Please tell me if this line of discussion is foreign to the spirit of the
lbo-list (as it were)--I can always take it offline. This isn't a Heidegger
list, after all.
>
>
>Really, Protestant? I always pegged it as more Catholic... for some reason
>I
>associate Heidegger more with the spirit of Aquinas (ontology and all that)
>than I do with Luther... but I guess I don't know Heidegger all that well,
>you're probably right.
Well, there is a real interest in, and appropriation of, Aquinas in Heidegger . . . but the real theological tradition underpinning _Being and Time_ is, I think, radical Protestant. This is really clear if you look at Heidegger's pre-B & T lectures on religion, "Augustine and Neoplatonism" and the one, don't recollect the title off-hand, where he analyses _Thessalonians II_. The categories he uses are clearly Protestant, and they were secularized later on in B&T.
Think especially of the roles that authenticity, freedom, and being-toward-death play in B&T--very reminescent of Augustinian/Lutheran notions of grace. Confronting one's own finitude, being seized by the power of being-toward-the-end that alters the very character of human existence, the way of life that opens up once one has become authentic; all very Lutheran notions. Of course, H. atheizes them.
H., incidentally, appears to have read Luther's entire _Gesammtausgabe_ (a real whopper) in the years prior to B&T.
Well, hey, that's what I think.
Chris Doss
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