For a Phenomenology of Religious Life

Abstract

With this essay, Emmanuel Falque pays off his debt to Martin Heidegger by tracing the methodological roots of his own work to The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Falque shows how Heidegger draws a ‘facticity in common’ from a variety of Christian texts (Paul, Augustine, medieval mysticism) that is nevertheless not limited to a theological form of discourse, but is precisely held ‘in common’ between the atheist and the Christian: the terms of the general philosophical analysis of ‘the human being as such’ have a theological provenance. Moreover, Falque holds up Heidegger’s engagement with the history of Christian theology as an example of how studying the history of thought does not have to mean sinking into a straightforward historicism.