The end of care: Augustine and the development of Heidegger's philosophy

The End of Care: Augustine and the Development of Heidegger's Philosophy examines the significant conceptual debt owed by Martin Heidegger's phenomenological hermeneutics to the ethical categories of Augustinian anthropology. In the summer of 1921, Heidegger turned to the Confessions in search of conceptual resources he could enlist in criticizing the 'metaphysical abstractions' plaguing modern philosophy. The results of this encounter were striking: the elaboration of "care" as Dasein's way of being, a view put forth most famously in Being and Time, hearkened back to the schematic drawn up in glossing Confessions X.1-40. However, just as Heidegger lauded Augustine for his unparalleled attention to concrete life, he also criticized Augustine for having "aestheticized" truth. I argue that, rather than merely signaling the break between Heidegger and Augustine, this criticism belies a more extensive, and much more difficult, proximity between the two figures than scholars have previously granted. Situating the encounter with Augustine within the larger context of Heidegger's development (1919-1927), I show the extent to which Heidegger re-defined the philosophical subject largely by adapting concepts which first emerge in "destroying" the Confessions. At the same time, I explore why Heidegger never fully granted the extent to which his hermeneutic theory was influenced by Augustinian anthropology. This latter fact remains crucial for understanding how Dasein developed out of Augustinian anthropology. By reconstructing the 1921 gloss on the Confessions, I suggest that its significance is not exhausted by what Heidegger retained of it. Rather, Heidegger in fact shied away from a potentially more radical notion of human finitude generated by his reading of Augustine. Interpreting Being and Time from this perspective, the present study not only reconstructs Augustine's influence upon Heideggerian thought. It suggests as well that Heideggerian ontology remained haunted by an alternative notion of finitude which contests its limits, leading us to re-think Heidegger's analyses of conscience, guilt, and temporality.