The «great burden» of religion: Jonas on Heidegger’s ambivalence towards the Jewish-Christian tradition
This article aims to reread the famous conference on Heidegger and Theology linking it with a still unpublished lecture on Being and Time Jonas held in 1967 at the New School for Social Research. From the reading of Heidegger’s masterwork, Jonas takes the idea of the ‘burdensome’ character of the existence, which he interprets in terms of a ‘polarity’ between man and its ‘other’ (other man, God, world). Such a polarity is for Jonas the very essence of ‘religion’ (as religamen) and of responsibility.