Abstract

At the beginning of his philosophical career (between 1918 and 1921), the young Heidegger analyzed various texts belonging to the field of the religious tradition: the Pauline Epistles, Augustinian writings and texts of the medieval mystics. Through these analyses, Heidegger formalized certain phenomena that we can find, a few years later, in Being and Time, illustrating the “warm” line of the existential analytic, the pathetic level of the ontology of Dasein: anxiety, death, consciousness, and guilt. My paper focuses on this process of ontologization of phenomena belonging to religious life, namely on the awaiting of Parousia which is used to elaborate the futural structure of being towards death. I finally argue that the keyword for the understanding of the phenomenological transfer from the religious life to the ontology of Dasein is the methodological idea of “formal indication”, whose meaning and role must be clarified.