ABSTRACT

This chapter examines why Heidegger saw mysticism as a suitable topic for treatment in the first place. It offers an interpretative summary of the lecture notes – and, because of the fragmentary nature of the notes, any summary has to be interpretative. Medieval mysticism is a form of expressing a lived religious experience but for the philosopher what counts is, ultimately, what it shows about the relationship between experience and the structuring of experience in their most intimate conjunction. Thinking back to the contrast between the medieval and modern worlds given in the conclusion of the Scotus thesis, it seems that Martin Heidegger's implicit question is whether such an experience and such a view is possible within modernity. 'Mysticism', then, enabled Heidegger to take a significant step beyond the impasse of Neo-Kantianism, even if it did not enable him to take the next step of relocating transcendence itself in time.