Neither Philosophy nor Theology: The Origin in Heidegger’s Earliest Thought

1 Introduction

Reluctantly that which dwells near the Origin abandons the locale. (F. Hölderlin, The Journey)

In Martin Heidegger’s “mature,” thinking, the notion of “the Origin” (Ursprung), also translated as “the primary leap” (Ur-sprung), has long been understood to play a key role. Heidegger’s 1934–1935 reading of Hölderlin, his Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), and Mindfulness, written between 1936 and 1940, tie the Origin directly to the truth of “Beyng” (Seyn) and the temporality of its swaying, i.e. to the central theme of Heidegger’s thought. To be sure, a sense of philosophy’s aim as inseparable from a not-yet-actualized sense of divinity pervades these late works. After all, Heidegger’s entire sense of the history of Beyng as developed in these later texts can be understood as regarding human proximity to “the last god.”^[1] For mature Heidegger, the Origin signifies not an origin of Dasein, but the belongingness of all origination to Beyng; accordingly, the first beginning of philosophy originates as the inceptual event through which an incalculable movement of history is brought forward in the direction of its own Origin, which, being paradoxically futural, is thus capable of being enacted as the other beginning. In these later texts, then, the Origin’s futurity indicates the promise, or rather, the possibility, of a non-eschatological fulfilment of what is ownmost in humanity as the sheltering of the truth of Beyng and the encounter with the last god. Moreover, Heidegger openly identifies the Origin, qua primary leap (Ur-sprung), with Beyng as the ground of gods.^[2]

In contrast to this complicated view of Heidegger’s later works, for most scholars, Heidegger’s early fundamental ontology seems distant from any religious problematic. Indeed, in the 1920’s lectures, theology is merely another positive science – a peculiar ontic phenomenon^[3] – while philosophy is said to be atheistic by definition.^[4] Although Heidegger’s ontology uses several terms traditionally associated with the religious problematic of soteriology (such as Dasein’s “fallness” or “corruption”), such terms are treated as being explicitly removed from the sphere of the ethical and the axiological, and thus apparently “de-theologized.”^[5] This at least seems to be the case if one views Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as a secular transcendental project. In this article, I intend to prove that both of these assumptions are false; Heidegger’s early thought is neither extricable from the sense of genuine religiosity which flourishes in his later works, nor do the terms indicating the possibility of such religiosity actually belong to theology. Rather, Heidegger’s motivation underlying the formation of fundamental ontology aims at conceptualizing the Origin of life and a peculiar sense of divine truth accompanying it. To show this, I shall address the origin of the notion of “the Origin,” first as discussed in Heidegger’s earliest lectures in Freiburg, and then in the formative years of his ontological project, following Heidegger’s turn from early Christianity to Aristotle. Heidegger’s discourse on the Origin in these formative years, I argue, implies the presence of a peculiar sense of truth, unknown to both philosophy and theology.

Notably, early Heidegger embraces Emil Lask’s distinction between the derivative kind of truth as correctness of judgement and the more original notion of truth of the object itself. For Lask, positive knowledge is not truth in the original sense, but merely correctness of judgement.^[6] This distinction serves Heidegger to distinguish the traditional notion of truth as correctness and the Greek notion of a-letheia, which becomes central to Heidegger’s thought since Being and Time.^[7] Namely an entity must first be un-covered as what it is, prior to any correct statement about it. Phenomenological truth, Heidegger writes in Being and Time, is “the disclosedness of Being.”^[8] This sense of truth as “un-covering” and “dis-closing,” as I shall show, is anticipated in the earliest ideas on the enactment of phenomena – phenomena are disclosed as what they are through the enactment of life. However, we will see that enactment itself can be more or less original, thus assuming a standard of the quality of disclosure itself, inexpressible in terms of “what” is uncovered yet accessible in the mode of existence that is peculiarly religious. To be sure, such a religiosity is related to the very possibility of discovering the sort of truth that is not a truth about entities or God, i.e. not a propositional knowledge which one can find in philosophy or theology. Rather, this truth exposes the Origin itself in the very genuine enactment of life.

Accordingly, in what follows I shall try to explicate the ways in which Heidegger’s thinking has never belonged to what is traditionally meant by “philosophy” or “theology,” but instead exposes both philosophy and theology as non-original endeavours, precisely due to their inability to conceptualize the Origin. Over the course of this explication, I will shed light on the sense of divinity that is implicitly operant in Heidegger’s early thought – a sense that has long required the application of this early thought itself to clear the way for its own non-metaphysical presentation.

2 The Origin and its truth

One of the earliest mentions of the notion of the Origin occurs in Heidegger’s first lecture courses, “Basic Problems of Phenomenology” and “Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression,” given between 1919 and 1920. There, Heidegger presents the notion of the Origin of life as the compass of human existence, discussing it together with the triple sense-schema of enactment–relation–content. Although the literature has discussed Heidegger’s early sense-schema, it has largely neglected the important inner relation between the two revolutionary innovations of enactment-sense and the Origin of life. As I will argue here, interpreting this particular relation between the notion of the Origin and enactment-sense as allowing a novel enactment-sense of truth – one that belongs to the Origin – crucially suggests that the truth of the Origin is central to Heidegger’s understanding of philosophy as such.

In describing the Origin as the compass of human existence, these early lectures specify the Origin not as the infinite fullness of life-worlds, but life itself as arising out of the Origin as the proper subject of phenomenology;^[9] in other words, the Origin, Heidegger explains, is that which phenomenology – the original science – must approach.^[10] This approach requires, however, an original, experiential comprehension, one from which philosophy is still too distant. That said, the Origin is not something immanent to life, i.e. not something that can be taken as a “content” of life-experience, but precisely stands “beyond” life-contents as their origin. Yet, at the same time, the how of life’s self-expression and inner dynamism is dependent on the Origin.^[11] As Heidegger puts it,

Origin is not a universal principle, a source of power. It is rather the form of production of life in all its situations, the form, which I always understand and reach only in a particular quality of form.^[12]

In other words, the Origin as the form of the “production of life” can only be explicitly reached in a particular “form” of life itself, i.e. in a particular “how” of life;^[13] rather than an external something separated from life, the Origin is, as noted above, that out of which life arises – a power of life’s own self-expression, available in a particular form, or mode of it. The central problem for phenomenology, then, is to comprehend this quality of form and to make it available without reifying it into some or other “what-content” (metaphysical entity). That is to say, the Origin must become available despite the fact that “the ground of experience itself is not giving itself over.”^[14] Life itself, Heidegger says, must be deepened by being “taken back into its origin in its whole facticity.”^[15] Consequently, the task of philosophy is not to provide universal laws or principles of knowledge, and neither to offer practical norms, but to understandingly guide “into the forms of life itself,” leaning not on instructions but on the “genuineness of its origin-understanding.”^[16]

All this said, the relation between life and its Origin is still quite unclear in the “Basic Problems of Phenomenology” lectures. In the next semester, however, Heidegger announces an astonishing revelation; since the Origin is not a universal principle or a source of power “hanging above” life, life is intrinsically determined by it. Accordingly, the how of life’s production varies according to its inner relation to the Origin. This, the very motivational essence of life, is possible only through an existential incentive that has nothing to do with physical survival or the enhancement of life, but only with “keeping up” to that quality of form which makes life what it is in a sense that is ungraspable in the objective terms of “life-sciences.” In the “Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression,” Heidegger further clarifies what this “form of production of life” means:

All reality receives its primordial sense through the worry of the self. The manners of having and pushing away the environing world hang together with the modification of the worry of the self. The worry of the self is a constant concern about lapsing from the Origin.^[17]

In these words, Heidegger points out directly that the self – as the central element of life – is not an independent subjectivity but is somehow determined by the Origin. The Origin, then, is neither something inner to, nor something separate from life. In fact, it is not a “something” at all. And yet, all reality receives its sense through one’s “worrying” relation to it. Moreover, wherever this worrying lives itself out in tasks, “actual self-worldly Dasein is spoiled.”^[18] Indeed, we may count among such tasks even such traditional philosophical endeavours as metaphysics or ethics. In this sense, what does the Origin really mean? In the context of the early Freiburg lectures, the Origin can only be made sense of in terms of Heidegger’s triple structure of sense: enactment, relation, and content. This structure allows for the conceptualization of the non-thematic sense-dimensions which precede all what-meaning (content). Since the Origin is available in the how of life alone, it can only be thought of in terms of the relation- and enactment senses which together constitute the how of life-production, including the way beings are available for experience. Indeed, one of Heidegger’s earliest discoveries is that the form/the how of all phenomena, i.e. the way beings are available for experience, depends on a quality of a relation enacted by that non-subjective, world-inclusive entity which he first names “life” and later “Dasein.”^[19] Heidegger’s “relation-sense” is then the way beings manifest as either “objects,” a “dwelling place,” “a threatening power of nature,” etc. To be sure, all these ways of manifestation are not forms of our (subjective) experience of entities but the ways entities succeed to show themselves on their own. Accordingly, what is traditionally thought as an objective presence of beings, characterizable by ontological categories, is only a particular mode of manifestation, i.e. a particular relation-sense of what beings may in principle be. Importantly, Heidegger thinks that relation-senses can be more or less original, depending on the existential stance characterizing the way one enacts the relation. Namely, the world does not manifest randomly, once as an objective aggregation of entities, and once as a mysterious venue where, for example, one’s relation to God takes place. Instead, the sort of relation-sense characterizing the world is dependent on what Heidegger calls “enactment-sense,” i.e. on the mode of existence which one brings forth in one’s life.

Such dependence of phenomena on Dasein’s enactment implies that the universe, in itself, does not consist of any positive “what-particles” since there is no “what” without a how of its terms of manifestation.^[20] While the giving character of a relation defines a separate sphere of sense prior to all things (it is not a being), it is itself inexplicable, apart from the sense of enactment which has been traditionally misunderstood as belonging to human “subjective” life.^[21] For Heidegger, then, the traditional subject–object dichotomy cannot contain the original sphere of life-experience which, in its fullness, incorporates the three sense-dimensions. The contemplation of the whole sphere of pure life, Heidegger explains, is neither external nor internal, neither transcendent nor immanent.^[22] Yet the contemplation of the whole sphere of pure life forces us to think the Origin of life, and to do so without imagining the Origin as either internal to our contemplation or external to it.

To be neither immanent nor transcendent sounds paradoxical in the context of a traditional understanding of sense, which is theoretical in essence and therefore nothing but a content-sense of a presentable “what.” Indeed, in all theoretical philosophy, the objective meaning of things and the sense of their subjective conditions are what-contents; even the relation between a subject and an object is conceived of as a particular “what,” namely, a givenness of something to something (or someone). More broadly, the subject–object dichotomy – or the delineation between immanence–transcendence – is essential to all theoretical philosophy.^[23] Even when theoretical philosophy offers artificial innovations like transcendence within immanence, there is still a sense of immanence consisting entirely of different sorts of what-contents (processes, acts etc.), as well as a sense of transcendence which is necessary only for differentiating the factically present objectivities from the potential ones. However, as Heidegger shows, on the level of life-experience, theoretical dichotomies fall off; the event of experience has a pre-objective sense and is of a non-theoretical intelligibility,^[24] where distinctions between the inner and the outer do not exist.^[25]

That said, taking the difference between the objective and pre-objective (or theoretical and non-theoretical) senses to be merely another what-sense, rather than belonging to a separate dimension of sense, leads to great misunderstanding; without some prior notion of a relation-sense, discussions concerning pre-objective meaning become vague and misleading. Relation-sense must first determine the experienced form that illuminates, for the first time, the derivative status of the subject–object dichotomy; the very sense of beings as manifesting “objectively,” namely “against” subjectivity, is one possible relation-sense of beings’ manifestation. Such a relation-sense is a paradigm of a non-original relation-sense, arising out of a non-original enactment of life since it hides the fact that experience is an event prior to the subject–object dichotomy. Not only is Dasein always conscious of some object – it is relational in essence. Namely, as Theodor Kisiel stresses, it exists as an event of delineating the sense of its own immanence out of the environing-world.^[26] Dasein’s “immanence” is thereby brought to its factical manifestation in life in a way that is inseparable from its world.

The triple sense-structure thus allows Heidegger to consider life (and later, Dasein) as being beyond itself, in-the-world, prior to any intentional relation to a given object. However, more important for the illumination of the non-theoretical nature of life is Heidegger’s discovery of the Origin of life as determinative of all life’s forms and contents. In this discovery, the Origin is most removed from the theoretical sense-dimension of traditional philosophy. Heidegger indicates this distance early on in his lectures in order to make the enactment-sense a theme of phenomenology itself. In this sense of the Origin then, the Origin is not experienced as a something, but rather appears in Dasein’s life as a distress about the possibility of becoming distant from it. Accordingly, all of Dasein’s businesses and activities are attempts to avoid this distress by objectifying it into everyday, positive kinds of vocations; one feels, for instance, that one is missing this or that to be whole, one wants to become someone, etc. (viz., the predominance of the content-sense).^[27] In fact, Dasein does not even exist in such everyday mode; its life is meaningless not because it has no content, but because the original form of meaningfulness is not reducible to what-content. Instead, the enactment and relation senses express whether one is lapsing from the Origin or not.

As Heidegger explains it, the worry about lapsing from the Origin is a worry about the meaningfulness of enactment, and the problem of the destruction of this meaningfulness “must be purely preserved and secured against collapsing into subject matter-ness.”^[28] Meaning, Heidegger says, must be grasped existentially–enactmentally.^[29] In light of Heidegger’s identification of “existential” with “enactmental,” it is clear that the worry about lapsing from the Origin is an existential concern. In Scott M. Campbell’s words, “life’s factical retrieval of its own origin is the self’s actualization of itself.”^[30] In light of what I have said regarding Heidegger’s understanding of experience as a non-theoretical horizon of intelligibility, the existential concern must “make sense” in a sense that is prior to the thematic level of the contents of experience. In other words, the worry must make sense to me, but not in terms of anything that could be found in the world. Accordingly, to think meaning “enactmentally” is to keep in mind that anything thematically meaningful embodies some or other form of possible manifestation (e.g. as an object, a tool, a thing of beauty) which is determined by an existential stance of the one for whom it is manifesting as such. More precisely, to think “enactmentally” is to refer to the sense of the very existential stance which underlies the form of any thematically present meaning.

Furthermore, since all reality is determined in its how of manifestation through Dasein’s relation to the Origin, the Origin is not to be thought as only relevant for Dasein’s life, but as determining the Being of beings as such. This is also the view of Campbell, for whom Heidegger’s ontological project is in many respects “an exploration of the ontological origin of life.”^[31] Moreover, according to Campbell, Heidegger’s early thinking of life as having an origin is a clear indication that he was moving towards the meaning of Being from the very start. That is to say, the existential concern of not lapsing form the Origin anticipates Heidegger’s notion of “care,” i.e. the fact of Dasein’s existential concern with its own Being. This very concern, however, must be thought enactmentally in the sense I have stressed without collapsing into a worry about some or other life-content. Everything spiritual, Heidegger says, “requires the enactmental appropriation.”^[32]

As I have shown here, the triple sense-schema is indispensable to the notion of the Origin since Dasein’s relation to it embodies a standard of existence unintelligible in objective terms. Rather than a universal rule that is accessible, in principle, to anyone as a what-content, it can only be experienced by Dasein itself as a ground of its own distressed concern for existence. In this light, the standard of existence is thus determined by the peculiar sort of truth belonging to the enactment sense.^[33] This sort of truth, however, could never have been explicitly noted by philosophy before Heidegger pointed out the sense-dimension appropriate to it. Indeed, speaking about the Origin in terms of the relation- and enactment-senses between 1919 and 1920, Heidegger departed from the sphere of what is traditionally acknowledged as philosophy; instead, he suggested that the relation-sense precedes the determination of something as present to consciousness. Neither a category nor a general characteristic of beings, this relation-sense is a form of presence of whatever appears in the context of the event of experience. Whether this form is original depends on the mode of life’s self-enactment, i.e. on the way it opens itself in regard to its own Origin. The sense of such openness (enactment) and the sense of a corresponding form of the world’s presence (relation)^[34] are first distinguished from the sense-form of a “something” (a being) in Heidegger’s triple schema of sense in the early Freiburg lectures.

Crucially, the distinction between the different kinds of sense allowed for the conception of the form of reality’s dependence on one’s non-thematic self-positioning in relation to the truth of the Origin of life. In other words, it affords thinking that what reality is, i.e. the way reality reveals itself to human experience, can be more or less original, depending on the quality of one’s ongoing effort of staying close to a sort of truth which has nothing to do with “objective” (or, for that matter, “subjective”) reality, and yet is determinative for the very sense of one’s life. The Origin of life is thus a central moment in Heidegger’s novel understanding of what human existence is and how it determines the Being of phenomena. That is to say, we should not simply identify the Origin of the early lectures with the notion of Being in Being and Time, but we should keep in mind the enactmental character of Dasein’s relation to the Origin as constituting a particular dimension of what will later be named Dasein’s transcendence towards Being. Indeed, in Being and Time Heidegger writes that the Origin (Ursprung) of Dasein’s Being, in its power, towers above what is originated.^[35] Moreover, penetrating to the Origin ontologically, Heidegger writes, we do not come to what is ontically obvious but rather discover the questionable character of everything that seems obvious.^[36] In this light, I suggest that in the early lectures Heidegger initiates this ontological investigation of the Origin; an investigation that, by illuminating the enactmental character of phenomena, discovers their questionable character. Importantly, as Ernst Tugendhat notices, there is a peculiar sense of the truth of enactment operating already in the early lectures, and it is a kind of truth which has nothing to do with Dasein’s wordily businesses, including traditional philosophical subject matters. The highest aim of Heidegger’s philosophy, then, is to open the subject area of our relation to the Origin and accordingly, of the truth of the Origin.

3 The truth of enactment in the “Phenomenology of Religious Life”

In the lectures I discussed until now, Heidegger could only indicate the general way in which Dasein is determined by its relation to the Origin. His interpretation of Christianity given in the 1920–1921 lectures on “Phenomenology of Religious Life,” on the other hand, offers a more concrete explication of this relation via the life of the Apostle Paul and the works of St. Augustine. Addressing these lectures now will allow us to zoom in on the sort of truth which I have previously linked to the Origin and to the enactment-sense of life, while illuminating the difficulty of achieving a purely “secular” conceptualization of this truth. The aim of this presentation of Heidegger’s religious seminars is not to claim that the Origin can be identified with God, but to suggest that Heidegger’s reading of the early Christians points towards a genuinely religious dimension of the Origin, which was interpreted by Paul in terms of the Judeo-Christian God. That is to say, even if Heidegger does not accept this traditional interpretation, it was only possible because a genuine moment of religiosity does belong to the truth of the Origin. Namely, this moment is related to the standard of primordial enactment in the sense of an inescapable existential crisis permeating one’s entire life and serving as a compass of whether one is able to withstand one’s automatic tendency to distance from one’s ownmost spiritual essence, and to struggle to stay near the Origin.

While the sense of enactment needed for accessing the truthfulness of existence (i.e. the standard of primordial enactment) may be unintelligible in terms of traditional philosophy, to Heidegger’s mind, it would seem to be precisely what early Christianity conceptualized as the divine truth that directs personal transformation. Indeed, in the “Basic Problems of Phenomenology,” given two years prior to his religious lectures, Heidegger had already declared Christianity as the “deepest historical paradigm for the peculiar focus of factical life”^[37] needed to bring the non-thematic source of all meaning (the self-world) to life. Indeed, one of the aims of phenomenology is to clear Christianity from ancient philosophy’s forms of expression.^[38] Even before the “Basic Problems of Phenomenology,” Heidegger had seen in Schleiermacher a sense of divine presence which does not add a supersensible object (God) to the world, but rather manifests, in all things, as what we can now point out as a relation-sense – the world is given to the pious man as fully dependent on God without, however, positing an objective conception of God besides it.^[39] That is to say, a peculiar wholeness is co-present,^[40] though still not given as a “what.” In this light, Schleiermacher’s influence on Heidegger’s formulation of an original domain of life, its relation to a peculiarly religious experience, and its opposition to calculative thinking,^[41] is clear years before the lectures on Paul.^[42] However, Schleiermacher’s thought illuminates only the peculiar relation-sense of religion,^[43] i.e. only the way the world is given to the pious man; that is, it does not address the very source of all givenness as it is determined by one’s existential worry and one’s struggle not to flee from it. It is this later sense of one’s enactment of life that needs to be illuminated in order to address the religious sense of the Origin specifically.

It is Paul, Heidegger says, who makes enactment a theme, thus illuminating the nature of the original truth which cannot be thematized but must rather be experienced in the original enactment.^[44] In this original enactment, one does not flee from the existential distress but faces the suffering of uncertainty and of the imminent danger of a fall. The complexes of such enactments correspond to a radical transformation of one’s mode of temporality from an objectified time – one criticized by Heidegger in his 1916 article “The Concept of Time in Historical Science” – to a future-oriented, kairological awaiting of the Lord’s second coming. Accordingly, the non-thematic standard of original enactment entails a relation between its truth and a particular mode of temporality.

Though the truth of the Origin thus turns out to be somehow related to the way human beings experience time, this relation between the Origin and temporality does not appear explicitly in the “Phenomenology of Religious Life.” It is my conviction, nevertheless, that, though Heidegger does not explicitly connect the notion of the Origin from his previous courses to the phenomenon of the early Christians’ authentic existence^[45] as he understands it, both themes address the need to face a distress intrinsic to human existence as such and the truthfulness of one’s life as determined by a mode of such facing. In both cases, one chooses to either flee or struggle with his own tendency for falling, thus acquiring a steadfastness, which makes available – though not thematically – a standard of life appropriate to human existence as such. As Heidegger reads in Augustine, to be steadfast in the most certain truth is the good.^[46] Moreover, only when Paul “withstands the anguish of his life, can he enter into a close connection with God.”^[47] Importantly, Paul’s anguish is not caused by some life-contents but belongs to the effort to have life itself, which, as Heidegger interprets it, means to enact life^[48] in terms of Paul’s religiosity. It is this Paul’s existential torment that Heidegger sees as the Origin of (a non-theoretical|) theology.^[49] Needless to say, this is the same Origin we met earlier as the Origin of life as such. Paul’s distress, writes Scott Campbell, comes from the Origin.^[50] Benjamin Crowe goes as far as saying that primitive Christianity became Heidegger’s philosophical “origin.”^[51] I suggest, however, that early Christianity merely illuminated the religious nature of the truth of the Origin, which, however, Heidegger did not see as exclusively belonging to the Christian life-experience.^[52] Indeed, Paul’s experience merely illuminates that the truth of the Origin is revealed in steadfastness and in it alone. It is experienced as a quality of enactment, never as a “positive,” universal truth.

Thus, we may say that, for Heidegger, Paul’s distress is an “enactmental” one. This existential distress “articulates his authentic situation and determines each moment of his life.”^[53] Accordingly, the very relation to God is decided in the dimension of enactment (i.e. an existential dimension). Only in this dimension can Heidegger find the relation between faith and truth. Truth, Heidegger says, “stands in a relational connection to faith.”^[54] This, according to Heidegger, means that “faith itself represents a context of enactment which can experience and increase.”^[55] Clearly then, Heidegger relates both truth and faith to the enactmental dimension of existence, which he has proclaimed in previous lectures to be guided by the existential worry not to lapse from the Origin. The norm of phenomenology, Heidegger says in “Basic Problems of Phenomenology,” is not truth in the sense of “correctness” or falsity, but rather originality (Ursprünglichkeit). ^[56] In light of Heidegger’s identification of the existential worry and the enactmental dimension of life, truth as originality is precisely the enactmental truth of the Origin, i.e. of what makes up a primordial enactment that does not lapse from the Origin. For the Christians, the love of truth is the enactment of truth which enables a “testing” of the divine.^[57] Indeed, even the fear of God is nothing other but a fear of a separation from the good, i.e. from the truth of enactment, experienced by the Christians as the majesty of God.^[58]

Restraining from a particularly Christian terminology of what Heidegger calls “the philosophy of the ancients,” can we not see that the enactmental truth and the fear of losing it point towards the truth of the Origin and the existential worry to lapse from it? In “Phenomenology of Religious Life,” however, Heidegger goes further by pointing out that the very existential distress in the basis of Paul’s life has a temporal dimension. It is this peculiar temporality of awaiting that will help Heidegger to think the Origin as the ground of gods in his later writings. Moreover, if the Origin in the early lectures already entails a peculiar sort of truth which was only explicitly experienced by the early Christians, and if the temporal mode of this truth is something that indeed requires an enactment of life that is in some sense religious, Heidegger’s earliest thought already contains an essential element of religiosity and is unthinkable without it. To think such a Heideggerian sense of enactmental religiosity, however, we must distance from the dogmatic Christian understanding of divinity. That is, we must stay “in between” Heidegger’s explicit phenomenological motivations and his implicit religious intuitions. On the one hand, since the Origin is not a metaphysical entity, Heidegger achieved an understanding of human existence as essentially concerned with the loss of the Origin without leaning on any religious metaphysics. On the other hand, his formulations of the kind of experiential truth that grants “authentic” existence its priority, and the kind of temporal structure tightly related to the manifestation of this truth, both depend on a uniquely Christian interpretation of life.

After all, as it is clearly seen in Heidegger’s reading of Paul, the very model of personal transformation as guided by a transcendent force inexpressible in terms of objective what-content is clearly closer to a religious understanding of life than to any of its theoretically-philosophical conceptions. Moreover, in St. Augustine Heidegger recognizes a sense of the “self” operative in the event of experience as life’s openness and as a form of all being-affected. In other words, life is not merely always related to something (viz., a pseudo-transcendence model of intentionality) but rather exists as an openness in which the self-giving character of the world is actualized for the first time in different modes of life’s self-enactment. Such an Augustinian notion of openness perfectly fits the relational essence of life, surpassing the subject–object dichotomy and allowing Heidegger to tie selfhood to the enactmental truth of the Origin. Indeed, the self is seen by Augustine as a groundless openness, existing out of one’s immediate reach, i.e. as ungraspable in terms of a secular representation of a self-positing consciousness.^[59] Only thus understood can selfhood be at once determined by the Origin, enact a relation in which phenomena appear in either original or non-original way, and be unable to reach the Origin except in experiencing nearness to it by persisting in the struggle to withstand existential distress and renew the primordial enactment. What sustains self’s openness, then, is life’s motivational essence fuelled by the existential concern not to lapse from the Origin, a concern which is interpreted by the early Christians as a call towards God.

From this perspective, the central point for the Origin’s phenomenology is that in both early Christian life and in everyday life, it is possible to experience (even if only by avoidance) that there is a truth which is a standard of existence. This truth, however, cannot be thought in a traditionally secular terms such as, for example, ethical norms. In the different modes of enactment, one is either closer or further from this truth. In other words, Dasein is sustained in its existence by an implicit striving towards a standard that is radically beyond it, unreachable by knowledge, yet explicitly experienceable by the early Christians as distant and coming from the future. Unsurprisingly then, the period after Heidegger’s 1920–1921 religious lectures is frequently characterized as de-theologizing Christian ideas, laying the groundwork for Being and Time’s atheistic ontology. Yet, though for Heidegger the Origin is not God, it anticipates a peculiarly religious dimension of the truth of Being. That is to say, Being and Time did not require prior de-theologizing, since the sort of religiosity implicit to the Origin surpasses theology and is implicit to Being and Time. Namely, my thesis is not that Heidegger borrows certain Christian ideas, but that he uncovers an original sense of religiosity which traditional Christianity is unaware of. The sense of such an original religiosity, however, still needs to be explicated.

4 Separating religiosity from theology

As I have shown above, Heidegger’s religious seminars make clear that the truth of the Origin, i.e. the truth of life’s enactment-sense, operates only implicitly in authentic Christian experience, and even then, only selectively across Christian texts. Heidegger even reads Augustine selectively because, I argue, he is sometimes tempted to lean on a secure language of Neo-Platonic metaphysics, inevitably distancing himself from the genuine sphere of the enactment-sense. That is to say, even Augustine is tempted to express himself in philosophically-theoretical language. As we have seen, for Heidegger, using philosophical categories to explicate religious experience is inherently problematic precisely because Western philosophy overlooks the enactment-character of life peculiar to religious experience and its appropriate sense of truth. However, this is precisely what theology does. For this reason, in the manuscript for a planned seminar on medieval mysticism, Heidegger notes that theology’s central problem is its dependence on philosophy and on the situation of respective theoretical consciousness in general. Because of this dependence, theology has not found a basic posture that is appropriate for its object.^[60] Accordingly, Heidegger offers to divorce religiosity from theology.^[61] That is to say, if the only model for authentic existence and original truth is intertwined with a peculiar experience of the divine, “religiosity” – as divorced from the prejudices of theology’s traditional theoretical frameworks – is what associates that experience with some sort of divinity. In order to make the first step towards an understanding of such original divinity (i.e. the divinity of the Origin), I intend now to make this divorce explicit.

Roughly put, before Heidegger, the philosophy of religion, and theology functioned as the only two approaches to a theoretical understanding of religious experience. For Heidegger, both are inadequate precisely because they are exclusively theoretical. While philosophy takes religion as an object and analyses it according to its own philosophically-theoretical motivations, thereby immediately limiting its understanding, theology is indeed more genuinely motivated to understand religion “in-itself.” Nevertheless, theology is doomed to failure as well – at least as a way of understanding religious experience – since by seeking a theoretical representation of religiosity it must still borrow conceptual means from philosophical frameworks. Heidegger’s comprehension of this problem is influenced by Franz Overbeck’s works on Christian theology, where he expresses an extremely critical view on the possibility of a relation between faith and (theoretical) knowledge.^[62] As Overbeck writes in Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie,

Therefore, the doing of every theology, insofar as it brings faith into contact with knowledge, is in itself self-determining and irreligious in its composition, and no theology can ever arise where the foreign interest is not placed next to the religious interest.^[63]

According to Overbeck, the very theoretical motivation of theology includes something irreligious, and foreign to its object. Christianity, he writes, has endowed itself with theology in order to make itself possible in a world that it actually negates.^[64] In other words, theology contradicts its own motivation. This contradiction becomes clearer if we recall Heidegger’s point that in authentic Christian experience, the enactment-nature of phenomena is illuminated together with a peculiar sense of truth. What theology, burdened with metaphysics, understands to be an actual denial of the world in its what-content, is, according to Heidegger, an enactment “not” intrinsic to Christian life-experience.^[65] Namely, Heidegger’s hermeneutical deconstruction allows us to understand this “not” as a modification of the quality of one’s relation to the world; that is, what the early Christians deny is not the world as it has already been objectified and analysed by scientists and philosophers (as if, for example, it was not real), but the very tendency to conflate the world known as such with the original phenomena determined by Dasein’s self-positing in relation to the Origin. In other words, in enacting an authentic relation to the divine, early Christians distance themselves from a pre-thematic interpretation of the world in theoretical categories. Consequentially, theology tries to ground itself in what its object must deny in order to retain its own sense. For Overbeck, the main reason for this fallacy is that theologists speak of things about which they lack all intuition, experience, and inner conviction, and they do so in a form intended for others who similarly lack all such experience.^[66]

In this light, philosophy is in a better position since, though it cannot pretend to fully understand the kind of truth revealed in actual religious experience (as Heidegger argues in the Paul seminar), it can still have some pre-understanding of it with the help of formal indications.^[67] Philosophy’s only aim, Heidegger says in “Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression,” is to “draw attention” to the sphere of enactmental appropriation, i.e. to the sphere of the spiritual.^[68] Accordingly, depending on whether one has factically experienced anything that can be illuminated by the sense-directions formally indicated by phenomenology, this pre-understanding must be taken into one’s personal life and produce some degree of understanding. Though such understanding does not have to be fully determined in its content, it can, for example, see that there is definitely something that eludes comprehension. If, however, one’s experience lacks the required quality of having-experienced-oneself on the axis of enactment-truth, no matter how educated one is, or how hard one tries, no real understanding can be achieved. Theology meets the same problem, exacerbated by the fact that it uses theoretical language. Thus, according to Overbeck, theology does not make religiosity more accessible, but rather veils it and makes hard to see what is really religious in religion. Heidegger makes a similar distinction between religiosity and theology, at least all former theology, since he does describe a possibility of a new kind of theology, based on the phenomenology of religious life. Yet, before Heidegger’s “existential” reading of Paul, this “new” theology was still only hypothetical, such that Heidegger’s criticisms of theology must be understood as pertaining to theology in general, in a sense that Overbeck criticizes as well.

Following the breakthrough in religious thought Heidegger makes in the 1920–1921 lectures we have been discussing above, one might expect that from 1921 onward Heidegger would deepen his readings of primary Christian figures, securing a reputation as a religious revolutionist. Instead, from 1921 until the publishing of Being and Time, Heidegger makes a radical turn away from Christianity and towards Aristotle, to the extent that the period is sometimes regarded as one of de-theologization, wherein Heidegger borrows terms from Christianity, presumably stripping them from their theological meaning. And yet, “de-theologization” assumes that the “religious” terms Heidegger is using are genuinely operative in the context of theology. Moreover, it also assumes a dichotomy between theology and secular thought. If we understand this dichotomy in a traditional sense of systematic theology vs philosophy, both sides are criticized by Heidegger, though for different reasons. Both reasons, however, block the possibility of understanding the Origin; while theology loses its relation to religiosity of authentic experience by using unsuitable theoretical frameworks, philosophy is simply unaware of such authentic experience. In this light, both philosophy and theology fail to grasp the sense of divinity underlying the truth of enactment-sense; theology thinks such divinity too “philosophically,” while philosophy itself oversees it completely.

Given this impasse, I argue that Heidegger’s conviction about the need to divorce religiosity from theology problematizes the view that his critique of theology in general and his distancing from Christianity in particular express a secularization of the ideas developed in the religious seminars. Rather than “borrowing” something from a distinct discursive sphere named “theology” in order to apply it in another distinct sphere known traditionally as “philosophy” in order to illuminate a non-theoretical conception of experience, I suggest that Heidegger’s seemingly secularizing motivations belong to neither sphere, since the enactment-sense of existence is overlooked by them both. Instead, Heidegger’s seemingly secularizing motivations belong to what I suggest is his attempt to conceptualize the divinity of the Origin, that is, not to identify Being with God, but to express a genuine religious dimension inherent to the truth of Being/Origin without assuming the existence or non-existence of God. However, to comprehend what makes religiosity genuine, we need a positive indication of the way “theoretical” essence of both theology and philosophy covers up the enactment-dimension of religiosity in relation to its temporality. Indeed, “theoretical” does not mean a mere objectification of something more “fluid” or “alive” but a falsification of the temporal mode of enactment as such. In the lecture course “Introduction to Phenomenological Research,” Heidegger presents it as a theoretical mode of care which is a “care about an already known knowledge.”^[69] That is to say, both philosophy and theology are theoretical in that they seek a truth that is “already there,” prior to genuine enactment. In “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle,” Heidegger has already pointed out the temporal character of theoretical attitude:

The “before” of the theoretical attitude thereby turns back to life relucently and presents itself as the highest value in the form of Objectivity, scientificity, free intellectual honesty and impartiality, and as the tribunal of a theoretical reason whose demonstrations are ever correct.^[70]

Connecting the ideas from two courses, Heidegger here characterizes the mode of care in human existence as we find it in everyday life with the “before” in which all theoretical thinking is rooted. As he goes on to explain in “Introduction to Phenomenological Research,” Heidegger attacks Descartes for fortifying the temporal mode of theoretical thinking. By equating truth with certainty, Heidegger argues, Descartes gave this mode of care its most telling form. This is problematic since, as we have seen in the light of Heidegger’s triple sense-schema, only a reified content, already experienced and stripped of its relation- and enactment-senses, can be “certain” in a strict sense, i.e. can possess a certainty of a positive something (like an object). Keeping this in mind, a mode of caring about the world that is motivated by having such certainty, must interpret experience in terms of what is already known and secure – the role of a priori is to safeguard this security. In this light, to divorce religiosity from theology, we must deeply transform the way we think about reality and truth, distancing from all a priori constructs. Heidegger exemplifies the predominance of the a priori in theoretical thought as characterizing Husserl’s phenomenology.^[71] As in all philosophy previous to fundamental ontology, Husserl tries to formulate a sort of universal normativity which will secure our understanding of the world once and for all. However, the world’s relationality, namely, the priority of the enactment- and relation-senses over the content-sense, does not allow universal normativity detached from human existence, but only a normativity which is “normative” for someone; normativity can only be investigated in terms of the structure of Being of that for whom it is a normativity, i.e. Dasein.^[72] This dependence of normativity on Dasein is derived from Heidegger’s idea that the form of world’s phenomenality (relation-sense) is tightly related to the Being of Dasein (enactment-sense). Hence, the fact that Dasein cares about the world in a mode of securing its a priory structure is related to Dasein’s quality of Being.

In the 1923 summer semester, Heidegger calls the underlying principle of the genesis of such a philosophically-theoretical attitude curiosity (Neugier).^[73] As he explains, a theoretical glance upon the world is a kind of curiosity, a detached wanting-to-know in order to have a secure ground; it de-interprets the world through a particular understanding of truth. In a critical analysis of Aristotle’s appraisal of theoretical contemplation from the same time, Heidegger labels it as covert hedonism, as a pleasure of enjoying the eternal. Such covert hedonism serves an important role in one’s existence, as well as in the philosophical motivations of Heidegger’s contemporaries and basically of everyone who does philosophy “for the fun of it.” For example, Heidegger accuses Husserl of implicitly urging his readers not to have any part in existence that is essentially insecure on the grounds of his commitment to an existential security of the theoretical attitude.^[74] Indeed, according to Heidegger, caring about an already known knowledge is nothing other than anxiety in the face of existence. ^[75] Existence, after all, is insecure not in the sense of the mere unpredictability of events, but in a much deeper sense arising from the enactmental nature of phenomena; no kind of what-ground on which Dasein could lean is independent from Dasein’s actualization of its sense. In other words, no ground can be universally justified. And yet, care about an already known knowledge “justifies” knowledge by knowledge itself.^[76] Deluding oneself by such “justifications,” I suggest, implies that one holds anxiously to a phantom of universally biding norms, which can – sometimes in a most sublime ethical form – relieve one from her responsibility to withstand the distressful insecurity of existence. After all, what makes both philosophy and theology “theoretical” is grounded in an attempt to flee from the existential worry not to lapse form the Origin.

Consequentially, it is not accidental that both philosophy and theology miss the enactment-dimension of life and have no access to the Origin. Rather, as the “Phenomenology of Religious Life” already makes clear, the theoretical attitude is a way of fleeing the distress by a falsification of original temporality in terms of what is “before” and the a priori. Indeed, while genuine enactment points towards a futural openness to the spontaneity of self-revelation, one’s absorption in everydayness turns the temporal order around so that it could seem that what already exists is what causes the feeling of uneasiness. In this context, the daily troubles regarding beings whose meaning has been already determined seem to be the reason for existential distress and the way for its dissolution. Even if one is seemingly directed towards solving her troubles in the future, that which is to be solved belongs to the world that is “simply there in a straightforward manner,” meaning, to what has an a priori precedence. Being-concerned with worldly matters thereby leaves out the world itself and induces carefreeness in regard to it, such that the world seems to be nothing but the worldly objects and matters.

Indeed, the mistake of thinking that the world is just there on its own is a mistake of conflating the world with an aggregate of objectively present (i.e. interpreted), absolutely certain, things; it is the result of an essential carefreeness in which care is asleep.^[77] Yet, as we know from Heidegger’s previous seminars, such falling asleep by being absorbed by everydayness is a way in which Dasein avoids its existential distress. So, both the everyday and the philosophically-scientific oblivion of the relational character of the world are similarly motivated by a constant flight in the face of existence. In fact, flight in the face of existence must be taken as a particular quality of the Being of enactment. Consequently, the first and the most important statement of fundamental ontology is that the truth of the Origin, namely, of the Being of enactment, remains unavailable in such flight. Particularly, the philosophical core of fundamental ontology lies in the understanding that the very truth philosophy is after, i.e. the truth of the Origin, is the same truth from which every human being anxiously flees. Consequently, philosophy cannot fulfil its own task by thinking up new solutions or even exposing new problems, but only through a personal transformation of the philosopher himself.

Given this particular understanding of philosophy’s task, it should be no surprise that it is Kierkegaard who anticipates the difference between the traditionally available kind of truth, and the truth of the Origin. It is also Kierkegaard who points out the role of temporality in what Heidegger later designates as the two modes of care. Caring about an already known knowledge can be compared to Kierkegaard’s conception of recollection, in which one discovers what is already there, like Menon’s slave led by Socrates step by step to recollect a certain a priori truth. It is easy to see how theoretically oriented philosophers proceed in the same way by assuming that there is some kind of eternal, already settled truth, merely waiting to be noticed. Kierkegaard contrasts this mode of experiencing truth with repetition, which looks forward in order to bring truth into existence rather than looking back to a truth that is already there (however undiscovered).^[78] Such forward-facing, creative discovery is only possible as a transformative self-constancy of the self; it is a repetition of the self. For Kierkegaard, like Heidegger, a theoretically-aesthetic attitude cannot experience such repetition, since repetition is too transcendent for it.^[79] This kind of creative truth dependent on a particular constancy of the self is one that Heidegger is able to explicate philosophically without being dependent on Kierkegaard’s theology. For Heidegger, repetition is a repetition of enactment; it has no external what-criteria. Indeed, genuine enactment is determined by an intrinsic demand to be repeated; it is self-transparent in a way that reveals the need of a decisive constancy which alone leads one to experiencing the truth that is not already there.

It is in this mode of care that Heidegger understands early Christian life-experience as determined towards a kind of truth that is yet to come. Yet this is also the mode of care which Heidegger explicates in a seemingly secular context as opposing the theoretical postulation of truth that is already there. I say “seemingly secular” because it becomes really hard to think in a traditionally secular way about the sort of truth that says nothing about anything in the already existing world, is unobjectifiable, and is “born” in a particular mode of life-enactment revealing one’s personal nearness to the Origin of life. Indeed, in later writings, the truth of Beyng will bear such characteristics and will be tightly related to the nearness and absconding of gods. In early lectures, on the other hand, Heidegger seems to insist that philosophy is atheistic by definition. In the following section, I shall analyse the relation between Heidegger’s lectures following the “Phenomenology of Religious Life,” in which Heidegger turns decidedly towards Aristotle, and the religiosity of his early phenomenology. This relation, as I shall argue, remains implicit precisely in order to enact the divorce between what is traditionally understood as “religion” and Heidegger’s own religious intuitions.

5 The implicit religiosity of Heidegger’s “a-theism”

In the winter semester immediately following his 1921 course on Augustine, Heidegger first featured a seminar with Aristotle in its title. “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle” heralded his developing focus on the role of historicity in philosophy not just by explicating its importance but by actually addressing the history of philosophy. Though Heidegger would not explicitly discuss the relationship between ontology and the Origin until Being and Time in 1927, “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle” presented the first steps of redefining philosophy as independent from theology, while pointing towards original religiosity ungraspable in traditional philosophical terms. In what follows, I will examine these first “post-Christian” seminars in order to illuminate Heidegger’s departure from traditional philosophy and show how his shift towards the language of fundamental ontology is intertwined with his view on the difficult relation between the philosopher and the divine.

In the first hour of the “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle,” Heidegger defines philosophy as “historiological cognition of factical life (i.e. it understands in terms of enactmental history).” It must, he continues, “come to a categorial (existentiell) understanding and articulation (i.e. an enactmental knowledge), wherein what is separable is not interpreted as an ensemble and an Origin, on the basis of what is traditionally separated, but is interpreted positively – on the basis of the fundamental comportment towards factical life, life as such.”^[80] As Heidegger has it here, a historical grasp of philosophy is not a chronologically ordered series of ideas, but rather an understanding of history as an enactmental eventuality of factical life. Based on such an enactmentally-historical understanding of life, there can be a positive interpretation of what is separable. That is to say, the Origin should not be taken in its traditional separation from the multiplicity of phenomena, but must be rethought as being-separable from the phenomena in a new sense, articulated in existentiell categories (enactmental knowledge) determined by the truth of enactment.

Yet, so far in Heidegger’s seminars, the only real access to the truth of enactment was rooted in a peculiar how of Christian life; according to the 1920 course on Paul, Christian having-become, as a mode of being in which such truth is experienced, is an acceptance of the how of Christian life.^[81] Even though this truth itself does not have to be (nor can it ever be) explicitly formulated, in order for it to determine philosophical articulations, it must be reachable in some way apart from the radical conversion Heidegger recognized in the life of early Christians. Thus, existentiell categories required for enactmental knowledge (for philosophy as such) will only be correct, i.e. related to the original truth, if the how of philosophizing can secure such access.

In “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle” it becomes clear that “questionability” is the characteristic of the Christian how that is central to Heidegger; as we have seen, Heidegger has previously pointed out that in early Christianity a radical emphasis on the self-world is enacted as a way of making the original sphere of life accessible.^[82] This emphasis, however, is only genuine as a questioning of the self in its historical existence. Consequently, Heidegger takes “questionability” to be determinative of fundamental comportment. Questionability (Fraglichkeit), he says, sharpens the comportment towards historical eventuality (Geschichte); it is the how of the historiological (Historisch).^[83] Heidegger inquinates this point even earlier, in the preceding course “Augustine and Neoplatonism,” arguing that the questioning attitude is what leads Augustine to the how of happy life, that is, to the enactment of authentic existence.^[84] Thus, we learn from the Augustine seminar that “questioning” is not meant as a question of objective presence (theoretical questioning), but rather as a peculiar form of self-experience, viz. I must become a question to myself. Only on the basis of such an attitude can philosophy proceed as an “ever present insecurity of skeptical questioning.”^[85] Since the object of philosophy is life in its self-enactment, the true having of philosophy is a comportment determined by self-questionability. Philosophy thus should be understood as having the very fundaments of one’s Being.^[86]

And yet, according to a closer examination of Heidegger’s criticism of theoretical thinking, by overlooking the Origin, philosophy evidently operates far from the fundaments of human beings’ Being and must be reviewed in light of its deviation from original self-questionability. Questionability and historicity thereby constitute the hermeneutical investigation of the forms in which philosophy and theology understand their subject matter. As Heidegger emphasizes in “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle,” they do so based on what is traditionally separated. In this view, for example, addressing existing philosophy in its separation from theology is insufficient for achieving a positive interpretation of life. On the contrary, Heidegger claims that Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were theologians – and so was Kant, if we do not downgrade him to a ridiculous role of epistemologist.^[87] This means that philosophy as such apart from theological motivations has not been achieved even in its most “rationalistic” branches. Hence, hermeneutical investigation must discover what philosophy is. The same, however, is true for Christianity; it cannot be thought of as being entirely separated from certain conditioning interpretations external to it. Heidegger points out the inevitability of such interpretations in the first Aristotle seminar:

The “life-nexuses” of the original Christianity have already matured within a surrounding world whose life was co-determined, in regard to its way of expressing itself, through the specifically Greek interpretation of existence and through Greek conceptuality (terminology). Through Paul and in the apostolic epoch, and especially in the patristic age, an incorporation into the Greek life-world was carried out.^[88]

As Heidegger explains, in order to delineate the truly religious core of Christianity, it is not enough to abolish theology and return to early Christianity, as Overbeck thought, since even the apostolic epoch is already incorporated into the Greek life-world and its understanding of the apostolic epoch. In the later writings, Heidegger will repeatedly explicate how certain movements in Greek thought indeed initiated a distancing of philosophy from the original sphere of experience. But as early as 1922, Heidegger insinuates that foreign theoretical elements became constitutive in both philosophy and theology. Accordingly, the theoretization of life is omnipresent. To distil the original sphere of philosophy then, one must not only clear it from the results of its own self-theoretization (a kind of philosophical “overthinking”), but also from the theological elements brought to it form a theoreticized religiosity. In this way alone, the genuine notion of the truth of the Origin can be achieved and investigated, both in the context of philosophy and in its relation to genuine religiosity. I argue that this is why early Heidegger tries to formulate a kind of thinking that is neither philosophy in the traditional sense, nor Christian theology. Rather, he seeks a new sense of philosophy which will be founded on a how of accessing the Origin. As I previously argued above, Heidegger understands this how as a radical questionability, and – enacted in philosophy – this how of philosophizing must be such that it allows access to the same level of disclosure as the one Heidegger illustrated in his earlier interpretation of authentic Christian life. In the following passages, Heidegger presents the subtle relation of this questioning how of philosophizing to a genuinely religious life:

Questionability is not religious, although it alone might lead to a situation of religious decision. My comportment in philosophising is not religious, even if as a philosopher I can also be a religious person. “The art resides precisely in that”: to philosophize and, in so doing, to be genuinely religious; i.e., to take up factically one’s worldly, historiological-historical task in philosophy, in action and in a concrete word of action, though not in religious ideology and fantasy. ^[89]

Here, Heidegger continues, philosophy, in its radical, self-posing questionability, must be a-theistic as a matter of principle. “Precisely on account of its basic intention, philosophy must not presume to possess or determine God. The more radical philosophy is, the more determinately is it on a path away from God; yet, precisely in the radical actualization of the “away,” it has its own difficult proximity to God. For the rest, philosophy must not overly speculate because of that but has, instead, it own task to fulfill.”^[90]

As seen in these passages, despite the fact that genuine religiosity should have no quarrel with philosophy, apart from the traditional positing of God and corresponding dogmas, there is a great difficulty in speaking of them in relationship to one another. In order for philosophy to fulfil its own task and by doing so to be genuinely religious, the genuinely religious must be purified from theistic preconceptions, and philosophy must stay away from God, not because it denies God, but because it must stay away from all ready-made metaphysics. That is to say, if the art of philosophizing is to be genuinely religious without making use of “religious ideology and phantasy,” philosophy has to overcome all traditional metaphysics, since all metaphysics is essentially sense-flat, that is, determined by the content-sense alone. All religious “ideologies and phantasies” are religious contents and philosophy has nothing to say about them. Namely, questionability is not religious in a sense that it does not ask regarding “religious” issues such as, for example, the existence of God. Yet, it might lead to a situation of religious decision. Moreover, to philosophize is to be genuinely religious. There is no contradiction here since, for Heidegger, to philosophize and to be genuinely religious pertain to a mode of enactment of self-questioning. In this mode, one does not have to count oneself as religious or even think of religion, yet what she does can lead to a situation of religious decision in a form of either accepting the possibility that there is a sort of truth different from the traditionally secular notion (as something that exists prior to its revelation) or fleeing from it into theoretical thinking. Accordingly, it does not matter what the philosopher believes, but only whether his enactment of self-questionability is sincere enough to let go of all a priori delineations of thinking, including the secular-religious dichotomy.^[91] Heidegger’s atheism is thus methodological in nature, because it rejects only what has not yet matured to the status of being genuinely religious.^[92] In fact, Heidegger only reluctantly names the actualization of such maturation “philosophy;” in the opening of his “Introduction to Phenomenological Research” course in the winter semester of 1923–1924 Heidegger go so far as to declare that traditional philosophical tasks have nothing to do with his aim – that philosophy is at its end.^[93]

Given this early declaration in 1923, Heidegger actually announces the end of philosophy about four years before the publishing of Being and Time. At the very least, this earlier announcement insinuates that Being and Time, in which the Being-beings and Origin-originated pairs first enter the phenomenological discourses of the twentieth century, is not a philosophical treatise, at least not in a traditional sense. It is, I suggest, a philosophical treatise in a more original sense, since it expresses Heidegger’s early attempts to make the Origin accessible. Indeed, Heidegger writes in Being and Time that an ontological penetration into the Origin reveals the questionability of everything that seems ontically obvious.^[94] The Origin, we read, towers above the originated.^[95] Similarly, in the summer semester of 1927 (“Basic Problems of Phenomenology”) Heidegger identifies temporality with the Origin and repeats that the Origin is richer than anything that originates from it.^[96] Next summer in “Metaphysical Foundations of Logic” we hear that the neutrality of the term “Dasein,” indicating not a particular human being but the Being of Dasein determining that being for which “its proper mode of being in a definite sense is not indifferent,” is the potency of the Origin (die Mächtigkeit des Ursprunges).^[97] Notably as well, in “Logic, the Question of Truth,” Heidegger interprets Kant’s “intuitus originarius” as originally giving Being to what is intuited.^[98] Combining Heidegger’s references to the Origin during this period, it is clear that, though Heidegger’s main themes are Dasein, Being, and temporality, all three are related to an ontological sense of the Origin, namely to its (original) temporal dimension, Dasein’s existential concern to exist properly (not to lapse from the Origin), and to beings’ ontological dependence on the way Dasein faces the existential concern. In this light, the end of philosophy is the end of a traditional, non-original philosophy, that is, of a philosophy whose themes do not aim at revealing the Origin, i.e. at making it accessible by guiding one’s enactment of self-questionability.

Accordingly, the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time is not a theoretical questioning “about” Dasein, but is the radical self-questionability aiming at the question of Being.^[99] Self-questioning leads to the question of Being because, as original enactment, it transforms the questioner and brings her near the Origin. What is decisive, Heidegger says already in 1921, is the mode of enactment, and indeed the Being of enactment.^[100] The “leap,” which Heidegger proclaims in 1919 as needed for deciding the life and death of philosophy,^[101] is nothing other but the enactment of questionability. Such an enactmental questionability is philosophy as a struggle against “ruinance,”^[102] a term indicating one’s movement of lapsing from the Origin. An actualization (enactment) of philosophical questioning, Heidegger says, brings forth the leap.^[103]

Yet, as we have seen, this questioning “must be a-theistic as a matter of principle,”^[104] not however in a sense of denying God, but merely in a sense of “staying away” from God.^[105] Indeed, questionability, understood as determining one’s mode of enactment, must stay essentially non-thematic; it is prior to any contents, religious or otherwise. As enactment, questionability is both a radical self-questionability and a questioning of Being. That is so, since enactment is the enactment of Being, happening each time according to Dasein’s mode of facing the existential concern. And yet, as Heidegger says, to be genuinely religious is to philosophize in this original way. The full meaning of this relation will only be unfolded in Heidegger’s writings of the late 30s where questioning Beyng will reveal an implicit and necessary possibility of a divinization of Beyng.^[106] We can, however, try to extract the sense of “religiosity” and “divinity” which Heidegger could have in mind in the years before Being and Time. What we need to look for are particular characteristics of enactment which characterize its relation to the Origin by transgressing the traditional rationality of theoretical thinking, offering thus something that, as Heidegger says, towers over beings in its power, and guide the leap in which humanity must become something other than merely rational animal. In particular, these characteristics must explain the binding (from Latin religare) essence of existence so that this binding would belong in some sense to the sphere of the godly, without however assuming something like a Judeo-Christian God. As I shall argue in Section 6, the Origin is that which indicates this binding godly element in Heidegger’s earliest thinking of Being.

6 Luther and Aristotle – the divinity of the Origin

As we have seen, philosophy as radical questionability pertains to a mode of the Being of enactment. The kind of truth revealed in authentic life determines the enactmental quality of Dasein’s Being; it is the measure of its proper existence. Importantly, while this kind of experiential truth is unfamiliar to Western philosophy, it is expressed in the descriptions of authentic Christian life-experience. Consequently, the question of whether such truth can be understood outside of Christian thought is crucial for philosophy. In fact, philosophy’s ability to address original truth regarding the Being of beings and the Being of Dasein depends on the outcome of that truth. Since prior to Heidegger philosophy was unaware of the problem of Dasein’s enactmental Being, a positive answer can only be brought forward by redefining what philosophy is. To be sure, this does not mean that philosophy must lean on Christian theology, since theology itself misses the triple sense-structure of phenomena. Instead, philosophy as fundamental ontology must incorporate this sense-structure; the Being of enactment is an ontological formulation of Dasein’s historical movement as determined by existential distress. This movement is directed either towards or against a particular truth belonging to the most radical sense of self-transcendence – it is literally beyond any positive expression.

As we have seen, where the main historical task of theology was to explicate this original sense of truth, it failed in doing so.^[107] Thus, Heidegger takes up this task, announcing in 1923 that his companions in research are two seemingly irreconcilable figures: Luther and Aristotle.^[108] Aristotelian logic represents the roots of all Western conceptualization of truth, while Luther saw clearly how a historically determined, de-interpretation of such a conceptualization hides the existential sense of genuine religiosity.^[109] In this last section of my examination of the role of the Origin in Heidegger’s early thought, addressing Aristotle and Luther will help further clarify the relation between the truth of enactment (i.e. of the Origin), temporality, and genuine religiosity in a sense of non-dogmatic divinity, in the very basis of the project of fundamental ontology.

First of all, for Heidegger, Luther had carried out a counter-strike to a scholastic reception of Aristotle.^[110] Thesis 19 of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation attacks the scriptural basis in the Letter to Romans that had been used to justify the adaptation of Greek philosophical conceptuality,^[111] such that in Luther – just as in Paul – Heidegger found a holistic, non-material understanding of man, one that comprehended the difference between flesh and spirit as an enactmental shift in one’s whole Being.^[112] Thus, I suggest that in Luther, Heidegger recognized an anticipation of the idea of Dasein’s turning away from the truth of enactment as determining its whole Being in the most radical way. It is this radicality of the corruptio of man’s Being that constitutes Luther’s interpretation of sin. Yet, the meaning of what Luther indicated as the difference between flesh and spirit – a counter-movement opposing the fall of Dasein, and approaching the Origin – cannot be thought as any kind of a what, not even an invisible what. Alister E. McGrath emphasizes this point in Luther, explaining that for Luther, “[a] theologian is not the one who looks upon invisible things of God in visible things, but who perceives the visible parts of God as seeing in suffering and the cross.”^[113] McGrath insists that, for Luther, an essential element of faith is the transition from the cognitive to the existential level. Rather than being dependent on the divine esse, faith depends on the divine velle. ^[114] In Heidegger’s terms, the kind of truth thus accessible by faith is not theoretical (what-sense alone) but existential, that is, enactmental.^[115] Namely, the access to such truth is not a matter of a knowing relation to an already existing truth, but of becoming true, that is, of enacting an entrance into the sphere of truth, or, at least as it was for Luther, making oneself appropriate for the event of truth-entry (decided by God alone) to occur. This, for Luther, is the meaning of seeing the truth in the cross and the suffering.

In this context, sin is not a particular deed but a way in which human beings are disposed towards things^[116] – it is a mode of Dasein’s Being characterized by a particular quality of enactment. Thus, Brian Hansford Bowels seems to misunderstand both Luther and Heidegger when he insists that, unlike Luther, Heidegger cannot speak of the state of “original righteousness.”^[117] Admittedly, the original righteousness is not a positively determinable state somewhere in the past – which would be a theology of glory – but a peculiar sort of “being-right,” that is, of being-in-truth. What I mean by “being-in-truth” here is precisely the opposite of what Heidegger indicates when he says that falling Dasein is in “untruth.”^[118] Namely, it is a determination of Dasein’s mode of Being, i.e. of its quality of enactment as opposing the movement of lapsing from the Origin. This sense is close to what Heidegger sees in Aristotle as the highest form of discovering, namely the pure comprehension of the matter without speech.^[119] Yet, as I show further, it still goes beyond Aristotle, for rather than being a contemplation of an already existing something, it is an active openness to revelation as an appropriate spiritual mode of human existence. Such a truth for Luther is not invisible, but is rather seen directly in the suffering and the cross and hence belongs to the theology of the cross. Therefore, to “return” to the original righteousness means to achieve a transformation of one’s Being by enacting an authentic (right) relation to the Origin. That is, for Luther, righteousness is not a virtue but, as Benjamin Crowe puts it, pertains to salvation understood as a “possibility that is only really as possibility for God.”^[120] Taking “God” here as the highest truth, indeed, in Daniel Dahlstrom’s words, as “truth in the primary sense,”^[121] only a single step is needed to connect original righteousness with the truth of the Origin, on which Dasein essentially depends and from which it is anxious to lapse. That is to say, the truth of the Origin is binding-religious for its achievement is not up to one’s will, is not a thematic objective corresponding to some or other characteristic of one’s life – Dasein’s will for this or that virtue is already an expression of objectifying its lapsing from the Origin. Indeed, in primordial enactment Dasein can only make itself available for receiving a truth which cannot be achieved by human reason. This is precisely how Heidegger’ himself understands the nature of religious truth.^[122]

In this light, Heidegger’s reference to Luther as his “companion” in 1923 is then not at all surprising. Rather, as I understand it, Luther’s original righteousness is the sense-direction of Dasein’s primordial enactment (i.e. of “existence” in a strictly Heideggerian sense), and experiencing this sense-direction is characterized by an authentic, future-oriented temporality. Indeed, for Heidegger, Luther stresses that a philosophizing that does not care about the essences and accidents of things intuited in the present is not the philosophizing of a philosopher or a metaphysician, but of the Apostle (Paul).^[123] This “philosophizing of the Apostle” is thus clearly characterized by a mode of care different from the theoretical caring about the already known. In Heidegger’s view, both Paul and Luther consider creation to be disgusted by that which already is (in the past/present) and desiring of that which is not yet, in the future.^[124] However, as Heidegger points out, Luther later fell short in unfolding the imminent possibilities of this future-oriented position since he too fell under the spell of Greek conceptuality.^[125] Nevertheless, Luther’s original understanding of temporality as coming from the future rather than bearing the past, and as determining the direct experienceability of the divine in the suffering-withstanding of existential distress, point towards a peculiar sense of divinity of the Origin. Undoubtedly, Heidegger learns from Paul and Luther that genuine religiosity is only reachable by repeating the genuine enactment directed towards a radically transcendent truth beyond the already existing a priori categories. Indeed, any “secular” matters are simply irrelevant from the point of such transformation – it is not the things in the world that need to be changed, and not even what I believe in or how I act, but the very sense of “I,” “world,” and “action” must be questioned without presupposing any “rational” principles, but by leaping into what falls upon me from “nowhere,” that is, from what is “not-yet” a principle at all, even though it is “already” an Origin of my life.

Notably, Paul’s “parosia” and Luther’s “original righteousness” are grasped as a return precisely because the kind of truth that is awaited defines one’s appropriate being. This truth does not turn Dasein into something else, but rather brings it “back” to what it must be, a mode of Being which, however, Dasein has never yet experienced. The original truth, if considered against the linearity of theoretical time, is paradoxical; the Origin is prior to anything that originates from it, i.e. the measure of Dasein’s existence is prior to any factical enactment, even as it is experienced futurally as what is yet to come.

Accordingly, the future-determined temporality of all the Christian figures I have tied here to the development of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology poses a paradox in the heart of the ontological project, for this temporality alone gives access to the Origin as the appropriate subject matter of phenomenology. A decade later, in Heidegger’s first explication of Hölderlin’s poetry at the 1934–1935 winter semester, this paradox is presented as follows:

The pure Origin is not that which simply releases something other from itself and abandons it to itself, but rather that commencement whose power constantly leaps over what has sprung forth, outlasts it in leaping ahead of it, and is thus present in the grounding of that which remains. It is present not as something that merely has a residual effect from earlier, but as that which leaps out ahead, that which, as commencement, is thus at the same time the determinative end – in other words, is authentically the destination.^[126]

At this point, the relation between this mature formulation of the Origin and Heidegger’s earlier engagement with a peculiar kind of the truth of enactment and its temporal essence should be clear: both formulations point towards a sense of divinity of truth revealed in an authentic mode of enactment, for it guides existence, leaping ahead of current facticity as a destination radically differing from the so-called rational structure of what we are used to think of as beings. Thus, stripped of any religious terminology, the Origin is religious precisely in the sense of its binding (religare) character grounded in the temporal paradoxicality and existential value, ungraspable in terms of psychology, anthropology, or any other science rooted in an assumption of a priori mechanisms of the world. Indeed, this sense of truth is tied directly to the sense of truth as un-covering, which Heidegger starts using during the 20s. However, rather than being bound by the way beings are uncovered, Dasein is bound here by the revelation of the meaning of its own existence and the radical dependence of such meaning on the Origin of life. Thus, what I have called the truth of enactment is merely implicitly present in Heidegger’s thought during this period and will be articulated only in his later thought. Yet, this sense is operative in Luther as well, however disguised under the cloak of theology.

Heidegger’s second companion, Aristotle, contributes to the understanding of the divinity of the Origin’s binding-religious character by allowing to relate Dasein’s movement of counter-ruinance to the sphere of the godly. In “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle” Heidegger conceptualizes Dasein’s movement of lapsing from the Origin as “ruinance”:

A formally indicative definition would therefore determine ruinance as follows: movedness of factical life which “actualizes” and “is” factical life in itself, as itself, for itself, out of itself, and, in all this, against itself.^[127]

What Heidegger explicates here is nothing less than the fact that the default mode of Dasein’s Being is to enact its own life out of itself against itself. This situation cannot be changed by discovering some a priori law or following a moral rule. The very meaning of change is quite peculiar and ungraspable in the context of traditionally secular philosophical disciplines. Since Dasein moves against itself, it must turn around towards itself. Here “towards itself” does not mean this or that person turning towards his or her worldly concerns (which would be a ridiculously anti-Heideggerian egoistic reading), but precisely towards Dasein in oneself, i.e. towards that for whom the appropriate mode of Being is determined by the most original truth of existence. In other words, the shift towards the Origin is a turn which can only be grasped in terms of Dasein’s movement of counter-ruinance. As a result, Dasein must turn itself towards itself by enacting a movement on the axis leading to the original awakening of its appropriate being-in-truth as being near the Origin (what Luther called “original righteousness”).

I argue that this counter-ruinance movement must be seen as divine, yet not in the traditional theological sense. In the 1922 summer semester, Heidegger explores the relation between divinity and movement in Aristotle to show that neither the Christian nor Aristotelian understanding of this relation is original. While Aristotle does indeed speak of a divine nature of movement in which life has independence, this movement is understood as θεωρία, where the being of θείον is θεωρία.^[128] The divine nature of movement is understood as θεωρία because Aristotle deduces the meaning of divinity from the problem of movement in his physics, wherein the sense of divinity is a purely theoretical movedness beyond any particular change. While movement as such determines life, the highest state of life must be a pure god-like how of just-looking. Consequently, Aristotle’s understanding of the divinity of movement is radically theoretical.^[129] One can see then that Aristotle commences “care about the already known knowledge” as a specific temporal interpretation of existence which does not need a supersensible realm wherein the “already” can be secured (in contrast to Plato). The θείον of θεωρία, as Heidegger will later point out, is interpretable as what always presences beforehand.^[130] The origination of beings is thus embodied in the ϕύσις as γένεσις, i.e. as arising, and as that which is constantly present in such arising.^[131] Accordingly, in Aristotle, the Origin itself is thought as the αρχη, an unchanging principle which must now be opposed to the ever-changing flow of experience thereby constituting a new artificial sphere of theoretical objectivity, either existing on its own (against subjectivity) or constituted by the transcendental subject. Due to this inceptual theoretization of the Origin/divinity, the subject–object distinction becomes necessary in all the following philosophy that follows Aristotle. In terms of Heidegger’s sense-schema then, we may say that a particular relation-sense of phenomena is reified in Aristotle into a constant character of the content-sense; that is to say, a particular way in which beings can become available for experience – corresponding to the schemas of theoretical cognition – is taken mistakenly for the way beings must be in order to be experienceable at all. In this light, the Origin can finally be (mis)understood as the unchanging beingness of beings.

Nevertheless, it is Aristotle who asserts the centrality of movement in what Heidegger presents as the Being of Dasein. Movement, Heidegger says in his 1924 course on Aristotle’s basic concepts, “is a being-there of a being that is in its becoming-completed, but is not completed yet.”^[132] Moreover, movement determines everything that falls under the realm of change (μεταβολή).^[133] This point is fundamental for conceptualizing Dasein’s turning towards itself as a radical existential change achieved by the movement of counter-ruinance. Indeed, Heidegger points out, change is the way of Being of Dasein; Dasein is always on-the-way, and it changes whether it is aware of it or not. As Scott Campbell notices, Heidegger refers such an essential incompleteness of life to its continuous arising out of the Origin.^[134] In this sense, a transformation of the Being of Dasein’s enactment is a peculiar movement within the “worldly” movement of everydayness, not aiming at a completion of anything that could be pointed out as an objective or an ideal. Life’s movement, writes Theodor Kisiel, “is the key behind the translation of the ‘original understanding’ [my italics], as the goal of philosophy.^[135] “The How of being human is to be found in the movement of coming to understand.”^[136] In this movement, what Aristotle called the “mode of understanding enlightenment” (die Weise des verstehenden Erhellens)^[137] needs to be addressed as divine since in it, according to Aristotle, the mode of Being of the divine (die Seinsweise des Göttlichen) is most truly alive. Moreover, it is divine also in a sense that it strives to understand that which has the being-character of the divine (Seinscharakter des Göttlichen).^[138] These two determinations co-constitute the temporalization-enactment of the divine life that deals with the divine understanding.^[139] Importantly, however, the sense of “divine” in Aristotle has nothing to do with godly entities. Θείου, Heidegger says, should not be translated as “religiousness” since it indicates for Aristotle only what is “being-always”; it is, as we have seen, a particular temporal determination of the unchanging beingness of beings. That is to say, what makes the movement of understanding “divine” is this particular temporal determination of a relation to what is being-always. Using Heidegger’s phrasing, we may say that the divinity of being-always “towers above” everything changing.

In Heidegger’s version of such a divine movement of counter-ruinance, the becoming-completed which is not-completed-yet receives the central place of a kairological future, a striving towards an unrepresentable sort of completion which does not signify the end of a process (what-sense), but the fulfilment of a truth-quality of one’s enactment of both the self and the world that “worlds” for it. Such a movement is indeed beyond any particular change in the what-contents of the world, even if not in the theoretical sense with which Aristotle endowed it. Accordingly, the divine independence of life in Aristotle corresponds to the fact that the counter-ruinance movement is not motivated (i.e. not moved) by anything missing that can be objectively pointed out “in the world,” but by an existential lack associated with lapsing from the Origin. The religiously-binding character of the Origin, which we met in the discussion of Luther, needs to be completed by a quasi-Aristotelian sense of divinity of Dasein’s transformation, independent of all “worldly” concerns and changes. That is to say, the movement towards the Origin needs to be shown to be motivated by a lack that is divine in a sense of being independent of the world.

Heidegger does indeed define human existence as “privative,” i.e. as being essentially determined by a lack in the basic movement of care.^[140] Already in 1922, Heidegger relates this lack to the human inability to wait (Warten), i.e. the inability to withstand the not-yet as a specific relation to the world and to the object.^[141] Taken in the context of everything Heidegger taught during these formative years of the early 1920s, we must not interpret waiting as a psychological what-determination of experience, but as a mode of turning around from one’s care about the already known, towards becoming a question to oneself, in search of a genuine enactment through which a novel, existentially original truth can be awaited. In the 1929–1930 course Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger explains that this waiting is directed towards an essential questioning of Dasein itself.^[142] Yet, in the preceding encounter with Aristotle between 1922 and 1924 Heidegger already makes clear that questionableness and awaiting determine Dasein’s maturation of openness, a maturation that does not posit an end but reckons with being-on-the-way; it is the how of Dasein’s counter-movement, of the hermeneutical interrogation unprecedented in the history of both philosophy and theology.

The movement of radical questionability does not set an end precisely because all pre-determined ends belong to the already known. The lack, which is indeterminately felt in ruinance cannot be determined by the already known; it can only be revealed through radical self-questionability. And yet, as we know from Paul and Augustine, radical self-questionability is suffering. It is through suffering that the existential lack in Dasein’s Being must be creatively disclosed as a need. Suffering, wherein, one can see God according to Luther, is the endurance of self-questionability, of awaiting as a particular mode of temporality. This endurance of self-questionability, as we have seen, is non-thematic in essence, is prior to all “beliefs” and “worldviews,” and is genuinely religious when one enacts it independently of any “religious” or “a-theistic” assumptions.^[143] Admittedly, this endurance is “beyond” worldly, objective changes, i.e. is divine in a sense close to Aristotle’s, not because it is theoretically-contemplative, but because it is independent from what is taken in theoretical philosophy (including Aristotle’s) as objective world; to be sure, it is “independent of the objective world” not because it is really beyond it in some super-sensible dimension, but because it belongs to the ontologically more original level of enactment-sense. In fact, the truth of enactment sense is revealed in such suffering-awaiting as a disclosure of that which has always directed our lives as a silent voice – one that reminds us of who we are – what will appear as a call of conscience in Being and Time, and as a call of Beyng in Contributions. Bearing this in mind, the divinity of the Origin consists both of its independence from the objective flow of events (via Aristotle), and of the fact of our existential dependence (i.e. our being-bound) on its guiding truth, as it is directly experienced in awaiting-suffering (via Luther).

Importantly, however, this divinity also differs from anything Aristotle and Luther could propose – the Origin is neither a theoretical ideal, nor a cause or ground of Dasein. What the Origin “is” can only be thought of in terms of that truth which one’s genuine enactment makes available. Indeed, such thinking has nothing to do with representational conceptualizing, but is precisely the awaiting-suffering through which the lack of one’s relatedness to the Origin – what will be later called “abandonment by Beyng” – is explicitly embraced. In the 1934–1935 seminar, Heidegger will call such awaiting-suffering thinking. Such thinking, he will announce, elevates Dasein in its understanding towards the destiny of demigods:

Here, thinking is not the empty operation of the intellect in making distinctions and connections, setting to work on some pre-given material, but rather is the suffering, anticipatory understanding of that Beyng that is experienced as the destiny of the demigods – suffering as a suffering that sustains – a suffering that accomplishes and creates.^[144]

A turn to the gods and the demigods may seem untimely in the discussion of early Heidegger’s investigations of the truth of the Origin, yet as Laurence Paul Hemming stresses, the origins of Heidegger’s understanding of the gods are found precisely during the period of his close conversation with Aristotle, prior to the publishing of Being and Time.^[145] Indeed, Aristotle’s understanding of divinity not as pointing towards something “beyond” humanity, but as the highest mode of human Being, is decisive for Heidegger. Rather than thinking about divinity in a traditionally religious way, as a matter of dogmatic faith alone, divinity is taken as a way of Being in which a human attains his or her highest way of Being, i.e. his or her spiritual health.^[146] Aristotle, of course, takes “theory” to be such a way of Being in itself, but the decisive point for Heidegger is that there is a single axis of human and godly, on which one can move, anticipating the “axis” of Beyng as the “between” of humans and gods.^[147] In this context, Heidegger is able to say in 1934 that a demigod would be someone for whom the nature of the lack in ruinance has become a divine lack; namely, the lack is not a mistake of any kind but an “endowment of its Origin.”^[148] Consequently, the demigod’s existence is fully determined by a movement towards the divine.

In summary, both Luther’s and Aristotle’s understandings of human existence and its possibility for living in a way associated with approaching divinity contribute to Heidegger’s unique sense of the truth of enactment and the mode of care in which it becomes dominant. The guiding role of the Origin, which Heidegger had exposed already in the first Freiburg lectures, and the “other-worldly” nature of the early Christian’s revelation are incorporated in his project of fundamental ontology without leaning on religious dogmas or theoretical prejudices. Rather, the sense of independence of life from any a priori constitution and its innermost intrinsic pursuit of creatively participating in bringing a not-yet discoverable truth to existence constitute the enigma of human relation to Being. Human tendency of lapsing from the Origin is acknowledged by Heidegger to be a divine lack in the 1934–1935 lectures on Hölderlin, a lack that can guide back to the Origin. Such a guidance is divine for it does not illuminate a path towards something already existing, but towards something that needs to come into existence in a form of a radical transformation of the sense of one’s life, unthinkable in any ethical, cognitive or other secular terms. The transformation is guided by the truth of the Origin which Heidegger will start explicitly asking only in the late 30s. The binding (religare) sense of the Origin will then turn into the need of Beyng, experienced by human beings as an abandonment by Beyng. The divine independence of the movement towards the Origin will then pertain to the essential uselessness of philosophy in all ontic manifestations of life. The truth of enactment will turn into the truth of Beyng itself. Indeed, Heidegger’s early thoughts on the Origin and the quality of Dasein’s enactment cannot be identified with the problem of Being in Being and Time, because Being and Time still prepares the way to think the Origin explicitly and is not mature enough to address the implicitly religious dimension of the Origin, which nevertheless accompanies and motivates Heidegger’s entire thinking from the very first lectures in 1919.

7 Conclusion

Over the course of this article, I have tried to show that from its very first formulations a decade before its appearance in Being and Time, and almost two decades before its mesmerizing return in the first Hölderlin lectures, Heidegger’s idea of the Origin cannot be fully grasped by Christian theology nor by the philosophically-metaphysical tradition, from Aristotle until this very moment in Western thinking. Only by letting philosophy and theology play with and against each other, while deconstructing both through Heidegger’s triple sense schema of enactment–relation–content, can the truth of one’s self-enactment differentiating one’s coming near to the Origin from one’s lapsing away from it, be delineated as phenomenology’s aim in particular and the aim of human life in general. It is this truth of one’s self-enactment – which is also an enactment of the phenomena’s manifestation – which religious thinkers associated with one’s spiritual health, and which Heidegger has shown to determine the quality of human existence.

Indeed, for Heidegger, one’s existential concern is the root of all behaviour and self-understanding, but also of one’s way (and need) of doing philosophy, and of the very sense of what is encountered in the world. As Heidegger will make clear few years after Being and Time, beings can be more or less beingfull.^[149] Whether I live among beings which genuinely show themselves, or in a world of impoverished objectivities grasped in terms of “worldly businesses” and immediate concerns, is dependent on how I relate myself to the Origin. While religious thinkers made this point clear without realizing that it stands beyond any particular religion, thus missing what genuine religiosity means, the so-called secular philosophy entirely omitted the sense of enactment-truth and its possible connection to original divinity. Therefore, Heidegger stepped out of the traditional philosophical understanding of truth and phenomena while keeping an eye on the genuinely religious nature of human ability for transformation and turning-towards an entirely incalculable future.

Though these elements of Heidegger’s thinking came to fruition only in the middle to late 30s, as I have shown, his project of fundamental ontology in the 20s is also seeded with them. As we have seen, the path towards Being and Time is filled with attempts to bring original religiosity in view, not, albeit, from the side of religious faith, but from the side of a possibility of philosophical maturation and phenomenological inquiry into the depth of human existence. The Origin is only available if a radical self-questionability is enacted in a way that illuminates the illusionary state of the non-questioned pre-understanding of Being. The task of Heidegger’s lectures after “Phenomenology of Religious Life,” then, is to attempt a phenomenological reconstruction of what it means for us to exist, and how such seemingly self-directed inquiry newly illuminates the possibilities of the world’s worldling. This task, as Heidegger says, had to be actualized as if it was atheistic, so that original religiosity – the one we find for example in the Hölderlin lectures and Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) – could be protected from the violently burning light of traditional metaphysics operating in both philosophy and theology.