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A Difficult Proximity: The Figure of Augustine in Heideggers Path

Author(s): Ryan Coyne


Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 91, No. 3 (July 2011), pp. 365-396
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659749
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A Difficult Proximity: The Figure


of Augustine in Heideggers Path
Ryan Coyne /

University of Chicago

i. introduction
In the years leading up to the publication of Being and Time (1927),
Martin Heidegger repeatedly insisted that his own analysis of existence,
once fully articulated, would enact a clean break with the tacit GraecoChristian or Augustinian forces at play in modern philosophy.1 Though
Heidegger would eventually disown this ambition as grandiose,2 his early
lecture courses (191927) nevertheless confirm its significance in at least
one respect: notwithstanding the 1921 Freiburg seminar entitled Augustine and Neoplatonism, references to Augustine in the current edition of Heideggers Gesamtausgabe are exceedingly rare.
It is therefore all the more surprising that in 42 of Being and Time
Heidegger confessed that he first came to define Dasein, or the human
being, as care (Sorge) through his efforts to interpret Augustinian (i.e.,
Graeco-Christian) anthropology with regard to the foundational principles reached in the ontology of Aristotle.3 To date, scholars have
1
Martin Heidegger, Phanomenologische Interpretationen ausgewahlter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles
zu Ontologie und Logik, GA62, 369. English translation in John van Buren, ed., Supplements:
From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 12425: The
tangled complexity of central, constitutive effective forces at play in the being of our contemporary situation will . . . be referred to in brief as the Graeco-Christian interpretation of life.
All references to Heideggers works follow standard citational practices. References to Sein
und Zeit in German (17th ed. [Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993]) will appear as SZ followed
by the page number. References to the English translation of Sein und Zeit by John Macquarrie
and Edward Robinson (Being and Time [New York: Harper, 1962]) are given in brackets as
BT followed by the page number. References to Heideggers collected works appear as GA
(Gesamtausgabe), followed by the volume number and page number. These citations are followed by the corresponding page number of the standard English translation, if available, in
brackets.
2
See Martin Heidegger, Dialogue on Language, in On the Way to Language (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), 36.
3
SZ, 199 n. 1 [BT, 243 n. vii; 492].

2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.


0022-4189/2011/9103-0004$10.00

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interpreted this remark as minimizing the positive contribution of Augustinian thought to the fundamental ontology outlined in the 1927
treatise. And they are not without at least two good reasons for doing
so. First, in this same treatise Heidegger unmistakably laments the persistence of those residues of Christian theology within philosophical
problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded.4 Second,
it is beyond doubt that the ontology of Being and Time was to a large
extent formulated in connection with an extensive rereading of Aristotle. While this has led some scholars to suppose that the concepts
elaborated in Being and Time are simply cut to fit the measurements of
Aristotle,5 an earlier draft of the 1927 treatise nevertheless further
underscores its debt to Augustinian thought: Dasein is a self-interpreting, self-articulating entity. It was seven years ago, while I was investigating these structures in conjunction with my attempts to arrive
at the ontological foundations of Augustinian anthropology, that I first
came across the phenomenon of care.6 Since the 1996 publication of
Augustine and Neoplatonism, we are in a better position to evaluate
this remark and to ask what was really at stake for Heidegger in his 1921
encounter with the Confesssions.7
4

SZ, 229 [BT, 272].


R. Brague, Aristote et la question du monde (Paris: PUF, 1988), 56: Il ne faut pas setonner,
sil en est ainsi, de constater que les concepts elabores par Heidegger dans Sein und Zeit ont
une pertinence particulie`rement nette la` ou` il est question dAristote. Tout se passe en effet
comme sils avaient ete tailles a` la mesure meme dAristote. This view is echoed by many
scholars, including F. Volpi, Being and Time: A Translation of the Nicomachean Ethics? in
Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. Theodore Kisiel and J. Van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press,
1994), 195212.
6
GA20, 418 [History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985), 302]. A relatively recent article by Theodore Kisiel, one of
the leading commentators on the early Heidegger, corroborated this timeline. See Theodore
Kisiel, Situating Augustine in Salvation History, Philosophys History and Heideggers History, in The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger: The Emergence of an Augustinian Phenomenology,
ed. C. J. N. de Paulo (Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen, 2006), 5355.
7
Most historians of philosophy have still hesitated to adopt this approach, despite the fact
that it may change our understanding of Being and Time. One notable exception is Thomas
Carlsons The Indiscrete Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). There is no shortage, however, of studies addressing the role of Christian theology in Heideggers development.
Among other works, see, e.g., the following outstanding examples: Thomas Sheehan, Heideggers Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, 19201921, Personalist 60, no. 3
(1979): 31224; Jeffrey A. Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, rev.
ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 4; Benjamin Crowe, Heideggers
Phenomenology of Religion: Realism and Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2008); John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994); Istvan M. Feher, Heidegger on the Atheism of Philosophy: Philosophy,
Religion, and Theology in His Early Lectures up to Being and Time, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1995): 182228; Theodore Kisiel, Heidegger (19201921) on
Becoming a Christian: A Conceptual Picture Show, in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays
in His Earliest Thought, ed. T. Kisiel and J. Van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 17593;
5

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A Difficult Proximity
To suggest that this encounter was crucial is hardly a stretch. The
early Heidegger invested Christian theological sources, Augustine as
well as Paul, with a strictly ontological relevance. Read properly, Heidegger argued, these sources would yield an entirely new philosophical
approach to subjectivity.8 Directly following Augustine and Neoplatonism, Heidegger made good on this promise, as he drew heavily upon
Confessions X.3039 to construct what he then called factical life or factical
beingthe conceptual precursor to Dasein.9 This strategy of repeating
and de-theologizing Augustine would have lasting effects on Heideggers work: many phenomena first described chiefly by means of paraphrasing the 1921 commentary on the Confessions would eventually find
their way into Being and Time. However, the proximity between Augustinian and Heideggerian thought runs much deeper than the borrowing
of a few terms might indicate to us.
In what follows I argue that at the heart of Augustine and Neoplatonism one finds the early Heideggers paradigmatic attempt to define
the essence of the I am as a form of nothingness or nihility,10 or what
Heidegger would later call the nothingness of Dasein.11 The imporHent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999); Jean Greisch, LArbre de vie et larbre de savoir: Le chemin phenomenologique de lhermeneutique
heideggerienne (19191923) (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 2000); and Sylvain Camilleri, Phenomenologie de
la religion et hermeneutique theologique dans la pensee du jeune Heidegger: Commentaire analytique des
fondements philosophiques (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008). On the early Heideggers reading of
Augustine, see especially N. Fischer, Selbstsein und Gottsuche: Zur Aufgabe des Denkens in
Augustins Confessiones und Martin Heideggers Sein und Zeit, in Heidegger und die christliche
Tradition: Annaherungen an ein schwieriges Thema, ed. N. Fischer and Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Hermann (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007), 5590.
8
See GA60, 54 [The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna
Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 36], where Heidegger suggests that his return to Christian sources would yield an entirely new set of philosophical
categories. See Benjamin Crowe, Heideggers Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), esp. 1543.
9
This is particularly evident in the lecture of Wintersemester 1921/1922, GA61, 79155 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 61115], though I shall not address
this topic in the present article. For recent discussions of this lecture course, see especially
Theodore Kisiel, Recent Heidegger Translations and Their German Originals: A Grassroots
Archival Perspective, Continental Philosophy Review 38 (2006): 26387, esp. 271; and Christian
Sommer, Linquietude de la vie facticielle: Le tournant aristotelicien de Heidegger (1921
1922), Etudes philosophiques, no. 1 (2006): 128.
10
In the lecture courses from the early Freiburg period, the description of factical life as
a kind of nothingness is foregrounded only after Augustine and Neoplatonism. See, e.g.,
GA61, 145ff. [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 108ff.].
11
Here I refer not only to the analysis of anxiety in Being and Time, according to which
Dasein is confronted by its own Being-in-the-world as nothing and as nowhere (SZ, 186
[BT, 231]; cf. GA17, 290), or to the subsequent analyses of finitude, conscience, and guilt,
which demonstrate that Daseins way of Being as care is permeated with nullity through and
through (SZ, 285 [BT, 331]) but also to Heideggers explicit use of the phrase the nothingness of Dasein, in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA3, 291. English translation in

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tance of this assertion is twofold. First, Augustine and Neoplatonism
makes clear that the textual correspondence between Being and Time
and the Confessions pertains to the most crucial, and most fundamental,
level of Heideggerian hermeneutics. It is Augustine who allegedly anticipates the very self-experience Heidegger wields in first criticizing
the Cartesian, Kantian, and Husserlian foundations of modern subjectivity.12 This experience consists in a radical form of self-interrogation
Heidegger sought to extract from the Confessions. It is this experience
that Heidegger rendered philosophically by defining Daseins Being penultimately as care and ultimately as time itself (die Zeit selbst). Second,
the very debt that Being and Time owes to the reading of Augustine
generates a dilemma at the center of Heideggers thought. The strategy
of repeating or adapting Augustine threatens to undermine the very
constructive enterprise it is meant to nourish. As I shall demonstrate,
the form of self-interrogation Heidegger thought he had uncovered in
Augustine remains tied to an extreme prohibition against self-representation. There is a significant tension between this prohibition and
the basic presuppositions guiding the construction of Daseins finitude.
As a result, though Heidegger enlisted Augustine in criticizing modern
philosophical accounts of subjectivity, he was nevertheless forced to continuously disavow the critical implications of his own readings of the
Confessions. In its fullest form, this argument has broad implications for
our understanding of Heideggerian thought as a whole. For it suggests
that Heideggerian finitude is articulated only by continuously displacing
the very Augustinian predecessor informing it. The present essay establishes the major terms of this dilemma by situating Heideggers Augustine and Neoplatonism within its larger philosophical context. Its
goal is to show how Heideggers difficult proximity13 to Augustine
facilitates, yet ultimately disrupts, the hermeneutic of Dasein.
ii. the cogito in verso
The initial guiding theme in Heideggers earliest Freiburg courses, perhaps more so even than the question of the meaning of Being in general,
was the inquiry into the nature of the human being as a self-interpreting, self-articulating entity.14 Only by dislodging a certain preconceived notion of the subject could Heidegger hope to renew inquiry
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1998), 204.
12
Compare GA56/57, 117; GA60, 13 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 10].
13
GA61.198 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 148].
14
See n. 6 above, and refer especially to the notion of the hermeneutic intuition in GA56/
57, 95ff.

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A Difficult Proximity
into the meaning of Being in general. The nature of self-representation
factored heavily into Heideggers burgeoning thought,15 not simply in
his efforts to develop a phenomenology of religious life but also in his
first criticisms of Husserl, in his rejoinders to the Baden and Marburg
schools of thought, and in his critical rereadings of Aristotle and Kant.
Yet, it was chiefly by confronting Descartes and his decisive influence
upon Kant and Husserl that Heidegger first sought to overhaul modern
philosophical articulations of subjectivity.
The critique of Cartesian subjectivity and the retrieval of Augustinian
thought were initially linked for Heidegger. They were flip sides of the
same coin. The earliest references attest to this. On September 13, 1920,
for example, Heidegger wrote to the young Karl Lowith, offering him
some advice on preparing for Heideggers upcoming Winter Semester
(hereafter WS) 1920 practicum on Descartes Meditationes de prima
philosophia. Here it is striking to see that shortly before his lectures
on Pauls Epistles Heidegger placed both his reading of Descartes as
well as his phenomenology of religious life in the service of a single
aimnamely, that of reversing the Cartesian cogito sum: For the
cogito, all of Christian philosophy comes into question for me, since I
want to see it backwards, look at it in verso, so to speak. It is only important
that you know something of the other metaphysical treatises and the
Regulae, so that the perversity of [Descartes] epistemological resolution
can be studied.16 Elsewhere, Heidegger made much of Descartes alleged perversion of the ego. A passage from the WS192122 course
explains best what it might mean to look at the cogito backward, or in
verso:
The sum is indeed the first, even for Descartes. Yet, precisely here a mistake
already arises: Descartes does not dwell on the sum but already has a foreconcept of its sense of Being in the mode of mere ascertainability, or more
specifically, indubitability. The fact that Descartes could deviate into episte15
See GA9, 2936; GA56/57, 9596; GA58, 93ff.; GA59, 3639; GA62, 346ff. The early Heidegger does not make extensive technical use of the term Selbstvorstellung. When, for example,
he employs the term representation or Vorstellung while discussing Kant, he uses quotation marks
(SZ, 31724 [BT, 36470]). Yet, the critique of what Heidegger would eventually call representationalist thinking runs throughout the early lecture courses, arguably beginning in
earnest with Kriegsnot-semester 1919. This rejection of representatonalist thinking is most prominent in the 1926 reading of The Critique of Pure Reason (see GA21, 272ff. [Logic: The Question
of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010)], 226ff.), in
which Heidegger criticizes Kant for his uncritical reliance upon Descartes. In this lecture
course Heidegger maintains that Kant determines time as a cogitatio, or representation, as
Vorstellung, and that this is symptomatic of the Cartesian dimensions of Kants critical works
(GA21, 278 [Logic, 231]).
16
This letter is cited in Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 554 n. 10.

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mological questioning . . . merely expresses the more basic fact that to him
the sum, its Being and its categorical structure, were in no way problematic.17

To view the cogito in verso means chiefly to render questionable or


problematic the sense of Being signified by sum, or I am. Let us
recall that in the Second Meditation Descartes employs a method of hyperbolic doubt to arrive at the conclusion for which he is well known:
So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it
is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.18 Heidegger does not
dispute the validity of this assertion. He, in fact, adopts it as his point
of departure in Being and Time.19 What he takes issue with is the fact
that Descartes immediately assigns the ego discovered in the Second
Meditation the status of a thing or thinking thing, that is, res cogitans:
I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks [res cogitans];
that is, I am mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reasonwords whose
meaning I have been ignorant of until now. But for all that I am a thing
which is real and which truly exists [res vera et vere existens].20 What
Heidegger calls the perversity of Descartes epistemological resolution
is perhaps best captured by this last phrase, which identifies the ego as
a res . . . existens, or an existing thing. The formula conflates two ways
of Being that Heidegger takes to be fundamentally divergentnamely,
thinghood and existence. His wager is that, since Aristotle, metaphysical
concepts have been designed to handle thinghood, whereas existence remains more or less undiscovered or forgotten in Western thought.
Along these lines, to reverse the cogito thus means to study the I am
as a unique way of Being in its own right, first, by refusing to interpret
it as a thing and, second, by developing a whole new set of categories
meant to express the I as a unique way of Being. In order to accomplish this task, Heidegger argues that he must first destroy the modern
philosophical subject, by uncovering the historical and philosophical
origins of its inadequate conceptual scaffolding.21 Only through this
17
GA61, 173 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 130]. Marion has already discussed
the significance of this passage. See Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction et donation: Recherches sur
Husserl, Heidegger et la phenomenologie (Paris: PUF, 1989), 120ff.
18
Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, AT VII.25. English translation in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:17.
19
SZ, 211 [BT, 254].
20
Descartes, AT VII.20 [Philosophical Writings, 2:18].
21
On the early Heideggerian theme of destruction, see esp. GA60, 5354; GA62, 346ff.;
GA62, 368ff.; GA17, 115ff. [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 83ff.], and GA24, 2632 [The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 19
23].

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A Difficult Proximity
work of conceptual desedimentation, he contends, will contemporary
philosophy avoid the Cartesian mistake of interpreting existence in an
indifferent, formally objective, uncritical and unclarified sense, one that
has no genuine relation to the ego.22
Herein lies the motivation for returning to Augustine. On multiple
occasions from 1919 to 1924, Heidegger suggested that a critical retrieval of Augustinian anthropology would provide the resources for
undoing Descartes alleged perversion of the cogito.23 This arguably explains why in the early Freiburg lecture courses Heidegger speaks of
the independent value (selbstandigen Wert) of the Confessions.24 The
final pages of Augustine and Neoplatonism, for example, reveal that
the entire course is animated by the hidden aim of fighting back against
Cartesian subjectivity:
Vita (Life) is no mere word, no formal concept, but a structural complex which
Augustine himself sawwithout, however, yet achieving sufficient conceptual
clarity. Today, this clarity has still not been attained, because Descartes moved
the study of the self as a basic phenomenon in a different, falling direction.
Modern philosophy in its entirety has not been able to rid itself of this. Descartes
watered down Augustines thoughts. Self-certainty and the Having-of-Oneself
[das Sich-selbst-Haben] in Augustines sense are wholly other [ganz anderes] than
the Cartesian evidence of the cogito.25

In these lines the opposition between Descartes and Augustine mirrors the disjunction between modern epistemological approaches to
subjectivity and Heideggers emerging hermeneutics of facticitythe
latter being Heideggers term for the interpretation of existence on its
own terms. These two thinkers, Augustine and Descartes, often linked
by historians of philosophy, represent for Heidegger diametrically opposed ways of construing what it might mean to have a self (das Sichselbst-Haben).26 But in what sense is Augustines account of self-certainty
wholly other (ganz anderes) than that of Descartes? And how far is
Heidegger willing to push this opposition?
At first glance, the final paragraphs of SS (Summer Semester) 1921
22

GA61, 173 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 130].


This fact has been previously noted, in Greisch, LArbre de vie et larbre de savoir, 222.
24
GA58, 57.
25
GA60, 298 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 226; translation altered slightly].
26
The apparent similarity between Augustine and Descartes was famously raised by Arnauld
in the Fourth Set of Objections (see AT VII.196218) to the Meditations. It was dealt with
by Descartes himself in his Replies (see AT VII.219ff.). There is a wealth of research on
this topic. See, e.g., Etienne Gilson, La liberte chez Descartes et la theologie (Paris: Alcan, 1913);
S. Menn, Descartes and Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); E. Bermon,
Le cogito dans la pensee de saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 2001); and, most recently, Jean-Luc Marion,
Au lieu de soi: Lapproche de Saint Augustin (Paris: PUF, 2008), 8998.
23

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seem to offer only the vaguest explanation.27 To answer these questions,
it is necessary to briefly delay our attempt to make sense of Augustine
and Neoplatonism. We must first look elsewhere in the early lecture
courses, in order to see just how closely Heidegger subtly aligns his own
hermeneutic method with Augustine. This alliance comes into focus if
we examine how the theme of reversing the cogito functions in Heideggers first sustained confrontation with Descartes. The idea of reversing the cogito is discussed extensively in the early Freiburg lecture
course, particularly in those courses given directly following Augustine
and Neoplatonism. Yet, it is not until Heidegger arrives at Marburg
that he confronts Descartes Meditations in any systematic way.
In the first Marburg lecture course, entitled Introduction to Phenomenological Research (GA17, WS192324), Heidegger devotes most
of his attention to Descartes and the Scholastic ontology that determines him.28 Here we encounter the earliest version of the standard
charge Heidegger would level against Descartes: under the sway of the
mathematical sciences, Cartesian metaphysics enacts a fundamental
repositioning in the basic determination of a humans being,29 while
at the same time leaving intact the old ontology . . . as a self-evident
foundation.30 Adapting Thomistic understandings of truth and volition,
Descartes reconfigures truth as certainty while arrogating to human volition various cognitive and volitional functions that Thomas reserved for
the divine. These endeavors result, according to Heidegger, in an extreme pelagianism of theoretical knowing, one that establishes the cogito
as the firm and certain foundation of a universal science.31 Henceforth
in the history of metaphysics, Heidegger asserts, all beings are ontologically determined by recourse to a single way of beingnamely, being as
being-certain, or mere ascertainability, which Heidegger will shortly associate with presence-at-hand or Vorhandensein.32
While this approach requires Heidegger to situate Descartes carefully
in relation to Thomas, it also leads him to align his own thought with
that of Augustine: We will make the sense of [Descartes] idea of truth
27
GA60, 299 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 227]: Self-certainty must be interpreted from
out of factical being; it is possible from out of faith. . . . The evidence of the cogito is there
[da], but it must find its foundation in the factical. For every science ultimately rests in factical
existence.
28
GA17, 109 [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 79].
29
GA17, 226 [ibid., 172].
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., 228 [ibid., 173].
32
Following Descartes, even the existence of the self is illuminated by the light reflected
off the purely present-at-hand, as Heidegger writes in 1924: The Being of the res cogitans (i.e.
consciousness) signifies Vorhandensein (GA64, 102).

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A Difficult Proximity
more accessible for ourselves by orienting truth to existence itself, and
asking in what sense truth pertains to existence at all. It is the Augustinian
question of the relation of veritas and vita.33 Here we cannot fail to notice
that the destruction of Cartesian metaphysics Heidegger attempts in
WS192324 is placed under the banner of a question deemed Augustiniannamely, in what sense does truth [veritas] pertain to existence
[vita]? Given that Heidegger wants to demonstrate that Cartesian metaphysics is a form of Pelagianism, it is hardly surprising that he aligns
himself with Augustine. At first glance, however, this alliance seems at
best peripheral to Heideggers main concerns in criticizing Descartes.
The course contains no substantive analysis of Augustine nor does Heidegger seem to revisit the allegedly Augustinian question identified as
anchoring the return to Descartes.
Upon closer inspection, however, it is evident that Heidegger does
indeed reassert this alliance with Augustine. In fact, his reading of
Descartes solidifies this alliance in the strongest possible terms and in
the most surprising fashion. His reading of the Meditations is designed
to show that the question itselfin what sense does truth [veritas]
pertain to existence [vita]?is the form of the cogito. It is what constitutes the cogito as cogito. This is the positive yield of destroying the
Cartesian res cogitans. Heidegger wants to show, in other words, that
having a self does not mean being certain of ones existence as an
object in the world. Rather, existence is nothing other than constantly
reiterating the Augustinian question and thereby constantly calling oneself into question.
This strange assertion requires elucidation. In 3945 of WS1923
24, Heidegger dwells on Descartes Second Meditation, rehearsing the
method of hyperbolic doubt. Here he studies the figure of the cogito at
the point of its emergence onto the scene of experience. By the beginning of the Second Meditation, let us recall, Descartes has placed all
external reality, including the evidence of the senses and of memory,
along with body, figure, extension, and motion under the supposition
of falsehood. Now the prospect of an all-powerful deceiver threatens
to undercut Descartes efforts to establish the existence of any being
with absolute certainty. Heidegger fixes his attention upon this moment,
in which it seems all but impossible to avoid extreme skepticism. Here
Descartes search for certainty is said to enter an end situation, incapable of advancing any farther.34 The search reaches an insurmountable impasse, placing Descartes up against this limit as though it were
33
34

GA17, 120 [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 87].


Ibid., 239 [ibid., 183].

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itself a form of nothingness: At the end of the path, the search [for
certainty] is so positioned that it is placed before nothing and before
the nothing of its own possibilities.35 It is only when placed into and
before the nothing that the search attains its positive outcome or
resolution. In reaching this limit the search is forced back upon itself.
The one searching is made present to him- or herself as out-for-something (auf-zu), lingering in the state of hyperbolic doubt: [Descartes]
is not only placed before the nothing, but also placed in the nothing of any
possibility of still encountering something. The search is before the nothing and it itself is placed into the nothing, and yet is still characterized
as out-for-something certain.36
Heidegger argues that this phenomenon of being out-for-something
is nothing other than the intentional structure of subjectivity. It is only
when hyperbolic doubt reaches its highest pitch that Descartes is finally
pressed to make a leap to see37 this structure for what it is:
All the search can encounter now is the being of the one searching itself. . . . The
search can now find only the Searching-Being itself [Suchendsein selbst], which
contains in itself its Being. . . . The esse of the very res that I come across is the
sort of being that must be expressed by the sum, I am. Not something like
the discoverability [Vorfindlichkeit] of doubting as a res is what is found, but
rather the fact [Tatbestand] that an esse is given along with the doubting.38

For Heidegger the Cartesian ego emerges from out of this end situation. It does so as the radical self-experience of the subject engaged
in searching for certainty. Yet, the ontological meaning of what is discovered as the I am is obscure. The only thing one can deduce about
this I is that it is somehow given along with itself, that is, given to
the one who doubts. Heidegger faults Descartes for too quickly concluding that the being of the one searching can be determined as a
thing, or more specifically thought-thing (Denkding).39 For Heidegger
the fact that in hyperbolic doubt I still encounter my own being as
searching for truth is entirely enigmatic. That I so encounter myself
is undeniably a fact (Tatbestand), but precisely what kind of being is
encountered remains uncertain.
Formally speaking, Heidegger contends, the cogito is essentially nothing other than this mysterious being-given-to-oneself, or pure selfaffection. What Heidegger calls the out-for-something (auf-zu) is noth35

Ibid.,
Ibid.,
37
Ibid.,
38
Ibid.,
39
Ibid.,
36

235
240
243
240
248

[ibid.,
[ibid.,
[ibid.,
[ibid.,
[ibid.,

17879].
183].
187].
184].
191].

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A Difficult Proximity
ing other than the egos intentionality, its intentional directedness
toward the world. This intentionality is not an object experienced by
the cogito. Nevertheless, it is still given or experienced. For Heidegger
the great breakthrough of the Meditations is the discovery that the ego
has an immediate, nonobjective access to its own intentional directedness. The ego, in short, is affected by its own Being. Yet, neither the
form of this reflexivity nor the content of the esse that affects the ego
in this manner is adequately handled by Descartes. Indeed, the destruction of the res cogitans in WS192324 is chiefly concerned with its reflexive form. Heidegger argues not only that the ego consists in intentional directedness toward experiential contents but also that this
directedness is underpinned at all times by an unthematic, implicit, and
essential reflexivity. The ego, in other words, always has itself: it is
always a self, even when it does not explicitly direct itself toward this
having-oneself. According to Heideggers formula, the cogito is always
a cogito me cogitare, I think myself thinking, or a having-oneself-alongwith-oneself (das Sich-mit-habens): Cogito does not simply mean: I ascertain something that thinks; instead, it is a cogitare, indeed, such that
I myself have this entity along with thinking.40 Thus, when Descartes
invokes a foreconcept of being to determine the Being of the cogito
sumthat is, when he simply assumes that the chief mark of its Being
is the fact that it is discoverable and thus certainon Heideggers reading he deprives himself of the ability to study this phenomenon of
having-oneself-with-oneself.41
The unique way in which I have myself as a fact for myself is precisely
what Heidegger elsewhere calls facticity.42 In his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger identifies this same reflexive form of facticitythat is, the fact
40
Ibid., 249 [ibid., 193]. Some commentators have rightly pointed out that the phrase cogito
me cogitare does not appear in Descartes Meditationes and that the formula is incorrectly used
by Heidegger to describe the form of the Cartesian cogito. Emmanuel Faye, for example, faults
Heidegger for wrongly interpreting Descartes on this basis (see E. Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Michael B. Smith [New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009], 26667). However, Faye does not acknowledge the fact that for Heidegger the
formula can be justified textually. Heidegger draws upon the description of the res cogitans
in Principles of Philosophy I.9 in order to provide such a justification. See Descartes, AT VIIIA.7
[Philosophical Writings, 1:195]: By the term thought, I understand everything we are aware
of as happening within us, insofar as we have awareness of it (Cogitationis nomine, intelligo
illa omnia, quae nobis consciis in nobis fiunt, quatenus earumin nobis conscientia). For a
discussion of this passage, and of the reflexive form of the cogito suggested by it, see Martin
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, trans. F. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper Collins,
1982), 109ff.
41
GA17, 250 [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 193].
42
See, e.g., GA9, 29 [Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 25] and compare with SZ, 4162 [BT, 6790].

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The Journal of Religion


that the I is always directed back (zuruckzielen) to itself in a peculiar
way43with ego as the form of representation in general: Descartes
says that every ego cogito is a cogito me cogitare; every I represent something simultaneously represents a myself, a me, the one representing
(for myself, in my representing). Every human representing isin a
manner of speaking, and one that is easily misunderstooda selfrepresenting.44 In the context of WS192324, however, Heidegger does
not invoke the language of self-representation or the Kantian definition
of the I as the form of all representation. Rather, he sticks to his own
peculiar terminology in legitimating the experience of selfhood
glimpsed yet immediately elided by Descartes: the cogito is here characterized by what Heidegger calls respectiveness, or Jeweiligkeit. For
the early Heidegger this concept signifies the radically finite and historically particular nature of the first person. In each and every case,
the I somehow has itself to-be (zu-sein). It has its own Being, in the
sense that it has been delivered over or thrown upon this Being, which
it must then appropriate or project before itself as a task to be achieved.
A unique way of being, this respectiveness remains irreducible to selfconsciousness, even in the entirely indeterminate sense in which Kant
saw the transcendental ego as accompanying the empirical ego: no talk
of accompanying [Begleiten] gets at the authentic factuality [Tatbestand].45 Here we find that in order to begin reversing the perverse
ontological determination of the ego as a thing, it is necessary to focus
on the fact that each and every respective I has itself in a peculiar
manner. The I am is affected by its own Being, and it thereby understands this Being in some way. Thus, it can in fact be a self as the
radically finite individual. Already in 1923 Heidegger makes clear that
I am is the being that in each and every case is, and must be, mine.
It is crucial that for Heidegger self-having is enacted only in the form
of self-interrogation. The WS192324 destruction of the res cogitans concludes with the assertion that the ego has itself, is with itself most genuinely, to the extent that it calls itself into question. For Heidegger
hyperbolic doubt is not brought to an end in observing that I am, I
exist is true each and every time that I utter this proposition. It is the
hallmark of his reading of Descartes that radical skepticism is overcome
only to the extent that the I am is discovered as an entity whose
standing in the world stems from its form as a question. This argument
is already present in the early Freiburg lecture courses that followed
Augustine and Neoplatonism: The formal indication of the I am,
43

GA9, 33 [Pathmarks, 27].


Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, 106.
45
GA17, 249 [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 193].
44

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A Difficult Proximity
which is the indication that plays the leading role in the problematic
of the sense of the Being of life, becomes methodologically effective
by . . . becoming actualized in the demonstrable character of the questionability (restlessness) of factical life as the concretely historiological
question, Am I?46 In plainer terms, Heidegger argues here that the
I am comes closest to itself, encounters its own unique way of being,
only by calling itself into question. It has itself authentically only in
asking Am I? This resolution or reversal of the statement I am into
the question Am I? or Am I truly? is having-a-self. It is coextensive
with existence: The peculiarity of the actualization of this question
[Am I?] is precisely the fact that, as a matter of principle, it does not
answer the question with a pure, simple, and perfect yes, which would
then obviate any further discussion of life, or with that kind of no.47
This same conclusion is echoed in Heideggers famous 1924 lecture,
The Concept of Time. There Dasein is defined as the fullness of time
(die volle Zeit),48 or as temporality itself (Dasein ist . . . die Zeitlichkeit).49
Yet, these definitions are only taken seriously, we are told, if and only
if they hit Dasein in the form of a question. Let us briefly spell out this
argument as a way of elucidating the destruction of Descartes. In the
1924 lecture, it is actually in the service of explaining how Dasein exists
in the form of a question that Heidegger first invokes the figure of
Being-toward-death. The phenomenon of death is invoked here as precisely that which renders Dasein questionable to itself. In order to test
the hypothesis that Dasein is there to be interpreted by itself as a
whole, Heidegger appeals to its mortality: everything is subject to the
presupposition that [Dasein] is accessible in itself for an inquiry that is
to interpret it with respect to its Being. Is this presupposition correct,
or can it be made to vacillate [oder kann sie wankend gemacht werden]?50
The fact that Dasein is mortal shakes or solicits (wanken) our confidence
in the presupposition that Dasein is there for itself as a whole. Is it not
the case that, as long as Dasein exists, a part of it remains outstanding?
Is not Dasein fundamentally incomplete? And when existence is finally
completed in death, is it not the case that Dasein is no longer there to
interpret itself as a completed whole? How then could Dasein ever interpret the whole of itself? Here it is significant that death shakes but
does not destroy the presupposition Heidegger wants to test. At the
46

GA61, 174 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 131].


Ibid., 175 [ibid., 131].
48
See Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. W. McNeil (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992),
16 and 16E [GA64, 118].
49
Ibid., 20, 20E [ibid., 123].
50
Ibid., 910, 9E10E [ibid., 114].
47

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end of the lecture, Heidegger argues that Dasein is indeed a whole and
that it can interpret itself as such. Dasein is, in fact, the fullness of time.
It is temporality itself. But this definition functions to intensify the very
shaking effect that death has upon us. How does Dasein have itself as
a unified whole in Being-toward-death? And how does it interpret itself
as such? It does so precisely by being called forth to appropriate its
possibilities through an experience of itself as finitely temporal: Who
is time? More closely: are we ourselves time? Or closer still: Am I my
time? In this way I come closest to it, and if I understand the question
correctly, it is then taken completely seriously. Such a question is thus
the most appropriate manner of access to and of dealing with time
as in each case mine. Then Dasein would be: being questionable (Fraglichsein).51 Here it is clear that Dasein is the fullness of time, only when
it interrogates itself by asking Am I my time? It is only as a question
that Dasein can experience its being as time.
The same concern animates the destruction of the res cogitans in
WS192324. In this earlier context, the Cartesian subject is indeed
granted philosophical legitimacy. However, Descartes is said to pervert
the experience of being-with-oneself implied by the form of the cogito
as cogito me cogitare, I think that I think. In contrast to Descartes,
Heidegger asserts that this latter phrase or proposition must be taken
in the sense of a formal indication, in such a way that it is not taken
directly (where it says nothing), but is related to the respective concrete
instance of what it means.52 We can make sense of what it means to
take the statement I think that I think as what Heidegger calls a formal
indication only if we refer to these other contexts, where Heidegger
argues that the form of the I am is that of a question and where
Human Dasein is essentially a question to itself. This implies the following: in arguing that the Being of the cogito should remain open and
labile, Heideggers reading of Descartes effectively comes full circle. It
reaches its conclusion in being led back to the very Augustinian question from which it sets out. Now, however, the very act of posing the
question what is the relation of veritas and vita? is no longer simply
the banner under which Heidegger undertakes an inquiry into the
history of philosophy. Rather, it is unveiled as the essence of existence
as such.
This ever-intensifying experience of self-interrogation is what the
early Heidegger called restlessness (Unruhigkeit).53 But what does it
mean to say that this questionability demonstrates that the ego is af51

Ibid., 22, 22E [ibid., 125].


GA17, 249 [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 193].
53
GA61, 1067 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 80].
52

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A Difficult Proximity
fected directly by its own Being? And what is the significance of the
fact that the Being or esse of the ego is given along with it?
The philosophical stakes of this assertion are not always made apparent
in Heideggers early lecture courses. During the early Freiburg period,
Heidegger argues repeatedly, often in coded form, that Husserls transcendental reduction obscures, rather than reveals, the true nature of
intentionality. By insisting that the ego is affected directly by its own esse,
Heidegger is actually attacking what he sees as the origins of Husserls
inadequate treatment of intentionality. That the ego or Dasein is affected
directly by its own Being, its Being-in-the-world, announces nothing
short of a clean break with both Descartes and Kant. Kant distinguishes
between the transcendental ego and the empirical ego in order to argue
that the I cannot gain access to what it is in itself. The ego is divided
into phenomenon and noumenon like any other object of experience.
According to Heidegger, the division is Cartesian in origin. In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes leaves little doubt that the finite intellect
is not directly affected by substance whatsoever. The finite intellect may
be directly affected by the attributes of entities, but it is never directly
affected by essence: Yet substance cannot be first discovered merely
from the fact that it is a thing that exists, for this alone does not by
itself affect us.54 Pure Being or esse does not affect us by itselfa thesis
that, according to Heidegger, Kant and Husserl both adopted uncritically. In SS1925 Heidegger challenges this thesis while linking it to Kant:
Descartes says that we have no primary and original access to the being
of the entity as such. What Descartes expresses here in this way, that
the being of an entity taken purely for itself does not affect us, is later
formulated by Kant in the simple sentence, being is not a real predicate; that is, being is not a datum which can be apprehended by way
of any kind of receptivity and affection.55 Against both Descartes and
Kant, Heidegger suggests that there is indeed an entity which can be
grasped directly and only primarily from its Being and, if it is to be
understood philosophically, must so be grasped.56 This entity is indeed
the cogito, the I am, whose essence as questionability not only affects
it directly but can and must be brought to fulfillment, that is, enacted
by this entity itself, to the extent that it readies itself for anxiety: Earlier,
in analyzing Descartes concept of the subject, I referred to his statement that we actually have no affection of being as such. But there is
54
Principia Philosophia I, 52: non potest substantia primum animadverti ex hoc solo, quod
sit res existens, quia hoc solum per se nos non afficit. Compare SZ, 94 [BT, 127].
55
GA20, 236 [History of the Concept of Time, 176].
56
Ibid., 237 [ibid.].

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such an affection. . . . Angst is nothing other than the pure and simple
experience of Being in the sense of Being-in-the-world.57
Thus, for the early Heidegger the experience of restless self-interrogation provides the only point of access to the pure, nonobjectifying
affection of Daseins esse. In Being and Time, the same function is fulfilled
by anxiety (Angst), which allows Dasein to grasp its Being-in-the-world
directly and experientially. Restless self-interrogation is what makes the
sum in cogito sum appear for itself: [the sum] is an objectivity to be
encountered first and foremost in questioning, and only thus can it be
encountered concretely in any given case.58 Yet, the affection of Being
at the root of facticity is by no means reducible to self-immediacy. It is
precisely in confronting itself as nothing that Dasein gains access to its
own essence: Uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit] is the threat to itself, which
is in Dasein. . . . Uncanniness is, if one asks what it is, nothing; if one
asks where it is, nowhere.59 Such is Heideggers chief tactic the metaphysical tradition of Descartes and Kant. He shows that it is precisely
as nothingthat is, not as a thing but rather as a questionthat its
own way of Being is given to Dasein.
iii. two senses of confessio
The link between radical self-interrogation and the nothingness of the
I am is first put into play by Heidegger in Augustine and Neoplatonism. At first glance, however, it is by no means clear that the lecture
carries such weight. The SS1921 manuscript suggests a seminar of rather
limited scope: a short preface discussing Dilthey, Harnack, and
Troeltsch is followed by a main part consisting of a line-by-line commentary on Confessions X.139. This main part is supplemented by various indices comprising student notes, many of which consist of Heideggers digressions on texts other than Confessions X. On the whole,
the course manuscript gives one the impression that Heidegger is mired
in insignificant details, that he has little invested in the course, and
that he is perhaps looking forward to the end of the semester. It comes
as no surprise that in August 1921 Heidegger voiced his frustrations
with the seminar in a letter to Karl Jaspers.60
57

Ibid., 403 [ibid., 291].


GA61, 176 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 132].
GA17, 290 [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 221].
60
See Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 192063, ed. von W. Biemel and
H. Saner (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990), 8 (August 5, 1921), 24: Das Semester
war fur mich im Ganzen eine Enttauschung; es lohnt nicht die Arbeit fur die, die vor
einem sitzen. Der eine oder andere fat einmal zu, um dann wieder bequemen Liebhabereien nachzugehen. Ich habe mich im vergangenen Semester oft gefragt, was wir eigent58
59

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A Difficult Proximity
However, a closer look at the seminar manuscript tells a more complex story and suggests that Heideggers difficulties in the summer of
1921 may have stemmed from his struggle to articulate coherently just
what he saw at work in the Confessions. In the broadest sense, Heideggers entire presentation of Augustine aims at a single goalnamely,
proving that Augustinian having-of-a-self (Sich-selbst-Haben) is paradoxically grounded in an act of negating the self before God and that
confession bears witness to this act. To recognize this, we must briefly
reconstruct the crooked path Heidegger travels in order to show how
the Augustinian soul achieves its true standing as a nothing (nihil,
Nichts) before God.61
At the outset of SS1921, Heidegger notes that what sets Book X apart
from the other twelve books of the Confessions is that it records Augustines act of confessing himself in the present, in the very time of [his]
confessing,62 or what Augustine calls the fruit of confession.63 This
confession thus entails determining what I am and what I continue to
be,64 and it is accomplished as part of Augustines search to answer
the question: What do I love when I love my God?65
Buried in Heideggers initial review of facts concerning Confessions
X, we discover one of the key theses of SS1921: the so-called fruit of
confession is actually a compound substance. Confessions X contains two
diametrically opposed ways of grasping the self, that is, two modes of
confessing oneself in the present.66 The text is split into an earlier
and a later set of considerations or reflections (Betrachtungen) on the
self. The first set stretches from Confessions X.1 to the excursus on memoria (X.819). In these chapters, Heidegger suggests, Augustine is
essentially searching for a fulfilling intuition of the divine. He is expecting to come upon the divine as though it were an object, as though
he could say: enough, here it is.67 Upon emerging from the excursus
on memoria, however, Augustine switches gears. Henceforth, he takes a
different approach to the self, which is recorded in chapters X.2039.
This second or later set of reflections on the self is not simply more
lich tun. (For me the semester was a complete disappointment; it wasnt worth all the work
for those sitting there before you. Handling this one or that one so that they could pursue
their comfortable hobbies. I often asked myself in the past semester, what are we really doing?)
61
GA60, 235 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 175].
62
Confessions X.3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Confessions are taken from
Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed, intro. P. Brown, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).
All translations of Augustines other works are from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation
for the 21st Century, ed. J. Rotelle, OSA (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1999present).
63
Confessions X.4.
64
Ibid.
65
Confessions X.6.
66
See GA60, 17677 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 12829].
67
See Confessions X.19.

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thorough, more detailed, more complete, more secure, and better
(eingehender, genauer, vollstandiger, sichere, und besser). Rather, it is
carried out according to an entirely different direction of grasping,
means of grasping, and enactment of grasping (Erfassungsrichtung, Erfassungsmittel, und Erfassungsvollzug).68 Augustine and Neoplatonism
is thus meant to show how and why Augustine passes from one way of
explicating the self to another and, in so doing, how he succeeds in
making of himself a question.69 This interpretive framework functions
as a strict guideline for Heideggers commentary and yet it is only at the
end of the course that Heidegger displays the so-called genuinely Augustinian sense of self-certainty embedded in the second or later
mode of confession.70
To isolate this sense, Heidegger first has to explain why Augustine
initially goes astray in confessing what he is and continues to be. That
is, he must account for why Augustine employs the earlier way of relating to himself and to the divine. In short, he must destroy the Confessions. From Heideggers perspective, the earlier mode of confession,
which is oriented toward intuiting the divine, stems from the fact that
Augustine has uncritically adopted from the Christian-Platonic milieu of
late antiquity certain objectivizing tendencies. Thus, in De Doctrina Christiana and elsewhere, Heidegger finds evidence of these tendencies, in
that creation for Augustine consists of a hierarchy of beings, that some
beings have more being than others, and that this hierarchy yields a
table of values dictating proper relations among beings.71
Broadly speaking, the application of this table of values is what Heidegger refers to as axiologization (Axiologisierung). To extract Augustines genuine religiosity from his texts, Heidegger asserts, this (Plotinian) axiologization must be entirely expunged. This critique proves to
be quite damaging to the edifice of Augustinian thought. A great majority of Augustines concepts are marked for destruction. Such basic
features of his thought as the doctrine of God as summum bonum, the
hierarchy of creation, the universal pursuit of happiness, and the human desire to rest in Godall of these are set aside in Augustine and
Neoplatonism as though part of a pagan framework foreign to lived
Christian experience.72
68

GA60, 17677 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 12829].


Confessions X.33.
On the importance of Augustine for the early Heideggers account of selfhood, see
especially Carlson, The Indiscrete Image, chap. 2: I am: Technological Modernity, Theological
Tradition, and the Human in Question, 3673.
71
De doc. christ. I.140.
72
The clearest explanation of Axiologisierung can be found in GA60, 27382, in which Heidegger discusses this theme in connection with Enarr. in Ps. 143.
69
70

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A Difficult Proximity
And yet, like all acts of hermeneutic destruction, this one is fundamentally constructive: one of the most important tasks of Augustine
and Neoplatonism is to determine in what sense the Augustinian enjoyment of God, or fruitio Dei, can be liberated from axiologization.
To this end Heidegger puts into play not one but two senses of the
fruitio Deione to be destroyed, the other to be salvaged.73 On the one
hand, that sense of fruito Dei marked for destruction is unmistakable:
by expunging from Augustinian anthropology the sense that creation
longs to rest in God, Heidegger simultaneously confronts what he takes
to be Augustines tendency to describe the divine as though it were
constituted as an object of theoretical perception.74 He thereby isolates
Augustines attentiveness to finite life as restlessness. On the other
hand, this restlessness goes hand in hand with an entirely different
sense of fruitio: The fruitio in Augustine is not the specifically Plotinian
one, which culminates in intuition (Anschauung), but is rooted in the
peculiarly Christian view of factical life.75 The claim is striking, since
it grants legitimacy, within certain parameters, to a dismantled form of
Christian Platonism. But in what sense? What is the genuinely religious
concept of fruitio at play in Augustine?
Augustine and Neoplatonism salvages an allegedly genuine sense
of fruitio by building a connection between enjoyment and love. Heideggers most sustained discussion of love occurs as a gloss on Confessions X.34, where Augustine juxtaposes the carnal pleasure of the eyes
(voluptas oculorum) and the invisible eyes that, once spiritually purified, look upon God with a loving gaze. Here it is the theme of purification that interests Heidegger. In the first Tractate on the Gospel of John,
Augustine discusses cleansing or purifying (mundare) the heart as the
condition for seeing God. He does so in connection with the Beatitudes.76 Heidegger, in turn, explicates this theme by glossing Sermon
LIII, where Augustine, meditating on Matt. 5:8, Blessed are the pure
in heart, for they will see God, advises his flock to turn inward and
scrutinize themselves in order to become pure:
Return again to your face. Think of the face of the heart [facies cordis]. Force,
compel, and press your heart to think of divine matters. Whatever occurs in
your thinking that is body-like, get rid of it. If you cannot yet say, Here it is,
73
This is undoubtedly confirmed by Oskar Beckers notes. See GA60, 272ff. [Phenomenology
of Religious Life, 204ff.].
74
Ibid., 272 [ibid., 205]: Die fruitio Dei steht letzten Endes im Gegensatz zum Haben des
Selsbt; beides entspringt nicht derselben Wurzel, sondern ist von auen zusammengewachsen.
75
Ibid., 272 [ibid.].
76
In Jo. ev. tr. 1.1819.

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still you say at least, This is not it. For when will you say, Here is God? Not
even when you will see Him, for what you will see is ineffable.77

Because everything hinges for Heidegger upon isolating the Augustinian visio Dei from what he calls the Plotinian sense of enjoyment
(which allegedly culminates in an objectifying intuition of the divine),
he equates the very work of purification mentioned in Sermon LIII with
the ineffable vision of God, a vision without vision: The self gains the
enactmental condition of the experience of God. In the concern for
the selfly life, God is present. God as object in the sense of the facies
cordis operates [wirkt] in the authentic life of human beings.78 What
role does the self or soul play in this operation? How does it enact
fruitio if not by experiencing God as an object, saying to itself here is
God?
To explain this, Heidegger explores the connection between fear
(timor) and love (dilectio, amor). First he appeals to Augustines Eighth
Homily on 1 John. Here the act of love consists in a certain well-wishing,
or benevolentia: all love, my dear brothers, implies necessarily an element of goodwill [benevolentia] towards those who are loved.79 Yet,
benevolentia is more complicated than it first appears. Pride can masquerade as benevolencecharity clothes the naked, so does pride . . .
when charity is the inward driver, pride must give place80which is
why Augustine asserts that benevolentia consists in wishing for the neighbor to be ones equal before God.81 This means helping the neighbor
to attain his or her true form as conceived by the divine:
Let your desire for [the enemy] be that together with you he may have eternal
life: let your desire for him be that he may be your brother. And if that is what
you desire in loving your enemythat he may be your brotherwhen you love
him, you love a brother. You love in him, not what he is, but what you would
have him be [Non enim amas in illo quod est, sed quod vis ut sit].82
77
Sermon LIII.11.12: Sed non iterum tu redeas ad istam faciem tuam. Faciem cordis cogita.
Coge cor tuum cogitare divina, compelle, urge. Quidquid simile corporis cogitanti occurrerit,
abice. Nondum potes dicere: Hoc est: saltem dic: Non est hoc. Quando enim dices: Hoc
est Deus? Nec cum videbis: quia ineffabile est quod videbis.
78
GA60, 289 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 219]. This citation provides a basis for the
etymological link Giorgio Agamben makes between the notion of the face of the heart and
the concept of facticity. See La passion de la facticite, in Heidegger: Questions ouvertes, cahiers
du CIPH (Paris: Osiris, 1988), 6384. This article is reprinted as chap. 12 of Potentialities, trans.
D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 185204.
79
Augustine, ep. Jo. VIII.5. English translation in Augustine: Later Works, trans. John Burnaby,
Library of Christian Classsics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), 321.
80
Augustine, ep. Jo. VIII.9 [Augustine: Later Works, 322].
81
Augustine, ep. Jo. VIII.5 [ibid., 321]: You may have the truest love for a happy man, on
whom you have nothing to bestow. . . . You should want him to be your equal, that you both
may be subject to the one on whom no favor can be bestowed.
82
Augustine, ep. Jo. VIII.10 [ibid., 32324].

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A Difficult Proximity
For Heidegger, Augustinian love is summed up in the very last phrase
of this quote: I will, that you be (you), or volo, ut sis. This phrase
appears just once in the SS1921 manuscript,83 but Heidegger made
constant use of it throughout his personal writings, 84 as well as in his
professional writings. 85 For Augustine, this definition of neighborly
love is modeled after Gods love for creation. In On the Trinity, Book
I, Augustine argues that to the extent that the word Father signifies
the essential unity of the triune Godhead rather than a person of the
Trinity, Father refers to Gods love for creation as a whole. Invoking
John 16:27 as his proof-text, Augustine explains that the broad use of
the term Father refers to God such that He loves us, that we may
be [. . . quales amat ut simus].86
It is not lost on Heidegger, however, that for Augustine the finite soul
is arguably incapable by itself of loving God in this manner. The soul
can cling to God (or have God, in Heideggers language) only by
chastely fearing God. The distinction Augustine draws between chaste
fear (timor castus) and servile fear (timor servilis) resolves the tension
between two potentially contradictory biblical passages. On the one hand,
the Vulgate Psalms 18:10 reads: The fear of the Lord is chaste [sanctus],
enduring for ever and ever.87 On the other hand, 1 John 4:18 states:
83
GA60, 29192 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 221]: In this optare (to wish), you appropriate
the possibility of genuine loving [In dieser optare eignest du dir die Moglichkeit des echten Liebens
zu]. Authentic love has a basic tendency toward the dilectum, ut sit. Thus, love is the will toward
the being of the loved one [Liebe ist also Wille zum Sein des Geliebten]. . . . Communal-worldly
love has the sense of helping the loved other toward his existence, so that he comes to himself
[. . . so da er zu sich selbst kommt]. Genuine love of God has the sense of willing to make God
accessible to oneself as the one who exists in an absolute sense. This is the greater difficulty
of life.
84
See Letter XV, from Letters 19251975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, ed. Ursula
Ludz, trans. Andrew Shields (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 21. (See Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und
andere Zeugnisse: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, ed. Ursula Ludz [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 2002], XV: And so great a day hovers over my pages and notebooks this
morning, and I am reading Augustines de gratia et libero arbitrio.Thank you for your lettersfor how you have accepted me into your lovebeloved. Do you know that this is the
most difficult thing a human is given to endure? For anything else, there are methods, aids,
limits, and understandinghere alone everything means: to be in ones love p to be forced
into ones innermost existence. Amo means volo, ut sis, Augustine once said: I love youI
want you to be what you are.)
85
Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, GA66 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 63. English
translation in Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (New York: Coninuum,
2006), 52, and Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2003), 367, GA81.5: Amo, volo,
ut sis. See also Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1971). See esp.
pt. 2: Willing, 2: Quaestio Mihi Factus Sum: The Discovery of the Inner Man (55110), in Arendt,
The Life of the Mind, 104: There is no greater assertion of something or somebody than to
love it, that is, to say: I will, that you beAmo, volo, ut sis.
86
Augustine, On the Trinity I.10.21 (translation mine).
87
Psalm 18:5: timor Domini sanctus permanens in saeculum saeculi iudicia Domini vera
iustificata in semet ipsa.

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There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear
has to do with punishment.88 Augustine notes that servile fear refers
to the fear that is driven out by love. This fear is essentially fear of
being punished: There are men who fear God because they fear to be
cast into hell, to burn with the devil in everlasting fire. This is the fear
that makes an opening for charity, but it enters only to go out again.89
By contrast, chaste fear is not apprehensive of evil things (mala caves).
It consists essentially in desiring the good: When you begin to long
for good things, chaste fear will arise in you. What is chaste fear? Not
letting go of the good. Listen: it is one thing to fear God lest he send
you to Gehenna with the devil. It is another thing to fear God lest he
retreat from you.90
Scholars have noted that this distinction between servile fear and
chaste fear mirrors the Heideggerian distinction deployed in Being and
Time between fear (Furcht) and anxiety (Angst).91 In SS1921, chaste fear
comes into play with regard to Confessions X.36, where Augustine asserts
that in desiring to be loved and feared by others, the soul neither loves
nor fears God chastely (non amare te, nec caste timere te).92 Thus, Heidegger finds a very clear textual basis in the Confessions for salvaging
his positive sense of fruitio by linking it to chaste fear: But when you
fear God, lest His presence desert you, you embrace him, thus you desire
to enjoy him (cum autem times Deum, ne deserat te praesentia eius,
amplecteris eum, ipso frui desideras).93 All that remains for Heidegger
is to interpret the trembling of Augustines heart as a sign of the
desire for genuine fruitio:94 This [trembling] is a phenomenon that is
constitutive of the concern for oneself: genuine timor. Slipping away
from it is a self-removal from the caste timere te, the pure fearing of God.95
The conclusion is now clear; chaste fear signifies the way genuine fruitio
is put into actionprecisely in fear, I keep a bonum,96 which is why
Augustine is said to glimpse the great unstoppable distress of life.97
88
In the Vulgate: timor non est in caritate sed perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem quoniam
timor poenam habet qui autem timet non est perfectus in caritate.
89
Augustine, ep. Jo. IX.5 [Augustine: Later Works, 333].
90
Ibid.
91
Otto Poggeler, The Paths of Heideggers Life and Thought, trans. J. Bailiff (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press International, 1997), 92ff. Compare C. N. J. de Paulo, Following Heideggers Footnotes to Augustine on Timor Castus and Servilis, in The Influence of Augustine on
Heidegger, ed. C. J. N. de Paulo (Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen, 2006), 299322.
92
Confessions X.36.
93
Tr. in Io. ad Parthos IX.5.
94
Confessions X.39.
95
GA60, 294 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 223].
96
Ibid., 297 [ibid., 225].
97
GA58, 62.

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A Difficult Proximity
iv. the cogito out of reach
The last half of Augustine and Neoplatonism maps the passage from
servile to chaste fear in Confessions X. Above I noted that, according to
Heidegger, Augustines act of confessing himself in the present or the
fruit of confession consists of two ways of confessing what he is. Heidegger locates a crucial turning point in Confessions X in the exploration
of temptation, which, in his view, anticipates the hermeneutics of Dasein.
Let us follow the steps in his argument. By Confessions X.26 Augustines
search for God has allegedly been redirected. The excursus on memory
has revealed the futility of searching for the divine as though it were
a determinate thing or quid. Now, as in Descartes Meditations, the search
reflects back upon the one searching. Augustine interrogates himself in
order to discover if, in fact, he has prevented himself from finding God.98
The most crucial part of SS1921, philosophically speaking, addresses Confessions X.3039, in which Augustine explores temptation and sin. Following 1 John 2:16, Augustine divides temptation into three kinds: lust
of the flesh (concupiscentia carnis), lust of the eyes (concupiscientia oculorum), and worldly ambition (ambitio saeculi).
Heideggers gloss on these three temptations is guided by two interpretive assumptions. First, in Confessions X.28 Augustine announces that
the life of man is constant temptation, and in Confessions X.29 he implores Gods mercy: All my hope is naught save in Thy great mercy.
Grant what Thou dost command and command what Thou will. To
explicate these lines, Heidegger invokes Augustines Psalm Expositions:
[God] examines our heart and explores carefully to see that it is where our
treasure is, that is, in heaven. He examines also our inward parts and explores
carefully to see that we do not capitulate to flesh and blood but rejoice in God.
Then he guides the just persons conscience in his own presence, guides it there
where no human being sees [ubi nullus hominum videt]; he alone sees who discerns
what each person thinks and what causes each person pleasure. For pleasure is
the end of care [ finis curae delectatio est].99

According to this Psalm commentary, divine guidance remains absolutely secret. The gift of divine counsel is hidden away, just as the
98
See Confessions X.26, with respect to which Heidegger remarks: The question where [wo]
I find God has turned into a discussion of the conditions of experiencing God, and that
comes to a head in the problem of what I am myself [was ich selbst bin], such that, in the end,
the same question still stands, but in a different form of enactment (GA60, 204 [Phenomenology
of Religious Life, 150]).
99
En. in Ps. VII.9 (here the translation is taken from Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the
Psalms 132, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. M. Boulding,
OSB, ed. J. Rotelle, OSA [Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2000], 123).

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real end toward which the soul strives is discernible only to God. For
Heidegger, Augustines exploration of temptation will highlight, rather
than resolve, this secrecy at the heart of finite selfhood. The experience
of this secrecy constitutes the worry (Bekummerung) through which
life confronts itself. The task for Heidegger in glossing Confessions X.30
39 consists in showing how, given this secrecy, the soul lets God be God
precisely by letting God remain unfound.100
The second assumption is less subtle than this. Heidegger simply
asserts that Confessions X.3039 traces a progression toward genuine selfpossession. Examining the first two temptations, fleshly concupiscence
and concupiscence of the eyes, he asserts that Augustine is still at a
remove from the genuine phenomenon of selfhood. Only worldly ambition (ambitio saeculi), the third form of temptation, revolves around
the souls capacity to win or lose its true standing as a self. Thus, all
the weight of Heideggers presentation is placed upon this third temptation, since it is here that we are meant to discover the genuine Augustinian forms of having-a-self and self-certainty.
The analysis of worldly ambition begins with Confessions X.36, wherein
this temptation is assigned a very precise structure. In the most general
sense, worldly ambition consists in wanting to be feared and loved by
men (timeri et amari velle ab hominibus).101 Even though fear and
love are necessary parts of social life, the effects of succumbing to
worldly ambition are quite dire, as Augustine explains: and while we
receive praises too eagerly, we lose caution and are caught up in them,
and so separate [deponere] our joy [gaudium] from the truth and place
it [ponere] in the deceitfulness of men: we delight to be praised and
feared, not for Your sake, but in Your place.102 Worldly ambition thus
represents a direct challenge to God, and Augustine is now left to ask
how the soul can avoid separating (deponere) its joy from God and entering into open rivalry with the divine. Augustine allegedly handles this
question by dividing worldly ambition into two types. The first type, the
love of praise (amor laudis), concerns the relation between the soul and
100
Augustine discusses un-finding God in a text that Heidegger did not have available to
him. See Sermon 360B/Dolbeau 25/Mainz 61, in Vingt-six Sermons au peuple dAfrique, ed.
Francois Dolbeau (Paris: IEA, 1996), 53ff: The soul must not dare to form images, as it were,
of God. It must first learn to un-find the one it wishes to find. [Nihil sibi anima, quasi in
phantasia formare audeat de deo: quem vult invenire, prius discat non-invenire.] Whats this Ive just
said: it must first learn to unfind [non-invenire]? It is when, reflecting on God, and something
occurs to it that it has seen, perhaps the beauty of the earth, it must clear it out of its mind
[respuat ab animo suo]. . . . You cannot know what [God] is, unless you first learn what he is
not [non potes ergo scire quid sit, nisi didiceris ante quid non sit].
101
Confessions X.36.
102
Ibid.

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A Difficult Proximity
its communal world or those neighbors in relation to whom the soul
measures its worldly standing. The second type Heidegger identifies as
private excellence (excellentia privata) or pleasing oneself (sibi
placens), which he translates as self-importance (Selbstwichtignahme).
In the case of self-importance, the communal world is entirely intellectualized: the soul now desires to be feared and loved by itself. It is
both actor and its own audience.
It is while addressing this second form of worldly ambition that Heidegger explains what is meant by genuine Augustinian self-possession.
Following Confessions X.39, he begins by outlining four ways in which
the soul puts on airs before itself. The entire weight of Heideggers
commentary is brought to bear upon this single chapter of Confessions
X. Those who are interiorly pleased with themselves, as Augustine tells
us (and as Heidegger parses it),
please themselves but they mightily displease [God]: (1) not because they are
displeased with things not good as though they were good, but (2) because
they are pleased with things good as though they were their own; (3) or even
if they rejoice in them as Yours, they think they have merited them; (4) or
even if as proceeding wholly from Your grace, then not as rejoicing with their
fellow men, but as grudging Your grace to others [non tamen socialiter gaudentes,
sed aliis invidentes eam].103

To explain these forms of self-importance, Heidegger articulates a


remarkably stark criticism of self-representation. The self-important
soul fails to recognize that it is nothing before God. Moreover, it fails
to recognize its sin as a sin, since it does not grasp that the mere act
of representing itself to itself, in whatever form, is pleasurable. And as
pleasurable, this act leads it away from genuine fruitio Dei. Here is the
strange yet crucial feature of Heideggers Augustine: for him, the act
of confession reveals that self-representation is necessarily idolatrous.
Augustines position is radicalized to the point where the Bishop of
Hippo allegedly contends that the soul cannot represent itself to itself
without idolizing itself. On this reading, true religious standing before
God coincides with the extinction of all self-representation. Insofar as
Augustine recognizes the intrinsic dangers of self-representation, he
thereby successfully diagnoses the extreme affliction of created being:
It is a peculiarity of these four modes of self-importance that a genuine appreciation of the bonum is indeed enacted [vollzogen wird] more and more . . .
103
Confessions X.39, following Heideggers rendering of it, according to GA60, 238ff. [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 17880].

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but that the self always sees itself before itself [das Selbst sich vor sich selbst sieht],
positing [vorsetzt] its own self-world to itself and taking it to be decisively important, even if only in such a way that it is the one in which [in der] and before
which [von der] grace and the donum are realized [verwirklicht]. But this means
that it is precisely in that mode in which the self no longer attributes any
achievements to itself that everything is relinquished in rejoicing before God
[alles aus der Hand gegeben wird in das Sichfreuen vor Gott].104

Here Heidegger traces two ways in which the soul falls back into
objectivizing itself. Either the soul takes pleasure in itself by recognizing
itself as the recipient of grace, in which case the divine gift of grace is
nullified by merely recognizing it as given, or the soul voids its own
enactment of charity by merely recognizing this enactment as such. In
this way Augustine is said to apply an extreme version of Matt. 6:3do
not let your left hand know what your right hand is doingto the
souls inner realm. All representations of the self must be dissolved; no
act of self-regard is devoid of concupiscence. The soul must bring to a
halt all self-regard, lest it enact hidden movements whereby, idolizing
itself, everything falls into the void . . . and everything is invalidated
in regard to the summum bonum.105 Conversely, by refusing to idolize
itself, the soul is able to genuinely rejoice before God. This genuine
fruitio Dei amounts to the souls nullifying every for itself. The soul is
thereby absolutized,106 riveted to its own destitution as nothing before
God.107 It is said to genuinely have itself as this nothingness. Likewise,
it is paradoxically by leaving grace untaken that the soul most authentically possesses it.108 In this manner Augustines search for God is
made to culminate in an experience of forsakenness not unlike the one
endured by Christ on the cross. Having oneself in this state of destitution signifies what Heidegger calls the last and most decisive and
purest concern [Bekummerung] for ones self.109
It is also what accounts for the fact that Augustinian self-certainty is
104

GA60, 240 [ibid., 180]; translation altered slightly.


Ibid.
106
Ibid., 260 [ibid., 195]. It is beyond the scope of this essay to trace the strange and subtle
shift in the early Heideggers use of the term absolute as a predicate of the ego. However,
I would like to suggest that the term absolute is given a positive sense in the lectures on
religious life, which Heidegger then disavows in the very next semester (see GA61, 177 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 133]).
107
Compare Confessions VII.11; and ep. 2; See esp. Etienne Gilson, Note sur letre et le
temps chez saint Augustin, Recherches augustiniennes 2 (1962): 20523.
108
On letting what is striven after remain untaken, and in connection with the notion of
eros in the Platonic tradition, refer to Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Platos Cave
Allegory and Theaetetus (GA34), trans. T. Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), 3033, 155:
instead of the object of this striving becoming a thing which as such can be taken into
possession, it always remains untaken as something striven for.
109
GA60, 240 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 180].
105

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A Difficult Proximity
wholly other than its Cartesian variant. The stark form of self-renunciation suggested by Confessions X.3940 models, for Heidegger, what
it might mean to desubstantivize or reverse the Cartesian ego cogito:
Augustine clearly sees the difficulty and the ultimately anxiety-producing character of Dasein in such having-of-oneself (in full facticity).110 The model of the reversed cogito in SS1921 is neither vague nor
implicit. It is, in fact, fully and rigorously articulated. As quoted above,
in glossing Confessions X.39, Heidegger maintains that it is only by prohibiting all self-representation that the soul, in relinquishing everything
before God, places itself and its world out of reach (aus der Hand
gegeben). Only thus does it rejoice in God. And only thus is the soul
open to the divine as the term of its longing.
Through a strange economy of sacrifice, however, it is by means of
this total self-effacement before God that the soul gains back its genuinely religious self-affection or reflexivity, its self-enjoyment (Sichfreuen) before God.111 This self-enjoyment is enacted as a mode of discourse, namely, prayer. If we translate this sacrificial dynamic into a
philosophical idiomor rather, if we follow Heideggers attempt to do
sothe point of convergence between hermeneutics and the Confessions
becomes clear. At the moment the soul negates itself before the divine,
reducing itself to nothingness (nihil ),112 we find a strikingly literal reversal of the modern Cartesian subject: whereas the Cartesian res cogitans
signifies an entity that is ontologically speaking present-at-hand or vorhanden,113 the prayer offered by the Augustinian ego is meant to signify
the self as ontologically desubstantivized in being placed out-of-reach,
aus-der-Hand-gegeben. This explains Heideggers otherwise mysterious remark, namely, that self-certainty is possible only from out of faith.114
This certainty consists in enacting ones radical infirmity in a manner
that absolutizes the restlessness of finite existence before God.
v. conclusion
If the reversal of the Cartesian cogito was achieved, in fact, in Augustine and Neoplatonism through a depiction of fruitio Dei, then why
did Heidegger find it necessary to abandon altogether his research into
110

Ibid., 241 [ibid.].


Compare GA24, 186 [Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 132]: Pleasure in the widest sense
is not only desire for something and pleasure in something but always also, as we may say,
enjoyment; this is a way in which the human being, turning within pleasure toward something,
experiences himself as enjoyinghe is joyous.
112
GA60, 235 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 175].
113
See n. 33.
114
GA60, 299 [Phenomenology of Religious Life, 227].
111

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the phenomenology of religious life? Why did he shut down the very
project that first allowed him to depict the cogito in verso? For indeed,
let us recall that after 1921, with a single exception, Heidegger never
again devoted an entire seminar to a Christian theologian.115 Here one
can surmise that Heidegger ceased elaborating a phenomenology of
religious life precisely because it had run its course; in little over a year
he had achieved his stated goal of seeing the cogito backward in a provisional manner. And yet this does not fully explain why Heidegger
generally sought to downplay the conceptual links between his own
treatment of existence and Christian theological sources.116
It was in fact strategically necessary, I argue, for Heidegger to disavow
the figure of the Augustinian cogito placed out of reach. The latter
can and must be interpreted as contesting the very account of selfpossession it supposedly authorized. Let me justify this assertion by
slightly expanding upon the evidence thus far presented. We have seen
that in glossing Confessions X.139 Heidegger asserts, first, that Augustine discloses what he is before God as nothing or nihil, and, second,
that Augustine has this nihil only to the extent that he enacts it by
negating himself in pure prayer or rejoicing before God. In other words,
Augustine calls himself into question most radically, uprooting all pride
and self-regard, in and through the experience of fruitio Dei. This being-questionable (Fraglichsein) deeply informs Heideggers own account of self-certainty. Shortly after Augustine and Neoplatonism, Heidegger began referring to the essentially reflexive character of Daseins
Beingthe way in which Dasein always has itself in some way, is always
a priori face-to-face with itselfas Befindlichkeit (disposition, mood)
or das Sich-befinden (self-finding, self-affection). The concept of Befindlichkeit plays a prominent role for Heidegger throughout the 1920s, not
only as a key feature of his rereadings of Aristotle and Kant but as a
basic feature of existence in Being and Time.117 In an often cited text
115
I refer to Heideggers Wintersemester 193031 seminar entitled Augustinus, Confessiones
XI (de tempore).
116
See, e.g., GA17, 275ff. [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 212ff.]; SZ, 229; BT, 272;
and refer to Kisiel, Genesis, 219 and 269.
117
See, e.g., GA18, 24148, for the connection between Befindlichkeit and Aristotelian hedone, and GA18, 271 [Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. R. D. Metcalf and M. B.
Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 184] for a more general discussion:
Being-in-the-world means: having a being there that is disclosed in its look and having to
do with it as disclosed. Being-in-the-world means: having the world there in a certain way. Not
only is the world had, but being-there has itself in disposition [Befindlichkeit]. Being-in-theworld is characterized by disposition. Being-there has itself: not in reflecting, as the primary
mode of having-itself there is in finding-oneself [Sichbefinden]. On the connection between
das Sichbefinden and Kantian moral philosophy, see, e.g., 5759 [Basic Concepts of Aristotelian
Philosophy, 41], 9296 [6466], 24145 [16264], 26263 [176], 27071 [184].

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A Difficult Proximity
from 1924, Heidegger uses Befindlichkeit to render the Augustinian term
affectio.118 We can interrogate this equivalency by drawing upon our reading of Augustine and Neoplatonism. To what extent does the 1921
reading of Augustine actually confirm the presupposition of Befindlichkeit,
namely, that Dasein has always found itself in some way, even if as mysterious to itself?
The answer is more difficult to discern than one would suspect. This
is because a form of self-renunciation similar to the one described in
SS1921 animates Dasein at its core. 119 In the crucial 1926 Logic course,
for example, Heidegger establishes that in its temporal meaning Dasein consists in the pure act of making present or Gegenwa rtigen. This
pure act of making present, whereby Dasein lets beings be what they
are, is, in fact, constituted by an internal sacrificial dynamic. Dasein
is time to the extent that it makes present beings as beings; its deepest
self-affection consists in a constant putting-itself-aside (ein standiges
Auf-die-Seite-treten).120 Dasein is the there, in other words, only by constantly uprooting itself from the site (Seite) at which beings give themselves as such. Only on the basis of this constant self-denial can Daseins
Being as temporality hang together as a unified structural totality. Our
relation to this dynamic of putting-oneself-aside is so enigmatic, Heidegger adds, that for us it is utterly inexpressible (unausdrucklich).121
Despite the fact that at its deepest level the figure of Dasein seems
to respect the extreme prohibition against self-representation launched
in Augustine and Neoplatonism, there is nevertheless good reason to
believe that not even Dasein escapes its force. There is a key discrepancy
between the self-certainty outlined in Augustine and Neoplatonism
and the one that is subsequently attributed to Dasein: regarding the
former, there is no clear textual justification for presupposing that the
ego is a priori face-to-face with itself, that it enjoys a pure and privileged
affection of its own Being. In other words, it is by no means the case
that Augustine and Neoplatonism confirms the presupposition that
118
See Martin Heidegger, Der Begriff der Zeit, ed. von H. Tietjen (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer,
1989), 10.
119
Here I refer in passing to the unifying effect that the experience of forsakenness (Verlassenheit) has on conscientious Dasein (see SZ, 277 [BT, 322], where Dasein is forsaken by
itself as the caller of conscience).
120
GA21, 401 [Logic, 331].
121
Ibid. It is curious that in this passage Heidegger describes our preview of time as
inexpressible, or unausdrucklich. A recent translation of this volume by Indiana University
Press renders the term in English as unthematic. But whereas Heidegger does make extensive use of the term unthematisch in this passage, he leaves little doubt about the mysterious
quality of our access to time as affecting-oneself by putting-oneself-aside (which I am here
linking to self-renunciation) when he refers to this access as unausdrucklich, and not unthematisch.

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The Journal of Religion


subsequently guides the construction of Dasein from start to finishnamely, that existence can and must be thought of as a unified
structural whole. On my reading, the 1921 course could just as easily
support the opposite conclusion, namely, that existence cannot and
must not ever be thought of as a unified structural whole. On my reading, Heidegger radicalizes the incomprehensibility of the soul for Augustine in such a way that it calls into question the basic presuppositions
underpinning his own view of facticity. Augustine and Neoplatonism
sketches such an extreme anti-Pelagianism that it casts suspicion on
all those structural elements of Daseins Being that allow it to stop its
own falling movement, to exist authentically, and to do so from out
of its own Being. The characterization of resoluteness in Being and Time
as the unity of care, or care cared for in care (Sorge. . . in der Sorge
gesorgte) may ultimately prove to be diametrically opposed to the essential disunity of the soul elaborated in SS1921.122 Does not Heidegger
emphasize, in 1921, the fact that for Augustine the end of all our striving, which he calls the end of care ( finis curae), remains fundamentally
inaccessible to the factical entity who is nevertheless constituted by it?
And would not this contradict the form of resoluteness articulated in
Being and Time, according to which Dasein itself is both the revealer as
well as the revealed?123 Moreover, in elaborating resoluteness as the
truth of existence, does not Heidegger answer the Augustinian question
concerning the relation between truth and life? Does not the attestation
that resoluteness gives of existence in that text prove that there is such
a thing as a true existence? To that extent, does not Being and Time
effectively disarm the Augustinian question, rendering it methodologically inert?
The stakes of disarming questionability in this way are immense, given
that Heideggers entire project of reversing the cogito is built upon a
particular methodological employment of the question as such. When
in Being and Time Heidegger asserts that the existential meaning of guilt
is derived from the fact that guilty [schuldig] turns up as predicate for
the I am,124 he leaves himself open to a critique derived from the
figure of the cogito out of reach. True fruitio Dei according to Augustine and Neoplatonism involves giving up every act of predication
with respect to ego ipse. This observation renders the analytic of guilt
in Being and Time highly suspicious; it suggests that in order to be guilty
Dasein in fact must retain some form of objective or objectifying self122

SZ, 300 [BT, 348].


Ibid., 307 [ibid., 355].
124
Ibid., 281 [ibid., 326].
123

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A Difficult Proximity
representation that, from the point of view of SS1921, would be the
very mark of inauthenticity.
Did Heidegger ever consider any of these possibilities? Did he ever
acknowledge in one way or another the tension I have located in his
account of finitude? In fact, there is a solid textual basis for suggesting
that the later Heidegger did so and that he sought to reappropriate
Augustine anew in light of the dilemma I am elaborating here.
In the essay entitled Anaximanders Saying (1946), Heidegger reinterprets the concept of care (Sorge) in the wake of his extensive engagement of Nietzsches philosophy. He does so by once more tracing
care back to Augustinian fruitio, by way of the German word Ruch
(reck) and Middle-High German ruoche or solicitude.125 Here care is
interpreted as a mode of usage or Brauch. Heidegger asserts that we
encounter what we have called the root meaning of to use [brauchen]
as frui when Augustine says: for what else do we mean when we say
frui, to enjoy, if not to have present something especially prized? [quid
enim est aliud quod dicimus frui, nisi praesto habere, quod diligis?]126 Now,
the link between this citation and Augustine and Neoplatonism is
much stronger than it seems: though Heidegger refers here to a passage
in which Augustine defines fruitio as having the beloved present to
oneself, he glosses this having present ( praesto habere) as handing
out, relinquishing, or giving away (Aushandigung) presence. To
have something present according to fruitio signifies giving it away. This
interpretive gesture directly recalls the centrality of the ego placed out
of reach (Aus der Hand gegeben) in SS1921. What matters above all is
that Heidegger now refuses to assign fruitio to Dasein. Instead, he asserts
that fruitio should no longer be predicated of enjoyment as human
behavior; nor is it said in relation to any being whatsoever, even the
highest [ fruitio Dei as the beatitudo hominis]. Rather, usage [or fruitio]
now designates the way in which Being itself [Sein selbst] presences [west]
as the relationship to what is present.127 What is at stake here? What
is the significance of employing fruitio as a term for how Being itself
presences in relation to beings? By detaching fruitio from human behavior,
Heidegger calls into question the central aim of Augustine and Neoplatonism, which is precisely to define fruitio as das Sichfreuen, that is,
125
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, 338. English translation in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 277.
126
Ibid. This line comes from Augustine, mor. I.3. For proof that Heidegger is not confusing
categories here but that Augustine defines fruitio as a form of usus, see On the Trinity X.4.17:
To use something is to put it at the wills disposal; to enjoy something is to use it with an
actual, and not merely anticipated joy (Uti enim assumere aliquid in facultatem voluntatis;
frui est autem uti cum gauido, non adhuc spei, sed iam rei).
127
Heidegger, Holzwege, 339 [Off the Beaten Track, 277].

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The Journal of Religion


a particular mode of human behavior. Moreover, by arguing that fruitio
should signify the way that Being itself presences or essences (west) with
respect to Beings, Heidegger asserts that Being itself is alone capable
of fruitio. By implication the mortal human is constitutionally incapable
of such a relation to other entities. The Anaximanders Saying not
only deals a decisive blow to the early Heideggers interpretation of
Augustinian anthropology but calls into question the entire attempt in
Being and Time to define existence as care. The subtle reappropriation
of Augustinian fruitio enacted here suggests that the early Heidegger
erred in the most fundamental waynamely, by confusing beings with
Beingprecisely to the extent that he let Befindlichkeit or Sichbefinden
designate fruitio.
Defining existence as care, then, the early Heidegger would have
lapsed into the very Pelagianism for which he initially faulted Descartes. Designating the essence of Being itself with fruitio or Brauch, the
late Heidegger thereby un-says care, depriving it of its initial function
as defining existence. Does the transfer of fruitio onto Being deprive
Dasein of all self-referentiality? In this state is it even possible anymore
to speak of Dasein (or Da-sein) as being there for itself, as present to
itself in the mode of Befindlichkeit? The correlate of the epochal character of Being we can experience most immediately is the ecstatic character of Da-sein. The epochal essence of Being appropriates the ecstatic
essence of Da-sein.128 The self-experience of Dasein is here correlated
with the essence of Being. Yet, Being here remains in oblivion; its nonessence or nondisclosure is prior to its essential character. Being withdraws itself (entzieht sich).129 Likewise, this self-withdrawal of Being arguably has its correlate in the unsaying of care, which shakes our
confidence in Befindlichkeit.
Does Heidegger ever fully explore what it means to deprive Dasein
of care, to unsay care as the definition of existence? In order to answer
this question one would have to reread the Turn in a manner informed by the arguments presented above. Here I have at least ventured
to explain why the early Heidegger could only begrudgingly acknowledge the figure of Augustine in his path. For the 1921 destruction of
the Confessionsa daring attempt to prove that the I always has itself
in some wayin fact belies the limits in which Heidegger first sought
to fix, perhaps unfairly, the essence of human finitude.
128
129

Ibid., 311 [ibid., 254].


Ibid., 244 [ibid., 196].

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