Intimations of a spiritual New Age: III. Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of numinous/Being experience and the "Other Beginning" of a futural planetary spirituality

Heidegger's later philosophy of numinous Being-experience is examined as part of a series on thinkers who, from the 1930s onward, envisioned a futural 'New Age' spirituality to counter globalizing materialism and disenchantment. The paper situates Heidegger within transpersonal psychology, religious studies, and James's 'pure experience,' while also addressing his early involvement with National Socialism as a spiritual metapathology of narcissistic inflation. From the mid-1930s, Heidegger moved toward a radical critique of universal commodification and technology, proposing an 'Other Beginning' and a 'last god' that would re-sacralize humanity for the guardianship of the planet and life.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures— also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930s envisioned versions of a futural “New Age” spirituality to address a globalizing materialism and its disenchantments—and so also creating a context for much of contemporary transpersonal and consciousness studies. A preliminary consideration of Heidegger in the contexts of transpersonal psychology, religious studies, the macro-histories of Toynbee and Sorokin, James on “pure experience,” and spirituality as intelligence must also lead to some reckoning with Heidegger’s disastrous initial involvement with National Socialism. Considered here in terms of a spiritual metapathology of narcissistic inflation/grandiosity, it was his way past this episode that led from the mid 1930s on into his radical critique of a globalizing technology of universal commodification and to an answering futural potential for a spiritual “Other Beginning” and “last god”—re-sacralizing humanity for the “guardianship” and “sheltering” of planet and life.