Freiburg. Yet the young Heidegger believed that in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology he had found the starting point for a new philosophizing. Husserl aligned himself against all construction and speculation about the background of the phenomenal; so many regarded his phenomenology as a warrant to take up once again ancient and medieval ontological questions. By the time he came to Freiburg in 1916, Husserl had turned toward modernity and the beginnings of its philosophical transcendentalism: if we are to understand phenomena in their being, then access to that being must be assured in advance. The transcendental “I” becomes the guarantor of access to truth. Quite unlike Husserl, the young Heidegger, roused by the European catastrophe of the First World War, followed those who departed from that transcendental approach to history and its catastrophes. Heidegger came to regard the transcendental “I” as facticity (Faktizität), which considers existence something to be taken up, thus placing itself within the integrated sphere of historical articulations.21
As a result, the young Heidegger also considered Franz Overbeck, patristic scholar and friend of Nietzsche, to have dissolved the synthesis of antiquity and Christianity. Original Christianity was related to its eschatological manifestations; believers who are prepared for the end of the world do not strive for Greek wisdom or contemporary culture.22 Heidegger expounded a unique account, presenting in his 1920–21 lectures Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion interpretations of the Pauline letters.23 While the old hermeneutic had been surpassed in the Protestant sphere by reversion to the stricter interpretation of New Testament gospel (what was therefore called “form history”), Heidegger could still hear “hermeneutic” from within crippled Catholic theology. He resurrected the term hermeneutic from Schleiermacher and Dilthey. For his first postwar lecture in 1919, Heidegger combined the “intuition” constructed by Husserl with Bergson’s sense of intuition as penetration into the flow of life, to talk about “hermeneutic intuition.”24 Phenomenological philosophy as ontological and transcendental became a hermeneutic; this hermeneutic philosophy had to become justified through an interpretation of Aristotle. Husserl wanted to publish Heidegger’s work on Aristotle in his phenomenological studies Annual. But Heidegger completed only introductory fragments and for the time being they remained unpublished.
With a view to an appointment, Heidegger in 1922 sketched his work on Aristotle for Natorp in Marburg and Misch in Göttingen. In the first part he would relate book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics to the Metaphysics and Physics, placing the accent upon phronēsis, which he characterized as conscience (Gewissen), in so doing discrediting metaphysical reason. This metaphysical reason supports with its philosophical theology only the self-grounding of knowledge (Wissen), while passing over actual life as well as its religiosity. Heidegger aimed to confront Aristotle with his
21. For details see Theodore Kisiel,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).22. Franz Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur: Gedanken und Anmerkungen zur modernen Theologie, ed. Carl Albrecht Bernoulli (Basel: Schwabe, 1919).
23. Martin Heidegger, “Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion (Wintersemester 1920/21),” in Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA 60 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995); translated in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004).
24. Martin Heidegger, “Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem (Kriegsnotsemester 1919),” in Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA 56/57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1999); translated in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002).