804. It seems clear to me from many ...

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It seems clear to me from many of Bultmann's formulations that he is in no way slavishly dependent on his own technical terminology -- much less on Heidegger's.

Thus, for example, he can speak of the modern man's knowing "openly or hiddenly" that "his life as a person [sein Personleben] cannot be the object of objectifying thinking" (GV 3: 181). If one compares the clearly parallel passage to which Bultmann himself refers only two sentences earlier, one finds the following more "technical" formulation: "There is in fact a language in which existence [die Existenz] naively expresses itself, and correspondingly, there is an it,science that talks about existence [die Existenz] without objectifying~nto being within the world" (KM 2: 187 [NTM: 101]). Clearly, "das Personleben" and "die Existenz;" are simply two ways of referring to one and the same thing-the first being the less, the second, the more, technical way of doing so.
Or, again, note the references toward the end of the German translation of Jesus Christ and Mythology to "existential, personal self-understanding [das existentielle, personliche Selbstverständnis]" or "such existential personal understanding [solches existentielle personliche Verstehen]." Here, again, "existential" is shown to be only a more technical way of talking about what we usually speak of less technically as "personal."

16 October 2001