This Winter Semester 1920–21 lecture course is divided into two parts, an introductory methodological part and a second part devoted to the phenomenological explication of religious experience. The second part, focused on the interpretation of St. Paul’s eschatological epistles, has become famous. Just before the Christmas break, Heidegger broke off his methodological explanations as a result of objections from students who had complained to the dean of the philosophical faculty over the lack of religious content in the course.
The first part is centered upon the self-understanding of philosophy. It springs from the factic life experience that is at once both the experiencing activity and that which is receptively experienced. Experiencing and the experienced are interlaced. Factic life experience tends toward the determination of objects and the objective regulation of life. By making factic life experience the central phenomenon of philosophy, Heidegger raises the possibility of reversing this decadent tendency. After a destruction of Ernst Troeltsch’s philosophy of religion, Heidegger clarifies the core phenomenon of the historical, which permeates the meanings connecting the three key terms of the course title. There are three ways in which the present seeks to protect itself from history: (1) The Platonic way, a radical renunciation of the historical; (2) the exact opposite, a radical surrender to history (Oswald Spengler); and (3) a compromise between these two extremes (Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Heinrich Rickert, and Wilhelm Windelband). Heidegger shows that we can only discover the historical in factic life experience through phenomenological explication. The direction of this explication is prefigured by formal indication.
The second part is a phenomenological explication of primal Christian life experience in conjunction with Paul’s epistles. Through an interpretation of Paul’s epistles to the Galatians, Heidegger obtains access to the lifeworld of primal Christianity. Christian life is actually factic life experience itself and lives temporality as such.
The central phenomenon of Christian life-experience is apostolic proclamation, which takes us to the heart of Paul’s self-world in its vital relation to the environment and with-world of the first congregations. In his interpretation of Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians, Heidegger focuses his attention on the temporality of Christian religiosity, which is dominated by the deciding moment or καιρός of the Second Coming of Christ.