Afterword of the Editors of the Lecture Course Winter Semester 1920–21

Martin Heidegger held the lecture course “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” as a private lecturer in the winter semester 1920–1921 at the University of Freiburg. According to the schedule of courses, it was held Tuesdays and Fridays from noon to one o'clock. It began on October 29, 1920; the last class was held on February 25, 1921. This is what it says in the dating of the postscripts.

The manuscript of the lecture course is lost. Even an announcement by the manager of the Nachlass in several wide-circulating newspapers brought no hint of its location. Yet there are five sets of notations, which allow for the approximate reconstruction of the train of thought and articulation of the lecture course. Three of these notations (Oskar Becker, Helene Weiß, Franz-Josef Brecht) are found in the German Literary Archives of Marbach; two are kept in the Husserl Archive of Leuven. From the total notations it is clear that Heidegger's lecture course falls into two distinctly differentiated parts, which are separated by a caesura at the end of the lecture on November 30, 1920. In Oskar Becker's notations, which employ a separate pagination for each of the two parts, the end of the first part is marked by the following sentence: “Owing to uncalled-for objections [Einwänden Unberufener], broken off on the 30th of November, 1920.” A query addressed to the archive of the University of Freiburg could find no explanation of the sort of objections. Presumably through these Heidegger saw himself forced to proceed abruptly from the extensive “Methodological Introduction” to the “Phenomenological Explication of Concrete Religious Phenomena”—thus the title of the second part of the lecture course according to Becker. Becker's quite legible notation probably derives from stenographical notes which were immediately transcribed after each lecture. Even if he at times significantly simplified Heidegger's sentences, and, as a rule, shortened them as well as providing his own structure, his notations can serve, in regard to the first part of the lecture course, as a foundation for the preparation of the text. Becker's notes on the first part of the lecture course are complete; in the second part are missing the lectures given on December 10th, and those from the 10th to the 20th of February.

The notations of Helene Weiß and Franz-Josef Brecht, dated throughout, are dependent upon one another for many long passages, and in others literally identical. In Helene Weiß's handwriting there are three different versions [Konvolute]: the relatively legible, paginated text of notations itself; additions to this text; as well as a partial copy of Brecht's notes. Compared to Becker's notations there is here a sort of terminologically simplified, considerably shorter version of the lecture course. This is also true of the notes taken by Brecht, in which some paragraphs without doubt originate from other unidentifiable note-takers. To these sources, we can add the notations of Franz Neumann of the Husserl Archive of Leuven, which was available to the editors in a transcription of unknown handwriting. They were made readily available to us by Professor S. Ijsseling and Mr. S. Spileers. The version contains only the first part of the lecture course, but it offers additional materials that were taken into account for the constitution of the text. The as yet untranscribed notations by Fritz Kaufmann in an old stenography, which are also in Leuven, could not be enlisted.

The preparation of the text required, first of all, the complete transcription of the Marbach notations through the editors. The reconstruction of the train of thought, which was carried out on the basis of an ascertained chronology of the particular lectures, made it possible to bring the available text material into a coherent order. For the first part of the lecture course, Becker's notations served as the guiding text. The preparation of the second part was more complicated in that Becker's notations lose precision and are also incomplete. Thus, the appropriate passages had to be reconstructed out of the other sets of notes. Every statement that was not redundant was considered.

In regard to authenticity, the text, prepared in this manner, cannot be compared to editions based on original manuscripts. The editors are aware of the problems regarding this sort of “secondarily authentic” constitution of texts.

In addition to the notations, there are Heidegger's handwritten notes from the context of the lecture course. We are dealing with single pages in a folder found in the German Literary Archive of Marbach. The handwriting is microscopically small and extraordinarily difficult to decipher. Because the pages are immediately related to the work of the lecture course and, in the absence of the originally handwritten lecture, are the only remaining original documents pertaining to the lecture course, they are reproduced in the appendices.

The punctuation has been updated carefully according to today's accepted rules. Titles originate from the editors in using Becker's table of contents as an orientation. The organization of sections and paragraphs was conducted likewise by the editors. In contrast to this, all the titles in the appendices are those of Heidegger himself. The wording of the various notations was in general maintained, but in integrating them into the body of the text they were occasionally modified with care. Square brackets [] in the quotations of the appendix indicate Heidegger's additions, while square brackets in footnotes indicate remarks of the editor. Instances of a missing passage are marked with ellipses […] and stars [*], and questionable interpretations are marked with question marks [?]. Abbreviations were left alone if what they indicate was at all in doubt.

The lecture course “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” held in the winter semester of 1920–21, is especially important for the understanding of Heidegger's early thought. Although there have been references to this lecture for decades in the scholarly literature, there reigned a general unclarity with regard to the available textual basis as well as the precise train of thought. The present edition should rectify this lack as much as possible. The position and status of the lecture course within Heidegger's oeuvre are determined by its object: nowhere else has the uniqueness of the philosophical foreconception [Vorgriff] been established as decisively in contrast to the scientific method, or are religious questions taken up with such extension and exegetical exactitude. Heidegger combines a critique of contemporary philosophy of religion (Troeltsch) with fundamental considerations of how factical life experience may be grasped in its historicity. The expansive discussion of the methodological fundamental concept of the “formal indication” constitutes the background against which the earliest witnesses to primordial Christianity undergo an intensive phenomenological analysis. In the framework of an “enactment-historical” explication Heidegger interprets selected passages from the letter to the Galatians as well as both letters to the Thessalonians. Heidegger works out in this manner the basic determinations of primordial Christian religiosity out of the phenomenon of the Pauline gospel. According to these determinations, we can recognize the enactmental character of factical life as such.

Since 1918, Heidegger's closeness to Edmund Husserl, both personal and in terms of philosophical content, determines the fact that these analyses stand under the sign of a “phenomenology of religion.” Husserl had entrusted the more specific working out of this phenomenology to his student, who, however, already worked on his own conception of phenomenology on the basis of the notion of factical life experience. In this way, the constant confrontation with the Christian tradition constitutes the background against which Heidegger will develop his “hermeneutics of facticity.” For the winter semester 1919–1920 he had announced a lecture course on medieval mysticism which he did not then give (cf. part III of this volume). The lecture courses published here from Winter Semester 1920–21 and from Summer Semester 1921 indicate the high point, and at the same time the end, of his studies in the phenomenology of religion.

The editors thank the manager of Heidegger's Nachlass, Dr. Hermann Heidegger, for entrusting us with this edition of the lecture course. It is also necessary to thank Prof. Friedrich Wilhelm von Hermann and Dr. Heidegger for help with deciphering passages which were difficult to make out. We gratefully thank Dr. Hartmut Tietjen for countless instruction regarding formal and textual composition of the lecture course, for transcription of notes and sketches of the lectures (Appendix) that were very difficult to read and for reading through for corrections; we thank Jutta Heidegger, Torsten Steiger, and Dr. Mark Michalski for their generous assistance in working out the corrections.

Frankfurt/Main, August 1995

Matthias Jung

Thomas Regehly