The Clearing and the Light:
Heidegger, Husserl, and the One Who Lives Our Experience
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
Two Philosophers and the Question of Being vs. Experience
Most readers of this site will never pick up Heidegger’s main work, Being and Time. But the question Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger wrestled with in the early twentieth century is one every Christian lives inside, whether he names it or not: where does a person stand when he knows something? Is he a spectator looking at the world through a window, or a participant woven into it? And if he is woven in, can he ever know anything true, or only what his time and place allow him to see?
These are not idle questions. The modern West has largely settled on an answer: truth is local, a product of culture and history, and anyone who claims more is either naive or dangerous. That answer has roots, and many of them run through Heidegger. In this essay I trace the line from Husserl to Heidegger, give each his due, and then argue that Heidegger saw something true and stopped one step short of it. The step he did not take is the one Scripture takes: the world is not merely where being shows itself; it is where God lives our lives with us, from inside.
Husserl: Consciousness as a Window
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) founded phenomenology, which, in plain words, is the careful study of how things show up in experience. His rallying cry was “back to the things themselves.” He thought philosophy had buried the world under theories about the world. Before we explain what a tree is chemically or economically, there is the tree as it appears to us: green, swaying, there.
To get at that appearance cleanly, Husserl proposed a discipline he called the epoché, a Greek word meaning suspension or bracketing. For the moment we set aside every assumption: whether the tree exists independently of us, what science says about it, what we have been taught. What remains is pure experience, and within it the structures by which anything appears to a mind at all. Husserl believed that patient description of those structures could reach the essential features of things: not just this tree, but what it is to be a tree, a number, a memory, another person.
For Husserl, then, consciousness is something like a window. It is the frame through which things appear, and the frame sets the conditions for what can appear. The method was rigorous and fruitful. But notice the picture. The observer sits behind the glass. He looks out and describes what he sees. The world is over there; the knower is here.
Heidegger: Pulled Back Into the World
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was Husserl’s student and dedicated Being and Time (1927) to him. He also broke with him at the root. Heidegger thought the window picture, a mind on one side and a world on the other, was the very error Western thought had been making since Descartes. Nobody begins life as a detached observer. We are born into a world already under way: a family, a language, tools, chores, other people. Long before we think about anything, we are busy with it.
Heidegger’s term for this is Being-in-the-world, hyphenated to show that it is one thing, not a person plus a world. His term for the human being is Dasein, German for “being-there.” The name is deliberate. A person is not a spectator outside the world but the “there” where things come to light, the place where being is disclosed.
His best-known illustration is a hammer. When a carpenter is driving nails, he does not regard the hammer as an object with a certain weight and shape. It disappears into the work; it is, in Heidegger’s phrase, ready-to-hand. Only when the head flies off does the hammer suddenly become a thing to stare at, present-at-hand, an object. Heidegger’s point is that the staring, detached, scientific mode comes second. It arises when our ordinary involvement breaks down. Our first relation to the world is not looking but living.
I think he is right about this, and a Christian should welcome it. Scripture never treats man as a disembodied mind gazing at creation. Adam is formed from the ground and put into a garden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). The commandments concern what we do with our hands, our mouths, and our neighbors. Knowledge in the biblical sense is closer to intimacy than to observation: “And Adam knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 4:1). Heidegger recovered something the Bible never lost.
The Circle We Cannot Step Out Of
If we are always already inside the world, then every act of understanding starts from somewhere. Here Heidegger reworks an old idea, the hermeneutic circle. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation, originally of texts and especially of Scripture. The circle names a familiar puzzle: you cannot understand a sentence without understanding its words, but you cannot settle what the words mean without the sentence. The parts need the whole and the whole needs the parts. Interpreters long treated this as a problem of method to be managed.
Heidegger made it a feature of existence itself. Every person comes to anything with what he called a fore-structure: expectations, a vocabulary, a sense of what matters, a guess at what he is looking at. We are always leaning forward toward our possibilities, and that leaning frames what we notice. The circle, then, is not a logical flaw to escape. It is the condition that makes understanding possible at all. The decisive thing, Heidegger said, is not to get out of the circle but to enter it in the right way.
There is truth here too, and every reader of the Bible knows it. A man reads Romans differently at twenty and at sixty, after a marriage, after a funeral. Anyone who claims to read without presuppositions is simply unaware of his own. The honest question is not whether we have a fore-structure but whether it is a true one, and whether we let the text correct it.
Truth as Unconcealment
From there Heidegger rethought truth itself. The usual definition, since Aristotle, is correspondence: a statement is true when it matches the way things are. Heidegger did not deny this, but he asked what has to happen first. Before a statement can match a thing, the thing has to show up. Something has to be brought out of hiddenness into the open.
He found a word for this in the Greek aletheia. It is usually translated “truth,” but it literally means un-concealment, the not-hidden. Truth, for Heidegger, is at bottom an event of disclosure: beings stepping out of darkness into what he called the clearing, the way a meadow opens in a dark forest and lets the light in. And every clearing is bounded. What one age brings to light, it also hides. There is always more in shadow than in sun.
A Christian can hardly read this without hearing echoes. “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad” (Luke 8:17). “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5). The Greek word for revelation, apokalypsis, is itself an unveiling word. The whole drama of the Bible is the movement of what was hidden in God into the open.
Where Heidegger Stops Short
Here the paths divide, and the difference is not small. For Heidegger, the clearing has no one behind it. Disclosure happens, but it happens within history, within a people, within an epoch’s way of seeing. There is no standpoint above the clearings from which to say which one is right. Critics from his own day forward have pressed the point: if truth is always unconcealment bounded by history, then the ground for saying that any claim holds for everyone, everywhere, has been dissolved. What remains is a series of worlds, each lit in its own way.
This is not an abstract worry. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and served as rector of the University of Freiburg under the new regime, and his private notebooks, published beginning in 2014, show that his sympathies were more than tactical. I do not raise this to discredit his insights by association; the hammer is still a good example. I raise it because it shows what can happen to a brilliant mind when truth has no anchor outside history. If a nation’s moment of disclosure is the clearing, who stands outside it to say that it is a lie?
I stand on the side that says truth is not finally local. Heidegger was right that we never see from nowhere, right that understanding is circular, right that truth involves things coming into the light. He was wrong to conclude that there is no one for whom everything is already in the light. The real areas of uncertainty deserve honest naming: no human being holds the view from above; every Christian reads Scripture through his own fore-structure; and the church has more than once mistaken its own era’s clearing for God’s. Those are reasons for humility. They are not reasons to give up the claim.
The One Who Lives Every Life From Inside
There is a deeper answer, and it is the center of what this ministry teaches. Heidegger rejected the detached spectator, and he was right to. Yet conventional Christianity has often pictured God as exactly that: the ultimate spectator, outside the world, looking in through the window and keeping score. That picture is Husserl’s window raised to infinity. It is not the God of Scripture.
“For in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there” (Psalm 139:7–8). God is not watching our lives from outside. He is living them with us, from inside. Each person is a place where God experiences the world: a “there,” to borrow Heidegger’s word, but a there that belongs to Someone. We are God’s experience of the world.
See how this changes each of Heidegger’s insights without discarding any of them.
Being-in-the-world becomes being-in-God. We are embedded in tools, language, and people, yes; but the whole web is held within one life, and that life is not blind.
The circle remains, but we are not alone in it. We always interpret from where we stand. But the One who indwells every standpoint is not confined to any one of them. Our fore-structure can be corrected because there is a perspective that includes ours and exceeds it, and that perspective speaks. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Paul grants Heidegger’s limit, in part and darkly, and then names what Heidegger could not: we are already fully known.
Unconcealment becomes revelation. Things come into the light not by an accident of history but because there is a Light. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Truth here is finally neither a proposition nor an event but a Person, and the clearing is where He meets us.
This is what supplies the ground Heidegger lost. If God lives each life from inside, then what I do to my neighbor, God feels in my neighbor. Moral truth is not a convention of my age; it is the shape of what love does to a life God is living. That is why His law can be kept out of love rather than fear. Not because a spectator is watching, but because the One who lives in me also lives in the person in front of me, and feels what I choose.
What This Means for How We Live
Three things follow.
First, we should be humble interpreters. Heidegger is right that none of us steps out of the circle. When we read Scripture, judge a culture, or argue a cause, we bring our time and temperament with us. The remedy is not to pretend otherwise but to enter the circle in the right way: prayerfully, in community, letting the text push back.
Second, we should not be afraid to say true things. The modern habit of calling every conviction “just my perspective” sounds humble, but it is Heidegger’s historicism at popular scale. A person can confess the limits of his sight and still say that cruelty is wrong everywhere and always, because it is wrong to the One who suffers it in every victim.
Third, we should live as participants, not spectators. The carpenter’s hammer disappears into the work. The Christian life, likewise, is mostly not a matter of staring at doctrines but of doing the work of love with them in hand.
Why the Concern Is Real
The drift Heidegger helped begin is not an academic curiosity. It shows up whenever a university treats truth as nothing more than power, whenever a law is defended only because “this is who we are now,” whenever someone reasons that since nothing can be known for certain, nothing can be wrong. The intuitive sense that something has gone unnatural there is sound. A world of clearings with no Light is a world where the strongest voice decides what may be seen.
Heidegger described our embeddedness in the world better than almost anyone. The answer to the problem he left is not to climb back behind Husserl’s glass. It is to recognize who else is in the world with us.
References
Primary Works
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 8. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1927.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Being-in-the-world and Dasein, §§12–13; the hammer, ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, §§15–16; the clearing, §28; the hermeneutic circle and fore-structure, §32 (p. 195; German p. 153); truth as unconcealment, §44.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 15–86. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Heidegger, Martin. Überlegungen II–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1941). Edited by Peter Trawny. Gesamtausgabe, vols. 94–96. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014.
Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. First published 1900–1901.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982. First published 1913. The epoché and phenomenological reduction, §§31–32.
Scripture
All Scripture quotations are from the King James Version: Genesis 2:15; Genesis 4:1; Psalm 139:7–8; Luke 8:17; John 1:5; John 14:6; Acts 17:28; 1 Corinthians 13:12.