Abstract

I argue that Heidegger is at bottom a phenomenological thinker by thematizing the ontological underpinnings of his project, i.e. the analogy of being. John Van Buren and others have argued that Heidegger is really a religious thinker, going so far as to say that he performs an "ontologia crucis ", an ontology of the cross, in the spirit of Martin Luther's "theologia crucis". Both Van Buren and Theodore Kisiel, in different ways, deconstruct what they interpret to be the more metaphysical project of Sein und Zeit and Heidegger's later writings through the lens of what they take to be the youthful Heidegger's more through-going de-mystification of western metaphysics. ;They think that the young Heidegger's project is free from the "aestheticism of western metaphysics" and attempt to re-inscribe his youthful project into the more metaphysically muddled Sein und Zeit in order to purify it its ocular-aestheticism. While I agree that the young Heidegger can shed light on his later developments, I do not think that the project of "demythologizing" Sein und Zeit really works. The reason that it does not work is because much of the resources that these genealogists are using, like Sein und Zeit itself, has as its general project the task carrying out a phenomenological ontology. ;In fact, while it is unmistakable that there are religious overtones and currents to Heidegger's work, it is just as unmistakable that the primary thrust of both the "young Heidegger" and the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit is phenomenological. Taking the material that best supports Van Buren and company's reading of Heidegger and co-opting it to support my oven reading, I argue that Heidegger performs a phenomenological ontology through a "primordial" retrieval of Aristotelian ethics and arrives at an ontological characterization of Dasein in terms of a proto-practical sphere. This is grounded in Aristotelian ϕrho&ogr;nuetasigmaiotasigma and not Lutheran conscience. In this context, I argue that an analogy of being conceived in terms of pirhoalphaxiiotasigma forms the theoretical basis for hermeneutic phenomenology