Magyar Filozófiai Szemle, 2011
2011 / 4. szám - SZEMLE - Summaries
Summaries Life Experience in Primal Christianity and Eschatological Time Martin Heidegger’s Early Lecture Course on the Phenomenology of Religion István M. Fehér The turning away from theoretical comportment and the concurrent attempt to gain a new access to life as it is being pre-theoretically enacted and lived - the effort to go back to original experience and to find a conceptuality adequate to it - are parallel developments in German philosophy and theology at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In his effort to find a hermeneutic return to “life”, for the young Heidegger - as is shown by his lectures on the, phenomenology of religion - primal Christianity appeared as a fundamental paradigrq. It was by the hermeneutic transformation of Husserlian phenomenology that Heidegger attempted to make life accessible - life as it was experienced in primal Christianity and had been described in the Epistles of Paul. From this perspective, the religious-theological relevance of the interrelated structure of “Erlebnis”, “experience”, and “understanding” originates from the hermeneutic-phenomenological thematization of the believing comportment, of how the believer enacts his/her faith. The paper undertakes the attempt to reconstruct the young Heidegger’s path of thinking with an eye to some major themes of the phenomenology of religion course, with special regard to the kairological conception of time elaborated in it. In Defense of Historical Experience On Paul Ricoeur’s Debate with Hayden White László Tengelyi Paul Ricœur highly appreciates the “dynamic structuralism” of Hayden White. Yet, he enters into a debate with White’s approach to history. The controversy revolves around the constitution of the historical field. White maintains that it is solely the discourse of the historian that constitutes the historical field; that is why the task of a metahistorical investigation consists in an analysis of the tropological structure and the explicative modes characteristic of this discourse. In contrast, Ricœur considérâtes life in history as the very basis of all constitution of the historical field; that is why he tries to replace White’s dynamic structuralism by a hermeneutic phenomenology of historical experience. However, due to the dynamic character of White’s structuralism, even the metahistorical approach to history allows us to recognize, at least, some traces of historical experience. Indeed, several traces of this kind are to be discovered in the studies White consecrates to the great 19th-century historians and philosophers of history. Yet, this fact does not obfuscate the clear difference between the two thinkers. It is only Ricœur who assigns to historical experience a fundamental role in the very constitution of the historical field.