work. The spatiotemporal frame is what unites the infinity of things. Eventually
he would see it as the setting or “horizon” within which life can emerge, a
realm of transcendence in the midst of experience. The concepts of a transcen-
dent horizon of personal existence and of the primordiality of time became key
points for the existentialism of Jaspers and Heidegger.
Heidegger: Catholic Anti-modernism
Intersects the Phenomenological Movement
Now at the height of its drawing power, the phenomenological network un-
derwent a public split. A rival center of creative energy crystallized around
Heidegger, whose Sein und Zeit (1927) branched off from Husserl’s middle
period. As with all creative work, Heidegger’s resulted from a confluence of
networks. To recapitulate these in biographical form inevitably results in
reconstructing the story in a Heidegger-centric way, since we have selected his
life for study only in retrospect of his fame. It takes a gestalt switch to move
into the foreground what we glimpse through the keyhole of Heidegger’s life,
and to see just those milieux as producing the intellectual transformation that
receives greatest attention in Heidegger’s work.
Heidegger begins as a bright young student of Catholic peasant back-
ground, no doubt one of many educated on church scholarships. After briefly
attempting a Jesuit novitiate, Heidegger in 1909 enters the local university,
Freiburg, one of the few in Germany which has an exclusively Catholic theo-
logical faculty (Guignon, 1993; Ringer, 1969: 253; Kisiel, 1993). It is the period
of intense struggle against modernism within the church, culminating a conflict
going back to the 1860s. The unification of Germany in 1871 was followed
by the Kulturkampf as the Humboldtian revolution of secularized education,
long since settled in the Prussian north, was forcibly extended to the Catholic
states of the south. In these same decades the unification of Italy against the
resistance of the papal state and struggles over secularized education in the
French Third Republic had provoked the papacy into militant defense of
tradition against science and secular culture. Some Catholic intellectuals re-
sisted, among them Brentano, who left the priesthood in protest in 1873.
Against recurring modernist tendencies within Catholic schools and universi-
ties, the pope in 1907–1910 wielded the charge of heresy and demanded fidelity
to doctrines of miracles and other items of faith (Caputo, 1993: 271; Sheehan,
1993: 73–75). Heidegger enters the intellectual space as a manifestation of the
anti-modernist movement, whose doctrine he upheld in Catholic house organs
in his first publications.
Freiburg brings him into the orbit of other intellectual movements. The
mathematical foundations crisis attracts him, through his Neo-Kantian teach-
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^743