Heidegger's Confessions

Heidegger's Confessions The Remains of Saint Augustine in "Being and Time" and Beyond

by Ryan Coyne

University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-20930-2 | Paper: 978-0-226-41907-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-20944-9
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Although Martin Heidegger is nearly as notorious as Friedrich Nietzsche for embracing the death of God, the philosopher himself acknowledged that Christianity accompanied him at every stage of his career. In Heidegger's Confessions, Ryan Coyne isolates a crucially important player in this story: Saint Augustine. Uncovering the significance of Saint Augustine in Heidegger’s philosophy, he details the complex and conflicted ways in which Heidegger paradoxically sought to define himself against the Christian tradition while at the same time making use of its resources.

Coyne first examines the role of Augustine in Heidegger’s early period and the development of his magnum opus, Being and Time. He then goes on to show that Heidegger owed an abiding debt to Augustine even following his own rise as a secular philosopher, tracing his early encounters with theological texts through to his late thoughts and writings. Bringing a fresh and unexpected perspective to bear on Heidegger’s profoundly influential critique of modern metaphysics, Coyne traces a larger lineage between religious and theological discourse and continental philosophy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ryan Coyne is assistant professor of the philosophy of religions and theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

REVIEWS

“Heidegger’s Confessions traces the role of Augustine across Heidegger’s thinking—early, middle, and late—to convincingly show that Augustine is not only a constant companion but an inspiration for Heidegger’s own transformations throughout his career.”

— Andrew J. Mitchell, Emory University

“Coyne’s careful reconstruction and analysis of Heidegger’s other ‘hidden debt’ provides us with much-needed background of the latter’s lifelong fascination with the author of the Confessions, just as it offers suggestive hypotheses to assess its overall ‘counterintuitive’ meaning and current import. Even where the later Heidegger’s Kehre turned further away from the religion of old, Coyne wisely suggests that Heidegger’s ulterior ‘deep inquiry’ into the existence and essence of man nonetheless redraws a ‘silhouette reflected darkly’ in Augustine’s most profound pages. Rare are the books that complete an emerging, complex picture in full philological and genealogical detail and also succeed in bringing systematic philosophical problems—here: that of the relationship between phenomenology and theology, existential or fundamental ontology and Christianity—into much clearer focus. Coyne has set the future debates concerning the legacy of Heidegger and all those he influenced in these matters on much firmer footing, while giving a truly original account of the decisive contribution that Christian tropes brought and continue to bring to bear on the critique of ancient and modern metaphysics.”

— Hent de Vries, Johns Hopkins University

“Heidegger’s Confessions explores major currents in Heidegger by taking his readings of Augustine as a guiding thread. Coyne shows that Heidegger’s occasional interpretations of Augustinian texts are not incidental to his thought, but are linked explicitly and implicitly to major questions in his philosophy—such as whether human beings can know themselves, possess themselves, and be whole. Heidegger’s engagement with Augustine also bears on broader questions about Being and its relation to God. Coyne’s approach goes well beyond a simple genealogical argument about how Heidegger was ‘influenced’ by Augustine, or a simple comparative study that tallies up agreements and disagreements between two thinkers. Instead, Coyne interrogates the very nature of influence, debt, and attestation, showing that Augustinian concerns are relevant not only to the relation between these two figures but to how philosophers cite their predecessors, how they relate to their own past thoughts, how philosophy tries to establish its own integrity, and how philosophy may remain beholden to theology at the same time that it combats it.”

— Richard Polt, Xavier University

“Coyne provides a rich exploration of ‘Heidegger’s own portrayals of Augustinian concepts,’ as he writes in the introduction. He traces these Augustinian concepts through Heidegger’s work to reveal the ways in which they inform some of Heidegger’s most fundamental themes. Coyne argues that Heidegger’s rearticulation of certain themes throughout his lifetime reveals the centrality of those themes and is reason enough to take them up carefully. Coyne does exactly that with the concept of ‘being-there,’ as presented in early Heidegger, and of ‘de-theologization,’ which appears in Heidegger’s writings of the 1920s. . . . Articulating his argument with care, Coyne brings new light to Heidegger and theology. . . . Highly recommended.”

— Choice

“Coyne’s new study of Heidegger’s extended, complex, and fluctuating relation to Augustine is an excellent piece of work that proceeds through a series of close critical readings of key texts extending from the early post–World War I lectures on religious life through to the 1957 paper on ‘The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics.’ Taking in central elements of Being and Time, the Contributions to Philosophy, the critique of Nietzsche, and the return to the Pre-Socratics, the apparently narrow focus on Augustine is used to develop an overall reading of Heidegger’s deeply conflicted relation to religion.”

— Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"Anyone tempted to take Heidegger’s occasional references to Augustine as marginal asides, worthy of curiosity or perhaps biographical but not philosophical interest should read Ryan Coyne’s Heidegger’s Confessions. Coyne’s examination of the Heideggerian texts and their histories makes clear that a confrontation with Augustine is indispensable to Heidegger’s elaboration of the most important questions, issues, and phenomena the master treated. . . . What is perhaps most impressive about Heidegger’s Confessions is the erudition and philological care Coyne exercises in documenting the presence of Augustine in the Heideggerian corpus. Coyne’s analyses are meticulous, his mastery of the texts and their histories compelling. These are indispensable virtues in the reading of a corpus as dense and complicated as Heidegger’s."

— Continental Philosophy Review

Acknowledgments

Introduction - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0008
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter One / Heidegger’s Paul - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0001
[Paul the Apostle, eschatology, katechon, phenomenology of religion, Temporality, guilt]
This chapter provides a detailed look at Heidegger’s 1920–1921 course entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” in which the writings of the apostle Paul play a crucial role. Setting this course in its philosophical context, it argues not only that Heidegger turned to Paul’s earliest writings in search of a novel understanding of temporality, but that the eschatological model of temporality Heidegger equated with Christian religiosity revolves curiously around the Pauline “katechon”-an obscure figured identified in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians as “holding back” the Second Coming of Christ. In demonstrating that Heidegger’s Paul lays the blame for the delay in Christ’s return squarely upon the Christian believer, this chapter contends that Heidegger’s initial readings of Christian theological sources, and his focus on eschatology, generates an extreme version of personal guilt that ultimately haunts his subsequent attempts to describe selfhood and human existence philosophically in terms of being-guilty. (pages 17 - 52)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter Two / The Cogito Out-of-Reach - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0002
[selfhood, Augustine’s Confessions, ontology, Descartes, existence]
Focusing on Heidegger’s 1921 seminar on Augustine’s Confessions, this chapter argues that Heidegger initially viewed Augustine as a bulwark against Cartesian metaphysics. This chapter demonstrates that during the early 1920s Heidegger contended that Descartes’ ego cogito should be reversed: the human being cannot and should not be described as a “thinking thing,” as Descartes thought. For Heidegger the human is not at all a thing, and its existence cannot be expressed in propositional form. Modern ontology, he argued, had failed to register the difference between existence and thinghood. In so doing it failed as well to note that selfhood can only be expressed as an unanswerable question, and not in the form of a proposition. This chapter demonstrates that Heidegger’s initial attempt to ‘reverse’ the Cartesian ego cogito-reframing it as an interrogative form-is reflected in his effort to discern a specific kind of self-renunciation, or a cogito placed “out of reach,” in Augustine’s Confessions. In tracing Heidegger’s critique of representational thinking back to his reading of Augustine, this chapter simultaneously argues that this critique in its theological context threatens to controvert Heidegger’s attempt to enlist it for his own philosophical purposes. (pages 53 - 86)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter Three / The Remains of Christian Theology - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0003
[de-theologization, hermeneutics, repetition, Aristotle, Christian theology]
In the years leading up to Being and Time Heidegger drew heavily from his reading of Augustine in formulating universally applicable hermeneutics of non-religious categories of human existence. This chapter provides ample evidence of this strategy while arguing that Heidegger paradoxically sought to rid modern philosophy of Christian theology by making use theological concepts, reiterating them while ‘de-theologizing’ them. In spelling out the logic of this repetition, or de-theologization this chapter simultaneously argues that Heidegger employed certain de-theologized concepts as tools of critique, but that their critical force was limited by his basic commitment to the foundational principles of Aristotelian ontology. This chapter suggests that the tension between these two tendencies on Heidegger’s part-his commitment to the principles of Aristotle, his attempt to constitute tools of critique by de-theologizing Christian sources-ultimately proves to be irresolvable. (pages 87 - 123)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter Four / Testimony and the Irretrievable in Being and Time - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0004
[Heidegger’s Being and Time, testimony, finitude, conscience, care, guilt, Dasein]
This chapter argues that the tension described in Chapter 3 above greatly influences the composition of Being and Time. Focusing on the theme of testimony, it suggests that Heidegger’s effort in 1927 to show how the human being or Dasein bears witness to its Being as a unified whole is unsettled by those of his concepts which result specifically from the de-theologization of Augustine and Paul. It demonstrates that in various discernible ways the structure of finitude in Being and Time and its component parts-being-towards-death, the voice of conscience, the notion of care, guilt-are put forth in ways that ward off the threat of a more extreme version of finitude that is conceptually linked to the reading of Christian theological sources. This chapter ultimately tries to make sense of the failure of Being and Time to achieve its stated philosophical goal of exhibiting the meaning of Being in general by interpreting this failure as a function of this threat. (pages 124 - 156)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter Five / Temporality and Transformation, or Augustine through the Turn - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0005
[time, Heidegger’s Turn, the question of being, Contributions to Philosophy]
This Chapter argues that in his later work Heidegger exploited the tension created by de-theologization in his early philosophical endeavors. It advances this argument on two fronts. First it documents the surprising connections between Heidegger’s brief reconsiderations of Augustine in 1930 and his prewar speculative writings, particularly his Contributions to Philosophy. By comparing key sections of this treatise with the arguments put forth in his 1930 seminar and lecture on the Confessions it becomes possible to see that Heidegger’s confrontation with Augustine in the wake of Being and Time largely anticipated, and contributed to, the central themes broached in Heidegger’s ‘Turn.’ This chapter demonstrates that this is particularly the case when it comes to two themes: the concept of time, and the question of Being itself, in its ontological difference from beings. (pages 157 - 193)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter Six / On Retraction - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0006
[retraction, Nietzsche, nihilism, death of god, metaphysics, ontotheology]
Chapter 6 discusses the later Heidegger’s tendency to redefine the meaning of Being in terms of retraction and forgetting as part of his attempt to carry out an immanent criticism of his own philosophical trajectory. It argues as well that this self-criticism on Heidegger’s part heralds the strangely muted resurgence of Augustinian terms in his confrontation with Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnosis of European nihilism and the death of God. Chapter 6 thus pinpoints the ways in which Heidegger’s mature critique of metaphysics echoes his original juxtaposition between Descartes and Augustine. It also explains how his efforts to respond to ontotheology by thinking Being in terms of retraction actually function to extend rather than to disown the strategies that he employed in his earlier work. (pages 194 - 228)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Conclusion /Difference and De-Theologization - Ryan Coyne
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226209449.003.0007
[keyword not supplied]
Abstract Not supplied. (pages 229 - 242)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index