christian sommer[Erfahrung, Leiden] can also save me: in this case my weakness is my
force, as we could say with Paul (2 Cor. 12.9).
In Being and Time, Heidegger exploits this double phenomenal
complex to articulate the transition from inauthenticity of fallen
Dasein to its authenticity through the annihilating experience of
anxiety: the Ent-schlossenheit [resoluteness, dis-closedness] modifies
[Ent-] the privation [Un-] of Eigentlichkeit that is Un-eigentlichkeit and
therefore realizes its nature (which is “life” in its philosophical modus).
This modification is a sublation [Aufhebung = tollere + con servare], as
Heidegger says it again in “The Concept of Time”: “The authentic
being of Dasein is what it is only so that it is authentically the in-
authentic Dasein, i.e., that it ‘sublates’ it in itself.”^23 Because, as he
repeats in Being and Time, authentic existence, Dasein’s highest
possibility of being, is “nothing that floats above fallen everydayness;
existentially, it is only a modified grasp of it.”^24
As we can see through this example, there is a complex play in
Heidegger between Aristotle and Luther, between Greek philosophy
and the New Testamentarian tradition. Heidegger is, in a certain way,
guided by the Lutheran project of a return to the proto-Christian
experience of the New Testament by way of a destruction of “pagan
wisdom,” i.e., a destruction of Greek philosophy and especially of
Aristotle, the “blind and pagan master”^25 : “I will destroy the wisdom
of the wise” (1 Cor. 1.19). The Heideggerian Destruktion of Aristotle
develops this initial impulse of the Lutheran destructio which wants
to dismantle the scholastic architecture considered as “theology of
glory,” which has turned away from the experience of cross and
passion.^26
knowledge from what is actual and able to teach, either ought not to be described
as ‘being acted upon,’ as has been said, or else there are two senses of alteration,
one a change to a negative condition, and the other a change to a positive state,
that is, a realization of its nature.”
- GA 64 [1924], 81. Cf. also SZ [1927], 370.
- SZ [1927], 179. Cf. also GA 24 [SS 1927], 130, 243.
- Luther, WA 6, 457.
- The destructio, as the ruina and annihilatio of sin and human wisdom, is central
in Romans that Luther considers as the “heart piece” (WA DB 7, 2) of the NT; cf.
WA 56, 157 on Romans 1.1.