Heidegger on Religion

Summary

Throughout his career, Heidegger explored the religious sides of life in ways that had far-reaching impacts on the thought of his contemporaries and successors. This study examines three important stops along Heidegger's ways of thinking about religion as the risky performance of life in new spaces of possibility. Heidegger's background assumptions are critically assessed. Section 1 examines Heidegger's 1920–1921 lectures on Paul, while Section 2 turns to the darker period of the late 1930's, exploring how Heidegger reconfigures religion in the context of his “new inception” of thought beyond metaphysics. Finally, Section 3 takes up Heidegger's challenging discussions of the divine in several post-war addresses and essays. In each case, Heidegger argues that we must suspend, bracket, or rescind from our tendencies to order, classify, define, and explain things in order to carry out a venture into a situation of indeterminacy in order to recast religion in a new light.