The impossible must be done. The event, if there is one, consists in doing the impossible.
—Jacques Derrida (2007), A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event
In this chapter, I argue that the relation to death dissolves the unity of the self and that this has two serious consequences for the existential analytic of Being and Time. The first consequence is that a first-person ownership of the relation to death is impossible. The second consequence, which is a corollary of the first, is that a first-person ownership of one’s existence before death is impossible. If I cannot own the relation to death authentically, then I cannot own my existence authentically, since the former is a necessary condition of possibility of the latter.
This does not mean that the dissolution of the unity of the self is beyond the pale of experience. I draw on reported cases of schizophrenia in Ronald Laing’s The Divided Self and on Heidegger’s description of anxiety in What is Metaphysics? to show that such a dissolution is a possible experience and that, consequently, possible experience does not depend on the unity of the self as a necessary condition of possibility. The target of my argument is Dan Zahavi’s transcendental phenomenological theory of experience in Self-Awareness and Alterity according to which there is no experience without the unity of the first person.
In section 2, I shed light on the distinction Heidegger draws between perishing and demise in Being and Time. Turning to Heidegger’s claim that death is in each case mine, I argue in section 3 that a first-person ownership of the relation to death is impossible.
In section 4, I consider another way of reading Heidegger’s claim. It can be read as saying that death singularizes the who. I draw on Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between ipse- and idem-identity in Oneself as Another to clarify what I mean by the distinction between singularization and individuation.
In section 5, I argue that the relation to death can bring about the collapse of the ‘mineness’ of existence and that this collapse is a possible experience, contrary to what Zahavi suggests in Self-Awareness and Alterity.
In section 6, I turn to Derrida’s Aporias. That text is akin to the spirit of Zahavi’s transcendentalism in some respects, insofar as it is intent on revealing non-revisable constraints on possible experience. Much like Zahavi, Derrida contends that the relation to death cannot appear as such. But in another respect, Derrida makes allowances for it in friendship and mourning, as does Heidegger with the notion of anticipation in Being and Time.
Accordingly, in this chapter, I argue that Heidegger and Derrida’s reflections on death can be seen as calling for a rethinking of the sense of consciousness or experience in transcendental phenomenology beyond the unity of the first person.
In section 49 of Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the existential interpretation of being-toward-death is ontologically prior to the biological understanding of death as an event that is bound up with the processes of life and to the anthropological and ethnological study of mortuary rites, burial or cremation practices, the domestic or public cult of the dead, practices of mourning and so on.
Biological explanations of the causes of death in plants, animals or humans, of their longevity, growth or reproductive cycles, presuppose an ontology of life. The science of life would not know what to apply itself to; the extension of its field would be left undetermined if it did not operate with a preliminary understanding of the essence of life. Its understanding of life, whether as a physico-chemical mechanism or as a movement of self-organization, guides, in turn, its understanding of death and anticipates its approach to it. But whatever the basic concepts the science of life and its ontology appropriate, they understand death – for evident reasons – as the end of life. Death is defined on the basis of life and the formal-ontological consideration of the kind of end that constitutes death, the meaning or essence of death, is left by the wayside.
No doubt, death signifies the end. But that can mean any number of things. Depending on whether the word is taken as a noun or verb, end can mean cessation, stopping or fulfilment; it can mean to limit, the limit or to be limited; to vanish or come to a close; the goal or reaching the goal, and so on. As long as the meaning of end is left undetermined, no decisive and unequivocal headway seems promising in the ontology of life.
That is why Heidegger can say that the concepts of life and death in biology and the ontology of life ‘need to be sketched by the ontology of Dasein’ (BT 291), which explores death in its formal-ontological constitution by reference to Dasein’s kind of being. Heidegger is well aware of ‘the peculiar formality and emptiness of any ontological characterization’. But this ‘must not blind us to the rich and complicated structure of the phenomenon’ (BT 292).
Similarly, anthropological studies of burial and cremation practices, of mortuary rites and funerary customs, presuppose a conception of death. Besides, such studies inform us more about a community’s self-understanding than about the essence of death. As Heidegger notes, most likely with reference to Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ‘the ways in which death is taken among primitive peoples, and their ways of comporting themselves to it in magic and cult, illuminate primarily the understanding of Dasein; but the interpretation of this understanding already requires an existential analytic and a corresponding conception of death’ (BT 291–2).
This brief and somewhat commonplace analysis of the order of priority or founding between the use of the concept of death in biology, the ontology of life and fundamental ontology – commonplace, at any rate, within transcendental phenomenology that Heidegger, I believe, does not entirely abandon in this period – leads to some of the most controversial and remarkable statements in Being and Time, statements that we have not yet finished interpreting.2
The existential understanding of death as being-toward-death is reducible neither to a universal structure of life nor to a particular cultural signification. Dasein’s dying (sterben) embodies an ontological structure that exceeds the horizons of life and spirit. On the one hand, dying cannot be identified with a biological process. If Dasein dies, or rather, because it can die, it ‘never perishes’. On the other hand, its death doubtless has a cultural and medico-legal sense in the world. That is to say that Dasein demises (ablebt). But it can do so only because and on condition that it can die. Dasein can ‘demise only as long as it is dying’ (BT 291).
Reading these passages in bewilderment, David Farrell Krell (1992: 92–3) wonders in Daimon Life whether the distinction between dying, demise and perishing is ‘wholly specious’. He adds that the introduction of the notion of demise ‘marks the demise of existential-ontological demarcation as such. That introduction constitutes one of the many ends of fundamental ontology.’ That is presumably because Heidegger, in Krell’s eyes, is unable to sustain the distinction between demise and perishing for very long. As Krell (1992: 98) notes a few pages later, ‘Ableben slips unobtrusively into the position formerly occupied by biological-medical Verenden. Ableben will now have to do, not with inappropriateness, but with biology and medicine!’
Dasein verendet nie. Dasein never perishes. Verenden is a term that Heidegger reserves for that which is living, das Lebendem (BT 291), usually, more narrowly, for animal life. Plant life rarely gets a mention in Heidegger’s works. The difference between verenden and sterben is clearly not reducible to a terminological point. Something substantive must be meant by it.
Let us suppose that Dasein is alive. That cannot be more than a supposition. Heidegger’s categorical denial that Dasein perishes opens the possibility that not every entity that is of the measure of Dasein is a living thing. A Dasein endowed with a non-biological constitution – a transcendental machine – is not inconceivable.3 However, if Dasein is alive, must it not perish?
Perhaps what Heidegger has in mind is that life and, in consequence, the end of living beings, perishing, do not enter Dasein’s ontological constitution. That seems to be true on the face of it as well. Being-toward-death does not vary even though Dasein’s physico-chemical makeup varies over time. Death always impends for me, whether I am young or old, healthy or ill, male or female.
Correlatively – although that is how Heidegger is usually read – perishing doesn’t enter its ontological constitution, Dasein verendet nie, since whatever perishes has no access to death and what defines Dasein is precisely such access. This is how Heidegger describes the meaning of perishing in a lecture in 1950, Das Ding.
Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself (vor sich) nor behind it (hinter sich). ... We ... call mortals mortals – not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death. (PLT 178)
To be alive is not a sufficient condition to be of the measure of Dasein. Dasein will perish if it has an organic form. It will perish not on account of its Daseinhood but on account of the fact that it is alive. An entity must have access to death as such to satisfy the condition of Daseinhood. What Heidegger probably means, then, when he says that Dasein verendet nie, is that Dasein never perishes qua Dasein.
Ableben aber kann des Dasein nur solange, als er sterbt. But Dasein can demise only as long as it is dying. What does Heidegger mean by this? Is it truly perplexing, as Krell (1992: 98) seems to think? Does it cause the distinction between Ableben and Verenden and, correlatively, between Dasein and the animal, to collapse, along with the possibility of the existential analytic?
I think that Taylor Carman (2005: 290) is on the right track when he says in Authenticity that the distinction between dying and demising is best seen as marking a difference between understanding one’s death from the first and from the third person. Since the ‘animal’ does not relate to its end in any way whatsoever, we can say that it perishes.4
I can understand death as a possibility that is mine in every case. Or I can understand it as an issue that is common to many.
In Dasein’s public way of interpreting, it is said that ‘one dies’ (man stirbt), because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that ‘in no case is it I myself’, for this ‘one’ is the ‘nobody’. Dying is levelled off to an occurrence which reaches Dasein, to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular... . Dying, which is essentially mine in such a way that no one can be my representative (unvertretbar), is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the ‘they’ encounters. (BT 297)
Death is always in play as a non-substitutable end for Dasein. No one can remove, replace or displace it by means of a symbolic or real sacrifice. It is an end in which no other has a share. It is, like an absolute secret, absolutely unshareable.5 As Heidegger says without circumlocution in his 1925 lecture History of the Concept of Time, ‘There is no such thing as death in general’ (HCT 313).
Doubtless, there is such a thing as ‘death in general’. But that thing is there for das Man. I objectify my death as a concern that is common to many, or as an occurrence in the world that has a legal, medical or cultural meaning. I regard my death as an event that is in no way different from the death of the other, any other.
If dying is always one’s ownmost, proper, or eigene end, if it is an end to which Dasein has a pre-objective access, that is, unmediated by cultural institutions and significations, an end to which it can attest as its ownmost, proper possibility, demising concerns everyman. It refers Dasein to the other’s death or to its own from the standpoint of the institutions and practices of its culture.
Ableben aber kann des Dasein nur solange, als er sterbt. Far from being confusing as Krell seems to believe, this statement must mean that I would not be able to relate to death in the third person (one dies) unless I was able to relate to it in the first person.
The distinction between dying and demising seems clear enough on the surface. But it raises a question. Do dying and demising mean the same thing under two different descriptions? Or do they intend two different things?
Heidegger’s talk of demise in the text is not always very precise. He associates it with the cessation of Dasein’s ‘physiological’ life, with the legal-medical certification of death, with the ‘“typology” of “dying”’ that is concerned with the taxonomy of psychological experiences (Erlebnisse) of dying persons (BT 291), and with an occurrence in the public world of das Man (BT 301). By contrast, dying is described as ‘the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’ (BT 294).
This suggests that dying and demising do not mean or intend the same phenomenon under two different descriptions. They mean different things in more or less the same way as originary time, that is, the temporalization of ecstatic temporality, refers to something other than metric time, understood as a succession of nows, even though the latter derives its meaning as time from the former.
In other words, once it is understood as an event in the world that is common to all of mankind – classically instanced in the major premise of a categorical syllogism, ‘All humans are mortal’ – dying is no longer what it is, Dasein’s eigenste and unvertretbare end. But that just makes it more urgent to ask what dying means.
Is a first-person ownership of the relation to death possible?
Expressions such as authentic (eigentlich) dying or authentic being-toward-death are no doubt pleonasms. Dying is an end to which the adjectives one’s own (eigen) and ownmost (eigenste) intrinsically belong. Heidegger writes:
By its essence, death is in each case mine, in so far as it ‘is’ at all. (BT 284)
When death is spoken of inauthentically, it is thought of as a common occurrence in the world. But when it is spoken of properly, it is thought of as something that is neither common nor worldly. Jean-François Courtine (1991: 80) observes in Voice of Conscience and Call of Being that the ‘only authentic utterance in which Dasein finds expression’ is ‘I shall die, I must die.’ We can say, with greater precision, that an authentic utterance that gives expression to Dasein will always use singular pronouns, my death, your death. Dasein owns its relation to death in a privileged, first-person way.
To be sure, that is true not only of the relation to death. It is true also of existence and of experience. Existence and experience are hardly conceivable save as owned in the first person. I am having a perception of this red cube. I exist. The author of my existence and of my experience may be unknown to me. It may be unidentifiable. But they cannot fail to have an owner.
That is not to deny that first-person ownership is, for the most part, neutralized, suppressed, or forgotten by das Man, such that existence and experience, including death, appear as impersonal causal events in nature or as culturally mediated significations.
In the sentence cited above, Heidegger qualifies the statement that ‘death is in every case mine’ with the clause ‘in so far as it “is” at all’. Why does he qualify it in that way? Is he having doubts about ascribing mineness to death?
Der Tot ist, sofern er ‘ist’, wesenmäßig je der meine. Heidegger is hesitant about using the verb being in the case of death. The word no doubt applies to experience and existence. They are different kinds of entities. They are determinable as such or such. But is death an entity? Is it determinable in a certain way or against a particular horizon? Does it not arrive from beyond the horizons of meaning that Dasein projects or the contexts of understanding in which it approaches entities and others?
If the word death does not denote an entity, if it is not the concept of a determinable object, if death gives me nothing to think about, then I am not sure that there is a first-person ownership of the relation to death. Can the I relate in the first person to what is not an entity without losing its unity and hold on itself? I am not sure.
Besides, far from endowing the first-person with a unity that would enable it to unify itself in the diversity of experience, the relation to death dissolves every kind of unity and identity. Death, supposing it has a meaning, signifies the dissolution of the unity of the self, the disintegration of the identity of the concept, the collapse of the unity of the name. It is the non-contingent limit of language and thought.
That is why there is no concept of death. That is why the name is an empty signifier. But that is also why a first-person ownership of the relation to death is a de jure impossibility.6
Does it mean that there is only a third-person ownership of the relation to death, an objectified death, or a relation to the death of the other in mourning?7 That is the conclusion that Derrida will come to in Aporias in his reading of Heidegger, as I show in section 6.
Maurice Blanchot remarks in the Space of Literature that death does not happen to the I. It happens to someone. Like writing, dying is a passivity without reserve that deprives the I of its activity, reducing it to the impersonal one.
[H]e who dies is anonymous, and anonymity is the guise in which the ungraspable, the unlimited, the unsituated is most dangerously affirmed among us. (Blanchot, 1982: 241)8
That is a lesson Heidegger too will learn two years after the publication of Being and Time in his 1929 inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics? It means that the dissolution of the unity of the I before death is a possible experience and that, in consequence, the unity of the I is not a necessary constraint on possible experience. That is what I show in section 5 against Zahavi’s transcendentalism in Self-Awareness and Alterity.
Heidegger says in Being and Time that death ‘knows no measure (Maß) at all, no more or less (mehr oder minder), but signifies the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence’ (BT 307). The category of measure, of the more and the less, does not apply here. Or if it does apply to the relation to death, then we must think of it as Dasein’s opening to the exorbitant, the impossible or the sublime.
Death is the possibility that gives Dasein access to the impossibility of existence. The impossibility of existence is Dasein’s non-presence, its departure from the world, its final farewell (Abschied) (Zo 184). Why is that ultimate farewell exorbitant or without measure? Death is the limit of its existence. But there is no limit to its non-existence. Its departure from the world is absolute and singular at the same time.
How can Dasein own the relation to that absence in the first-person? No doubt, that absence is not there as long as Dasein is there. As the Epicureans say, if I am, then death is not; if death is, then I am not. When Dasein is there, its death is there only as a future. But that is a future that is discontinuous with the present.9 My eventual absence is not thinkable as a modality of the present, as a past- or future-present. It is not an event that I will be able to recall once I will have died. Nor is it an event that will become present to me or that I can expect in advance. I cannot be ready for something that has never been and that will never be present to me.
But if my departure from the world is a future that is unthinkable as a modality of the present, then it is by the same token unthinkable as a modification of being as presence (see Chapter 3.2 for the connection between being and time, presence and the present: the comprehension of the former is based on the latter). It exceeds the categories of being as modifications of presence. Now possibility is a category of being. It is a modification of presence. Hence the question arises whether death is possible. ‘Is my death possible?’ Derrida (1993: 21) wonders in Aporias.
Der Tot ist, sofern er ‘ist’, wesenmäßig je der meine. Death is in each case mine, if it ‘is’ at all. This sentence can mean something other than that Dasein has a first-person ownership of the relation to death. The Jemeinigkeit of death can also mean that dying singularizes Dasein.
I am not sure that it is accurate to say that it individuates Dasein. An individual, in the strict sense, denotes an indivisible something like an atom, and Dasein is not an individual in that strict sense, whether as soul, substance, ego or person. These are all instances of things that are indivisible. Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between the identity of the self (ipse) and the identity of the same (idem) in Oneself as Another goes some way towards clarifying what I have in mind with the distinction between singularity and individuality.10
Following Kant, Ricoeur claims that permanence in time is the transcendental criterion for numerical identity. If I want to determine whether the object of my perception is a substance, that is, a what or, in Kantian terms, something that is distinct from the perceiving self, then I must consider whether it is permanent in time.
Now Ricoeur argues that character conforms to that criterion. Character constitutes a person’s numerical identity. One’s second nature consists of acquired and sedimented habits and dispositions that remain relatively unchanged through life. Character must then be distinguished from another ‘form of permanence in time’ that is not merely the schema of substance and that relates to ‘the question “who?” inasmuch as it is irreducible to any question of “what?”’ (Ricoeur, 1992: 118). As an example of the former question, Ricoeur mentions keeping one’s word.
[That] expresses a self-constancy which cannot be inscribed, as character was, within the dimension of something in general but solely within the dimension of the ‘who?’. (Ricoeur, 1992: 123)
When I promise my partner to do something I make myself accountable to her. She also counts on me. She expects that I will remain true to my word even if, in the face of adversity, I was forced to act out of character repeatedly and my character was to gradually change. The constancy of the self is, in consequence, distinct from the permanence of character. According to Ricoeur, it is grounded in an ethics of responsibility.
[Ipse-identity] is represented by the essentially ethical notion of self-constancy. Self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting himself or herself so that others can count on that person. Because someone is counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another. The term ‘responsibility’ unites both meanings: ‘counting on’ and ‘being accountable for’. (Ricoeur, 1992: 165)
Is the dimension of the who accurately staked out that way? I am not sure.
It must be asked, in the first place, what the who precisely picks out. The answer, standardly, is that it picks out a person rather than a thing. But who is the proper subject of the who? Is it someone who makes herself responsible before the other in the institution of the promise? Or is it someone who makes herself responsible for her existence, granted that she has become mindful of the fact that she can die at any moment and that her existence is, accordingly, non-replaceable?
Let me put the question otherwise. What singularizes existence first of all? What makes it mine in the first place? Is it my ethical responsibility before the other?
There are good reasons to think so. For if that responsibility is non-transferable, if no other can take my place in fulfilling my ethical duty to the other, then that duty or responsibility highlights the non-replaceability or uniqueness of my existence.
Now the thing about uniqueness is that it is irreducible to a concept. In particular, it is irreducible to the concept of identity, whether to the concept of specific or that of numerical identity.11 Uniqueness means absolute difference, Levinas says to Raoul Mortley (1991: 16) in an interview. It is like an intuition without concept.
Or shall we say that what singularizes existence, first of all, is one’s exposure to death rather than the responsibility for the other?
I am not sure how to decide that question. In whatever way it is decided, whether in favour of Ricoeur (or Levinas) or Heidegger, it is clear that the terms in which Ricoeur poses the issue precludes him from accurately demarcating the who from the what. The issue is posed in terms of ‘two models of permanence in time’. The suspicion, therefore, is that the what and the who are determined as two species of permanence in time. As the schema of substance, it follows that selfhood and sameness are conceived as two instances of substance. Contrary to what Ricoeur desires to think in terms of his distinction between ipse- and idem-identity, self-constancy and character constitute two instances of the what.
No such suspicion arises with Heidegger. For it is not by reference to two modes of presence that the who and the what are distinguished in Being and Time. It is by reference to the imminence of death, the future, that the who appears as a distinct dimension of Dasein. If the who is the site of singularization, of the non-replaceability of existence, the what is the site of individuation, of the constitution of the numerical identity of substance. Only what is absolute (non-relational) and singular – death in its imminence – can singularize absolutely.
The various characteristics that Heidegger uses to describe dying in section 50 of Being and Time are in effect characteristics of imminence, bevorstehen.
[Death] reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped. As such, death is something distinctively impending (Bevorstand). (BT 294)
Dying is an end before which Dasein always already stands. It is not a telos, a potentiality whose actualization fulfils and perfects Dasein.
With ripeness, the fruit fulfills itself. But is the death at which Dasein arrives, a fulfillment in this sense? (BT 288)
Let us suppose that Dasein attains a state of maturity in the world in the Aristotelian sense. It is perfect and whole. It is engaged in fulfilling its elected potentialities-for-being-a-self. Nevertheless, its end does not cease approaching. Its end is not a potentiality that calls for being actualized or exercised like a habit or virtue. Its end is, properly speaking, atelic. It can have no reality or actuality for Dasein, no mode of presence, save as what is to come at any moment. Death is imminence pure and simple.
As long as Dasein exists, it cannot finish dying. It is as if dying was interminable for Dasein, as if death was always not yet or no longer there, and the gap, in truth infinitesimal, between existence and nonexistence never ceased shrinking without closing.
That is why ending for Dasein cannot signify being at an end (Zu-Ende-sein) but, rather, being towards the end (Sein zum Ende). Death’s imminent approach discloses the dimension of the to come (Zu-kunft). It reveals the future on which Dasein projects itself in anticipation. The self-projection on death in anticipatory resoluteness manifests Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself. This ‘“ahead-of-itself” is what first of all makes such a Being-towards-the-end possible’ (BT 303).
Ricoeur (1992: 123) is right to say that the self-constancy of Dasein finds its meaning in anticipatory resoluteness.
Existentially, ‘Self-constancy’ signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness. (BT 369)
Self-constancy in Heidegger means neither self-sufficiency (autarky or independence) nor the ethical responsibility to the other accomplished in the promise. It signifies Dasein’s ability to come back to itself as the same, its power of self-constitution. Heidegger writes in the Zollikon Seminars:
The constancy of the self is proper to itself in the sense that the self is always able to come back to itself and always finds itself still the same in its sojourn. (Zo 175)
As I show in greater detail in the next section, this power of self-constitution does not rest on a solid foundation. In resoluteness, Dasein projects itself on death before returning to itself as the same. As a consequence, it is in principle vulnerable to suffer loss of self, anxiety and absolute disorientation. Its social and practical identity is never without some trace or evidence that it is, in its very being, related to death. After all, the reason why its existence is always an issue for it is that it is affectively aware that it can die at any moment.
I have argued that a first-person ownership of the relation to death is not possible (see section 3). If that argument is sound, then the question arises whether a first-person ownership of one’s existence is possible in the face of death. Or does anxiety before death bring to naught the mineness of existence?
Heidegger seems to be in two minds about this. In Being and Time, he sees the possibility of death as authenticating his description of existence as a thrown projection that is uniquely mine in each case. In What is Metaphysics?, the possibility of death or anxiety appears as the complete undoing of mineness.
In the second chapter of Division II of Being and Time (see Chapter 2.4 for a detailed analysis), Heidegger argues that Dasein can own its existence in the first person (authentically) only if it can own its being-toward-death in the first person (as its ownmost possibility of being).
Conscience calls Dasein from its fallenness in the mundane world of das Man. It calls it to assume responsibility for itself. Dasein is answerable to itself because it has been entrusted to itself: it finds itself disclosed as an entity in the world, that is, projected as a possibility of being (say) a carpenter or teacher, a parent, a sister, etc. Conscience calls it to take responsibility for this disclosure or projection since its non-replaceable existence is at stake in it.
That is something that becomes conspicuous to Dasein in anxiety. In anxiety, Dasein is present to itself as an entity that is both disclosed in the world and disclosive of the world. It has itself as an entity that is both projected and projecting.12
Here the disclosure and the disclosed are existentially selfsame in such a way that in the latter the world has been disclosed as world, and Being-in has been disclosed as a potentiality-for-Being which is singularized, pure, and thrown. (BT 233)
Disclosed as thrown projection, Dasein now faces the choice of having to choose itself. What it chooses in choosing itself is not a factical possibility like being a carpenter or teacher. Anyone can be a carpenter or teacher. What is uniquely its own is the formal structure of existence, namely thrown projection. That is what it must choose and own as if for the first time rather than continue to take for granted its transcendental constitution.
Dasein can do so, Heidegger insists, to the extent that it projects a factical possibility on death. Why death? Because death removes the content of that factical possibility, it renders it insignificant and brings in relief its formal structure. It shows that I remain naïve so long as I continue to think that to be a teacher is a social role in the world or a natural station in society rather than a projection into which I have been thrown, and for which I am responsible, since projection is an accomplishment of mine.
It is thus by focusing my factical possibilities on death that I can start owning the factical situation that I find myself in explicitly as mine. ‘Courage for anxiety in the face of death’ (BT 298) makes possible an authentic appropriation of existence.
In What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger is more cautious. He suggests that there is an alternative to the three possibilities, sketched out in Being and Time, of responding to anxiety:
(a)I flee from anxiety before death by immersing myself in the world. I live my existence as one lives it, that is, by understanding myself from what I do or from how others perceive me. That is self-evasion in the face of anxiety and death or inauthenticity.
(b)I am brave for anxiety. I am thus able to appropriate existence explicitly as mine in given factical situations.
(c)I am indifferent to anxiety before death. It does not affect me or, more precisely, anxiety remains latent. Here I understand my existence in a modally undifferentiated way, that is, this self-understanding is not explicitly articulated from either the first- or the third-person, authentically or inauthentically.
Heidegger writes in Being and Time:
This potentiality-for-being, as one that is in each case mine, is free for authenticity and inauthenticity or for a mode in which neither of these has been differentiated. (BT 275)
In What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger suggests that in addition to these three possibilities, which depend on the fact that existence is mine in each case, anxiety can be so overwhelming and unsettling that it can bring about the collapse of mineness. What appears in such a situation is a singular existence that is unclaimed by the self and that remains, in consequence, anonymous.
The aim of What is Metaphysics? is also different from Chapter 2 of Division II of Being and Time where death and anxiety appear in the course of an argument that is designed to show that an ontic-existentiell attestation of an ontological structure is possible. Heidegger delivered his inaugural lecture before the faculties of the natural and social sciences at the University of Freiburg in 1929. He argues that it is not possible to talk about entities without having some understanding of the kind of entities they are and also of how they are. That understanding does not have to be articulated in concepts or propositions in order to talk about entities. It is a general presupposition, a necessary condition of possibility, of any meaningful talk about entities. I must have some vague or inexplicit grasp of the is, for instance, if I am able to distinguish between the is of predication and the is of identity in the sentences Socrates is wise, and Socrates is a human being.
Another way of saying the same thing is that there is no science without metaphysics. Science represents a particular way of talking about entities, whereas metaphysics is concerned with the being of entities. Heidegger then argues that the understanding of the being of entities, whether or not it is richly articulated or explicit to itself, presupposes, in turn, an understanding of the difference between being and entities. What is that difference? That difference is what comes to light in anxiety. It is Dasein.
Anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves – we humans who are in being – in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though ‘you’ or ‘I’ feel ill at ease; rather, it is this way for some ‘one’. In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there. (BW 101)
Daher ist im Grunde nicht ‘dir’ und ‘mir’ unheimlich, sondern ‘einem’ ist es so. The sudden collapse of meaning in anxiety is radically disabling, Heidegger tells us. It is so unsettling that the I vanishes. Put differently, the collapse of meaning is an experience that can no longer be owned in the first or third persons. All that remains when the world grows dark in anxiety, when language and meaning withdraw, and the ability to refer to the self or to the other has been quashed, is the experience of being there pure and simple.
But is an experience like that possible? Does not the possibility of experience depend on the possibility of owning it in the first person, as Kant and Husserl show in different ways?
That is what Dan Zahavi argues in Self-Awareness and Alterity. He says that there is no type of experience that lacks a first personal mode of givenness. By first personal givenness, Zahavi does not mean self-identification through criteria such as name, sex, physical appearance, family, nationality, profession, knowledge or memories. None of these third personal characteristics are necessary in order to think of or to refer to oneself as I.
Suppose someone is suffering from amnesia. She is immobilized in a dark room and is ignorant of her biography. She is still capable of being self-aware and saying I do not remember anything.
[The I] refers without attributing any specific property to the entity in question, and my awareness of myself is consequently not mediated by the awareness of any identifying property. (Zahavi, 1999: 7)
[The I] cannot fail to refer to the object it purports to refer to, and one can consequently speak of its ontological and referential priority over all names and descriptions. (Zahavi, 1999: 3–4)
The self that I am aware of when I utter the sentence I do not remember anything does not exist apart from the pre-reflexive experience of being unable to remember anything. It is neither the transcendental ego that unifies the goings on of the empirical ego nor is it the empirical ego, an object posited in the world.
The subject or self referred to in self-awareness is not something apart from or beyond the experience, nor is it a new and further experience, but simply a feature or function of its givenness. If the experience is given to me originarily, in a first-personal mode of presentation, it is experienced as my experience, otherwise not. (Zahavi, 1999: 12)
Zahavi contends that there is an irremovable centre or orientation to experience. There is a first-person to which experiences are always given. At bottom, an experience is given to me, or it is not an experience.
Is Zahavi correct? Is an experience such as Heidegger describes in What is Metaphysics? inconceivable?
Let me consider cases of depersonalization. Someone who suffers from that condition believes that others control their thoughts or that there is someone else who is thinking their thoughts. Doesn’t that suggest that there is a mode of experience that lacks givenness in the first-person?
Zahavi is sceptical of the way such experiences are described.
[Although] the experiences of a subject suffering from depersonalization have been described as experiences which lack the peculiar quality of my-ness, one might question the accuracy of this description.
Depersonalized experiences appear strange and intrusive. But, Zahavi continues, ‘They cannot lack this formal kind of my-ness, since the subject is aware that it is he himself rather than somebody else who experiences these foreign thoughts’ (Zahavi, 1997: 154).
That argument is hardly convincing. It merely asserts what needs to be proved. That is that the subject is aware of being the owner of these foreign thoughts. Zahavi’s assertion contradicts a patient’s self-description that Ronald Laing reports in The Divided Self.
I forgot myself at the Ice Carnival the other night. I was so absorbed in looking at it that I forgot what time it was and who and where I was. When I suddenly realized I hadn’t been thinking about myself I was frightened to death. The unreality feeling came. I must never forget myself for a single minute. I watch the clock and keep busy, or else I won’t know who I am. (Laing, 1969: 109)
The patient is recalling that she was not aware of who she was and of where she was at the Ice Carnival. It is as if, whilst being there, she was not there, as if she had become a living corpse, experiencing a ‘death’, an eclipse of ‘myself’, which had brought on the feeling of ‘unreality’. That is why she now insists: ‘I must never forget myself for a single minute’ (my emphasis).
Zahavi does not give us any good reason for thinking that this patient has misdescribed her experience.
It might be argued that some experiences of depersonalization are experiences of extreme self-objectification. Zahavi observes:
The subject is so obsessively preoccupied with his experiences that they are gradually transformed and substantialized into objectlike entities, which are then experienced as alien, intrusive, involuntary, and independent.
Self-objectification is a form of reflective self-awareness. That presupposes the first personal givenness of pre-reflexive self-awareness (Zahavi, 1999: 156).
It certainly seems as if a depersonalized experience is objectified in an act of reflection. But that does not capture the full extent of the experience. I find it odd, in the first place, that Zahavi does not once mention Heidegger’s account of anxiety. All of the experiences of depersonalization that Laing reports in The Divided Self (on which Zahavi draws) are experiences of anxiety.
In the second place, the schizoid doubtless has a heightened awareness of her outward behaviour. She regards it as meaningless, insubstantial, unreal or mechanical. But that is a defence mechanism against anxiety before death. Death is understood by some patients as loss of self, as becoming one with the world (Laing, 1969: 99; see the case of James), as the kind of sacral fusion that Hölderlin describes at the start of Hyperion and whose loss he mourns in the remainder of the poem:
To be one with all that lives, to return in blessed self-oblivion into the All of nature. (Hölderlin, 2011: 13)
Let me first consider what fails to function in depersonalization. Depersonalization might be described, in a first approximation, in Rimbaud’s phrase as ‘I is an other.’ Existence is not or is no longer mine. What does that mean?
It does not mean that my existence has now become an object to me or that it is now under the control of some alien voice. The schizoid lives under a constant threat. That is that her existence is slipping away from her. Mineness is always on the verge of collapsing. It is as if her ability to project her existence as hers was about to fail.
That is what Laing suggests when he describes the depersonalized subject as ‘ontologically insecure’. That is a subject whose identity is so weak and feeble that she is pulled in contrary directions.
On the one hand, she lacks the conviction that she is real. Contrary to what Descartes believes, she cannot be sure that she exists when she thinks. She needs to be in the presence of others who can be aware of her, since that alone can give her the reassurance she needs: to know that she does indeed exist and is real. She believes that I am, I exist, is a true proposition that applies to her, not each time that it is put forward by her mind, but so long as others are conscious of her. She thus makes herself visible to others so as to protect herself from the overwhelming feeling of being unreal, insubstantial, a nullity.
At the same time, however, to be visible to others is to be exposed to danger. The danger is that others are aware of her just as she is aware of herself, that is, as an insubstantial thing, a nullity.
Accordingly, the subject de-subjectifies herself. She makes herself invisible to herself and to others as well in an act of self-oblivion. She blends with the landscape like a chameleon and becomes one with what there is.
Indeed, considered biologically, the very fact of being visible exposes an animal to the risk of attack from its enemies, and no animal is without enemies. Being visible is therefore a basic biological risk; being invisible is a basic biological defence. We all employ some form of camouflage. (Laing, 1969: 110)
The schizoid lives in a conflicted and tensed state. She needs to be visible and invisible at the same time. She needs to be visible to others so that she can be convinced that she exists. She needs to be invisible to others and to herself so that she can be convinced that others don’t see her as she sees herself.
That is how a patient described her experience:
It struck me that if I stared long enough at the environment that I would blend with it and disappear just as if the place was empty and I had disappeared. It is as if you get yourself to feel you don’t know who you are or where you are... . I would just be walking along and felt that I had blended with the landscape. Then I would get frightened and repeat my name over and over again to bring me back to life, so to speak. (Laing, 1969: 110)
By blending with the landscape, Laing comments, the patient lost ‘her autonomous identity, in fact, she lost her self’. She did not faint. Consciousness does not disappear when the self disappears. Instead, the disappearance of the self seems to bring about an intensified awareness, an acute anxiety that is blinding and that leaves one speechless. It is as if the marked differentiation between entities, their distinct outline and boundaries, suddenly dissolved and what remained was the presence of an undifferentiated whole, a void or ‘empty place’, as the patient puts it, in which the distinction between I and you, and self and world has totally vanished.
To a certain extent, this camouflage and blending with the environment is a game, a ruse or pretence. But that is also where the trouble lies, according to Laing:
The individual may find that the pretense has been in the pretending and that, in a more real way than he had bargained for, he has actually lapsed into that very state of non-being he has so much dreaded, in which he has become stripped of his sense of autonomy, reality, life, identity, and from which he may not find it possible to regain his foothold ‘in’ life again by the simple repetition of his name. (Laing, 1969: 111)
We stand, then, before two options. Let us say that we agree with Zahavi that an experience is necessarily given first-personally. It follows that none of what Laing reports and none of what Heidegger says about anxiety qualifies as a description of experience.
I have grave doubts about that. Not least because Zahavi’s fairly conservative transcendental phenomenological notion of experience seems to force him to reject reported descriptions of experience for no apparent reason other than that they do not fit the theory.
The other option is that we acknowledge that givenness in the first-person or self-reference is not an irreducible and necessary feature of experience. Anxiety, the relation to death, and schizophrenia articulate the absolute limit of transcendental philosophy. They show that the possibility of consciousness is not necessarily constrained by the unity of the first-person.13
On the basis of the evidence adduced in this section, it is reasonable to assume that mineness can collapse in anxiety before death. Isn’t that what it means to be mortal? Exposed to death as death, the sense of things can fail, leaving me unable to think and say I, you. In such a situation, all that remains is the sheer fact of being there.
Heidegger claims that I can own existence in the first-person only if I can own the relation to death in the first-person. Dasein can be authentically itself (eigentlich es selbst) only if it can become free for its own mortality (eigenen Tod) (BT 308). Since it is impossible to own the relation to death in the first-person, as I have shown in section 3, I cannot see how it is possible to own existence in the first-person before death.
Instead of enabling it to unify itself in an act of self-appropriation, anxiety before death tends to fracture the unity of the self, as I showed in section 5 and as Heidegger acknowledges in What is Metaphysics?. That must mean that the courage in the face of anxiety that makes possible an authentic appropriation of existence is a theoretical construct in Being and Time and not merely a somewhat rare and exotic possibility.
At the same time, I argued against Zahavi that the fracturing of the unity of the self is a possible experience, providing that the sense of experience is broadened and is not unduly restricted to first-personal givenness.
Now Zahavi is not the first to have ruled out the possibility of such an experience. In Aporias, Derrida argues that access to death as death is not possible. As a result, it is not possible to distinguish Dasein from the ‘animal’ and the existential analytic falls to the ground. If access to death is impossible, then Dasein will perish like the ‘animal’. Let me cite Derrida’s passage from Aporias in full.
The impossibility of existing or of Dasein that Heidegger speaks of under the name of ‘death’ is the disappearance, the end, the annihilation of the ‘as such’, of the possibility of the relation to the phenomenon as such or to the phenomenon of the ‘as such’... . According to Heidegger, it is therefore, the impossibility of the ‘as such’ that, as such, would be possible to Dasein and not to any form of entity and living thing. But if the impossibility of the ‘as such’ is indeed the impossibility of the ‘as such’, it is also what cannot appear as such. Indeed, this relation to the disappearing as such of the ‘as such’ ... is also the characteristic common both to the inauthentic and to the authentic forms of the existence of Dasein, common to all experiences of death (properly dying, perishing, and demising), and also, outside of Dasein, common to all living things in general. Common characteristic does not mean homogeneity, but rather the impossibility of an absolutely pure and rigorously uncrossable limit ... between an existential analysis of death and a fundamental anthropo-theology, and moreover between anthropological cultures of death and animal cultures of death. (Derrida, 1993: 75)
Derrida seems to be saying that Heidegger’s thinking of death in Being and Time is caught in a double bind. Either death can appear as such or it cannot. If it can appear as such, then it was never what it was supposed to be, notably, the inapparent, or what is to come at any moment, since a death that can appear as such carries the sense of demising or perishing. It is the other’s death or the ‘animal’s’, an objectified death.
But if death cannot appear as such, then Dasein finds itself in the same predicament as the ‘animal’, since death can also not appear to it. The key sentence in the passage seems to be the following:
But if the impossibility of the ‘as such’ is indeed the impossibility of the ‘as such’, it is also what cannot appear as such.
Derrida seems to have omitted a third alternative beyond this either/or. It is true that death cannot appear as such. However, its refusal to appear or its non-appearance can appear in anxiety. No doubt, the impossible is impossible. But it does not follow that the possibility of the impossible is, in turn, impossible.
Heidegger is clear that, whatever else can be said of it, the possibility that constitutes death is not a category of being. It is not a modification of presence (see section 2). Possibility does not mean here unfilled actuality.
The closest closeness which one may have in being toward death as possibility is as far as possible from anything actual... . Death as possibility gives Dasein nothing to be “actualized” and nothing that Dasein, as actual, could itself be. (BT 306–7)
Death cannot have any reality for me save as something that is to come at any moment. The meaning of the future is determined by this imminence. But if this future is not a modality of the present, if it cannot be thought under a category of being as a modification of presence, then to think the relation to death is to think, beyond being as presence, an alterity that is without common measure in the world or without precedent in history. The uniqueness of death – of a death, someone’s – marks each time the end of history. It also spells the end of an entire epoch that has sought the meaning of being by reference to the present or its modalities.
Heidegger and Derrida are both thinkers of that end. Aware that death is not a modality of the present, Heidegger envisages anticipation as a mode that puts Dasein in relation with it, whereas Derrida sees in mourning (the relation with the death of the other) a relation with a past that was never present.
Derrida’s argument against Heidegger in Aporias must, in fact, be taken with some caution. On the one hand, his argument suggests that the categories of being constitute an absolute limit on thought. It is impossible to think of death, he seems to be saying, since it cannot appear as such, that is, since it exceeds the categories of presence or phenomenality.
But, on the other hand, Derrida’s entire project of deconstruction consists in showing that what appears as such does not constitute a limit on what can be thought. More precisely, it consists in showing that what can appear under a name, a concept, or an identity, does not impose a limit on what can happen. The impossible can happen. The impossible is that for which there is (as yet) no name, concept, or identity. Death in Heidegger is very much a thing like that and, I think, Derrida knows this well.
Derrida uses the word impossible in at least two senses in his reading of Heidegger in Aporias. At times, he uses it in the classical sense to mean that which cannot be or be conceived. That is how he uses it when he has in mind Blanchot’s claim that the instant of my death is an impossible experience. Blanchot speaks of ‘the impossibility, alas, of dying’ (Derrida, 1993: 77). Derrida sometimes inflects the sense of Heidegger’s description of being-toward-death in that way. He says, for example, that dying is the aporia, ‘the impossibility of being dead, the impossibility of living or rather “existing” one’s death’ (Derrida, 1993: 73). But, as François Raffoul (2010: 292) has rightly pointed out in The Origins of Responsibility, Heidegger’s analysis of being-toward-death has nothing to do with the supposed possibility or impossibility of an experience of its occurrence.
When Dasein dies – and even when it dies authentically – it does not have to do with an experience (Erleben) of its factical demising. (BT 291)
It is because Derrida thinks of death in Blanchot’s sense as an impossible experience that, as Raffoul observes, he concludes his critical reading of Heidegger with the Levinasian claim that the death of the other is, phenomenologically, the first death.
[I]f death is indeed the possibility of the impossible ... then man, or man as Dasein, never has a relation to death as such, but only to perishing, to demising, and to the death of the other .... The death of the other thus becomes again ‘first’, always first. It is like the experience of mourning that institutes my relation to myself and constitutes the egoity of the ego... . The death of the other, this death of the other in ‘me’, is fundamentally the only death that is named in the syntagm ‘my death’. (Derrida, 1993: 76)
Another sense of the impossible emerges in these reflections on mourning. The impossible here means the unique. If what constitutes appearance or phenomenality (the as such) is the possibility of exchange or substitution, the present or representation, identification or determination under a concept, then the unique is (the) impossible. The unique is unidentifiable against a horizon or background since it is absolutely unlike anything that was past or is present. But the impossible, Derrida insists, can be experienced. It can come to pass in mourning.
Somewhat like Ricoeur and Levinas, Derrida holds that the singularization of the who takes place in the ethical relation with the other human being, in friendship and mourning. As he shows in The Politics of Friendship and Memoires for Paul de Man, there is no friendship without the possibility of mourning. Since one friend must die before the other, mourning lies at the basis of friendship.
Freud conceives of mourning as labour or work, as the negation and sublation of the other into oneself, as a kind of cannibalistic process of assimilation and ‘interiorization’. For Derrida (1993: 61), ‘originary mourning’ consists in the thoughtful remembrance (Gedächtnis) of the other in her singularity. It is a mourning that affirms the alterity of the other rather than a work of memory or interiorization (Er-innerung).
What transpires in originary mourning is the felt difference between the memory of the other – the other who is now nothing more than an idea or memory – and the other’s absence, which is absolute and singular, and which the mournful self is unable to contain. That felt difference reveals the other in her uniqueness.14 It also makes Freudian mourning impossible.
It makes what Freud calls successful mourning impossible where the dead other is assimilated in the self without remainder. It also makes unsuccessful mourning impossible, as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok describe it, where a part of the ego is identified with the dead other who then continues to live on in the ego as a stranger, unassimilated or undigested (see Derrida, 1985: 57–8).
The other who is irrevocably gone and absent draws the self to ‘an absolute past’ (Derrida, 1989: 66). The self cannot assimilate this past nor can it identify with it.
Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory. With the nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as other, and as other for us, upon his death or at least in the anticipated possibility of a death. (Derrida, 1989: 34)15
The possibility of the friend’s departure from the world is singularizing. It throws the self back on its ‘terrible solitude’ (Derrida, 1989: 33). It constitutes the self as a responsibility before the other, as an infinite responsibility of remembrance. Originary mourning opens the space of ethics for Derrida.
The ‘other appears as other’, he says in the passage above. The impossible can come to pass. The absolute and singular absence of the friend, which reveals the other in her uniqueness, opens itself in mourning. From that perspective, a certain rapprochement becomes possible between Heidegger and Derrida.
Derrida distinguishes originary mourning as an opening to the absolute past from the Freudian conception of mourning as labour and assimilation of the other. In a similar vein, Heidegger distinguishes anticipation as an opening to the absolute future from expectation as a relation to entities that become present in the world.
Heidegger is clear that the relation to death does not have the form of an expectation. To expect is to represent what can come to pass. Expectation puts Dasein in relation to entities with a view to their possible actualization and presence. By contrast, vorlaufen puts Dasein in relation with a future whose proximity to the present is infinitesimal but incalculable. Death can come at any moment. That distance between the future and the present, although miniscule, is beyond any conceivable measure. It marks the space between existence and ‘the impossibility of any existence at all’ (BT 307). It is in that space of time, as we shall see in the next chapter, that Levinas’s ethics of the other human being unfolds.