Thinking finitude as abandonment: Heidegger's death of God

In Heidegger's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology, finitude, not the infinite, is shown to be the site of 'divine' awareness of being. Heidegger uses the term 'abandonment' (Verlassenheit) to summarise the finitude that Hegel overlooked - abandonment being a theme that Heidegger had first developed in Sein und Zeit as & Uuml;berlassenheit or 'delivered over'. However, while abandonment counters the Hegelian absolute, where nothing is ever left out, it does not escape it, since the distress of finitude then becomes what is essential or timeless. This realisation comes to Heidegger later, during his lectures on Nietzsche, where the notion of the abandonment of beings by Being (Seinsverlassenheit) conveys that, from the standpoint of Being, finitude is what is positively given in time rather than an essence that is recovered with the demise of the infinite. The 'death of God', in other words, thought from the side of Being rather than beings, is what first lets finitude be. Finally, I suggest that Nietzsche's Zarathustra, which also exhibits affirmative rather than resentful atheism, develops the theme of abandonment in a very different register from Heidegger - as the end of every telos or work. Heidegger's thought of abandonment, by contrast, remains tied to a task.