Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, March 20 2025
Professor Carmine Di Martino of the University of Milan held a seminar on March 20, 2025, on Heidegger’s writings from the first Freiburg period, presenting them through the development of some Key themes.
Since their publication, the critical reading given to these writings, which the philosopher was uncertain whether to publish (would they bring to light something that bothered him?), has partly changed. What inheritance they represented became clear only later.
According to Di Martino, Heidegger is an author who exemplarily summarizes within himself the two great matrices of Western culture: the Greek and the Judeo-Christian. He makes them play together productively with a certain strategy of reading and contamination.
Since the publication of Being and Time, no one has been able to escape the interpretive canon he coined, which reread all of the West as a great parable of the forgetting of being and the reduction of being to entity: a metaphysics of presence or of the present entity, if you will.
Heidegger’s great move was to pose a problem that was not obvious. The Judeo-Christian matrix gave him the cue to identify a turning point. The first questioning does not occur with respect to being but with respect to man. One does not start from being as such, but from the being that man himself is and for whom being is a question. The entire tradition fails to think the human being in its historicity therefore misses the target.
But how does Heidegger interpret the human being otherwise? What is his source?
The answer is proto-Christianity and in particular three places: Paul’s letters, Augustine in The Confessions, mysticism, from Bernard of Clairvaux to Meister Eckhart, to Luther. From there he brilliantly derives a peculiar inheritance, since primitive Christianity is the repository of an experience of authentic life.
First thematic nucleus identified by Professor Di Martino: elements of proto-Christianity and the question of the meaning of being. In Paul, Heidegger finds a peculiar conception of temporality, kairological temporality. Time that condenses in the moment, experienced as conversion, as decision, appropriating moment, kairological time: this is the historicity of the living. The eschatological meaning of the parousia conditions Christian existence, which is under the sign of the second coming of Christ. This is translated by Heidegger into living toward the future. This, Di Martino explained, is the way of thinking about Dasein, the concrete totality of man, that fictitious self oriented toward the future and not toward simple presence. Proto-Christian men live by “futuring themselves”, and this gives their life a weight, an authenticity: proto-Christian being is unbalanced beyond itself, toward the future.
Why is it problematic for being to be simple presence? From here the antithesis is born, not from a metaphysical reflection on the meaning of being but from an interpretation of life in a context, in a determined community.
Second thematic nucleus: the facticity of existence, never considered by philosophy. The source of this second nucleus is Augustine’s thought: “Questio mihi factum sum”: the self-understanding of my being is the fundamental question. “Fallen life” is also a transcription taken from Augustine along with the concept of restlessness: “Inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescant in te”.
Regarding the phenomenology of dispersion, De Martino observed that fallenness is the place where the human being experiences the possibility of recovery: dispersion and recovery as the dialectic of man-world. Augustine offers Heidegger the possibility of elaborating the description of the ruinous movement, where “ruinanz” is a term taken from Luther: phenomenology of the ruinous movement and the counter-ruinous movement.
Restlessness, instead, will be conceived as the kinesis or motility of existence when Heidegger will use physics (and not Aristotelian metaphysics) to translate his intuitions into philosophical language (Heidegger, after the Freiburg courses from 1923 onward, reinterprets Aristotle in light of the factical experience of proto-Christian life).
Christianity allows Heidegger to think concrete historicity in its authentic temporality: this “factical life” that feels the weight of itself – life in trouble (Augustine, Confessions) – that feels itself dragged into dispersion by temptation.
Heidegger, therefore, radicalizes the Christian experience by cutting off its theological-metaphysical ulterior dimension. The human being is rethought: Dasein temporalizes itself by futurity. What matters is not presence but the future: here is the reversal. Also the inquietudo, cutting the second part of Augustine’s phrase, remains as concern, the most authentic meaning of existence. Inquietudo or “Dasein as care”.
In concluding, Di Martino referred to this process as an ontologization of the Christian heritage and translation of its theological and ontological categories with Greek metaphysical categories.
This approach affects the interpretation of Being: no longer flattened onto the entity, not ad-venient to objectify itself but ad-venient in its withdrawing. Being ensures the presence of beings always by withdrawing, without translating itself into presence. Parousia, coming that must never objectify itself, coming without the expected, if the expected were to present itself the expectation would cease. The same happens with restlessness.
This operation gave rise to Being and Time, a work that despite what the author wanted is the greatest treatise on the human being and on existence, not already a treatise on being, or rather: a transcendental-style treatise on the human being, the living being, for whom only the understanding of being is a problem.
