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Realism and belief attribution in Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion

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Abstract

This essay offers a new reading of Heidegger’s early “formally indicative” view of religious life as a broad critique of popular representations of religious life in the human sciences and public discourse. While it has frequently been understood that Heidegger’s work aims at the “enactment” of religious life, the logic and implications of this have been rather unclear to most readers. Presenting that logic, I argue that Heidegger’s point parallels that of Alfred Schutz in suggesting that typical academic discussions of religion constitute a determinate, deficient way of relating to religious individuals and groups and their concerns. Those concerns appear to the researcher herself in a way that they would not if the theorist were actually entertaining them as states of affairs in the real world, leading her to attribute beliefs to a hypothetical “nobody.” Heidegger’s early notion of formal indication explains the logic behind our lack of “realism” toward certain topics of research, and his comments on the study of religious life are a paradigm case for the descriptive fallacies that phenomenology can help to address.

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Notes

  1. Marion (1991, pp. 44–45); Thomson (2005, p. 15 n. 12); Vedder (2007, pp. 9–10); Crowe (2008, pp. 49–50).

  2. Vedder (2007, p. 27); Camilleri (2010, p. 335).

  3. For example, Ben Vedder goes so far as to ask, “[W]ould not the real [i.e. Heideggerian] metaphysician be more religious than everyday believers, the members of a church, or even the theologians of any given religion?” (Vedder 2007, pp. 5, 66). Vedder’s questioning the religiosity of churchgoing believers is a step beyond the project of critiquing popular discourse about religion; I follow Crowe in viewing the latter critical project as the more significant one in Heidegger’s early work.

  4. Caputo (1994, pp. 327–344); Westphal (2001, p. 15).

  5. Not all in the conversation would regard (a) and (b) as problems. For instance, Hubert Drefyus’ account of mindless “coping” (though Dreyfus has not contributed directly to this conversation) seems to enthusiastically support (a); see Dreyfus (1991). A phenomenology of the “holiness” of experience, such as Vedder presents, could be compatible with at least some version of (b); see Vedder (2007, pp. 215–236).

  6. Crowe (2008, pp. 36–37).

  7. Crowe (2008, p. 13).

  8. Heidegger (1962, p. 89).

  9. Vedder (2007, p. 4).

  10. McGrath (2010, p. 182).

  11. Kisiel (1993, p. 26), and Van Buren (1994, pp. 328–340). As Kisiel notes, formal indication became the key to Heidegger’s understanding of the “logic of philosophy” and philosophical categories, a topic that Heidegger drew from Emil Lask and his own work on individuation in Duns Scotus.

  12. Heidegger (1998, p. 52). While the comment in the 1927 lecture refers to theology proper, Heidegger’s earlier work, as Crowe has shown, targets trends in the way religion is discussed in psychology, social theory, epistemology and other academic fields. See Crowe (2008, p. 36ff.).

  13. Derrida, on the contrary, assumes that Heidegger’s aim is to correct first-order talk about divinity by outbidding the classical negative theology, such as that of Pseudo-Dionysius (Derrida 1989, p. 49).

  14. For discussion of the two-step version of FI presented here, see Dahlstrom (1994, p. 783). McGrath adds a third step prior to these, in which the researcher states some positive claim about Dasein (McGrath 2010, pp. 185–187). I have left that initial step assumed, as Dahlstrom does, since formal indication only functions inasmuch as researchers are already situated within extant discourses.

  15. Heidegger (1962, p. 152).

  16. Dahlstrom describes this on analogy to written music or a theater script, both of which refer to an actual performance (Dahlstrom 1994, p. 790).

  17. Heidegger (1962, p. 152).

  18. Heidegger (1962, p. 71).

  19. Heidegger (2004, p. 39ff).

  20. Heidegger (2004, p. 15).

  21. Husserl (1998, §13). Heidegger directly repeats §13, including Husserl’s examples, in WS 1920–1921 (Heidegger 2004, pp. 39–42).

  22. Heidegger (2001, pp. 25–27, 105–106).

  23. Heidegger (2001, p. 105).

  24. Ibid.

  25. Husserl (1970, p. 231).

  26. Husserl (1970, p. 202).

  27. Heidegger (2001, p. 105).

  28. Heidegger (1962, pp. 72–73, 450; 2001, pp. 28–29, 61–63).

  29. Heidegger (2002, p. 84).

  30. Heidegger (2002, p. 88).

  31. Heidegger interjects, “What is woman?” (Heidegger 1999, p. 18).

  32. Heidegger (1999, pp. 17–24).

  33. Heidegger (1999, p. 21).

  34. Heidegger (2004, p. 8).

  35. Ibid.

  36. Husserl (1970, p. 114ff.); Heidegger (2001, p. 29).

  37. Schutz (1967).

  38. Schutz (1967, pp. 176–181).

  39. Schutz (1967, pp. 188–189).

  40. Schutz (1967, p. 163).

  41. Ibid.

  42. Schutz (1967, p. 172).

  43. Schutz (1967, p. 191).

  44. Schutz (1967, p. 192).

  45. Heidegger (2004, p. 70).

  46. Ibid.

  47. Heidegger (2004, p. 70; emphasis mine).

  48. See e.g. McGrath (2006, p. 195); Vedder (2007, p. 44); Griesch (2010, p. 147). For a comparison of Heidegger’s notion of “fulfillment” in these religion lectures and Husserlian “fulfilling intentionality,” see Kisiel (1994, pp. 180–181).

  49. Heidegger (2002, p. 76; 2004, p. 87).

  50. Heidegger suggests that Weber was correct in his discipline to observe ideal types in large-scale economic movements, but that Jaspers is not similarly correct to claim to “observe” ideal types of individual psychology (Heidegger 2002, p. 101).

  51. Heidegger (2002, pp. 82–84).

  52. Heidegger (2002, p. 96).

  53. As Heidegger puts this in 1927, the study of religion ought to be “historical,” “systematic” and “practical” in the same sense that its intended object—which at some level must be this very real world of “Being-there” (Dasein) that the researcher is experiencing—is historical, systematic and practical (Heidegger 1998, pp. 46–48).

  54. Heidegger’s diagnosis of the milieu of early twentieth century religious studies appears to have been accurate; for an intellectual history of the period see Masuzawa (2005).

  55. James (1982, p. 503). See also Heidegger (2004, p. 15).

  56. Heidegger (2004, pp. 14–21).

  57. See Troeltsch (1991, pp. 33–45, 77–86). Masuzawa, like Heidegger, focuses on Troeltsch’s work as a culmination point of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious studies in Masuzawa (2005, pp. 309–323).

  58. Heidegger (2004, p. 19).

  59. Heidegger (2004, pp. 31–33, 81).

  60. Heidegger (1962, p. 456ff).

  61. Heidegger (2004, p. 52).

  62. Heidegger (2004, p. 27).

  63. I borrow this idea of a “scaffolding” for cognition from Clark (1998, pp. 32–33, 180–184).

  64. See Crowe (2008, pp. 80–91); Vedder (2007, pp. 51–59); McGrath (2006, pp. 190–196).

  65. Heidegger (2004, p. 72).

  66. Heidegger (2004, p. 73).

  67. Heidegger (2004, pp. 67, 104).

  68. Heidegger (2004, pp. 77–79).

  69. McGrath (2010, p. 188); for an extended discussion of this point see Van Buren (1994, pp. 328–330).

  70. McGrath (2010, p. 188); Husserl (2001, pp. 197–200).

  71. Heidegger (2004, p. 77)

  72. Heidegger (2004, p. 55).

  73. Westphal (2001, pp. 42–43).

  74. See e.g. Heidegger (2004, §29).

  75. Heidegger (1962, pp. 195–203).

  76. Heidegger (2004, pp. 85–86).

  77. Masuzawa (2005, pp. 326–327). Like Heidegger, Masuzawa sees Troeltsch as a paradigm of the times.

  78. Heidegger (2004, p. 63).

  79. Fitzgerald (2000, pp. 3–32, 159–180); Masuzawa (2005, p. 3ff.); Asad (2008).

  80. For instance, Asad (2008) has suggested that our limited academic categories for understanding blasphemy and religiosity led secular writers to misunderstand the anger of some Islamic groups over 2005 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

  81. My sincere thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on the draft of this essay, and to John van Buren for comments on an earlier draft.

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  1. Philosophy Department, California Polytechnic State University, 1 Grand Avenue, San Luis Obispo, CA, 93407, USA

    David J. Zoller

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Zoller, D.J. Realism and belief attribution in Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion. Cont Philos Rev 45, 101–120 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9208-3

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