christian sommerproblematic, since it brings up the question of detheologization and
phenomenological (re)conceptualization, and, more generally, the
question of the legitimacy and the limits of this kind of phenomenol-
ogical “secularization.”
In this lecture, Heidegger claims that the object of theology is Chris-
tianness, distinguished from Christianity, following Kierkegaard and
Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche’s friend. And the essence of Christianness
is faith, described in a very Pauline-Lutheran view: faith is a possibil-
ity of existence “that the touched [betroffen] Dasein cannot master on
its own, in which Dasein became a servant, brought before God and
thus born again.”^18
Heidegger characterizes faith as rebirth (“Glaube = Wiedergeburt”).^19
And in this faithful Christian existence, the pre-faithful/atheistic
existence of Dasein is aufgehoben, sublated, not removed, but lifted up
into a new form in which it is kept and preserved, as Heidegger insists:
“the sense of the Christian event as rebirth is that Dasein’s pre-faithful,
i.e., non-faithful, existence is sublated [aufgehoben] therein.”^20 The pre-
Christian existence is abolished and preserved in the Christian
existence.
But what Heidegger says of the sublating relationship between
Christian existence and pre- or non-Christian existence is exactly what
happens in his own phenomenological analysis of Dasein: he sublates
the Christian existence into the analysis of Dasein concretely under-
stood as performed philosophical existence. More precisely, through
the experiences and phenomena of Christian existence and life-world
[Lebenswelt], Heidegger operates a phenomenological and ontological
conceptualization of the pre- or non-Christian existence detached
from all faith and revelation. But it is important to see that Heidegger
uses implicitly, by formalizing it, the paradoxical operation through
which he describes the Christian existence in faith as resurrection,
which we can find at the heart of Being and Time, namely the transition
from inauthenticity to authenticity through the specific mutation that
happens in the annihilating experience of anxiety.
- GA 9 [1927–28], 53.
- GA 9 [1927–28], 53.
- GA 9 [1927–28], 63.