• bloodninja
    272
    So I'm new here. Hi :)

    For Heidegger death functions like a hinge between division one's everydayness and division two's temporality. What seems clear within the context of the whole book is that death must be a formal ontological structure of dasein rather than an ontic way of taking up that structure. His extremely difficult and confusing phenomenology of death shows that he is using this everyday word in a very unusual way. Thus, in using death in his ontological-existential way he is excluding a lot from it; he formalises the everyday concept until the everyday meanings drop out. So for example, he does not mean death as the end of biological life (perishing) nor the way we are towards that end; he does not mean our end as dasein (demise) nor our being toward our demise; he doesn't mean the death of other dasein; he probably doesn't mean death as a major existential crisis (depression) since this is maybe too ontic and not ontological and formal enough. Whatever death is it is clear that one can be toward death it in an owned (authentic) or an unowned (inauthentic) way. Angst has an important role to play also as death's attunement. It's also clear that death is an existential limit-situation. Most problematic is that death has to be a phenomenon.

    While eating a hot curry today my mouth was on fire and I was thinking how the existential-ontological kernel that Heidegger formalises out of the everyday ontic understanding of death is probably most clearly understood as unintelligiblity. Once he has fully formalised death he says that "death is the possibility of impossibility". I think that what he is getting at with 'impossibility' is again most clearly and easily understood as unintelligibility because after-all existential possibility is what gives one's own dasein intelligibility. An owned being-toward-death would be open to a new understanding of being, i.e. open to making the unintelligible intelligible, or as Dreyfus would say, open to the unique situation. Unowned being-toward-death on this interpretation would the tranquilised falling back upon dasman’s everyday familiar intelligibility and thereby becoming closed off to the unique situation and the angst it requires. An owned being-toward-death requires an attuned-understanding: the angst (attunement) that goes with being a world discloser (understanding). It is angst because you're projecting on the basis of your owned groundless uncanniness (unhomeliness). And it is uncanny because it is unintelligible.

    Death is also described as a limit-situation (Jasper's concept that Heidegger takes over). But death is the existential limit of what? The limit of intelligibility. I was also thinking about death as the concealment of being and an owned being-toward-death as the unconcealment of being. I particularly like this last thought!

    Maybe I'm wrong in thinking of death as unintelligibility. My perspective on this topic is a synthesis of my slow readings of Being and Time and also some very helpful commentaries from Bert Dreyfus, William Blattner, Carol White and Kate Withy. Carol White's treatment of death is the most eye opening.

    Does anyone have a different perspective on death in Being and Time?

    Cheers!
  • 0af
    44
    Really facing one's death as death obliterates "everydayness." All of it can be seen from the outside. Perhaps everydayness is immersion in all of the little tasks and goals that life for the most part is. Perhaps life can only be seen as a whole from the virtual outside of our imagined death. This virtual perspective-from-nothingness is perhaps a surfacing that grasps the world as a stage of busy maniacs.

    I understand the possibility of impossibility like this. It's possible that (all of the sudden) all things will become impossible to me. So my possibilities are haunted by (or include) the possibility that all of these possibilities will vanish. Death steals even the possibility of death. You can only die once. As I experience it, this possibility of death is like a nothingness that haunts somethingness. Because it ends, life is a dream. I have to face this death in a solitude that is more or less unique to my dying. In my view, there's a deep form of heroism possible here. There's a new freedom in play for those who can endure the contemplation of the "nothingness" that haunts "somethingness." That somethingness looks more contingent, less binding with its center missing. Immersed in the dream, we wrestle with necessity. With one foot outside of the dream, this necessity reveals itself as optional (we choose to live once we attain the sense of our "right" to dispose of ourselves) and contingent (within the dream there is no final justification for the specific nature of the dream, but only a tracing of relations between its spinning gears).
  • szardosszemagad
    150
    The biggest and most damaging criticism of Heidegger in German philosophical literature is "Warum etwas einfach machen, wenn es auch kompliziert geht?" Which translates into English, "Why make something simple, when you have a chance to make it complicated?"

    It may be completely true what he says about death, but I already have a concept of that, and I don't need to learn what Heidegger means by hinges, by division one, by division two, and by dasein. All these are noise, complicated amplified noise, without which existence was simple and acceptable, and the new concepts overcomplicate things to the extent that their own mother would not recognize them.

    In other words, Heidegger was one of he masters of bullsh(t, and boy was he good at it.If you find any sort of rhyme or reason or meaning in his flow of words, kudos to you. But be honest: are you the wiser for it? Was not death already a concept not hard to internalize? Was it necessary to make the process of dying into a limit-situation, with uncanny (unhomely) unintelligence, thus pulling Dreyfus into the equation, who wanted nothing to do with this in the first place.

    I'll be frank: this sounds like philobabble to me. Death? Do we need to connect it with dasein (which nobody in the English-language speaking philosophical world knows what it means) and with limit issues and with intelligence of unhomeliness?

    Zheesh.
  • 0af
    44


    I think Heidegger translates non-philosophical insights into a complicated language so that they seem like high-tech profundity. That's probably based on an ungenerous oversimplification, though I have put a certain amount of time into trying to see what all the hype was about. Readers of philosophy have a tendency to be seduced by the jargon. I view this jargon as sometimes justified and sometimes indulgent. Anything that can't be paraphrased is suspicious. We want someone out there to be profound, so we project profundity on ambiguity. It sounds high-tech, so maybe we fantasize that we are participating in something as difficult and objective as science and yet as exciting and ethically relevant as literature. Then there's the fame effect. Everybody talks about X, so X must be great. Maybe X will turn out be a fad in retrospect, hammer pants for precocious young men who dress themselves in difficult and prestigious words. The opposite danger is using these kind of doubts to avoid the cost of thinking in a new way (of feeling lost or conned at first.)

    I try to avoid these dangers via the paraphrase test. If I can't offer a thought in my own words along with an argument for its value, having spent some time with an author, then that author is at least more or less worthless to me. I like the idea of stopping there and not proclaiming that author's uselessness to the general, even if I do hold everyone to the paraphrase test. ("Tell me what those words mean to you, so I know you're not unwittingly a fashion victim...")
  • bloodninja
    272
    ("Tell me what those words mean to you, so I know you're not unwittingly a fashion victim...")0af

    I think in really simple terms, For Heidegger, death relates closely to authenticity/mineness. What turns out to be authentic (or owned) are ways of existing (possibilities) that disclose the mineness aspect that is basically characteristic of every dasein. Whereas what turns out to be inauthentic (or unowned) are ways of living that disclose the conformism aspect that is equally basic of every dasein. So for example, any of your possibilities that involve making the world intelligible in a unique and original way are authentic. Whereas, all of your ways of making the world intelligible by falling back upon the everyday meanings circulating within everyday public life, are by default inauthentic.

    It seems pretty clear to me that the anticipation of ontological death is only an extreme case and development of this mineness mentioned in the opening pages of Being and Time. The anticipation of ontological death, as the impossible possibility (note that for Heidegger possibility means a way of existing), is a way of living that is open to new ways of being; is open to making the world(s) intelligible in unique ways.

    The phenomenon of inauthentic being toward death, by contrast, is a turning away from this authentic ontological death and its angst; it is a becoming attuned, either by way of escape or ignorance, into what he calls a cowardly fear of demise.

    An example of an authentic being toward death might be 0af in their posts above, but a good example of an inauthentic being toward death is szardosszemagad:

    It may be completely true what he says about death, but I already have a concept of that, and I don't need to learn what Heidegger means by hinges, by division one, by division two, and by dasein. All these are noise, complicated amplified noise, without which existence was simple and acceptable, and the new concepts overcomplicate things to the extent that their own mother would not recognize them.szardosszemagad
  • n0 0ne
    43
    I think in really simple terms, For Heidegger, death relates closely to authenticity/mineness. What turns out to be authentic (or owned) are ways of existing (possibilities) that disclose the mineness aspect that is basically characteristic of every dasein. Whereas what turns out to be inauthentic (or unowned) are ways of living that disclose the conformism aspect that is equally basic of every dasein. So for example, any of your possibilities that involve making the world intelligible in a unique and original way are authentic. Whereas, all of your ways of making the world intelligible by falling back upon the everyday meanings circulating within everyday public life, are by default inauthentic.bloodninja

    I know that wasn't a reply to me, but I really like it. Would you agree that this kind of thinking already exists outside of Heidegger? Even as a teenager (perhaps you can relate) I felt a certain disgust toward conformity, doing the things that "one" did without question, although they didn't feel right. It was all there for the taking in the word "nonconformist" or in the stories about Van Gogh, for instance. Romanticism. Creative genius. The heroic weirdo.

    Is it possible that Heidegger wrote as he did because the book was a way for him to emerge from the objective /metaphysical pose, still dripping with a metaphysical style? Or did he choose his liberating rhetoric so that it would appeal to his scientistic, academic readers? Was he bringing down the house from the inside? Seducing them in a scientistic language that could sneak under their metaphysical pretentiousness? I'd guess it was a combination of the two. He was pretentiously waking up from pretentiousness and was well-equipped to help others do the same. They would have ignored a 100 page book in clear German and he didn't have the nerve to write it?
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