The Image of the World and Metaphysical Idolatry

Martin Heidegger and the Weltanschauung

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to outline one of the perspectives according to which the relationship between subject and world can be declined in modernity, starting from the centrality that the concept of Weltanschauung assumed in the first half of the last century. The hermeneutic lens through which the subject-image-world nexus is investigated is the Heideggerian conception of the transcendental subject and of the connected objectification of the world, which is fully expressed in the famous 1938 lecture Das Zeitalter des Weltbildes. The aim here is an idolatrous interpretation of the Weltbild as opposed to a possible iconic interpretation of Heideggerian thought of being; for this reading I will use the phenomenological understanding of these two theological figures ‒ the idol and the icon ‒ first offered by Jean-Luc Marion in his 1977 text The Idol and Distance.