As I read the history of philosophy, Heidegger is in the intellectual sphere one of those people who tears down philosophical kingdoms. (Nietzsche and Marx did their share as well, let the record show.) What Descartes and Kant and Hegel constructed they did with the idea that the human mind, whether that mind be a detached eye or a manifold that categorizes phenomena or the world’s apparatus for thinking about world’s self, was ultimately intelligible through a lens of radical, secularizing doubt. While Nietzsche and Heidegger are no Christians, nonetheless they call radically into question the metanarratives (that word, of course, comes later in the game) that would elevate universal–sometimes mathematical, sometimes not–reasoning and purportedly eliminate the need for particular experiences, particular articulations, and especially particular moments of revelation. At the end of division one of Being and Time Heidegger does say that true philosophy needs to eliminate the last vestiges of Christian theology (and I’ll get to that on Thursday, I promise), but along the way he’s broken down the assumptions that Descartes and Kant used to reduce the rich theology of the Church to a flat theism.

¶ 10:17 PM