A Phenomenology of Love as Event: Bultmann Beyond Heidegger

Rescuing Rudolf Bultmann from Heidegger’s shadow, Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere presents a philosophical reading of his theology, which reveals his unique phenomenology of love as an event.

Bultmann (1884-1976) is often regarded as a mere footnote to Heidegger’s philosophy: a theologian whose thought was principally built on the Heideggerian analytic of human finitude. Yet, by reading Bultmann anew, in light of other continental philosophers’ engagement with Heidegger - from Jaspers and Levinas to Ricoeur and Falque - this book rejects that idea as a misunderstanding. Instead it contends that Bultmann radically develops and even improves upon Heidegger’s phenomenology.

Guiding the reader through his argument in a clear and compelling style, Cassidy-Deketelaere reveals how Bultmann understands the experience of love as not being limited to an empirical occurrence but rather having a truly transcendental scope: what phenomenologists would now call ’event’. With this, Bultmann’s theology not only resolves the contemporary critique of Heidegger’s method as precluding a dynamic between the empirical and transcendental, but further provides a new alternative paradigm of human finitude based on love, and not death (Heidegger) or birth (Arendt).

Far more than a footnote, The Phenomenology of Love as Event uncovers Bultmann’s significant contribution to philosophy. Through his theological writings, Bultmann shows us that love is the central experience of human existence, one that transforms the being of Dasein, despite Heidegger never allowing for it.

Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at KU Leuven and Visiting Professor at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences, Belgium. He is the co-editor of The Pulse of Sense: Encounters with Jean-Luc Nancy (2022) and The Emmanuel Falque Reader (Bloomsbury, 2024).