20
Death
In view of the genocidal wars and the slaughter of millions of noncombatants in the last hundred years, it is not surprising that death is a crucial issue for twentieth-century continental philosophers. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927; cited as Heidegger 1962) provokes a fascination with death that continues to be a central preoccupation of existentialism. However, when Heidegger in his “Letter on Humanism” (1947; cited as Heidegger 1993) repudiates Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist reading of Being and Time, he opens the door to philosophical reactions against existentialism.
In addition to Heidegger, however, these existentialist and phenomenological ruminations about death are unimaginable without Hegel. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is the story of shapes of consciousness undergoing dialectical transformations. The transitions from one shape to another involve a form of logical suicide or “dialectical negation” whereby a shape of consciousness discovers incoherence between what it thinks it can know and what it does know. In the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, for instance, death takes on a central philosophical importance when Hegel makes it one of two conditions – the other is work – for the emergence initially of self-consciousness and eventually of free self-consciousness. Death has this role because it is only by seeing one’s entire life negated that one comes to have a sense of one’s life as a whole. Without this grasp of the whole of life, Hegel suggests that a being could be neither self-conscious nor free. At the same time, however, Hegel’s analysis may be open to the objection that one could not be aware of one’s death unless one were already self-conscious. This problem elicits different reactions from philosophers as twentieth-century continental thought takes on different shapes. Heidegger’s phenomenology and Sartre’s existentialism, which are the topic of this chapter, represent crucially different moments in the history of “death” in twentieth-century philosophy.
Martin Heidegger on Being-toward-Death
In Being and Time, Heidegger maintains that a distinguishing feature of human existence, or what he calls Dasein, is that it is an issue for itself. Dasein can call itself into question and take a stand on itself. However, Heidegger expressly avoids beginning his analysis of Dasein with the isolated, reflective individual standing at a distance from worldly affairs. Dasein is neither a Cartesian cogito whose contents are transparent to itself nor an existentialist tragic hero who stoically resists the social pressure to conform. Instead, Dasein is to be understood from its immersion in everyday activities. Whereas the existentialist picture views everydayness negatively, for Heidegger our ability to get around in the world and to cope with its demands is a skill. Although he says that everydayness involves “falling,” he is not using this term pejoratively. However, when he also describes everydayness as “fleeing,” the suggestion of evasion and self-deception is evident. We find ourselves always already “fallen” into a situation that we did not create and that we cannot entirely control. When we are unable to face up to the situation, which includes human mortality, we flee into doing what everyone else would do. Although Heidegger does not express it this way, the difference between falling and fleeing is much like the difference between acculturation and conformism. Acculturation is how people acquire their preferences. Conformism turns these preferences into patterns of thought and action that everyone is expected to display. Acculturation gives us the possibilities in terms of which we understand our lives. Conformism reifies these possibilities into a single set of necessary norms that then becomes the only recognized and sanctioned way that one should comport oneself.
Insofar as functional acculturation or falling can turn so readily into dysfunctional conformism or fleeing, Heidegger needs to explain how Dasein can resist the conformist pressures of society and establish its unique identity or “authenticity.” An antecedent for his account of how this resistance is possible is the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who had already seen death as the key to this problem. In his one prose work, The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; cited as Rilke 1990), Rilke distinguishes between the great death and the small death. His character, Malte, anticipates not only Sartre’s protagonist in the novel, Nausea (1938), but also Heidegger’s distinction between my own death and the death of others. Rilke’s Malte, who is destitute and despondent in Paris, writes:
The desire to have a death of one’s own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one’s own . . . You come, you find a life, ready-made, you just have to slip it on. You leave when you want to, or when you’re forced to: anyway, no effort: Voilà votre mort, monsieur. You die as best you can; you die the death that belongs to the sickness that you have (for since all sicknesses are well known, it is also known that the various fatal endings belong to the sicknesses and not to the people; and the sick person has, so to speak, nothing more to do). (Rilke 1990: 9)
Death is experienced uncomfortably and is covered up in elaborate but discreet funerals where, as Thomas Mann suggests, one can blink at death and not see it. Heidegger, Rilke, and Mann make the point that in refusing to recognize death, one refuses to recognize life.
In Being and Time, Heidegger maintains that the everyday evasion of my own death happens by taking my own death as if it were the death of another. Death is not really encountered when another dies insofar as one lives on. Furthermore, although one suffers a loss when another dies, it would be a mistake to equate that loss with the loss that the dying person experiences. When the other dies, for the survivors there is just one less person in the world, whereas the dying person loses everything. As an example (not Heidegger’s), consider grief for a stricken loved one. Profound grief is not simply for the objective loss of the person or for the resulting restrictions on one’s own continuing possibilities. Instead, a more authentic form of grief would be over the other person’s own sense of the loss of any continuing possibilities.
This sense of loss is misconstrued by typical ways of thinking about death as an end, such as when a curtain comes down at the end of a play. Heidegger deconstructs such clichés about death, which mistakenly treat the end of life as the end of a present-at-hand object or a ready-to-hand tool. Death is not equivalent to the fullness of the moon because Dasein always includes what is not yet. Even when faced with immediate execution, Dasein still has a bit of the “not yet” left. Death is also not comparable to the ripening of fruit because Dasein does not necessarily end in fulfillment, or it may have long passed its ripeness. Death is also not similar to the rain stopping, the road ending, or the bread running out. When the road ends in a construction zone, for instance, it is simply unfinished or incomplete, which Dasein never is. Dasein is always entirely itself at every moment precisely because of its relation to its death. Dasein’s death is always impending, even if not in the same way that a storm or the arrival of a friend impends. In these latter examples life continues, whereas “the death which impends does not have this kind of Being” (Heidegger 1962: 294). In death, what is impending is more radically the absence of any impending at all. Heidegger therefore characterizes death as “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (Heidegger 1962: 294). Heidegger’s point is that the idea of death as an end that completes life is an inappropriate characterization of Dasein’s dying.
There are many inauthentic ways of covering up my own death. Publicly, the other always dies, not oneself. Dying is “leveled off” so that it only happens to nobody in particular, and “‘in no case is it I myself’” (Heidegger 1962: 297). The ambiguity of idle talk conceals the nonrelational (unbezügliche) or the not-outstrippable (unüberholbare) character of my own death. The fact that death is not to be outstripped means that it is unavoidable and necessary. Death is nonrelational because I must die my own death. The “temptation” is to go into what we now call denial and conceal our own deaths from ourselves. People try to “tranquilize” the dying by telling them that they will be fine again soon. Heidegger believes that the living are really trying to convince themselves that death is not a problem. Watching people die becomes so uncomfortable that an actual death is taken as a serious social inconvenience, and even a display of “downright tactlessness” (Heidegger 1962: 298).
On the existentialist reading of Being and Time, Heidegger is sometimes interpreted as dwelling on anxiety in the face of death because he wants to encourage both a stoic indifference to death and an aristocratic superiority over death. This criticism misreads Heidegger’s text, for he describes this attitude of indifference toward death as the inauthentic alienation from death. This alienation is produced by two evasions. First, there is the evasion of turning anxiety about the impending death into a fear of the event itself. Fear is of an object in the world, whereas anxiety is about the world as such. Collapsing anxiety into fear makes a concern for death into a weakness. This concern about being weak leads to the second evasion whereby one then has to prove one’s superiority and indifference to one’s own death. However, it is important to realize that Heidegger is not advocating this attitude of superior indifference. Instead, he sees such an attitude as another instance of inauthentic “alienation” from the inevitability of one’s own death, and as an attempt to blink at death by trying not to care about it. Although Heidegger does not put the point exactly in these words, his analyses imply that this attitude fails insofar as the effort involved in the attempt to control death shows how much one really does care about one’s mortality. At least, this interpretation is suggested by Heidegger’s examples of trying to control death by “brooding” over it all the time or by “expecting” it at any moment, both of which in effect represent the attempt to put death off as long as possible (Heidegger 1962: 305). Even an air of “untroubled indifference” toward the uttermost possibility of existence masks a deeper concern where Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being is “constantly an issue for Dasein” (Heidegger 1962: 299). At one level, Heidegger is suggesting that the attempt to appear indifferent to and untroubled by death is likely to be merely feigned. At a deeper level, his point is that being-toward-death is not just a matter of “thinking about death,” but that it pervades a much broader spectrum of everyday comportment.
For Heidegger, facing up to instead of fleeing my own mortality becomes the key to authentic life. Heidegger believes that my own death has priority over the death of others (a claim that Sartre disputes). Death is uniquely mine, Heidegger says. He adds that dying is the one thing that nobody else can do for me, and that I cannot do for someone else: “No one can take the Other’s dying away from him” (Heidegger 1962: 284). Just as for Hegel, for Heidegger the possibility of death first makes it possible to see one’s life as a whole. This vision would also include a projection of the “not yet” that is still outstanding in one’s life. Given the immersion in the multitude of demands placed on one in everydayness, the possibility of rising above these demands and seeing life as a whole would seem unlikely. Only the possibility of death and of the withdrawal of all these everyday demands gives rise to a sense of life as a whole, even if simply in the negative sense of all that would no longer be the case. Mortality is behind our sense of our finitude, and the recognition of finitude is what first makes some things matter more than others.
The authentic relation to death involves not being in denial, but instead, recognizing the certainty of death. What Heidegger calls the anticipation of the certainty of death “shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached” (Heidegger 1962: 308; emphasis added). In this sense, anticipatory being-toward-death “individualizes” Dasein (Heidegger 1962: 310). Anticipation frees up Dasein from inauthentic everydayness and from the anonymous other (das Man) so that it can act “of its own accord” (Heidegger 1962: 308). To individualize is not to subjectivize, however, and Heidegger does not mean to cut Dasein off from the world and leave it with inner subjectivity as the only source of commitment. To subjectivize Dasein in this way is the mistake made by the existentialist misreading of Heidegger. That is at least the view of Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism,” where he writes: “Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a “subject,” whether this is taken as “I” or “We.” Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject–object relation” (Heidegger 1993: 252).
Although death could come at any moment, insofar as it is not here just yet, it is indefinite. The constant indefiniteness as to “when” the utter impossibility will become possible is the “constant threat” held open in anxiety (Heidegger 1962: 310). Heidegger draws together the certainty and the indefiniteness of death in what he calls “anticipatory resoluteness.” Insofar as death is certain, one must anticipate it rather than cover it up. However, insofar as death is indefinite, and one does not know when it will happen, one finds oneself pushed into taking action. In taking action not haphazardly, but resolutely and with determination, Dasein “frees itself for its world” and is “nothing else than Being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 1962: 344). By a “being-in-the-world,” Heidegger means that Dasein is a committed agent, who is situated in a worldly context, and not a disengaged subject, whose place in the world cannot be located. Resoluteness, explains Heidegger, “does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I’” (Heidegger 1962: 344). To detach Dasein from its engagement in the world and to make it an alienated and isolated subject is the (existentialist) error that is due to what the “Letter on Humanism” describes as “the dominance of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity” (Heidegger 1993: 222–3).
Of course, we are still cultural beings and resoluteness will draw on the way the world is, including the way the anonymous other (das Man) configures it for us. Even when I determine my own commitments and others no longer determine my commitments for me, I am not disconnected from others because my commitments will involve understanding the others’ potentiality as well as my own. The authentic Dasein can only ever start from possibilities inherent in its Situation. Heidegger does not think that resolve comes down to empty advice such as carpe diem (“seize the day”). However, he also says that “even resolutions remain dependent on the ‘they’ [das Man] and its world” (Heidegger 1962: 345–6). As an example, consider that in deciding one’s career, one has to choose from what is available. However, the choice of becoming a teacher or a doctor or a sculptor is not authentic resoluteness insofar as these slots are there already. Authentic resoluteness would involve how one configured one’s career to one’s own potential and made one’s activity distinctive.
Resoluteness does not create the concrete Situation, but only puts Dasein into it (Heidegger 1962: 347). Through the encounter with the limit-Situation of being-toward-death, anticipatory resoluteness allows us for the first time to disclose the concrete Situation authentically as our own, even if it is not our creation. In anticipatory resoluteness, the deeper, ontological being-toward-death is thus no longer simply about death in Rilke’s “ontic,” everyday sense of the moment of dying. Instead, being-toward-death involves reconfiguring life after the realization that at the limits choices have no transcendent grounding or justification. By showing that there is no authority for action other than one’s own accord, authentic anticipation leads Dasein to give up commitments that it no longer sees as binding. Authentic resoluteness then involves thinking and acting so differently as even to transform the world and to change history. Ontologically interpreted, Being and Time therefore does not see authenticity as the psychological result of a private subject choosing its inner attitude toward the world. On the contrary, authenticity is a function of Dasein’s efforts to bring about genuine change in the social and historical world.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Heidegger
In Being and Nothingness (1943; cited as Sartre 1966), the quintessential work of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre offers a different account of the finitude of existence, one that draws on the structure of choice rather than on the inevitability of death. For Sartre, one’s death has little relevance to one’s life. “It is the Other who is mortal in his being,” Sartre asserts, and “there is no place for death in being-for-itself “(Sartre 1966: 699). Sartre recognizes that humans are finite beings, but he thinks that this finitude is not to be found in a future death that awaits me so much as from the present need to choose a course of action. Finitude and the irreversible direction of time come from the temporal necessity of choosing one thing before another and being unable to reverse this sequence. To argue for radical freedom and to prove that death is of no importance, Sartre wants to undermine the analysis of death in Being and Time. One must remember, however, that his criticisms often depend on an existentialist misreading of Heidegger. In particular, subjectivity for Sartre must be the point of philosophical departure and Sartre thinks that Heidegger goes wrong at the start by trying to avoid the Cartesian cogito. An initial critical move is to reject Heidegger’s claim that dying is the only thing that no one else can do for me. Sartre maintains that no one else can love for me either, or do any number of other things for me. Furthermore, because subjectivity is already required if I am to be able to recognize death as mine, death does not individualize. Sartre also argues that death could not be awaited. “Live each moment as if it were the last” is bad advice, from Sartre’s point of view, because it loses sight of the need for consistent action in a life that looks to the future. Sartre insists that I cannot experience my own death, because when I am dead, I cannot experience anything. Therefore, when I try to adopt an attitude toward my own death, what I am really doing, according to Sartre, is trying to view myself from the point of view of the other. Contra Heidegger, then, because I cannot experience my own death, Sartre concludes that death is merely a contingent brute fact. As such, my own death has no meaning for me.
However, at this point a close reader of Heidegger will want to insist that Sartre appears to be overlooking some central points of Heidegger’s analysis that anticipate and avoid these criticisms. In particular, Heidegger’s distinction between “perishing,” “demise,” and “being-toward-death” must be taken into account. “Perishing” and “demise” both suggest in ordinary language the ending of a life. “Perishing” is the ending of anything that lives. However, Dasein does not simply perish. Unlike lower forms of life, ending matters to it and is a feature of life itself, not merely a point at which life ends. Moreover, Dasein cannot perish. Insofar as Dasein never experiences its end, only the organism perishes. If “perishing” does not apply to one’s own sense of existence, it also does not apply to the death of others. Human burial practices would not be as elaborate as they are if others were thought simply to perish. When loved ones die, cultural practices do not treat them as having simply ended. Instead, elaborate rituals are constructed to show that they continue to matter to us. If Sartre were right, a human corpse would be simply a lifeless thing. For Heidegger, in contrast, as something that has lost life, a human corpse deserves continued respect. Cultural burial practices confirm this claim.
Heidegger goes beyond ordinary language, therefore, and uses the term “demise” specifically for the ending of Dasein, which involves more than merely perishing: “Dasein too can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish” (Heidegger 1962: 291). He also distinguishes demise from being-toward-death, even if ordinary language does not. Demise is the ending of a human life. However, “demise” is not coextensive in meaning with “being-toward-death,” which is a feature of every moment of Dasein’s life, not merely of the last moment. Being-toward-death involves a way to be, and specifically, a way to be toward the end, which Heidegger distinguishes from being at an end. “Being-toward-death” is a phenomenon of life. Heidegger says explicitly, “The ‘ending’ which we have in view when we speak of death, does not signify Dasein’s Being-at-an-end [Zu-Ende-sein], but a Being-towards-the-end [Sein zum Ende] of this entity. Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is” (Heidegger 1962: 289). Heidegger grounds his claim in a citation handed down from antiquity through Seneca: “‘As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die’” (Heidegger 1962: 289).
Even if these distinctions obviate some of Sartre’s criticisms of Heidegger, Sartre has other disagreements with him about the structure of human life and the direction of temporality. For Sartre, death can only remove meaning from life. A senseless death makes life senseless as well. This claim has several corollaries. Death cannot be the completion of life insofar as the individual does not freely determine death. Waiting for death would undercut all my other projects insofar as it would be the project of not having a project. Rather than death being the key to individualization, it cannot individualize because it is radically impersonal. In short, Sartre connects death to the existentialist notion of the absurd.
Sartre also disagrees with Heidegger about death as the source of temporal direction in the connectedness of life. Because death comes from the outside and is not an event that I can do anything about, it is not even one of my possibilities but is instead a pure fact, a brute datum. Sartre even goes so far as to say that at bottom death is “in no way distinguished from birth” (Sartre 1966: 698). This claim echoes the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who maintained that insofar as no one finds the eternity before one’s birth disturbing, no one should fear the eternity after one’s death. However, from Heidegger’s point of view, this argument is off target because his notion of being-toward-death is concerned with what goes on between birth and death, not before birth or after death. Moreover, Lucretius and Sartre ignore the temporal asymmetry between birth and death. Most people feel strongly averse to their death, but not to their birth. There is a good reason for this aversion. As the contemporary analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel, has argued in a way that supports Heidegger, “The direction of time is crucial in assigning possibilities to people or other individuals” (Nagel 1979: 8). Nagel maintains that the difference between birth and death is that death deprives one of life, whereas the time before birth does not represent a loss of life. To die earlier would represent a loss of possibilities. To have been born earlier would make one a different person entirely.
Finally, Sartre presses a charge derived from Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave, which Sartre generalizes into an account of the relation of self and other. Sartre says that death is “the triumph of the Other over me” (Sartre 1966: 697). The only way to prevent myself from being looked at and reduced to an object with no freedom is, on Sartre’s account, to look back at the other and reduce it to an object. When I am dead, according to Sartre, I lose the ability to look back, and thus my death makes me the future prey of the living. This charge again depends on the existentialist assumption of an inner subjectivity that is isolated and alienated from others. Normally, however, one does not expect one’s family or acquaintances to experience one’s death as their triumph. Loved ones are also unlikely to think of the deceased as their prey. Sartre’s counterintuitive claim follows only from his pessimistic view that social relations are essentially antagonistic. As one of his characters says in the short play, No Exit (1944; cited as Sartre 1989), “Hell is – other people.”
Making these philosophical interpretations of death explicit is not a morbid enterprise. On the contrary, these philosophers’ reflections on death are intended to help people live fuller lives. These phenomenological and existentialist debates are not about how to die, but about how to live. Correspondingly, from the social and historical perspective, philosophy’s goal in the twenty-first century should be to ensure that the carnage of the twentieth century is not covered up and forgotten. By remembering the victims, philosophy now has a better chance of realizing its greatest hope and overcoming its deepest fear. The hope is that in the new century the record on life and death will be better. The fear is that it could turn out to be even worse.
References and Further Reading
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). New York: Harper & Row (original work published 1927).
—— (1993) Letter on Humanism. In D. F. Krell (ed.), Basic Writings (pp. 213–66). San Francisco: Harper (original work published 1947).
Nagel, T. (1979) Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rilke, R. M. (1990) The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (trans. Stephen Mitchell). New York: Vintage (original work published 1910).
Sartre, J-P. (1966) Being and Nothingness (trans. H. E. Barnes). New York: Washington Square Press (original work published 1943).
—— (1989) No Exit and Three Other Plays (trans. S. Gilbert). New York: Vintage Books (original work published 1944).