Editorial Note

Abstract

The significance of the present volume lies in the fact that it revisits Heidegger's reflection on God in the light of newly published literature, thereby presenting new approaches to already established thoughts.Heidegger's phenomenological thinking originates from Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger seems to follow him in the sense of the Ideas I, where Husserl expresses the impossibility of a mundane God (See Husserl, Ideas I, §51) because of the absolute consciousness of God which cannot be taken as an object of human experience; Heidegger, in the so-called Natorp-Report, interprets philosophical analysis of God as the "raising of hands against God" 1 . Nevertheless, as is well known, the question of God accompanies in Heidegger's analysis of being-historical thinking, and there are many ways to approach this difficult topic. However, the first example of the conceptual analysis of God appears already in the 1920s in the appendix of HGA 60, where Heidegger, under the title of The Absolute, intensely analyzed Adolf Reinach's religious notes. His methodological inquiries are also revealed by the parallel interpretation of historicity as a phenomenological problem, and as the problem of religious experiences in Reinach's religious notes. Contrary to Heidegger, Reinach interpreted religious experience as a similar act to social acts, however, the religious act is directed at someone [at God], who is not present. The absence of God constitutes the paradox in Reinach's religious thinking, because, on the one hand, the experience of God is individual, but, on the other hand, this experience is undividable for those who have no faith.This way, it is not accidental that Heidegger's notes for the planned lectures on medieval mysticism in 1918 focused on the question of whether 1. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zu Ontologie und Logik, ed. Günther Neumann HGA 62 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann 2005), 363n54.