“Philosophical Luther”. Confessional source for Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity

Abstract

The article discusses the hermeneutics of facticity from Martin Heidegger’s early works. Initially, M. Heidegger considered the factual life in the framework of phenomenological method. His analysis of the early Christian religious experience revealed the structure of pre-theoretical existence level and had key importance in clarifying that concept. The connection with religious experience, the interpretation of Apostle Paul’s Epistles, the appeal to Aristotle’s arguments about the linearity of time and the “theology of the cross” by M. Luther allowed German thinker to highlight in hermeneutics of facticity a project of “philosophical salvation” expressed in the articulation of Dasein’s authentic existence. Heidegger restores the understanding of human existence as the radically unique and finite, and that becomes the basis for such a project. At the same time, three themes in the fundamental ontology of Dasein (“fallen-ness”, “conscience” and “being-to-death”) are rooted in the theological anthropology of M. Luther. As a result, in the early works of M. Heidegger, one can reconstruct his own secular version of the eschatological expectation of the end of days, designed to replace the metaphysical “soteriology” having its origin from Plato and Parmenides. The main concepts of such a project are a philosophical clarification of the worldview characteristic of early Christianity, and it has its confessional source in M. Luther Protestant theology of the cross.