Experiencing Factical Life in Its Originality Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religion and His Hermeneutic Turn Against the Background of His Confrontation of Life-Philosophy and Early Christianity on the Way to Being and Time.

The paper attempts to show the significance of Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion as an important step on his way to his magnum opus. In particular, I wish to exhibit traits characteristic of, and to prove decisive for, Heidegger’s path of thinking in terms of his confrontation with the leading philosophical tendencies of the age, thereby centring discussion around the reciprocal connections of phenomenology, historicism, hermeneutics, and Lebensphilosophie. Specifically, I will argue that it was with an eye to, and drawing upon, his previous understanding of religion and religious life, as well as of the relation between faith and theology, that Heidegger was to conceive of philosophy and its relation to human existence in Being and Time. He performed his hermeneutic turn through a reciprocal fusion and radicalization of phenomenology and life-philosophy – an operation permeated by the attempt to return to factical life and factical life experience in its originality. Rather than consciousness and its intentional acts, as conceived by Husserl, the thing itself philosophy had to return to was for Heidegger factical life. – The argument will be elaborated in two steps. First, I will sketch an outline of Heidegger’s development in the post-war years; second, against the background of this sketch I will focus more specifically on his 1920/21 course on the Phenomenology of Religion by selecting and highlighting some of the features I think are salient for Heidegger’s thinking no less than for the Sache selbst.

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