Defining the Problem

Any purely phenomenological description of the human being as in some sense “finite” must avail itself of a concept of finitude that does not rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the concept of God. Theologically motivated descriptions, however, face no such dilemma; they can and, indeed, must avail themselves of some concept of the human creature as a finite being created in God's image (Gen 1:27 KJV). For there to be a meaningful difference between these two descriptions, the concept of finitude common to both must have a different sense in each. These are some of the methodological requirements Heidegger lays down in Sein und Zeit §10: “The Delimitation [Abgrenzung] of Phenomenology from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology.”Footnote ¹ Heidegger's strategy for distinguishing the analytic of Dasein, in which the concept of finitude (Endlichkeit) plays a foundational role, from what he refers to as “the anthropology of Christianity”Footnote ² consists in distinguishing between two concepts of finitude: (1) finitude as lack or imperfection, defined as ens finitum relative to God as ens infinitum, and (2) an original concept of finitude, which, not being defined relative to God, is purely phenomenological and constitutes the horizon of any and all understanding of Being.

My principal argument will be that Heidegger's strategy, for better or worse, fails: whatever the difference between them, both of these concepts of finitude have to be defined relative to God, and so the distinction between the ens finitum of Christian anthropology and what many of Heidegger's commentators refer to as “original finitude” is not a rigorous one.Footnote ³ I will base my argument on the premise that finitude, preliminarily defined as a mode in which the self relates to its powers, cannot be disclosed independently of some relation to other powers and, paradigmatically, God. In short, the conditions under which I can encounter myself as a finite being are common to both Christian anthropology and the analytic of Dasein in Sein und Zeit. If so, then phenomenology and theology, whose relation to one another has since the early 1990s been a matter of intense controversy in both France and the United States, are––when it comes to the quaestio de homine––subject to the same conditions, whatever their positive doctrinal differences.Footnote ⁴

For the remainder of Section I, I will lay out the problem with which I intend to deal, focusing specifically on how Heidegger's appropriation of Husserl's phenomenological method determines the relation between finitude, phenomenology, and theology in Sein und Zeit and related texts. In Section II, I will explain what Heidegger finds so problematic about the theological definition of the human being as an ens finitum. In Section III, I will explain why Heidegger is constrained by the theoretical burdens of the Seinsfrage to embrace the concept of finitude in Sein und Zeit. Finally, in Sections IV–V, I will raise some questions about whether Heidegger can successfully establish a rigorous distinction between phenomenological and theological concepts of human finitude and, therefore, whether he can successfully establish a rigorous distinction between the analytic of Dasein and the Christian anthropology he refers to in Sein und Zeit §10.

Long before becoming a member of the phenomenological idiom, finitude was a theological concept the origins of which can be traced to Gregory of Nyssa, if not before.Footnote ⁵ Later, it became a concept of metaphysics, canonized by Duns Scotus and taken up, in different ways, by Suárez and Descartes, only to be transformed by Kant, whose concept of finitude Heidegger is known to have taken up and modified.Footnote ⁶ In purely chronological terms, finitude did not officially become a phenomenological concept until April 1927, the year Heidegger published Sein und Zeit. Heidegger was well aware of the layered history of the concept of finitude and the problems it potentially creates for any purely phenomenological description of the human being based on the concept of finitude. Indeed, in Sein und Zeit §10, Heidegger defines “traditional anthropology” in terms of its Greek and Christian ancestry,Footnote ⁷ and he does so partly in order to mark it off from the purely phenomenological description of Dasein’s finitude he hopes to offer in Division II of Sein und Zeit. He writes:

There are two important elements in this traditional anthropology:

1. 1. “Man” is here defined as a ζ ον λόγον ἔχον, and this is Interpreted to mean an animal rationale, something living which has reason. But the kind of Being which belongs to a ζ ον is understood in the sense of occurring and Being-present-at-hand. The λόγος is some superior endowment; the kind of Being which belongs to it, however, remains quite as obscure as that of the entire entity thus compounded.

2. 2. The second clue for determining the nature of man's Being and essence is a theological one καὶ ε πεν ὁ Θεός. ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ’ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν––“faciamus hominem ad imaginem nostram et similitudinem.” With this as its point of departure, the anthropology of Christian theology, taking with it the ancient definition, arrives at an interpretation of that entity which we call “man.” But just as the Being of God gets Interpreted ontologically by means of the ancient ontology, so does the Being of the ens finitum, and to an even greater extent.Footnote ⁸

For Heidegger, the problem with traditional anthropology consists, not in the fact that it interprets the human being as an ens finitum, but rather in the fact that it offers an inadequate interpretation of the ens finitum, one that remains controlled by “ancient [Aristotelian] ontology,” an ontology of what Heidegger terms the “present-at-hand” (das Vorhandenes, Vorhandenheit), for which the only available sense of ens finitum is that of being created or caused by another, superior being: God.Footnote ⁹ For Heidegger, Christian anthropology errs in offering an inadequate interpretation of the ens finitum, one that Sein und Zeit will have to rectify, not simply abandon. This means that there is a minimally common thread, however loose, running through both Christian anthropology and the analytic of Dasein. The analytic of Dasein is in some sense continuous with Christian anthropology, and Heidegger's decision to employ the concept of finitude in Sein und Zeit places some degree of pressure, however small or large, on his distinction between the analytic of Dasein and Christian anthropology, for he clearly sees the ens finitum both as an indispensable resource for the analytic of Dasein and as a potentially destabilizing presence he will have to methodologically control. Heidegger's burden of proof is clear: for the remainder of Sein und Zeit to be read in light of the methodological imperatives he lays down in §10, he will have to distinguish the existential sense of finitude from its theological sense. In short, he will have to offer a description of Dasein’s relation to its powers that both deploys the concept of finitude and methodologically reduces any reference to a transcendence in relation to which such finitude may be disclosed.

From a methodological point of view, Dasein, as described in the existential analytic, has not heard tell of any historical event of revelation, and for §10 to successfully guide the interpretation of the existential analytic, the contents of such revelation can in no way determine Heidegger's description of Dasein’s mode of self-relation. As John Caputo has succinctly put the matter:

Thus, just as Husserl, in Ideas I §56, has to determine which sciences fall under the blow of the phenomenological reduction, arguing that “from the standpoint of the phenomenological science we propose to establish, that signifies <considering> . . . which sciences it might draw from without violating its pure sense, which <sciences> it might and might not use as given beforehand, which, hence, need ‘parenthesizing,’”Footnote ¹¹ so too Heidegger in Sein und Zeit §10 has to decide whether theology, as one of the historically received sciences in terms of which Dasein has interpreted its being, would, if admitted, violate the pure sense of phenomenological, fundamental ontology. Bluntly put, his answer is “Yes, it would.” What Caputo refers to here as the “methodological atheism” and “neutrality” of Sein und Zeit is but the consequence of Heidegger's phenomenological reduction of the theological, natural, and human sciences in §10 of that treatise. Even though Heidegger does not employ Husserl's technical terminology in Sein und Zeit §10, he will do so immediately afterwards in Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie §5 as a form of retrospective self-clarification.

Heidegger delivered Grundprobleme as a lecture course at the University of Marburg in the summer of 1927, not long after the publication of Sein und Zeit. In Grundprobleme, he explicitly established what would henceforth be an unbreakable bond between the phenomenological reduction, the suspension of the positive sciences, and the concept of finitude. In §5, he redefines the phenomenological reduction, not à la Husserl as “the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude . . . to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness,” but rather as the method of “leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being . . . to the understanding of the Being of this being.”Footnote ¹² He then adds that “ontology has nothing in common with any method of the other sciences, all of which as positive sciences deal with beings.”Footnote ¹³ Despite otherwise radical differences between Husserl and Heidegger vis-à-vis the definition of phenomenology and its tasks, Heidegger accepts the Husserlian decision according to which the positive sciences must fall under the blow of the reduction for a pure phenomenology to be possible. This includes theology, which, according to Heidegger's famous lecture, “Phänomenologie und Theologie” (also delivered in 1927), is the positive science of faith in God.Footnote ¹⁴

But in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger faces a problem Husserl did not. For Husserl, the phenomenological reduction excludes the ens finitum as a way of characterizing the being of transcendental consciousness,Footnote ¹⁵ whereas, for Heidegger, the phenomenological reduction seeks to preserve a sense in which Dasein is an ens finitum. Here again, the question is whether Heidegger can employ this concept without violating his own methodological requirements in Sein und Zeit §10. This amounts to asking whether he can offer a description of Dasein’s relation to its powers that is in no way founded on Dasein's relation to something wholly other than itself or, more prosaically, to God. Must Heidegger's Dasein, like Descartes's ego in Meditationes III, discover its finitude only in a phenomenologically irreducible relation to the idea of God? And, if so, is this relation sufficiently thoroughgoing to make a hard and fast distinction between phenomenology and theology less and less obvious when it comes to the quaestio de homine?

The Traditional Concept of Ens Finitum

What does Heidegger find so inadequate about the Christian or, more broadly, theological interpretation of the human being as an ens finitum? The short answer is that this interpretation fails to identify the sui generis mode of being of the ens in question, first of all because, following in the footsteps of ancient ontology, it uncritically interprets Dasein according to the category of substance. This becomes particularly evident in early modern metaphysics. Thus, in Sein und Zeit §20, “The Fundaments of the Ontological Interpretation of the ‘World,’” Heidegger, in order to delimit the existential analytic from the modern inheritance of traditional anthropology, reproduces Descartes's definition of substance in Principia Philosophiae I. 51: “By substance we can understand nothing other than a being which is in such a way that it needs no other being in order to be [Per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae ita existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum].”Footnote ¹⁶ He then offers the following brief commentary on Descartes's definition:

In Grundprobleme §14c, Heidegger writes: “The ancient interpretive horizon for beings–reference to production–sets the standard for the interpretation of the person, the finite mental substance.”Footnote ¹⁸

The theological concept of the human being as an ens finitum is parasitic upon that of the ens creatum, which expresses the fact of being produced or caused by another, more powerful entity: God. Negatively stated, the finitude of the human being is interpreted here in terms of its lacking the power to have caused or produced itself, i.e., in terms of its not being a causa sui. In short, the finitude of Dasein is interpreted in terms of the causal power it lacks, but another entity––God––possesses. Human being is interpreted in terms of an ontic difference between two beings, not according to the ontico-ontological difference between a being and its mode or way of Being, to which the reduction in its Heideggerean form leads, guided by the ontological difference between Being and beings.Footnote ¹⁹ In sum, such a characterization gets no further than an ontic consideration of the causal relation obtaining between two beings: Dasein is interpreted in light of (1) a common concept of substance and, in the hermeneutic horizon opened up by such a concept, (2) another being, whose causal efficiency satisfies the criteria of substance absolutely: God, in relation to whom Dasein is only a substance in a relative and derivative sense. Thus, God, himself “ontologically interpreted by means of ancient ontology,” is, as Heidegger puts it in Grundprobleme §14c, “the ontological model, in conformity with which the idea of original being is conceived and the determinations of all derivative beings are normalized.”Footnote ²⁰

As a basis from which to interpret the mode of being proper to Dasein, such a concept of the ens finitum is ontologically inappropriate. Having suspended theology as an ontic, positive science, the existential analytic describes Dasein, not as a substance whose finitude consists in its being efficiently caused by another entity, but rather as a being who exists in relation to the various possibilities of its existence (Seinkönnen) and whose description proceeds according to categories specifically designed for securing a genuinely ontological characterization of Dasein: viz., the existentials (e.g., being-in-the-world, being-with, falling, conscience). This requires interpreting the ens finitum, not according to the categories of the ancient ontology of Vorhandenheit, nor yet according to the subsequent modification of these categories by Christian anthropology, but rather according to the sui generis mode in which Dasein exists, beginning with its average everydayness, the foundation of which is, ultimately, finite temporality.

From Ens Finitum to Endlichkeit

As I argued in Section I, Heidegger is attempting not to negate Christian anthropology in Sein und Zeit, but rather to clarify the ontological sense of the ens finitum inadequately interpreted by Christian anthropology. The concept of the ens finitum belongs to Dasein as one of the ways in which it has historically, if inadequately, interpreted its being in light of both ancient ontology and the Old and New Testaments. Furthermore, and more importantly, the existential analytic cannot dispense with the ens finitum, above all because, without some such concept, it would lose the one horizon in terms of which the question of the meaning of Being can be raised: viz., originary temporality, which is finite (endlich).

For Heidegger, the Aristotelian interpretation of time as an infinite sequence of discrete nows furnishes no such horizon. When Aristotle, in Physics IV §10, raises the question “What is time?” and specifies that he is asking whether time “belong[s] among beings or nonbeings?,”Footnote ²¹ he offers a response to this question based on a concept of being that is itself already determined by one of the dimensions of time: the present, the now, which alone truly “is.” The circularity of such an endeavor is manifest. Aristotle––who, according to Heidegger, sets the stage for the history of the concept of time that Hegel, Bergson, and Husserl merely modifyFootnote ²² ––asks about the Being of time in terms of one of its dimensions: the now. The now, moreover, pertains only to what is intratemporal, to entities, beings that are now present in time. Aristotle is ultimately asking whether time is or is not something present in time. By interpreting time according to the model furnished by the present (Gegenwart), Aristotle fails to secure the phenomenon of temporality as the transcendental horizon for any and all understanding of Being. Time loses its ontological significance by becoming the object of a question about whether it is ontically a present being. Thus, in Being and Time §6, Heidegger writes:

If time is the horizon of the meaning of Being (i.e., that on the basis of which Being is always already understood) and if Being is not itself a being, then time can no longer be interpreted as something intratemporal, since intratemporality pertains to entities, to beings, and not to Being, which, precisely, is not a being in time. The Seinsfrage requires a transformation of the historically received, Aristotelian concept of time as an infinite sequence of nows. Thus, Heidegger is led to the finitude of Dasein, not because of Dasein, but rather because (1) he needs an original interpretation of the phenomenon of time, and (2) with the exception perhaps of Augustine, the interpretation of time after Aristotle yields only variations on the Aristotelian interpretation of time as an infinite sequence of nows. In short, the inadequacy of such an infinitist concept of time vis-à-vis the Seinsfrage is what ultimately leads Heidegger to introduce the concept of finitude into the heart of phenomenology. Only under the pressure imposed by these theoretical constraints does the phenomenon of Dasein’s finitude become phenomenologically or ontologically relevant. This, moreover, explains why Heidegger is constrained to transform Christian anthropology: he needs an original concept of time, not as an infinite sequence of nows, but rather as the horizon of Dasein’s understanding of Being.Footnote ²⁴ He wagers that the concept of time is possible as such a horizon only as finite temporality, by way of the finitude of Dasein.

Because the meaning of Being is given to Dasein in its understanding of Being, the appropriate concept of time can only be secured by describing Dasein’s relation to time. As Heidegger puts it:

The originary temporality Heidegger describes in Sein und Zeit can be summarized very briefly.Footnote ²⁶ For Heidegger, Dasein always comes toward itself, i.e., relates to both its past and its present from a future possibility of its existence into which it has always already projected itself. Heidegger's analysis of equipmentality may help clarify the sense in which this is so. For Heidegger, Dasein’s use of equipment is an index of the temporality constitutive of its Being-in-the-world. Equipment has the mode of being of the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), as distinguished from the present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). Put very simply, equipment is not merely “there” as an “occurrent thing” for a disinterested “observer,” but is, ultimately, always in relation to some possibility or other of Dasein’s existence. As Heidegger puts it in a beautiful passage: “That which is dealt with, if rightly understood, sheds light upon the concernful dealings themselves.”Footnote ²⁷ Equipment is not disclosed to Dasein in the mode of a “bare perceptual cognition,”Footnote ²⁸ but rather in the mode of an “in-order-to” of prospective accomplishment. I use a hammer in order to build a house, and so the house is the “towards-which” of the use of the hammer. I build a house for the sake of sheltering myself from the elements, etc. There is a referential system of assignments involved here. Equipment is disclosed only within a totality of such assignments, never in isolation. As Heidegger puts it:

This passage makes clear that that towards which equipment is used does not refer exclusively to an order of production of other ready-to-hand things, but, ultimately, to a being that does not have the character of the ready-to-hand, but rather that of Being-in-the world: Dasein and its possibilities (here, being-sheltered). It is Dasein to whom this system of assignments ultimately refers as terminus ad quem: “This primary ‘towards-which’ is not just another ‘towards-this’ as something in which an involvement is possible. The primary ‘towards-which’ is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which.’ But the ‘for-the-sake-of’ always pertains to the Being of Dasein.”Footnote ³⁰ The ordinary, “vulgar” concept of time as a free-floating infinite sequence of nows results, according to Heidegger, when abstraction is made from Dasein’s Being-in- the-world, or “world-time” (Weltzeit). Heidegger writes: “We give time the name world-time because it has the character of significance, which is overlooked in the Aristotelian definition of time.”Footnote ³¹

For Heidegger, the “world-time” disclosed through a description of equipmentality is itself grounded in “original time” (ursprürungliche Zeit). The key point about original time is that, unlike both the Aristotelian definition of time as an infinite sequence of nows and the “world-time” of significance, it is finite and non-sequential. Heidegger characterizes original time in the following extremely dense passage:

Despite its difficulty, one thing is clear from this passage: for Heidegger, the existential concept of the future has priority over the other dimensions of time, all three of which are temporalized simultaneously, not sequentially. This is not the case for either the Aristotelian definition of time, which privileges the present, or the world-time of significance, which, despite its phenomenologically well-attested character, remains sequential. In his description of original time, Heidegger is not making a fanciful remark about time-travel. He is not saying that Dasein has first to go to the future in order to then come back to the present. Such an interpretation of original time falls back into the very temporal sequentialism from which Heidegger is trying to distance himself here. His point is simply that Dasein exists “futurally” [zukünftig] in its present. “By the term ‘futural,’ we do not here have in view a ‘now’ which has not yet become ‘actual’ and which sometime will be for the first time. We have in view the coming in which Dasein . . . comes towards itself.”Footnote ³³

In short, Dasein always “comes toward itself,” i.e., relates to both its past and its present from a future possibility of its existence into which it has always already projected itself. The totality of its having-been is taken up in a present in which Dasein comes towards itself from out of the future. This is significant because the outermost limit of Dasein’s future thus conceived is––death, and, from a properly Heideggerean point of view, death is not merely an event or occurrence that will take place at some point in the future, but rather the final possibility of Dasein, that to which all of its possibilities as such refer, and one that retrospectively, as it were, affects or determines its relation to any given possibility, however dimly. Time is, therefore, originally finite, has its origin in Dasein, and determines Dasein’s Being-in-the-world in its totality.

In sum, the phenomenological reduction, as defined in Grundprobleme §5, leads from the apprehension of a being to the understanding of the Being of this being. In both Division II of Sein und Zeit and Part Two of Grundprobleme, Heidegger argues that Dasein’s understanding of Being can lead to the meaning of Being only by way of time and, more specifically, by way of Dasein’s relation to its outermost temporal limit: viz., death, toward which Dasein exists––authentically or not––in each of its inherited possibilities. The phenomenological reduction can only reach its destination––the meaning of Being––by way of the analytic and, therefore, finitude of Dasein. Contra Aristotle, temporality is not determined as a being, but rather as that on the basis of which all beings are disclosed to Dasein. Temporality can exercise a genuinely transcendental function as the basis of Dasein’s understanding of Being only as original finitude. Heidegger transforms the Christian anthropology of the ens finitum in order to derive the concept of time he needs for the Seinsfrage. The question that remains to be answered is whether Heidegger effects this transformation without surreptitiously relying on the categories of Christian anthropology and the idea of God.

From Endlichkeit to Ens Finitum

The analysis of Dasein’s understanding of Being undertaken in Division I of Sein und Zeit leads to the conclusion that “everydayness reveals itself as a mode of temporality,”Footnote ³⁴ and the analysis of temporality reveals itself as original finitude through the phenomenon of mortality. The phenomenon of mortality, however, is but one axis of the concept of finitude in Sein und Zeit, and Heidegger privileges mortality, not because it exhausts the phenomenological content of finitude, but rather because of its significance vis-à-vis the Seinsfrage, as I argued in Section III, above. In its broader extension, Heidegger's concept of finitude embraces, not one, but the two outermost limits of Dasein’s existence in Sein und Zeit: (1) birth, by which Heidegger means, not merely the event of having been born, but the thrown inheritance of possibilities Dasein did not and could not have given to itself, possibilities which determine its existence,Footnote ³⁵ and (2) death, by which Heidegger means, not merely an event to come, but rather the outermost limit of Dasein’s possibilities, from out of which it relates to each, authentically or not. Does this existential concept of finitude (Endlichkeit) preserve a necessary, irreducible relation to the Christian anthropology of the ens finitum from which Heidegger distinguishes the existential analytic in Sein und Zeit §10? To answer this question, I need to further unpack the concept of finitude in Sein und Zeit.

Heidegger defines Dasein’s mode of temporalizing as the way in which it relates to the possibilities that have been handed down to it, possibilities which it has neither chosen nor created, but rather into which it has been thrown and which it must project from the future, be it in the inauthentic mode prescribed for it by das Man or in the resolute mode of authentic decision. Death presents Dasein with the possibility of an authentic projection and, therefore, appropriation of the thrown possibilities that form the basis of its existence, and it does so by individuating Dasein, forcing it to face and take up these possibilities as its own. In short, death presents Dasein with the opportunity to modify and, therefore, convert inauthentic thrownness into authentic thrownness. Finite temporality is a function of the relation between Dasein’s thrown possibilities and its death. Dasein’s original future is disclosed through the phenomenon of mortality, and its original past is disclosed through the phenomenon of birth and thrownness.

Thrownness and mortality present Dasein with the most radical experience of its powerlessness. For Heidegger, these forms of powerlessness do not signify that Dasein is imperfect or lacking in something, for two closely related reasons. First, the concepts of lack and imperfection are indissociable from the Greek ontology of the present-at-hand and its subsequent appropriation by the Christian anthropology of the ens finitum. For something to be lacking means simply that it is not there, or that it is missing, relative to what it ought to be: “A lack, as the not-Being-present-at-hand of something which ought to be, is a definite sort of being which goes with the present-at-hand.”Footnote ³⁶ A book lacks a cover, but ought, as a book, to have one. Similarly, in Christian anthropology, the human being is imperfect because it falls short of an ideal or requirement that has been set over against it, a requirement that may be satisfied in the hereafter, if not in the here and now. For Heidegger, Dasein does not exist relative to a requirement or possibility that it not be thrown or mortal: “The idea of the ‘not’ . . . understood existentially, excludes relatedness to anything . . . which may have been required.”Footnote ³⁷ The fact that Dasein suffers thrownness and mortality does not mean that it lacks a perfection, but rather that it can never gain power over the thrown, mortal condition it must live.

Second, for Heidegger, a lack or imperfection can do no positive ontological work. Thrownness and mortality, however, do positive ontological work, since they constitute the being of Dasein: “‘[W]hat one has in view here is rather a ‘not’ which is constitutive for this Being of Dasein––its thrownness.”Footnote ³⁸ Ultimately, thrownness and mortality constitute the phenomenon of original temporality, which the existential analytic discloses as the transcendental horizon of Dasein’s understanding of Being. No mere lack or imperfection can do that. For Heidegger, lack and imperfection exercise no transcendental function, and so cannot furnish a horizon from which to raise the Seinsfrage.

Nevertheless, the question remains: does Heidegger's description of Dasein’s existential finitude successfully reduce any and all reference to the concept of lack and the idea of God? This is not so clear. In Sein und Zeit §58, Heidegger devotes a number of paragraphs to the existential meaning of the “not” and the “never” by which he describes Dasein’s thrownness. He writes:

What is the sense of the “never” and the “not” in these passages, and how do they affect the sense of the propositions they modify, propositions that are supposed to have a purely ontological, existential sense? What, for example, does it mean to say that Dasein can “never gain power over” the ground of its existence, in the sense that it can never gain power over its thrownness? Before resolutely taking over its possibilities as its own, these possibilities must have been handed down to Dasein. Never being able to gain power over thrownness means never being able to deal one's own existential hand or even choose one's own deck, so to speak. Thrownness means being the passive recipient of possibilities one did not create or cause for oneself. The “inability” of Dasein emerges here only against the backdrop of a creative, causal power it lacks and a powerlessness it must existentially assume in the face of mortality. The sense of lack, although transcendentally modified, is not entirely reduced.

Correlatively, the causal power Dasein lacks is but one side of a coin, the other side of which is the causal power another being possesses. The fact that Dasein can never gain power over its thrownness can only function as a testament to its finitude under the condition that it be disclosed in relation to a being who, unlike Dasein, does indeed have causal power over its existence “from the ground up,” a being for whom thrownness simply has no sense. For the proposition “Dasein can never gain power over its ownmost being from the ground up” to function phenomenologically, two prior operations are required. First, this phenomenological description of Dasein must be affected by the idea of a being that does have such a power. Otherwise, there will be no positive content to negate, no “being able to gain power over thrownness” that Dasein can never have. Second, it requires describing Dasein in relation to that power, for only then can it be asserted of Dasein that it can never gain power over its thrownness. The creative, causal power of another being forms the basis of Dasein’s relation to its own powers as “finite.” The Greco–Christian categories of causality and creation remain effective here and determine the intelligibility of the phenomenon of finitude in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger does not successfully dissociate the ens finitum from the ens creatum. The former continues to affect the latter, for even when God does not explicitly appear in any of Heidegger's descriptions, his infinite power nevertheless constitutes their horizon.

But is such a conclusion, together with the argument from which it has been inferred, properly phenomenological? This question––entirely legitimate––needs to be addressed here, if only because Heidegger himself addressed it in his famous debate with Ernst Cassirer in Davos in Spring 1929.Footnote ⁴⁰ The question hinges on whether arguments such as the one I have been pursuing are premised on the necessity of a merely formal conceptual opposition between finitude and infinitude, or whether it actually belongs to the phenomenological content of the way in which Dasein relates to its powers. As Heidegger put it in his dispute with Cassirer:

For my argument to have a properly phenomenological significance, it cannot be premised on the relation between two concepts, but only on the phenomenological content of the relation Dasein has to its powers. In other words, if the experience of finitude Heidegger describes in Sein und Zeit presupposes a horizon constituted by the idea of God, it must be shown that it presupposes such a horizon, not as one concept presupposes another, but rather as that in light of which Dasein’s existential sense of inability is phenomenologically disclosed. Is this the case?

One cannot begin here by accepting as self-evident the proposition that Dasein relates to its powers prior to and independently of its relation to other powers or forms of power. This proposition is phenomenologically suspect. Powerlessness, of which finitude is only one name, is not possible as an experience without some relation, however subterranean, to an other whose powers exceed my own. Every experience of finitude, up to and including Dasein’s experience of finitude, is constituted in relation to an other. There is no inability—ontic or ontological—that does not refer to an ability in an other. The inability to speak or walk or see can only be disclosed in relation to the ability of others to speak or walk or see, for only then do they have an ability that I do not. If nobody could see, there would be no such thing as blindness. Powerlessness is not an experience I can have independently of my relation to others. Thrownness, as ontological powerlessness, means, among other things, being the recipient of possibilities I did not create, but which I can receive and must project or take over as my own, authentically or not. It means not being able to be or exist as myself prior to or independently of these possibilities. Here, my sense of what it would be to exist prior to or independently of these possibilities can only emerge in relation to a power wholly unaffected by passivity, possibility, and the necessity of thrown projection. Unlike, say, the inability to walk, thrownness, as ontological powerlessness, cannot be disclosed in relation to another Dasein, for each and every possible Dasein is determined by thrownness. The other in relation to whom thrownness first becomes phenomenologically accessible to me as an index of finitude must, therefore, transcend in power each and every Dasein. Only in relation to such a power can I relate to my own existence as thrown, can thrownness function as an ontological category, or existential, describing the finitude of Dasein. If Dasein is thrown into a world in which it must find itself, then what it cannot do—viz., step behind or master its thrownness—will always bear the trace of some figure of the absolute. My powerlessness is always disclosed to me on the basis of my relation to an other: “If power is at the same time impotence, it is by reference to power that this impotence is described.”Footnote ⁴² Phenomenologically, powerlessness is a relation. There has to be more than one. This directly contradicts Heidegger's definition of Dasein’s finitude as “that possibility which is one's ownmost, which is non-relational [unbezügliche].”Footnote ⁴³ Far from being non-relational, it is precisely because the outermost limits of Dasein’s powerlessness cannot be disclosed relative to another Dasein that it can only be disclosed relative to a being or power on the other side of these limits, a being for whom thrownness simply has no sense: God.Footnote ⁴⁴ Dasein relates to its finitude from what Lévinas refers to in Totalité et infini as “a point of view exterior to itself from which it can apprehend itself.”Footnote ⁴⁵ If so, then the consequence is clear: the existential analytic presupposes the idea of God as infinite power, and this idea functions as the transcendental horizon from which to identify and describe the finitude of Dasein. As Descartes famously put the matter: “The perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite; that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Without such a horizon, there is no longer a clear sense in which Dasein can be said to be finite at all. Dasein relates to its finitude from a place it cannot occupy and only relates to itself as finite after, not before, it has come back to itself from that place.

Despite Heidegger's best efforts, the “not” that “belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness”Footnote ⁴⁷ is both ontical and ontological, referring both to a causal power that Dasein lacks relative to the idea of God and to the original past Dasein must project from out of its mortal future. And yet, according to Heidegger, the categories of causality and creation belong to the ontology of Vorhandenheit, an ontology that does not recognize the need for a separate set of categories—the existentials—by which to describe Dasein’s sui generis mode of being. If, as I have been arguing, the categories of causality and creation do indeed remain effective in Heidegger's description of the finitude of Dasein in Sein und Zeit, then the distinction between the ontology of Vorhandenheit (common to both ancient ontology and Christian anthropology) and fundamental ontology becomes increasingly difficult to determine, and the possibility of a purely ontological description of Dasein free from the trace of theology becomes increasingly difficult to secure.