–119, 121–123, 125, 126,
Polytheism, 13, 14, 132, 133, 140, 166, 176, 177, 185, 200, 310
141, 143, 150, 151, 156 Sloterdijk, Peter, 106, 126
Presence, 10, 28, 34, 36, 37, 126, Spectrality, 304
136, 139–141, 149, 164, 166, Spirit (Geist), 19, 31, 32, 35, 36, 53,
168, 181, 213, 214, 216, 226, 55, 63, 67, 71, 94, 105, 108, 110,
229, 232, 233, 236, 237, 241, 112–116, 119, 143, 146, 160,
263, 264, 266, 269, 161, 171, 180, 183, 212, 281
280, 303 Stein, Edith, 6
Protestantism, 26, 27, 29, 85 Supersessionism, 111, 112, 117–119,
124, 125
Index 321
T 250, 258–271, 273, 274, 279,

Taubes, Jacob, 70, 115, 127, 156 280, 282, 284, 285, 288, 293,
Technology, 77, 80, 88–91, 97, 112, 297, 298, 301, 302, 305–307,
131, 140, 141, 145–147, 150, 309, 310
153, 160, 193, 201, 206, 238, Kairos, 53, 134–136, 143, 144
240, 248, 288, 294, 310 temporality, 119, 179, 180, 258,
Testamentary writing, 195, 196, 198, 262–265, 267, 288
205, 207 Trace, 4, 9, 62, 127, 197, 202, 215,
Theology, 2, 4–19, 26, 27, 29–31, 235–239, 249, 250, 283, 310
40, 42–44, 50, 53–57, 63, 64, Transcendence, 216, 217, 219–222
67, 72, 73, 77, 78, 80–83, 85, Transition, 148, 174–176, 180, 194,
86, 91, 116, 124, 127, 128, 131, 196–199, 211, 213, 258, 268,
132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 144, 271
152, 154, 191, 216–220, 222, Treaty of Versailles, 31
227, 230–232, 242–246, 248, Truth, 28, 33–36, 78, 85, 86, 93,
249, 269, 271, 272, 277, 278, 95, 99, 105, 117, 118, 121,
280, 293, 297, 299, 301–304, 125, 126, 132, 135, 137, 138,
310 140–143, 161, 166–168, 176,
Catholic theology, 13, 77, 78, 82 192, 193, 200, 201, 211–214,
Political theology, 127, 128, 131, 217, 218, 221, 222, 224–229,
132, 138, 152, 154 234, 237, 239–241, 250, 260,
Postmetaphysical theology, 8, 18, 265, 273, 280–282
227 theory of truth, 281. See also
Protestant theology, 7, 73 Aletheia
Theopoetics, 14, 144,
148–151, 231
Theopolitics, 131, 133, 138, 140, U
143, 148–150 Uexküll, Johan Jakob, 283, 286,
Thomism, 6, 84 289–291
Tillich, Paul, 6, 83 Unconcealment, 211, 216, 219, 233,
Time, 1–11, 15–17, 24, 25, 30–32, 237, 238, 269, 270
34, 36, 38–41, 52–59, 61, 62,
68–72, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 91,
93, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109, V
112–114, 116, 118, 119, 122, Vatican I, 23
124, 126–128, 133–135, 137, Vattimo, Gianni, 120–123, 128
139, 140, 143, 145, 147–151, Violence, 105, 106, 108, 111,
153, 159, 161, 164–169, 112, 116, 122, 127, 132, 136,
172–174, 177–180, 183–187, 138–140, 145, 147, 149–151,
193, 196, 198, 199, 202–207, 156, 160, 161, 172, 183, 221,
214–216, 218, 219, 225, 226, 228, 293
229, 235, 237–239, 243, 245,
322 Index
Vitalism, 84, 287, 288, 295, 302, 307, 166, 169, 172, 173, 175–178,
309 181, 183–185, 192–196, 201–
Volk, 25, 32–34, 38, 45, 77, 148, 227, 206, 212, 215, 217, 219–224,
273 227–232, 238–240, 258, 269,
271, 273, 278, 282, 284–286,
289–293, 295–303, 305, 311
W world-poor, 229, 291, 292
Will, 9, 28, 32, 38, 62–66, 73, 93, world-poverty, 297
104, 105, 108, 109, 117, 119, World Jewry (Weltjudentum), 9, 132,
125, 138–146, 148, 150, 153, 146, 147, 149, 160, 173, 282,
161, 178, 181, 185, 187, 193, 284. See also Antisemitism
195, 200, 201, 204, 230, 232, World-view (Weltanschauung), 77, 79,
238, 241, 280, 300, 309 81, 82, 84–88, 96, 240, 281
World, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 19, 28, 31, 32,
35, 38–40, 50, 52, 53, 58–60,
64, 67, 68, 77–90, 94, 97, 99, Z
102, 105, 108, 111, 116, 118– Zabala, Santiago, 120, 121, 128
121, 123, 125, 126, 132, 140, Zionism, 123, 124, 128, 248
143, 145–147, 149, 160, 165,

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HEIDEGGER’S BLACK

NOTEBOOKS AND THE

ISBN 978-3-319-64926-9 ISBN 978-3-319-64927-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949186

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover credit: Fred Stein Archive/Contributor

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

We wish to express our gratitude to Amy Invernizzi and Phil Getz at

1 Introduction: Heidegger and Theology after the Black

2 Religion in the Black Notebooks: Overview and Analysis 23

3 In the Spirit of Paul: Thinking the Hebraic Inheritance

4 Why Heidegger Didn’t Like Catholic Theology:

5 Anarchist Singularities or Proprietorial Resentments?

6 Monotheism as a Metapolitical Problem: Heidegger’s

7 Love Strong as Death: Jews Against Heidegger

8 Apocalypse and the History of Being 191

9 Gottwesen and the De-Divinization of the Last God:

10 Confessions and Considerations: Heidegger’s Early

11 The Irritability of Being: Martin Heidegger, Hans

About the Editors

Mårten Björk is a Doctoral Student in Theology and Religious

Jayne Svenungsson is Professor of Systematic Theology at Lund

Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University

Studies and has published extensively on phenomenology, hermeneutics,

Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011), and Giving

Introduction: Heidegger and Theology

© The Author(s) 2017 1

Again, this was not entirely new knowledge. Just as Heidegger’s

philosophical venture to dismantle the history of metaphysics could be

However, to understand the strong influence Heidegger exerted on

thereby relieve them—and above all their modern readers—of their

regarding the relevance of his later philosophy for theology. In a letter to

exculpatory narrative that his Nazi Party membership was an aber-

Heidegger’s philosophy in fact embodied elements from Christian the-

[Q]uite consistently, is the Bible [according to these theologians] taken

But as to Heidegger’s being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden

secondly, that there is a need to re-examine the critical potential of the

ethical thinker had an unmistakably Heideggerian imprint. However, as

contrast between Heidegger’s theopoetics of the Greek gods, on the one

human life, but of life in general, makes the deficiencies of Heidegger’s

4. Martin Heidegger, ‘Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache’ (1953/1954),

of the French ‘turn’ in various regions and theological traditions. In the

van Fleteren, Frederick. Martin Heidegger’s Interpretations of Saint Augustine.

Religion in the Black Notebooks:

© The Author(s) 2017 23

and the medieval mystics’ ‘proto-phenomenology’ with the emphasis on

resolute anticipation of this perpetual, inavertible, and inescapably per-

state Baden. To fight against the church (Kirche) as a whole, Heidegger

how it [beyng] loses its only-just-dawning truth, which belongs to itself

Modernity, in Heidegger’s analysis, has reduced the world to mere

Christianity, he concludes, ‘triumphs again through the production of

Heidegger’s dismissal of the Confessing Church deserves more research.

Contesting the Nation

intellectual-spiritual paralysis cries to heaven’.38 The National Socialist

Although Heidegger’s version of National Socialism differed in

‘alone enables the creation and maintenance of values’.61 Heidegger,

wars” [are] so entangled’ in the modified metaphysics of Western

Contesting the Apocalypse

1 Introduction: Heidegger and Theology after the Black

2 Religion in the Black Notebooks: Overview and Analysis 23

3 In the Spirit of Paul: Thinking the Hebraic Inheritance

6 Monotheism as a Metapolitical Problem: Heidegger’s

7 Love Strong as Death: Jews Against Heidegger

8 Apocalypse and the History of Being 191

9 Gottwesen and the De-Divinization of the Last God:

10 Confessions and Considerations: Heidegger’s Early

11 The Irritability of Being: Martin Heidegger, Hans

Introduction: Heidegger and Theology

4. Martin Heidegger, ‘Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache’ (1953/1954),

Religion in the Black Notebooks:

14. A detailed account of Heidegger’s institutional conflicts with the

34. Heidegger, GA 94, 49.

59. Hannah Arendt to Günther Gaus, in an interview given on 28 October

77. For a fuller account, see Wolfe, ‘Messianism’.

In the Spirit of Paul: Thinking the

Bultmann and Marburger Theology

Responding to Turbulent Times

to Hitler’s attempt to domesticate the Lutheran churches altogether,

Jonas and the Return to Heidegger’s Paul

5. Marlène Zarader, La dette impensé. Heidegger et l’héritage hébraique (Paris:

Romano Guardini and Heidegger:

Guardini’s Theological Challenge to Heidegger

hydro-electric plant is constructed on the Rhine, this is not ‘technology’