"The intolerability of the thought that man is preserved in being"

"There was . . . no place in the thought of antiquity for a [(for the post-Scholastic, modern)] concept of self preservation [(Selbsterhaltung)]....
     "The Middle Ages left behind a question of which antiquity was unaware.  The Middle Ages put the question—in all truth brought it forth—because it believed that it had the answer to it.  The answer created the need for the problem.  The answer was the extravagant claim of a constant, inward, and most radical dependence of the world on God [(einer ständigen, innigsten, radikalsten Abhängigkiet der Welt von Gott)].  He is not only its once and for all creator, its regent and administrator.  He must also be its 'preserver [(Erhalter)]' in the strictest sense.  The concepts of continual creation and divine concursion [(der creatio continua und des concursus divinus)], peculiar to the Middle Ages, arose from a consistent conformity to this answer.  In the face of the entire stock of ideas which it had received from ancient metaphysics, the Middle Ages forced itself to conceive of nothing, or the void (nihil), almost as the normal metaphysical state of affairs and to think of the creation from nothing [(die creatio ex nihilo)] as a miracle [(Wunder)] constantly effected against this normality.  This [post medieval, modern] return from the abyss of contingency could not bring about a restoration of ancient indubitability.  The new answer to the question (which itself had since been radicalized) had to be even more radical in the sense of assuring its rationality.  The material which the reception of Stoicism offered did not meet this need."

     Hans Blumenberg, "Self-preservation and inertia:  on the constitution of modern rationality," Contemporary German philosophy 3 (1983):  218 (209-256), a translation of "Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung:  zur Konstitution der neuzeitlichen Rationalität," in Subjektivität und Selbsterhaltung, ed. Hans Ebeling (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 1976), 145-207, in which this occurs on pp. 156-157.  The heading comes from p. 216/153 ("Die Unerträglichkeit des Gedankens, der Mensch werde im Dasein erhalten").