The Eclipse of Humanity: Heschel’s Critique of Heidegger

When the analysis of Who Is Man? is unapacked in the light of these associations it is clear that Heschel rejected poetry and metaphor as a means of theological elucidation, that he offered a profound examination of the Holocaust and that the major thrust of his thinking eschews Heidegerrian deconstruction and the postmodernism that ensued in its phenomenological wake.

Who Is Man? contains direct and indirect criticisms of Heidegger's notions of 'Dasein', 'thrownness', 'facticity' and 'submission' to name a few essential Heideggerian concepts. In using his ontological connective method in opposition to Heidegger's 'ontological difference', Heschel makes the argument that the biblical notion of Adam as a being open to transcendence stands in oppostion to the philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger and is the only basis for a redemptive view of humanity.