Heidegger on Death

A Critical Theological Essay

George Pattison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317122760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This book examines the question of death in the light of Heidegger's paradigmatic discussion in Being and Time. Although Heidegger's own treatment deliberately refrains from engaging theological perspectives, George Pattison suggests that these not only serve to bring out problematic elements in his own approach but also point to the larger human or anthropological issues in play. Pattison reveals where and how Heidegger and theology part ways but also how Heidegger can helpfully challenge theology to rethink one of its own fundamental questions: human beings' relation to their death and the meaning of death in their religious lives.

Chapter 1
Running towards Death

Introduction

Many of Heidegger’s early readers interpreted his philosophy, especially as articulated in Being and Time, as a philosophy of death. As such it could be read (and perhaps dismissed) as a philosophical reaction to the trauma of mass death in the First World War.1 Culminating, it seemed, in the claim that authentic existence was to be found exclusively in a resolute anticipation of death and that human being – Dasein – was most profoundly a being towards death, Being and Time was certainly open to such readings. But whether they really or adequately reflect all that is going on in that work or even the most essential tendency of its thought is another matter. Indeed, as we have seen, it is open to question whether, when Heidegger writes of ‘death’ in that work, he actually or primarily means death in the everyday sense of the biological cessation of life. If it is a general rule in philosophy that one should always be prepared to take a second look at what seems most obvious, this is nowhere more true than with regard to Heidegger’s treatment of death.

This last comment calls for a general clarification regarding the aim of this essay, namely (and to repeat what was said in the Introduction), that it is not intended simply as a commentary on what Heidegger had to say about death and, as such, a contribution to the ever-expanding field of Heidegger studies. Although I shall seek to attend as closely as possible to what Heidegger is actually saying, the chief aim will be to address the question of death itself, whilst taking Heidegger as my main interlocutor, since (in my view) it is Heidegger who has offered the most intellectually consistent and rigorous account of death in modern philosophy. Reading Heidegger on death, then, requires us to get and to keep ‘the thing itself’ in view in good phenomenological manner. We are reading Heidegger here in order better to understand the meaning of death and not just as a formal philosophical exercise or a study in the history of human thinking about death. As this study develops, it will become clear that I regard Heidegger’s view of death as essentially flawed, but I understand it to be flawed precisely in terms of his own idea of truth as unconcealment or disclosure. That is to say, I regard it as failing to bring into view all that needs to be seen if we are to have an adequate understanding of death. A constant refrain of Being and Time is the claim that one or other approach to a question fails because it does not ‘penetrate’ the matter at issue to a sufficient depth and my contention here is that the same judgement can be applied to Heidegger’s own treatment of the question of death. But – and again in keeping with his own understanding of truth – this is not to say that Heidegger is simply ‘wrong’ or incorrect. On the contrary, if Heidegger does not see and consequently does not say all that belongs to the matter at issue, he sees sufficiently clearly and deeply to bring us to the point at which some of the key issues concerning death start to emerge. Few, if any, of the great thinkers of the past can lead us so convincingly to what is most decisive in this matter, not merely despite but perhaps also because of those points at which we cannot follow him. In this regard it is, as so often, obligatory to acknowledge that we can only see what we see because we are able to stand on giants’ shoulders.

But if we get to the point of seeing further than Heidegger, this is not just a matter of incremental growth. It is not as if Heidegger was the inventor of some new technology that we are now attempting to apply or adapt. Heidegger’s own approach to death stresses that how we understand death will depend on the attitude we take towards it, so that what we say about death is in complex and intimate ways interrelated with how we feel, think, and talk about ourselves, about how we are. This means that Heidegger’s own approach is inevitably connected with his own self-understanding, and one strand of my argument in this essay will be that his interpretation of death is strongly influenced in both positive and negative ways by his own ambivalent relation to the religious traditions on which he draws heavily but which he also systematically resists. As will become clear, this is much more complicated than a straightforward confrontation between a Heideggerian view that declares death to be the simple and final annihilation of self-conscious subjectivity and a religious view that promises some kind of post-mortem future. Heidegger is not ‘wrong’ from a religious point of view because he denies an afterlife2 (in fact, he claims, somewhat implausibly, that his analysis is without prejudice to such a question3) but rather because of how he portrays the defining characteristics of human Dasein in the here and now. Since what this means is the matter of this essay as a whole, I shall not now pursue this comment further and my point here is simply to make clear, from the beginning, that this is a reading that is both deeply and gratefully indebted to Heidegger and that, to a considerable extent, is reading with Heidegger but that, finally, breaks away from Heidegger to offer an alternative reading of the human condition, a reading that is both Christian and existential.

But before we go any further in considering the rights and wrongs and strengths and weaknesses of Heidegger’s account of death, it is perhaps necessary to have some idea as to what that account actually says. In the following chapters I shall take up a sequence of specific themes from the discussion of death in Being and Time and some later works, but I shall begin now by giving a preliminary summary of the relevant chapters of Being and Time itself. Inevitably, even the most pedestrian exposition will already involve significant interpretative moves, especially when what is to be presented is a philosophical argument of some subtlety and complexity. I certainly do not pretend that the précis that follows is entirely neutral. I am in particular aware that my decision to include the chapter on conscience and guilt in my exposition of the discussion of death will be resisted by some Heidegger scholars.4 Nevertheless, and even if my account might seem to invite the misreading that Being and Time simply is a ‘philosophy of death’, I shall attempt to set out Heidegger’s basic argument in as straightforward a way as I can. That we shall then need to qualify this account on a number of important points does not negate the value of establishing a maximally clear if also pedestrian base from which to begin. Indeed, such a procedure reflects something of Heidegger’s own ‘method’ in Being and Time and other writings, as, having set out a certain view of the matter at issue, he repeatedly stops to question the account he has given thus far, to identify its inadequacies, and then to move on to a new level of questioning that, sometimes, effectively undermines all that has gone before. With that procedure in mind, let us then attempt in as straightforward a way as possible to address the question as to how death finds its way into the argument of Being and Time.

Introducing Death

Heidegger introduces the theme of death in the opening section, ¶45, of Division II of Being and Time. But to understand why he does so we have first to see where his argument has at this point got to.

Being and Time begins with Heidegger stating the need to re-open the classical metaphysical question of being and to do so in a philosophical context in which even the meaning of the question has been forgotten and obscured. If we are to start again, he says, we can do so only at the point at which being is most directly and uncontroversially present to us, namely, in our selves, in our own capacity to raise the question as to the kind of beings that we are, the being that makes us the beings that we experience ourselves as being: the being that is ‘there’ – Dasein. Against what he sees as the characteristically post-Cartesian move of beginning with the knowing subject and then attempting to account for how such a subject can genuinely come to ‘know’ the world out there in reality, Heidegger offers a radical alternative based on his view of Dasein as being in the world. On this view, it is simply a myth to think that we begin with the consciousness of ourselves as knowing subjects. In fact, we never have any experience of ourselves that is not bound up with our experience of the world. Experiencing ourselves as eating, hammering, talking, observing beings, our sense of who we ourselves are is and can only be developed through a constant and uninterrupted traffic with our world – and, equally, we never have any experience of the world as a pure, detached ensemble of objects independent of our practical and noetic interest in it. Being-in-the-world is in this sense a structural given that precedes both subjectivity and objectivity, and it is only through interpreting this being-in-the-world that we can get to find out who we ourselves are and the kind of being that is proper to us (noting that, in Heidegger’s German, the word for ‘proper’, eigen, is essentially related to the word customarily translated ‘authentic’, eigentlich).

On this basis, Division I of Being and Time sets out what Heidegger calls the ‘Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein’. Here too he makes another important and original, though less conspicuously advertised, move. Previous philosophers have tended more or less explicitly to take one particular way of being human as definitive for what is truly human as such. For Plato it is the philosopher who is the exemplary human being, for the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages it is the saint, for Nietzsche the artist. By way of contrast, Heidegger resolves to limit himself to what can be known from the analysis of what he calls ‘average everydayness’, in other words, human beings as we find them (‘we’, as we find ourselves) existing in their everyday lives without any particular claim or capacity for extraordinary insight into the truth of their condition. In this situation human self-understanding is typically formed by the way in which we identify ourselves with how we are involved in the world, as engineers, husbands, cleaners, or soldiers. Our self-image is a reflex of our world in us.

The development of this self-image or self-understanding primarily occurs in and as language (or ‘discourse’, Rede), that is, as the way in which we speak about ourselves with one another. For the most part we do so without reflecting fully on all that is potentially conveyed by what we say and much conversation is simply a matter of passing on views, opinions, and phrases that we have picked up from others, which Heidegger calls ‘idle talk’ (Gerede). The issue here is not that we mostly talk about day-to-day trivia. Rather, it is about how we talk and, in this perspective, political or philosophical debate can be (and perhaps mostly is) just as much a matter of ‘idle talk’ as neighbourhood gossip.5 Truth, in Heidegger’s view, is not just a matter of saying what is correct but occurs when we are able to bring the matter at issue out of a state of forgetfulness or concealment and come to see it for what and as it is. Already in the Introduction he makes clear how it is discourse (logos) that is the primary means of revealing the world and bringing what is being talked about into view. This is always a matter, as he puts it, ‘penetrating’ more or less deeply into what is under discussion, and the problem with Gerede is therefore precisely that it speaks in such a way as to inhibit a more penetrating or a more encompassing view of what is being discussed to be developed. And perhaps it is not hard for us to see that even philosophers talking together about death may do so in such a way as to obscure rather than illuminate the true human meaning of the subject. All too often and at all levels of discourse our talking together is guided by ‘curiosity’ (a term Heidegger takes from Augustine) rather than really wanting to know and it is therefore unsurprising if it ends in ‘ambiguity’ rather than clarification.

We are, as Heidegger puts it, ‘thrown’ into our world and, so to speak, wake up to ourselves in a situation that is far from perspicuous. We never exist without a certain awareness that Heidegger characterizes in terms of state-of-mind, understanding, and language that precede a developed self-consciousness. Macquarrie and Robinson’s ‘state-of-mind’ is a rendering of Heidegger’s term Befindlichkeit, a word containing a root element recognizably cognate with the English ‘find’. This suggests not that our mental states are what we ourselves have planned or chosen in advance but that we are always ‘finding’ ourselves to be in some way or other. If asked how we are, we are rarely without an instant response: ‘good’, ‘alright’, ‘so-so’, ‘a bit down’, etc. This is just how we find ourselves being – we can work on it, try to cheer up, or, as the case may be, quieten down, but we can’t not start out from some given mood or state-of-mind that we did not in the first instance plan or invent. Moreover, as my example suggests, we can normally spontaneously articulate our mood in language, as ‘good’, ‘alright’, etc. and, to complete Heidegger’s triad of terms, what we say expresses and conveys a certain understanding of how we are: when I say ‘good’ or ‘alright’ I do so on the assumption that I am saying something meaningful that will be understood by the person to whom I am talking. Yet, Heidegger says, carrying on in this way only ever gets us so far. We never get to say all we could say about how we are but are always falling short of an adequate self-understanding. The situation of Dasein in its average everyday way of being in the world is therefore one of ‘fallenness’, which, Heidegger insists, should not carry the moral or religious connotations of the Christian idea of the Fall.

But if we are always falling short of an adequate self-understanding, how do we ever get to know that we are doing so, i.e., that we are in error? Lacking other evidence, aren’t the prisoners in Plato’s cave-parable justifiably convinced that their shadow-world is the only reality there is? What’s going to make anyone think that there’s more to life than their average everyday experience of it? How are we ever going to become aware of what Heidegger calls our ‘more primordial’ possibilities?

Heidegger’s answer to this question is focussed on two further terms. The first of these is anxiety (Angst), a term he takes from Kierkegaard but also characteristically transforms in the process. Like Kierkegaard, he distinguishes anxiety from fear. Fear is fear of something particular, the wild beasts in the forest or failure in an upcoming examination or competition. In the case of anxiety, however, ‘That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such’ (186/230). Anxiety has no specific object but is an all-encompassing sense that in my being-in-the-world I am not who I am, that I am constantly falling short of knowing and being who I am, that I am missing myself in my life. Anxiety ‘is nothing and nowhere’ (187/231), and yet this ‘nothing’ unsettles us in the whole compass of our dealings with the world and with others. It makes us feel that we are not at home in our world or in ourselves. In this way it is anxiety that reveals our fallenness – and yet, precisely for this reason, it is anxiety that makes us flee the sense of ‘uncanniness’ (Unheimlichkeit – literally the state of not being at home) that it arouses and seek to absorb ourselves all the more in our average everyday preoccupations as if they were all there was. For the most part, Heidegger says, ‘we have no existentiell understanding’ (190/234) of anxiety and assiduously but more or less unconsciously avert our gaze from what anxiety discloses. But the busier we are in assuring ourselves that ‘everything’s alright’ the more apparent it becomes that perhaps it isn’t and perhaps there’s something missing.

Before we can understand what this ‘something missing’ might be, we need to take account of another key Heideggerian term, ‘care’. The importance of this term can be gauged by the statement in the opening paragraph of Division II, summing up the outcome of Division I, that ‘The totality of Being-in-the-world as a structural whole has revealed itself as care’ (231/274). With regard to our question of death, care, as we shall see, is also the hinge on which Heidegger moves from the analysis of being in the world offered in Division I to the ‘existential Interpretation’ that centres on the account of Dasein’s being as being towards death.

In its inception the idea of care is elegantly simple. We have already seen how, for Heidegger, our way of being is distinctive by virtue of the fact that we are the beings for whom our being can itself become an issue. But this means that we are able to step beyond our immediate state of just being and, as it were, look at ourselves from beyond ourselves and think of ourselves in the light of how we might be or could become. How we are now involves us considering what we want to do next and how we might become in the future – shall I go for that new job, get married, or seek early retirement? As Heidegger says, ‘Dasein is already ahead of itself in its Being. Dasein is always “beyond itself”, not as a way of behaving towards other entities which it is not, but as Being towards the potentiality-for-Being which it is itself’ (191–2/236). Implicitly this already broaches the goal of Heidegger’s enquiry that time establishes the s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• References
• Introduction
• 1 Running towards Death
• 2 Death and I
• 3 At the Scaffold
• 4 Guilt, Death, and the Ethical
• 5 The Deaths of Others
• 6 Language, Death, and the Eternal
• Bibliography
• Index