Abstract
Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit presents one of the most striking reflexions on human facticity, i.e. the fact that Dasein fundamentally exists in a world letting Dasein and world be co-extensive. By quoting two central personages in theology, Pascal and Augustine, Heidegger refers to a concept of love that is constitutive for Dasein’s facticity to truth and to knowledge. By investigating the claim that love is as good as absent from Sein und Zeit, the article intends to show that the scanty references to love nevertheless have a central role in Heidegger’s early work and, furthermore, why Heidegger returns to it in his later thinking. Interesting in this regard is the connection between the theological concept of love and Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’. The article places Heidegger’s Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition in the realms of his Dasein analysis focussing on facticity. Taking its methodological cues from Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, the article shows how the concepts of possibility and impotentiality (Ohnmacht) become essential in Heidegger via his reference to love. Lastly, the article examines to what extent Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit paraphrases the old angelology letting the Dasein concept become its secularisation.
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Notes
The Geschlecht series includes ‘Différence sexuelle, différence ontologique’ (Geschlecht i) and ‘La main de Heidegger’ (Geschlecht ii) in Derrida (1987) and ‘L’Oreille de Heidegger’ (Geschlecht iv) in Derrida (1994). Geschlecht iii, devoted to Heidegger’s reading of Trakl’s poetry, has still not been published and only exists as a manuscript handed out to speakers at a Derrida seminar in Chicago in March 1985 (cf. Krell 2006). In the following, references are made to Martin Heidegger (1927) Sein und Zeit in GA2, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1977; translations of Sein und Zeit follow Macquarrie & Robinson’s translation Being and Time (1962), Harper & Row, New York 2008; if I have adjusted the translation, this is marked by a * in the reference. All references are made based solely on the original, not the translated text. All other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. In citations brackets, […], mark my insertions throughout the article.
Important in this regard is that charitatem comes from caritas and not, as Macquarrie & Robinson translate the citation in Being and Time, from charis, meaning grace.
I am here following a hermeneutical idea presented by Gianni Vattimo (Vattimo 2000). As Vattimo’s title suggests, Nietzsche is the interpretational key to Heidegger and not, as in the traditional and historical conception, the other way around. Thought and history, as suggested by Vattimo in this text, are not chronologically coherent. Regarding citation as a philosophical theme, cf: Leitmotiv. Motivi di estetica e di filosofia della arte, no. 2, 2002 (cf. especially: Baroncini 2002).
This citation points in the direction of Heidegger’s central term Sorge (cf. e.g. Heidegger 1927: especially §41, pp. 254-261) which, just as Augustine’s conception of love, could also be formulated as a love to the world and, thus, tie in nicely with the current article’s general scope. However, to follow such a line of inquiry – which is certainly valid – would mean to break with the current article’s philological point of departure in the two citations from Pascal and Augustine respectively, which explicitly make reference to love.
That the concept of world is what is at stake in these lines in Augustine containing, furthermore, a parallel to Heidegger is a view also shared by Arendt. She refers to Heidegger’s 1929 book, Vom Wesen des Grundes, where Augustine’s mundus means: ‘das Seiende im Ganzen und zwar als das entscheidende Wie, gemäß dem sich menschliches Dasein zum Seienden stellt und hält’ (Heidegger 1929: p. 145. Cit. in: Arendt 1929: p. 42, n. 2.). In the terminology of Sein und Zeit, this would correspond to being-in-the-world.
The latest historically and philosophically oriented analysis of Christian angelology is found in: Coccia 2009.
For a treatment of this Aristotelian passage, cf. Agamben’s translation and his following analysis (Agamben 2005b: p. 281): ‘Every potentiality is impotentiality of the same and regarding the same (of which it is potentiality; tou autou kai kata to auto pasa dynamis adynamai)’.
For a further interpretation of this passage in the realms of political philosophy, cf: Agamben 1995: p. 69f.
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Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to Prof. Charles Lock and Ph.D. scholar Daniel Midena, both University of Copenhagen, whose comments have strengthened my manuscript very much. I also thank the reviewers of my article for a critique I have benefitted from greatly.
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Östman, L. Love and Grace in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit . SOPHIA 53, 535–551 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0389-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0389-6