The Gnostic Sophia’s Reflection in Heidegger’s Authentic Dasein

From the moment a human being is born, they are accompanied by their thrownness into this world together with Dasein. Heideggerian Dasein constantly operates at the foundation of human existence, and the individual must, through cultivating it, free themselves from the decree of thrownness in order to reach authentic Dasein. This involuntary, non-elective compulsion of human beings in the existing world carries a quasi-gnostic content. Heidegger’s mode of thought is rooted in the authentic experience of life and in apprehending Dasein from the standpoint of existence-an understanding accessible in the phenomenology of Being and Nothingness. Heidegger’s aim is to reestablish a renewed union between us and the deeper meaning of the world, and perhaps this is one reason for his attention to the East. Accordingly, Metaphysics ought to acknowledge that even within our finite world, meaning cannot be reduced to the scientific and the objective, because such reduction sterilizes the reality of the self. Heidegger’s aesthetic sense lies within the essence of truth and, more broadly, in the fundamental question of being and existence. If being exists, it is apparent that it possesses absolute transcendence. Reflecting on the philosophical question of how one can properly affirm transcendence while at the same time permitting the self to partake in what transcendence brings about is an approach which - by examining Heideggerian Dasein and the Gnostic Sophia within it - makes an encounter with the witness of truth possible. The common ground between the school of Gnosticism and existentialism is also examined.