Through Theology to Phenomenology,
and Back to Anthropology? Heidegger,
Bultmann, and the Problem of Sin
christian sommer1. Between Phenomenology and Theology:
The Problem of Sin
I will enter into our problematic through an archeological analysis of
a particularly significant case of thinking during the twentieth cen-
tury, where we can find, albeit in a highly entangled way, New Testa-
mentarian and/or theological elements within a philosophical frame-
work: Heidegger’s Being and Time published in1927. To make manifest
this complex interrelation between philosophy and theology, which
perpetuates a Western tradition that begins at least with Augustine’s
reception of late Ancient Greek philosophy, I would like to isolate, in
Heidegger’s text and subtext, an exemplary phenomenon that we may
call the “circuit of lust.” I will then question this operation of trans-
position or transfer of theological elements and discuss its legitimacy
in Heidegger and beyond.
Heidegger’s analytics of “falling” or “fallenness” [Verfallen, Ver-
fallenheit] will be our starting point. In §38 of Being and Time, the
general mode of phenomenalization of the “mobility of falling”
[Bewegtheit des Verfallen] of human being or Dasein in its everydayness
is characterized by the term “whirl,” or “turbulence” [Wirbel]:
This constant tearing away from authenticity and into the “they” [das
Man] (though always with the simulation of authenticity) characterizes
the mobility of falling as a whirl.^1- Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [SZ], Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001, 178; Being
and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962;