Cura et Casus: Heidegger and Augustine on the Care of the Self (original) (raw)

In the context of the much-debated 'return of religion', this paper argues that Heidegger's concept of responsibility for oneself, including the idea of fallenness, owes itself chiefly to Augustine's discussion of sin and temptation. The crucial difference is that Heidegger conceives the process of an agent's singularization as taking place in confrontation with one's dying, the dying that opens up possibilities for action and understanding to an agent, rather than with the personal loving god of Augustine's Confessions. …is there not a least some Platonism in the Verfallen? Jacques Derrida, "Ousia and Gramm!" I Modern thought and life finds itself in the awkward position of drawing sustenance from sources it can neither endorse in their entirety nor shake off in the manner of a tabula rasa. Presumably, this is the situation of all thought. For the moderns, however, the conundrum takes on peculiar salience due to the claim to generate its resources-in particular for ethical life, in its widest sense-from out of itself, from non-traditional, secular sources. While the emphasis on selfgeneration has been criticized at least since Hegel's critique of Kant, a perceived, and muchdiscussed, return of religion to modern or postmodern culture has in recent years led to a renewed focus on the theological sources of the modern West. In a less hubristic stance with regard to 2 overdrawn Enlightenment hopes, the task in approaching this cultural phenomenon has become one of acknowledging a double debt to religion, especially Christianity: recognizing in it the origins of seminal, more or less secularized ideas without which our ethical life cannot be seen as what it is, such as the ideas of responsibility and universal equality, while perusing religion with regard to that which (still) remains-perhaps to our disadvantage, but at least explicatory in relation to the return of religion-unsecularized, unappropriated, and perhaps untranslatable. With regard to the first debt, the debate about the degree to which such translation has been successful, or completable at all, is far from over (from Carl Schmitt to Hans Blumenberg and Claude Lefort). However, recent years bear witness to a remarkable shift in emphasis toward the second issue. Philosophical, cultural, and religious thinkers, secularists, non-secularists, and those in-between-at times called, or denounced as, post-secularists-are broaching the question of that which, having its origins in religious thought and life, should or should not, could or could not be translated into the language of modern culture. It is remarkable in this context that even self-avowed secularists, who insist on such translation more than others, concede that the self-generation of modernity is hard to achieve, that the religious heritage still provides urgently needed resources that await their translation. Jürgen Habermas claims that, in the face of the possibility, provided by the recently discovered, and still to be discovered, tools of genetic engineering, of designing human beings so as to undermine their sense of autonomy, the Christian distinction between the creator and the created demands translation into the language of our postmetaphysical lifeworld (Habermas 2001). For Jean-Luc Nancy, that which remains to come of Christianity, that which philosophical concepts (those of, for instance, Hegel and Schelling) have determined as inaccessible, is represented by the ideas of love and faith-to be sure, belief or faith not in an epistemic sense (Nancy, Benvenuto, 2002).