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

Summary

The paper examines the phenomenology of numinous experiences in the later works of Heidegger, alongside other thinkers who proposed a 'New Age' spirituality in response to materialism during the 1930s. It discusses Heidegger's early connection to National Socialism and his subsequent critique of technology and commodification, suggesting a pathway toward a spiritual renewal that emphasizes humanity's role in protecting the planet.

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.

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