Death by Dasein

Interlude. This week, we take a detour off the road Toward Meaningful Work to examine what exactly Heidegger means by Dasein and Being-toward-death, and why these concepts are relevant to the "turning toward death" I believe is necessary to overcome the "Work Ethic."


Obligatory bibliography, or books you may also want to check out.

Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden: Blackwell, 2013.
Dennis-Tiwary, Tracy. Future tense : why anxiety is good for you (even though it feels bad). New York, NY : Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublilshers, 2022. 

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other existential, phenomenological, mythological, ontological, and socio-political questions regarding Work (Life and Death). I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 4: Death by Dasein

Alright, no beating around the bush, it’s time to start talking about death and dying. 

Ah, who am I kidding? Of course I’ve got some more anecdotes and one big definition to throw your way first. 

When I was a grad student, I was a Philosophy TA for three courses; Critical Thinking, Deductive Logic, and Intro to Philosophy. The main topic of the Intro class was Philosophies of Death and Dying – yeah, way to get introduced to Philosophy – starting with Plato (and so also the death of Socrates), and Lucretius, and then getting into Judith Butler and Michel Foucault about the body, suffering, and precarity, and contemporary ethical and legal scholarship on things like Euthanasia and the Right to Die, or Death with Dignity legislation.

I’ve long had a somewhat quiet fascination with death, well, not death per se, but death and dying, and afterlife mythologies and philosophies. I was never so goth as to dye my hair black and paint my face white, well, I have, not at the same time, and not because I was a goth, the first was for a Connor Kent/Superboy cosplay and the later was a Joker costume, but I have had a picnic in a cemetery, done some photography in cemeteries, and had some pretty fascinating visits to the Catacombs, the Montparnasse Cemetery, and the burial vaults in the Paris Pantheon and Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides. And, not to mention I’m a big fan of museums. 

I mentioned in the intro that I that I had attended an after-school catechism program, well, I was raised and confirmed Catholic, and an avid(ish) church-goer into my teens. In my final Religious Education “report card” the Priest informed my parents he’d not had a student with such a grasp of religious concepts and encouraged them to enroll me in seminary. Not an idea I was particularly fond of given the life becoming a priest would have entailed. Also, having grown up with Jewish and other non-Catholic friends, it was always in the back of my mind that I could never quite reconcile the idea that good people, who had done nothing wrong, could and would be punished for all eternity simply for following the “wrong” religion.  This really stood out after having moved to the South where Catholics, like my family, were considered cultists, and Jews, Muslims, and everyone else were a small minority (now, to be fair, Charlotte has by and large moved on from this since we moved here, but you don’t need to go far to find area where this is still the case). 

That… dissatisfaction, left me wanting to explore other options, and I cast that net pretty broadly across history, philosophy, theology, and mythology, and I have found that history has left me grounded, philosophy has kept me questioning, and mythology has left me enamored with storytelling. But, nothing in theology ever satisfied my questions regarding the punishment and reward theory of the afterlife. If anything, the deeper I looked into theology, the less I thought of organized religion in general. As an art history geek though, I have to admit a… complicated relationship with religious art and architecture. But, I’m sure we’ll get to that eventually. I was just listening to an Acid Horizon podcast on Deleuze and Agamben and their, competing, essays on art and creation, and lets just say I have plenty to say regarding art and work. 

If I needed to sum up my thoughts on death and slap a label on it, I would say I’m an existentialist. I find the idea that we are ‘condemned to our freedom’ (and thus ultimately and entirely responsible for our actions) to be the most ethically compelling argument regarding life and death. We are not, by nature, good or evil, saints or monsters, saved or damned, we are simply what we have chosen to do, for good or ill, and, of course, with the caveat, that not all of our choices are free – most of our choices are restricted by one power structure or another – but if our society is to be ethical, we must hold each other, including and especially the powerful, [With great power comes great responsibility] accountable for those choices. 

To paraphrase Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, without hope, without witness, without reward, just be kind. 

Now, in the last episode, I mentioned a concept of Heidegger’s, Dasein, but didn’t want to hammer everyone over the head in definitions for the whole episode, so left that one hanging a little. But since that’s coming back up now, let’s first unpack it a bit. 

Heidegger’s Being and Time is a 500 page beast in which he lays out the ontology of Being – the essential being of Being, what a Being is, and his basic mechanism is Dasein. Literally, in German, if you break it up, Da, “there,” (as in over there, but, more accurately as in thrown over there) and sein, “being,” and of course Dasein a capitalized noun. It is a “there-being.” I’ll try to be concise here, but thanks to the joys of English homophones and German grammar, this is a little thorny as spoken English, a Dasein is a being (lowercase) for whom their (possessive) Being (uppercase) matters. It’s not just their being (in the verb form) but their Being (in the noun form) that matters to them. It’s something they think about, imagine into the future, take pains to preserve, and are generally concerned with it’s, i.e. their own, continued existence. 

Also critical to Dasein are its being-in-the-world, its being-with-others, and, especially for our purposes, its being-towards-death. And yes, of course those are all hyphenated phrases. 

Super abridged version, Dasein’s being-in-the-world (all hyphenated), is its existential facticity. Its.. how it is, in the world, in reality, as such. Dasein is not a brain in a jar or Neo in the Matrix, it is a real Being being in the world. It’s is also Dasein’s that which is ready-to-hand (its how it is encountered – for example, a hammer is ready-to-hand as equipment when it is used to hammer a nail, or a pair of shoes are ready-to-hand as equipment when they’re worn, well, as shoes). It is also spatial, in that it encounters others in the world, and does so with concern and familiarity. And, importantly, it can get lost in this, in it’s everydayness, in its in-the-worldness in being fascinated by what is in the world, in its, well, they-self.

Regarding concern and familiarity, Dasein encounters the other as with concernful solicitude – the other’s being solicits concern. 

Its being-with-others is the “existential-ontological meaning” of Dasein. Its phenomenal being-as-such. It doesn’t matter if the Other is present or not, “Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein,” says Heidegger, “even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived.” In fact, their Being-away or Being-missing are only possible because of Being-with, and Dasein’s Being-alone is only a “deficient” form of Being-with.

To try to sum this up, a human being is always already in the world with other human beings, and even being alone is only possible in a specific, spatial relation to others. Others, it is critical to note, that are themselves also Dasein. Dasein’s possibilities for being depend on its Being-with-others. 

(Now, if you want to take this in a slightly different direction, check out Emmanuel Levinas, who flips this on its head a bit, somewhat inverting Descartes’ cogito (the, I think (or I doubt, rather) therefore I am) into the Other sees me, therefore I am)

Alright, Being-towards-death. 

Death is the ultimate, final, possibility-of-Being, and as possibilities for Being are dependent on being-with-others, death is one’s “ownmost, non-relational” possibility, and the issue of concern is one’s no-longer-being-with-others. 

Heidegger states, “This ownmost possibility, however, non-relational and not to be outstripped, is not one in which Dasein procures for itself subsequently and occasionally in the course of its Being. On the contrary, if Dasein exists, it has already been thrown into this possibility.”

Death is not a possibility one can choose for or against. By virtue of one’s existence, one has been thrown into the path of the inevitability of death. One is, factically, already dying. There is no question of if, only when. 

“Thrownness into death reveals itself to Dasein,” Heidegger continues, “in a more primordial and impressive manner in that state-of-mind called ‘anxiety.’ (Angst being the German term that Heidegger’s using)… That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world itself. That about which one has this anxiety is simply Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being. Anxiety in the face of death must not be confused with fear in the face of one’s demise.”

So, important note here regarding anxiety (Angst) and fear. Fear of one’s own end, for Heidegger, is a kind of cowardice, an inauthentic version of being-towards-death. He’s also approaching this as universally applicable. These states apply to Dasein – to a human being being a human being as such. So one’s individual fears are their own, not Dasein’s.

With that, two more distinctions. First, anxiety and fear.

The common psychological conception of anxiety and fear, that anxiety is without a direct object and fear has a direct object isn’t really what Heidegger is referring to, but it can be helpful to use in contrast.

Generally, if I’m claustrophobic, then my fear has an object, enclosed spaces, or if I have a fear response to seeing a bear on a trail in the mountains, the fear is in response to the bear. There is a clear (even if only potential) danger present-to-hand, to stick with Heidegger’s terminology, that is causing my fear. On the other hand, anxiety typically has no direct object (though it can be general or specific; a general sense of anxiousness or a specific sense of dread when, say, a loved one calls and says, “we need to talk.”).

Clinical psychologist and author Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, in Future Tense, notes that “Whether general or specific, anxiety is what we feel when something bad could happen, but hasn’t happened yet.” Anxiety arises from projecting oneself into a future. 

For Heidegger though, fear is superficial, everyday, (in that is in response). “Fear is anxiety, fallen into the ‘world’, inauthentic, and, as such, hidden from itself.” Authentic anxiety, on the other hand, is existential to Being-in-the-world. It is because anxiety is the existential condition, that Being-in-the-world, being alongside it and being concerned with it, that such a Being-in-the-world can ever be afraid. 

Okay, second distinction we need to make is in Heidegger’s references to authentic and inauthentic. The aim is to be, towards death, authentically. 

Heidegger states, “Factically, Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part in an inauthentic Being-towards-death. How is the ontological possibility of an authentic Being-towards-death to be characterized ‘Objectively’, if, in the end, Dasein never comports itself authentically towards its end, or if, in accordance with its very meaning this authentic Being must remain hidden from others?” 

Quick little side-note there. I find that line particularly interesting. This idea that the authentic being must ‘remain hidden from others.’ Keep in mind, this is being written after the formation of the Nazi party,  but before Heidegger was elevated to the rector position and joined the party himself.  

As far as inauthenticity, Heidegger is pointing to two crucial problems in how Dasein behaves and thinks. First, that Dasein, in concerning itself with its own Being and acting towards continuing to be, puts aside the existential facticity of Dasein’s own end… Death. Second, that Dasein’s general mode towards death is fear of death, and thus avoidance of death, in the face of its inevitability. And third, that it doesn’t actually appear possible. Authentically Being-towards-death appears to be a contradiction in that “concerning oneself with actualizing” means signifying “bringing about one’s own demise – which contradicts concerning oneself with being – and “if it were done, Dasein would deprive itself of the very ground for an existing Being-towards-death.”

Heidegger points out earlier in the text that we’re only able to know death, basically, secondhand, because of the Other. We can only witness death. We cannot know death. As thinking is part of being, and death is the end of our being, we can’t think anything and be dead at the same time. Our being-in-the-world and Being-with-others, the death of the other, evidences the facticity of death. Writ large, the lack of immortality across the whole of human history evidences the facticity of death for all future humanity – now, it could be argued, that’s not necessarily true. As Hume pointed out, inductive reasoning – that because X has always happened such and such a way in the past, X will continue to happen that way in the future – is a logical fallacy. And it is logically false to claim that if I flip a coin in the air it will fall because it has always fallen before. Logically, there is a possibility that at some point, the coin won’t actually fall, if I base that reasoning, in my argument, on past behavior. Logically, it is only safe to say that because the coin has always fallen before, the most likely scenario is that the coin will continue to fall in the future.

Science!

We could spend a whole episode, hell, we could spend a whole semester, I’m sure scores of philosophy grad students before me have even spent entire degrees and post-bac and post-grad research projects, on what Heidegger has to say about authenticity, but, for our purposes here, I’m just going to try to sum up authenticity regarding Being-towards-death. 

It is in the anticipation of death, the “waiting for the actualization,” that we can come close to understanding what death means as possibility. Death, is the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all. Death” he states, “as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be.” It’s a contradiction. Dasein, being a human being as-such, cannot be and not be at the same time. Anticipation of death “signifies the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence.” 

But wait, there’s more! And I’m just going to roll with this whole upcoming passage. For those of you playing the home game, we’re in Being and Time, Heidegger’s pagination, 263. Please do not confuse this with the Heidegger drinking game, drinking every time he says Dasein or Being – I strongly encourage against this, unless it’s water, maybe, I mean, you’ll be super hydrated, one might even say, Being-hydrated. And I hope(?) this episode doesn’t become the PvW drinking game.

States Heidegger, “Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-Being [(as a quick reminder, we’re still in the capitalized noun form of Being territory – the Being, noun, of being, verb)] of that entity whose kind of Being is anticipation itself. In the anticipatory revealing of this potentiality-for-Being, Dasein discloses itself to itself as regards its uttermost possibility. But to project itself on its ownmost potentiality-for-Being means to be able to understand itself in the Being of the entity so revealed – namely, to exist. [(take that cogito)] Anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being – that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence.”

Now, recalling the earlier definition of anxiety, Heidegger notes anxiety is “a basic state-of-mind [that] belongs to such a self-understanding [understanding being accompanied by a state-of-mind] of Dasein [that has been brought face to face with the thrownness of its ‘that-it-is-there’, face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of existence, and now open to the constant threat to itself of its own individualized being] on the basis of Dasein itself.” One’s own individual being is itself the potentiality for non-existence. If I exist, then I will die. “Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety.” 

Okay, so, a last bit on authenticity. Having now defined anxiety existentially, Heidegger summarizes authentic Being-towards-death as such, “anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather in an impassioned freedom towards death – a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.”

So, Being-towards-death isn’t death-seeking or sitting around waiting for death, or living in fear of death, avoiding – even mentally, as belief in an afterlife fundamentally requires a denial of the impossibility of existence and a projection of one’s self, and others, beyond the impossibility of their existence – it is a self-understanding and certainty of one’s own, individual existence, free from the “they,” no longer concerned with asking for confirmation of one’s own existence, validation-seeking to be contemporary, and anxious of one’s own end. 

Now that we have an idea of what Heidegger’s Being-toward-death means, what does turning toward death mean? Great question! And we’re gonna’ save it for next week. This episode has felt kinda’ dense, so, I’m going to leave some space to chew on it for a bit. 

Next week, we get back to my meaningful work argument and tackling turning toward death, a little bit of Marx, and a whole lot of Bataille. 

‘til then.  

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