through theology to phenomenology
Let us have a look at this crucial operation in its double dimension.
On the one hand, Heidegger indeed uses the Lutheran theologoumenon
of the paradoxical operation of God [opus alienum et proprium] hidden
in tribulation [Anfechtung], or, as we could say, the very logic of the
Cross: God takes the world to give the grace. The illusion of the securitas
of the vita activa and of the vita contemplativa is destroyed and
annihilated by the intervention of the “strange work of God” [opus
alienum Dei]: the old man has to die to be reborn and to come back to
God [opus proprium]. Deus tentat nos: the strange work of God leads the
homo vetus to despair, leaving him only the possibility of hope,
referring him, as Heidegger puts it in his talk on Luther in 1924, to
the only possibility of a “persisting [Durchhalten] in the world,” or in
the secularized reformulation of his unpublished treatise The Concept
of Time of 1924, to the possibility of “holding out in anxiety.” Dasein,
in its “being that is anxious about itself in front of the nothing,” lets
itself [lässt sich] be reduced to itself.^21
On the other hand, in the Second Book of Aristotle’s De anima,
Heidegger, in his lecture course of 1924 on the basic concepts of
Aristotelian philosophy, finds the conceptual structure of a special pa-
thetic alteration that does not destroy or corrupt, but “saves” the
power of hexis towards a positive state of realization [energeia, entelech-
eia] by way of a salvation, conservation or preservation [sotèria: Auf-
hebung].^22 What happens to me and alters me in a pathetic experience
- PSL, 106 ; GA 64 [1924], 81. Cf. also SZ [1927], 370.
- Cf. GA 18 [SS 1924], 262; GA 18 [SS 1924], 196: “Something happens with
me in a manner that this experience or suffering [Erleiden] has the character of the
sozein. Through the fact that something comes to my encounter, that something
happens, I am not annihilated, but it is only then that I reach myself the authentic
state [eigentlicher Zustand], i.e. the possibility which was in me becomes now au-
thentically real. Under the expression ‘sublation’ [‘Aufhebung’], Hegel took the
phenomenon of sozein in Aristotle”; Aristotle, De an., II, 5, 417 b 2–4 (trans. W.S.
Hett): “Even the term ‘being acted upon’ is not used in a single sense, but some-
times it means a form of destruction of something by its contrary, and sometimes
rather a preservation of that which is potential by something actual which is like
it, in accordance with the relation of potentiality to actuality”; b 10–20: “That
which produces development from potential to actual in the matter of under-
standing and thought ought not to be called teaching, but needs some other name;
and that which, starting with a potentiality for knowledge, learns and acquires