The irritability of being

Martin Heidegger, Hans Driesch and the future of theology

Mårten Björk

pp. 277-313

in: Mårten Björk, Jayne Svenungsson (eds), Heidegger's Black notebooks and the future of theology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter investigates the anthropology that underpins Heidegger's quest for the liberation of Dasein from the "animality" of humanity, and that prompted him to embrace Nazism and to develop a theology of what he described as "the last god". Heidegger's ontological stipulation of the human as Dasein is contrasted with the biologist and neovitalist philosopher Hans Driesch's philosophy of the organism, which Heidegger used in his 1929/1930 lecture series The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. These famous lectures give us a privileged access to the unfolding of Heidegger's thinking towards an Antisemitic and pro-Occidental mythology of the last god in the Black Notebooks. Through the contrast between Heidegger and Driesch, the author wishes to show that the future of theology may be found in the of critical metaphysics initiated by the neovitalists' original way of addressing the problem of immortality and eternal life.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Driesch Hans