MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S PHENOMENOLGY OF DEATH
I.
Human Condition
a. Human person tries to define himself
i. “why is there existence rather than nothing?”
b. Life is immersed = day by day existence = caused him to reflect
i. Feelings of absurdity, anguish, freedom, responsibility, etc.
ii. Immersed in phenomenology: “you and I are phenomenology”
c. Being?
i. What the human being would reveal about being human
ii. Method used: phenomenology
1. Focusing on the object as presented in our consciousness, from a point where there is nothing but the object
itself
2. So that a pure description, without explanation or theory, becomes available.
3. Disclosure a thing makes of itself
4. Hiddenness of a thing is overcome by its concealment (truth is unraveled)
a. Man is “there” in the world = fateful sending (destiny)
i. Where the “human” takes shape
ii. As if man is thrown in the world (DASEIN)
iii. Existence = to be in the world
iv. Invoking an Infinite Being
1. Explanation of “thereness”
2. Immediacy of being “there” is lost
b. Proceeding to the other elements of his immersion: man’s basis is CONCERN or CARE
i. Appropriating existence for myself: freedom
ii. Temporality
1. It is my time, my life, that is at stake.
2. Our actions are regulated by time
3. Knowing oneself in a “horizontal context”
4. Our life is linked to an unknown future (death)
5. Death = present to us at every moment ( mood of DREAD)
c. RESPONSE the human being gives to his condition
i. Anguish/ Despair (reminiscent of Kierkegaard)
1. Life becomes absurd:
2. Surpassed by: faith (Kierkegaard)
ii. We Fear = Anxiety does not know
1. World does not discloses itself immediately
2. Threat = detrimental
3. Threat is something close = threat is radiating = it will ACTUALLY reach us.
iii. All relations with other Daseins are dissolved
1. Future thrusting to our personal consciousness
2. Authenticity is lost: we ignore death by losing ourselves = being busy everyday
a. The “THEY”
i. Stowed away an interpretation for the event of death
ii. One of these days one will die too, but right now it has
nothing to do with us
iii. Dying is a personal experience and no one can be my
representative
iv. Concealing the face of death by talking the death of other
persons in the belief that the idea of death can be escaped
= return to a tranquilized life (CONSOLATION)
3. Authentic existence = embracing death = authentic freedom
II.
Man’s being in the world consists in being alongside with things (“concern”) and in being with others (“solicitude”)
a. Once thrown in the world, Dasein realizes its own possibilities; it constantly actualizes its potentialities of existence.
i. As such, man is always ahead of himself
ii. Being thrown in the world, he discovers himself there absorbed in things and people, and constantly realizing his own
possibilities for being.
iii. This is what Heidegger calls ‘Care’, the fundamental structure of Dasein
b. The primary item in care is the ahead of itself of Dasein.
i. Dasein as project always comports itself towards its potentiality for being.
ii. As long as man exists in the world, his potentiality for being is never exhausted
iii. There is always something to be settled yet in man
iv. Man, as long as he IS, has never reached his wholeness. Man always has an unfinished character
c. Man reaches his wholeness in death
i. In death, man loses his potentiality for being, he loses his ‘there’
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III.
IV.
ii. There is no more outstanding in man, everything is finished, settled for him.
iii. He is no longer being there.
d. Death is the transition of man from Dasein to no-longer Dasein
i. There is the impossibility of experiencing this transition
ii. No one has ever come out alive from death to tell us about death.
e. How are we going to describe the phenomenology of death?
i. Our first experience of death is the death of others.
ii. In death, man is no longer a person but a thing, a corpse.
iii. We have no way of knowing the loss of being that the dying man suffers
iv. We never experienced the death of another as he himself has experienced it.
f. In death, the totality of man is involved; it is Dasein coming to an end. Dasein’s dying is not representable
i. Death is always mine
ii. As long as man exists, he lacks a totality, a wholeness; and this lack comes to its end with death
g. This ‘not-yet’ of Dasein is like the ‘not-yet’ of the unripeness of the fruit.
i. The ripeness of the fruit is the end of its lack-of-ripeness, the end of the ‘not-yet’ of the fruit.
ii. As long as the fruit is not ripe, it is already its not-yet
iii. In death, man may or may not arrive at his fulfillment
h. Dasein therefore, as long as it exists, is already, its end.
i. The end of Dasein is not to be understood as being-at-an-end but as being-towards-the-end
ii. Heidegger’s phenomenology of death is not a description of death of an after-life, but of man as a being-towards—hisend, a being-towards-death.
BEING TOWARDS DEATH AND CARE
a. Care has the following characteristics of Dasein’s being
i. Existence, in the ‘ahead-of-itself’
1. Man, in being ahead of himself, as project comes to the disclosure of his extreme possibility, the possibility
that he will no longer be there
2. Death as something impending
3. Death is the possibility of my no-longer possible, of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there; the possibility of being
cut off from others and from things.
4. This possibility is the possibility that must be, something that I cannot outstrip
ii. Facticity, in the ‘being-already-in’
1. As soon as I am born into the world, I am already thrown into the possibility of death.
2. This possibility is revealed only in the basic mood of man = anxiety/ the experience of dread
3. Anxiety is not fear, because fear is concerned with something determinate which threatens my immediate
involvement of things
4. Anxiety is something indeterminate
iii. Falling, in the ‘being-alongside’
1. Many are ignorant of death
2. Many are engrossed in immediate concern with things, thus covering up their ownmost being-towardsdeath, fleeing in the face of it.
EVERYDAY BEING-TOWARDS-DEATH-INAUTHENTICITY
a. The ‘they’ hides death by saying, “people die… one of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do
with us.”
i. It is something not yet present-at-hand, and therefore offers no threat
ii. Denial of certainty: ambiguous attitude of the ‘they’ with regards to the certainty of death.
b. The inauthentic mode of man of being-towards-death
i. He loses himself in the ‘they’ and forgets his distinctive potentiality for being.
ii. The they has a very nice way of hiding the true nature of man’s being-towards-the-end
iii. When a person is dying, they ‘they’ talks to him into the belief that he will not die, that he will recover his normal state
of tranquilized everydayness.
iv. By tranquilizing death, the neighbors console the dying person and of course themselves.
v. The normal carefreeness of everyday concern must not be disturbed
vi. To start thinking about death is considered by the ‘they’ as a sign of cowardice, of fear, of insecurity.
vii. The ‘they’ does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death.
viii. Anxiety in the face of death is taken as a sign of weakness
1. According to the ‘they’ , the attitude to the fact that one dies is that of indifferent tranquility
2. This indifferent tranquility means the alienation of man from his ownmost non-relational potentiality for
being-towards-death.
c. Everyday being-towards-death is therefore a “falling”, a constant fleeting in the face of death
i. The everyday man is constantly evading death, hiding it and giving new explanations for it.
d. Inauthentic man:
i. Evades this higher certainty in carefreeness
ii. Man stops worrying about death and busies himself in the urgency of concern, deferring death as “sometime later.”
iii. The inauthentic man confers a kind of definiteness upon this indefiniteness of death by intervening it with urgent
matters of everyday.
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V.
VI.
AUTHENTIC BEING TOWARDS DEATH
a. The authentic response of man in his awareness of being-towards-death is not of evasion, of covering up death’s true
implications, nor of giving new explanations for it.
i. Man must face the possibility of death as his possibility
b. Facing this possibility is not actualizing it, that is, bringing it to happen
i. This would be suicide, and suicide demolishes all the potentialities of man instead of bringing them into a whole
totality.
ii. Nor does it mean that man must brood over death, calculating it; for death is not something one can have at one’s
disposal
c. The authentic being-towards-death is anticipation of this possibility.
i. By anticipation man comes close to death, not by making it actual but by understanding it as the possibility of
impossibility of any existence at all for him.
ii. Anticipation reveals to man that death means measureless impossibility of existence.
iii. This projection of his utmost possibility will provide him with a vision of his own present existence, the latent
possibilities lying before him.
d. He must therefore wrench himself away from the impersonal ‘they’ and make himself an individual, alone
i. Death individualizes man, because death does not belong to everybody, but to one’s own self
ii. This individualizing by death reveals the ‘there’ of man, his being-alongside-things (concern) and his being-with-others
(solicitude)
iii. It reveals to man that his concern and solicitude is nothing when his ownmost potentiality for being is itself an issue in
death.
iv. Authentic being-towards-death does not mean cutting oneself off from all relationships; rather it means projecting
oneself upon his ownmost potentiality for being rather than upon the possibility of the ‘they’ self.
v. Death is known to the authentic man as non-relational
e. In accepting death as the possibility, man frees himself.
i. Man is delivered from becoming lost in possibilities
ii. While before. In the ‘they-self’, he was secure in the impersonal but dictated by it, now in anticipation, in accepting
death as his extreme possibility, man for the first time can understand and choose among the possibilities in the light
of this extreme possibility
iii. In authenticity, man guards himself from falling into the ambiguous ‘they’ and he is now free to be himself, the person
he himself wants to be.
f. The indefiniteness which goes with the certainty of death calls for authentic Dasein to open itself to the constant threat arising
out from its being ‘there’
i. The state of mind that is open to this constant threat is anxiety
ii. In anxiety, man comes to face to face with the ‘nothing’ of possible impossibility of his existence.
iii. Anxiety individualizes man, and individualizing him, makes him become certain of the totality of his potentiality for
being.
iv. Authentic being-towards-death is essentially anxiety
g. Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily
unsupported by concernful solicitude
i. Freedom towards death – a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the ‘they’, and which is factical,
certain of itself, and anxious.
KARL RAHNER’S NOTION OF DEATH
a. Death is an act of man, an act of self-affirmation in regards to his acceptance or refusal to be his authentic self, a self that is open
to transcendence
b. At death, there is no longer any concupiscence on the part of man
i. Concupiscence means the evil that lessens the power of man to choose between good and evil
c. Death brings a kind of finality, a definity to the life-long decision of man with regards to his destiny
d. Every free act of man should carry an awareness of his fulfillment to a commitment, a realization that this one free act helps to
build a total decision of his whole being to the good
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