Heidegger Is No Hero

Abstract

Even though methodology and theorizing seem more often like idling the engine of the mind, taking up a theoretical stance can be risky business. By ‘methodology’ I not only mean certain techniques of analysis, like statistics, for example; I chiefly have in mind certain commanding styles of inquiry which set the form and matter of our intellectual endeavours. Here one can count behaviourism, empiricism, Heideggerian existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, historicism, structuralism, functionalism and so on. Thus doing theoretical (some call it ‘methodological’)² work commits us not only to certain ways in which conceiving and studying religion may involve us, but also to the larger visions of human nature embedded in them.

Since this essay was first written (1978) and published (1982), significant attention has been given the issue of the relation of Heidegger to Nazism. I believe my essay, reprinted here with the addition of a short introduction omitted from The Christian Century published version, was however, among the first to raise this question in a trenchant way, and to draw the conclusions by the means employed. This is certainly the first essay directed at the community of scholars in religion and theology to broach the subject.