Abstract
This chapter will attempt a close reading of a few paragraphs in section 74, “The Basic Constitution of Historicality” of Chapter V: “Temporality and Historicality” in Division Two: “Dasein and Temporality” of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our aim is to work out ideas about philosophical mysticism in its fundamental ontological difference from ordinary, mostly religious or spiritual notions of mysticism; those latter forms are ideas attributed to religion, theology, or non-doctrinal forms of spirituality, including paganism, animism, and totemism, that link human experience with some form of immaterial transcendence, let alone ethereal yet existent deities. Specifically, our thesis is that the unique notion of the ‘mystical’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time is doubly distinct from a.) all previous interrelations of philosophy and religion/theology in the history of Western thought from the Pre-Socratics up to Hegel, later Schelling, and Kierkegaard and b.) Hegel’s attempt of an aufheben of religion into philosophy at the end of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), at least as understood by secondary interpretations over the last two hundred years (Pinkard 2023).