Heidegger: Christian Theology Demythologized

"Reason and feeling exist in me side by side, but they touch each other and form a galvanic pile. The innermost life of the spirit consists for me in this galvanic process, in the feeling of reason and the reason of feeling, yet so that the two poles always remain separate" (Schleiermacher: Personal and Speculative, by Robert Munro B.D., Pub. Paisley, Alexander Grardner, 1903, p. 82) Not Copyrighted, [Pdf].

Theology is a complex system of symbols. Heidegger formulated a secularized demythologized philosophical version of Christian theology by applying a phenomenological eidetic reduction to strip away old philosophical dichotomies, worn out formulas, and parochial sentiments. A philosophical interpretation of Christian theology must be atheistic in principle (Negative Theology) and also apply to non-religious experience as well (Heidegger, M., Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, trans. J. van Buren et al., Albany, State University of New York Press, 2002, p.121). Individual spirituality can flourish even in this essentialist-reductionist form of Christianity, but organized religion cannot. Organized religion as Christian orthodoxy must have symbols and not necessarily Christian symbols. Some Christian sects may reject the literalist interpretation of some Christian symbols, but accept its central truths. The fatal flaw of humanism is it has no symbols. Demythologized Christian theology can be re-mythologized into a more meaningful and relevant theological paradigm for modern generations living in advanced industrial sociality to counter dehumanization and absolute scientific nihilism.

Friedrich Schleiermacher: Spirituality Unchained

One excellent model for a new theological paradigm other than Heideggerian demythologized Christianity is that of the German Lutheran theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834). In 1917 Heidegger discovered Schleiermacher’s theology and enthusiastically gave lectures on Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion, and gave as gifts Hermann Suskind’s book Christianity and History in Schleiermacher. Then in 1918 and 1919, Heidegger extensively discusses Schleiermacher in a letter with philosopher Elisabeth Blochmann. ("The Earliest Heidegger: A new Field of Research" by John Van Buren. in "A companion to Heidegger / edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, 2005, p. 20)[Pdf]. Schleiermacher believed “that there are an endless multiplicity of valid forms of religion.”(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Schleiermacher). 

Unlike Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, Schleiermacher has an explicit socio-political theory and is known as the “Father of Modern Liberal Theology” who opposed state interference in the Christian religion that should be family based and not state based. However, Schleiermacher also believed society should be organized around the cosmopolitan multiplicity of human diversity in which each individual might fully live an enriched spiritual life. For Schleiermacher, “This inner life, reached through self-contemplation, is man's real and abiding life.”(Munro, p. 65).

The young Schleiermacher had been educated by the Moravian Brethren (Herrnhuter) known as a mystic pietist Christian sect that had five religious principles: simplicity, happiness, unintrusiveness (non-proselytizing), fellowship, and the ideal of service. Later he studied at the University of Halle in 1787 and earned has degree in theology with minors in classical philosophy and philology.  He was assigned to pastorships in Prussian Stolp and in Berlin. In 1810 at the founding of the University of Berlin, Schleiermacher was appointed head of the theology department. Later in life he wrote, “ I am still a Herrnhuter (a member of the Moravian Brotherhood) only a Herrnhuter of a higher order."(Munro, p. 35). During his lifetime Schleiermacher translated nearly all of Plato’s dialogues from Greek into German. He had a German Romantic neo-Spinozistic view influenced by other philosophers such as theologian, poet Johann Herder who was the first to argue “language contributes to shaping the frameworks and the patterns with which each linguistic community thinks and feels...language is 'the organ of thought”; also, Johann Fichte who first originated the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectical epistemic model later known as the hallmark of Hegel who never used those triadic terms. Schleiermacher personally knew philosopher poet of the German Romantic school Friedrich Schlegel.

Schleiermacher wrote his most famous work on philosophy of religion Discourses on Religion, Addressed to the Cultivated among its Despisers in 1799 at a time that religion was thought to be irrelevant as the Enlightenment emphasized human reason. Schleiermacher argued “ecclesiastical theology is not fixed and immovable, but living and adapting itself to the ever-growing Christian consciousness of the ages.”(Munro, p. 109). In this publication Schleiermacher,

“... sought to save religion in the eyes of its cultured despisers (prominent among them some of the romantics, including Friedrich Schlegel) by, inter alia [among other things], arguing that human immortality and even God are inessential to religion; diagnosing and excusing current religion’s more off-putting features in terms of its corruption by worldly bourgeois culture and state-interference....”(Stanford: Schleiermacher).

The most important concept in Schleiermacher’s theology is the distinction between organized religion and spiritual experience. Human experience is characterized by a conscious intuition (not intellectual) originating from a pre-logical ontological understanding of the universe and of an infinite universal non-reified being that unifies all of existence. He rejects the idea of direct intuition of the absolute, or a Hegelian universal science of philosophy. It is from the fact of this fundamental religious experience that religious dogma is derived post hoc:

“He saw that the men of his age were despising religion because they did not understand its meaning. The doctrines, and the ceremonies, and the uses of religion, which they mistook for the thing itself, were in reality not religion at all: they were simply its external and necessary manifestations... "It is the intuition and sentiment of the universe," " a sense and taste for the eternal;" "the immediate consciousness of the universal being of all that is finite in the infinite and through the infinite, of all that is temporal in the eternal and through the eternal. This seeking and finding of the universal being in all that lives and moves, in all becoming and change, in all action and suffering; and to have and to know, in immediate feeling, life itself as the infinite and eternal life that is religion”(Munro, p. 60).

Later in his writings Schleiermacher shortens his description of the non-thematic ontological connection humans have with the universe as a “feeling of absolute dependence on the infinite.” Of course, his critics seized on the term “feeling” to characterize it as “irrational emotionalism.” Hegel, famous for his aphorism, “The Real is the Rational, and the Rational is the Real,” wrote in the forward to Religion in Its Internal Relationship to Systematic Knowledge, (1822), authored by his student Hermann Hinrichs, that "If religion grounds itself in a person only on the basis of feeling, then . . . a dog would be the best Christian, for it carries this feeling more intensely within itself and lives principally satisfied by a bone." This tendency in theology toward the emotional and spiritual that Schleiermacher represented in Lutheranism was derisively referred to as “pietism” which really meant sanctimonious-ness.

Schleiermacher attempted to create a modern philosophy based on ancient Greek thought. Heidegger was likely inspired by Schleiermacher to revise Western ontology based on the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides to uncover the question of being. Heidegger first investigates the question of being ontologically, not epistemologically. We encounter being with our whole body, and not just intellectually, so that there is no troublesome Cartesian mind/body dichotomy in Heidegger’s ontology. Again, Schleiermacher’s pre-epistemological religious intuition, or feeling, likely inspired Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s ontological structures which include “unconcealment” (aletheia), “meditation,” “apprehension”(noein), and “appropriation.” 

”Appropriation does not designate a "realm" as does Being, but rather a relation, that of man and Being. What is radically new and non-Metaphysical about Appropriation is not only that it is an "activity"--a non-static process--Appropriation is non-metaphysical because in the relationship between man and Being as appropriated to each other, the relation is more fundamental than what is related”(On Time and Being , Translated by Joan Stambaugh, New York, Harper & Row, 1972). 

  

Existentialists say, “Existence precedes essence.” This means that human existence is grounded in material existence first, and only afterwards is thematic meaning (essences) derived from consciousness in a process of mediation and (re-) interpretation. Ontology precedes epistemology. And every epistemology posits a concealed ontology. For Schleiermacher, infinite divine reality is not about knowledge or ethics, but rather “the identity of Spirit and Nature in the Universe or G-d. Conceptual thought cannot apprehend this identity. But the identity can be felt...an ‘immediate self-consciousness, which equals feeling’.”(Fredrick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy: Modern Philosophy, Fichte to Hegel, Vol. 7, Part I, Doubleday, 1965, page 185.)

Schleiermacher viewed the Church as a society in itself separate from the State arguing for a free society with the organizations necessary to fully develop each individual’s potential and freedom. The union of Church and State inhibits the contributions of the multiplicity of religious traditions. And a State Church encourages corruption of religion itself by injecting “alien political functions onto religious mysteries,” such as requiring Jews to be baptized to obtain civil rights. Organized religion should instead center on the family. Schleiermacher was among the first male proto-feminist and wrote publicly for the civil rights of Jews in Prussia. In 1789 Schleiermacher “encouraged women to seek sexual fulfillment, and to free themselves from inhibitions about discussing sex.”(Stanford: Schleiermacher). Of the anti-science sentiment in the Church of his day he wrote, “Why was the tree of knowledge so sternly prohibited? Was it that our masters were afraid to make known the results of modern research lest perchance they should approve themselves to our intellect; or lest, mayhap, they should not be able to refute them?”(Munro, p. 29).

Ethical individuals are created by the local community, general society, and social institutions and are an end in themselves (Kant) to create the greatest good for the person and those around her. By community emphasizing the spiritual well-being of persons and families, a self-sustaining virtuous cycle of societal input and individual output is established making a “free society.”  Society thinks by means of discourse (this is another theme Heidegger borrowed from Schleiermacher). Every individual (not the Smithian truck and barter accumulating economic man) is unique and must be allowed to participate in the life of society:

“In a person whose feeling form of self-consciousness remain latent or inchoate, the sense of personal identity is deficient...such a person fails to contribute to the common...good; he is an inert reflection of his world, not one whose moves and enriches it; he is a person in the formal sense but is destitute of spiritual life...all of human culture ultimately depends upon the cultivation of the religious life”(The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967 ed., Macmillan & Free Press, Vols. 7 & 8, p.316 “Schleiermacher,” by Richard R. Niebuhr). 

Schleiermacher is known for reformulating Protestant theology emphasizing Christocentrism in which Christ is the source of one’s inner religious consciousness.

“phusis loves to hide.”--Heraclitus​

The ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus conceived of “phusis” (or Nature, or physics) as being characterized by both logos (Reason) and of what-is (all things). Philosopher Carol J. White wrote, “...phusis is both the activity which lets what-is manifest itself and that which is manifest. As the activity of manifesting, it itself does not show itself, and thus it hides; but this activity reveals phusis as ‘nature’....”

Carol J. White further notes that for the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides,“noein [apprehension] perceives the ...being of what-is as a totality, noein is the Parmenidean equivalent of Being and Time’s moment of insight or, more exactly, of our special capacity as Dasein for spiritual openness and insight. This religious consciousness gives us the ability to see the One in the many.

She loves to hide so you must use the arrow keys to keep up with her.

Stonemilker

A juxtapositioning fate

Find our mutual coordinate

Moments of clarity are so rare

I better document this

At last the view is fierce

All that matters is

Who is open chested

And who has coagulated

Who can share

And who has shut down the chances

Show me emotional respect

I have emotional needs

I wish to synchronize our feelings

What is it that I have

That makes me feel your pain

Like milking a stone

To get you to say it

Who is open

And who has shut up

And if one feels closed

How does one stay open

We have emotional need

I wish to synchronize our feelings

Show some emotional respect​