christian sommerand Time.^31 Heidegger’s phenomenological conceptualization is close
to Bultmann’s demythologization [Entmythologisierung] understood as
the hermeneutic and anthropological reconduction of a mythological
text, i.e., the New Testament, to a historical and thus repeatable pos-
sibility of human existence.^32 But the Bultmannian demythologization
works without the Aristotelian reconceptualization that gives a central
axis to Heidegger’s analytics of Dasein.
But we should nonetheless question the legitimacy of Heidegger’s
complex phenomenological “secularization” and “detheologization”
of theological and/or New Testamentarian structures. The problematic
might focus on three interrelated aspects concerning secularization,
atheism, and anthropology.
The phenomenological conceptualization and reinvestment brings
the pre- or non-Christian existence, through formal indication, into
light, i.e., the “neutral” human existence that, as such, does not depend
on Christian faith and revelation. Thus the phenomenological and
Aristotelian “secularization” of theologies, especially the Lutheran theol-
ogia crucis, as a reconduction of existential structures that organize
human life to their being, is at the same time a “detheol ogization”^33
of the theologumena and a dechristianisation of the Christian content.
- Cf. GA 29/30 [WS 1929/30], 53; GA 26 [SS 1928], 11. Among the latent Aris-
totelian “possibilities” that Heidegger repeats and integrates in his own concep-
tuality in the 1920s, we could indicate for example the problem of the sense of
philosophical conceptuality [Begrifflichkeit] (GA 60 [WS 1920/21], 89); the prob-
lem of mobility [Bewegtheit] as movement and rest in Phys. (GA 18 [SS 1924], 314,
379; GA 31 [1930], 59); the apophantic structure of logos in De interpr. (GA 21 [WS
1925/26], 168f); the concept of privation [sterèsis] in Phys., I, 7 and Met., V, 22
(GA 33 [SS 1931], 110); the negativity of human discursive power [dunamis meta
logou] in Met., IX, 2 (GA 33 [SS 1931], 154); the negativity of a-lètheia (GA 26 [SS
1928], 159; GA 27 [WS 1928/29], 79); the doctrine of passions [pathè] and fear
[phobos] in Rhet. (GA 18 [SS 1924], 178; GA 20 [SS 1925], 393); the doctrine of
chance [tychè] and hasard [automaton] in Phys., II, 4–6 (NB [1922], 70); the con-
cepts of dunamis and energeia (GA 33 [SS 1931], 81)... - Cf. Bultmann, “Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung” [1963], Glauben und
Verstehen, 4, 1965, 51993, 128–137. - On Enttheologisierung, cf. GA 63 [SS 1923], 26 (ref. to Kant, Religion innerhalb
der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft); GA 17 [WS 1923/24], 156–157, 159 (with ref. to
Descartes, Med. IV, AT 76); SZ [1927], 49.