To the “Things Themselves”: Heidegger, the Baden School, and Religion

Near the beginning of Being and Time, in § 7, Heidegger invokes the famous phenomenological battle cry, “to the things themselves!” In his gloss on this maxim, Heidegger observes that phenomenology is “opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as ‘problems’, often for generations at a time.” ¹ Here, Heidegger commits himself to the spirit (if not the “letter”) of phenomenology as developed first by Edmund Husserl. For Heidegger, “phenomenology” is the name of a way of doing philosophy, rather than for a set of substantive views. Indeed, it is a way of doing philosophy that does not commit itself ahead of time to any specific views or programs, and instead allows its own course to be dictated by the “thing themselves.” Heidegger’s allegiance to phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy is a constant throughout his career, from his earliest work after World War I to his efforts to “let beings be” in his later writings. This is perhaps most clearly the case in his early studies of the phenomenology of religion (1918-1921). In fact, Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion provides a clear example of what it means to study religion with a view towards the “things themselves.”