The paper deals with Augustine's presence in Heidegger's thought. Indeed, Augustine is not only the main source for the young Heidegger's training (together with Husserl's phenomenology and Aristotle's philosophy), but is also the fundamental inclination, sometimes hidden, that Heidegger tries to absorb and metabolize in his own thought. The Confessions' interpretation - in particular the reading of book X on memoria and temptatio and book XI on time faced during the Lectures on Augustin and Neoplatonism - is the chance Heidegger has to make some basic theoretical decisions. Human being is nothing but an historical and temporal being-there who raises the question of being because he is in himself that question. While for Augustine the question is raised before a You, in Heidegger's thought the question of human being - i.e. the question that human being is - is handed over to "nothing", because the mystery of being can never become a presence. The possibility of a confession, as a dramatic dialogue between the I and the presence of being, becomes for Heidegger the sign of the finitude of the being-there and the impossibility of being in itself. The aim of the paper is to show Heidegger's attempt (in some lectures and articles wrote during the early Twenties) to "save" Augustine's discovery of inquietudo interpreting it on the ground of Aristotle's physis - i.e. that being which has within itself the principle of the movement - as a self-referential kinetics of life.
History of Metaphysics; Phenomenology of Religious Life; Martin Heidegger; Augustine of Hippo; Aristotle; Being-there; Question of being; Memory; Temptation; Time; Physics, Kinetics of life