nant established churches, especially ones which rule with the aid of state
monopoly. But as secularization succeeds and religion becomes privatized, the
liberal churches and their rationalizing intellectuals lose their distinctively
religious offering. To fill the unmet demand for religious emotions, on one side
spring up new religions and pseudo-religious cults. The Stefan George circle,
Steiner’s Anthroposophy, occultism, and many other movements of late Wil-
helmine and Weimar Germany are analogues to the cult movements of any
period of a volatile religious market, such as in the United States both in the
1920s and in the 1960s–1970s. On the other side, some intellectuals of the
older churches, recognizing the decline of their organizations’ appeal, sought
to revitalize from within by a neo-conservative movement. Such religious
movements can make allies with external, more purely political movements of
conservatism, but it is a mistake to see their dynamic as merely a political one.
The Protestantism of Barth, Bultmann, and Tillich, and the allied existentialism
of Heidegger and Jaspers, are by no means simply a side-eddy of fascism,
although there are some places of overlap. Much more generally the religious
movement preserved its own standpoint against the encroachment of political
totalitarianism.^41
Division of the Phenomenological Movement
Sein und Zeit was the reputation-making work for Heidegger, and the great
work of German existential phenomenology, because it synthesizes in abstract
and general form the key intellectual resources of these several networks. Even
as it proposes the destruction of the history of Western philosophy, it recon-
structs that history around a central question, calling attention to the most
general metaphysical issue that can be raised. The search for the univocal
ontology of being resonates with the religious concept of God, but it is a
properly philosophical question in its own sphere; it is precisely because
Heidegger carries through his philosophical construction that theology receives
a new resource. Scotism is not revived but transformed. Phenomenology is
carried so far afield that it acquires not an extension but a rival. Neo-Kantian-
ism dies serving as foil for a position which rejects epistemological issues
centered on a subject over against a mind-filtered world, putting in its place a
being, Dasein, whose primordial nature is existing-in-a-world. The question
shifts elsewhere. It is no longer a question of whether and how there are facts,
but of the ontology of dealing with the brute factuality of existence as presence.
Dasein has access to being, but the meaning of being, especially the issue of a
univocal being underlying all its modes, now comes to the fore. Philosophy,
which lives on its problems, is set on a new course.
Technically, Heidegger was continuing Husserl’s project. Husserl had long
748 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths