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Confessions of an Existentialist: Reading Augustine After Heidegger: Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

James K.A. Smith
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Our task is to read Augustine after Heidegger, in a double sense: first, chronologically, returning to read Augustine after having passed through Heidegger, re-reading the Confessions after reading Being and Time. But in a second hermeneutical sense, we are reading Augustine after Heidegger; that is, we are reading Augustine after/as Heidegger read him in the period of his earliest development. By doing so, we mean to let Heidegger’s sketch of factical life (Existenz) function as a “hermeneutical situation” of our reading of Augustine as well indicate the way in which Augustine’s Confessions functions as a horizon for Being and Time.

The impetus for returning to Augustine is found in Heidegger’s turn to the doctor gratiae in his early work on the phenomenology of religion. In the young Heidegger’s work in the phenomenology of religion, it is as much phenomenology as religion which is at stake; that is, the rigorous questions of phenomenological method find a limit case in the consideration of religious experience. Thus, a phenomenology of religion functions as something of a ‘testing ground’ for phenomenology understood as a hermeneutics of facticity. As Jean Greisch has noted, these “questions of method, which have an effect on the philosophy of religion, primarily take up the question of the status of phenomenology itself, and even the status of philosophy itself in the sense of an appropriate conceptuality.”

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 82 , Issue 964 , June 2001 , pp. 273 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Greisch, Jean, “Bulletin de philosophie herméneutique: Heidegger, Schleiermacher, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Misch, Abel,”Revue des sciences philosophiques et thélogiques 80 (1996), p. 640Google Scholar. For my analyses of early Heidegger's phenomenology of religion, see my “Liberating Religion From Theology: Marion and Heidegger on the Possibility of a Phenomenology of Religion,”International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 46 (1999), pp. 17–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the revised phenomenological method derived from this, see my 'Taking Husserl at his Word Towards a New Phenomenology with the Young Heidegger,”Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmudern Thought 4 (2000), pp. 89–115.

2 For their landmark research, see Kisiel, Theodore, The Genesis of Heidegger: Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 149–219Google Scholar and Buren, John van, 131e Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 157–202Google Scholar.

3 For an outline of this project, see my essay, “Alterity, Transcendence, and the Violence of the Concept: Kierkegaard and Heidegger,”International Philosophical Quarterly 38 (1998), pp. 376–380Google Scholar.

4 An edition of this lecture course, along with that of Wintersemester 1920/21, and notes for a course on mysticism which was never offered, have been collected and published in Heidegger, Martin, Phänomenologie des religiosen Lebens: 1. Einleitung in die Phiinomenologie der Religion. 2. Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus. 3. Die philosophischen Gnutdhgen der mittelalrerlichen Mystik, Ga. 60, Hg.Jung, Matthias, Regehly, Thomas, und Strube, Claudius (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995)Google Scholar. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as Ga 60.

5 For a critique of this assumption, see my analysis in “The Art of Christian Atheism: Faith and Philosophy in Early Heidegger,”Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997), pp. 71–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For Heidegger, the “hermeneutical situation” represents the conditions of interpreting and understanding; and it is the task of hermeneutic phenomenology to explicate this situation. For a discussion of the “situation” which conditioned his early reading of Aristotle, see Heidegger, Martin, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation,” Hg. Hans‐Ulrich Lessing, in Dilthey‐Jahrbuch 6 (1989), esp. pp. 237–254Google Scholar; “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” trans. Baur, Michael, in Man and World 25 (1992), esp. pp. 358–376CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 We refer to Augustine and the “existentialist” tradition, inclusive of Heidegger, cognizant of the fact that Sein und &it is not, properly speaking, an “existentialist” anthropology but ultimately an ontological project. Here we are concerned with the Duseinanalytik as a self‐contained analysis, ‘bracketing’ its ontological telos. Augustine does also play a role in the more properly existentialist movement of Sartre and Camus. See, for instance, Camus' thesis (submitted for the Diplôme d'études supérieures), Métaphysique chétienne el Néoplatonisme (1936).

8 Soliloquies 1.1.1; 1.2.7. We follow the Latin text in Obras de San Augustin, Tomo I,3d ed., ed. P. Vicotrino Capanaga (Madrid BAC, 1957), employing the translation of Burleigh, J.H.S. in Augustine: Earlier Writings, LCC (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953)Google Scholar. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as Sol.

9 See Arendt, . Love and Saint Augustine, trans. Scott, Joanna Vecchiarelli and Stark, Judith Chelius (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 50Google Scholar.

10 We refer to the edition in CCSL XXVII, ed. Lucas Verheijen (Tumhold: Brepols, 1981) and will employ the translation of Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Henceforth abbreviated in the text as C, followed by book, chapter, and paragraph reference.

11 Marion, Jean‐Luc, God Without Being, trans. Carlson, Thomas A. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], p. 97Google Scholar.

12 For a lucid consideration of the Augustinian theme of “self‐alienation” and its development in western thought, see Booth, Edward OP, Saint Augustine and the Western Tradition of Self‐Knowing (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

13 For a similar development within the phenomenological and Augustinian tradition, see Dooyeweerd, Herman, In the Twilight of Western Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought, Collected Works, B4, ed. Smith, James K.A. (Lewiston, Ny: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998)Google Scholar, ch. 2, “The Concentric Character of the Self.”

14 Below (§ 4a) we will explicate the structure which undergirds this valuation, viz., the distinction between “use”(uti) and “enjoyment”(frui).

15 For a discussion, see Rappe, Sara, “Self‐Perception in Plotinus and the Later Neoplatonic Tradition,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997), pp. 433–450.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 For development of these themes, see my “How (Not) To Tell A Secret: Interiority and the Strategy of ‘Confession,’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2000), pp. 135–151,CrossRefGoogle Scholar where I also consider the parallels with Kierkegaard's notion of an “essential secret” and the thematics of “indirect communication.”