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Series:   Elements in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger

Heidegger on Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2024

Benjamin D. Crowe
Benjamin D. Crowe
Affiliation:
Boston University

Summary

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

HeideggerMartinreligionmetaphysicsphenomenologytheology
Type
Element
Information
Series: Elements in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Online ISBN: 9781009459761
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 16 January 2025

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