804. formulations

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Itseems clear to me from many of Bultmann's fonnulations that he is in no way slavishly dependent on his own technical tenninology-much less on Heidegger's.
Thus, for example, he can speak of the modem man's knowing "openly or hiddenly" that "his life as a person [sein Personleben] cannot be the object of objectifying thinking" (GV 3: 181). Ifone compares the clearly parallel passage to which Bultmann himself refers only two sentences earlier, one finds the following more "technical" fonnulation: "There is in fact a language in which existence [die Existenz] naively expresses itself, and correspondingly, there is a
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
Existent;" 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 Selbstverstiindnis]" 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