Martin Heidegger — A Protestant Church Father of the Twentieth Century? The Early Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion and the Crisis of Western Culture

Abstract

On the morning of 26 March 1929, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) met for a two-hour public debate at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland. The week before they had, as part of a three-week long international and interdisciplinary rendezvous known as the Davos Hochschulkurs, each given three individual lectures on the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, and now they were to discuss their differing views (cf. Heidegger, 1997, pp. 191–207). Cassirer was one of the leading intellectuals in Germany at the time, and Heidegger had become a philosophical celebrity after the publication in 1927 of Time and Being (Sein und Zeit). However, the event did not go down in history because of the actual content of the philosophical debate. Instead, the event at Davos came to be seen, symbolically, as one of the decisive moments in European intellectual history, a ‘final moment of rupture’, as Peter E. Gordon puts it, ‘between humanism and anti-humanism, Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, or rationalism and irrationalism — as if this single event brought into focus the defining struggles of twentieth-century thought and politics’.¹ Cassirer, the German-Jewish Neo-Kantian philosopher, represented a cultivated Enlightenment position, while Heidegger, the new and radical philosopher, wanted to challenge and oppose Neo-Kantianism and the ‘old’ thinking, that is, the attempt to create a synthesis between science and universal values.