Phenomenologies of Faith and Hope

What has this statement from Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians to do with phenomenology? That is my question, and I shall frame my response to it primarily in terms of Heidegger’s take on phenomenology, for it is Heidegger who, in 1921, lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, if not on those to the Corinthians, and it is Heidegger for whom the subordination of eternity to a temporality of finitude is an issue. My understanding is that his attempt to mobilise elements from a phenomenology of religious life, for the construction of an analytics of finitude in Being and Time, requires him to succeed in separating off a finite time of phenomenological experience, from the non-finite time of the object of theology, divinity, in which attempt the writing of that text founders. I am, however, also intrigued by the impact on Husserl, of his conversion to Christianity, which I think has to be taken as more than simply a token gesture. The question then would be whether Husserl’s exposure to the question of faith, as distinctive of Christianity among religions, and to a distinction between Offenbarung (the revelation of divinity to human beings) and Enthüllung (the revealing of what is at first concealed to human beings), has any role in the articulation of phenomenology, as the interrogation of that which is implicitly contained within the formal indications of pre-predicative experience. The transformation of the Kantian question of experience into the Heideggerian notion of facticity goes by way of Husserl’s notion of the primacy of sensory givenness, which Husserl, with the aid of Landgrebe, reworks in Experience and Judgment (1938) as the notion of the prepredicative. Heidegger’s studies of religious texts facilitate this transformation, and the status of the latter, the emergence of the notion of facticity, may turn out to depend on the validity of the studies of religious texts. As is well known, Heidegger offers the analysis of facticity as the site for registering a givenness of states of affairs in the world to Dasein, determinate existence, in place of Husserl’s earlier descriptive account of the givenness of what there is in intuition, and in place of Husserl’s later transformation of that notion of intuition in the descriptions of the priority of pre-predicative experience. This transition from a description of what is given, to an analysis of existence definitively cuts phenomenology loose from any residual positivism or naturalism. It also constructs an obstacle to any re-appropriation of