How Death, Demise, and Time Structure Dasein’s World
“The walls are beating/ It’s my reflection in my death/ It’s the alarm clock riding the horizon” –Tim Kinsella, A Tell Tale Penis
Heidegger’s conception of death is one that is simultaneously integral to his philosophical project in Being & Time, yet also subject to misunderstanding and conflation with the similar yet fundamentally distinct concept of demise. Like many of the other newly employed neologisms, death’s significance coincides with his notion of care, authenticity, temporality, and anxiety, so much so that the conflation between death and demise may generate contradictions and misunderstandings. Death’s colloquial signification is what Heidegger means by ‘demise’, that being “kicking the bucket”, so to speak. ‘Death’, on the other hand, is a specifically existential and ontological mode of being for Dasein that situates Dasein temporally, as it lurks ‘two steps ahead’ and out of sight from us, but its possibility never fully disappearing. Death also, however, as part of its ever-looming possibility, can happen to Dasein, and further, is something that Dasein can overcome. This paper seeks to make this distinction between death and demise clear, and by doing so, demonstrate the methodology of Heidegger’s concept of death so that we may realize how Dasein relates itself to its world.
To contextualize this essay before jumping into death, we must first make clear both how Dasein and its world intersect and ‘shape’ one another, and, then, how our Dasein has beflindichkeit, or mood. Firstly, Dasein is not a ‘subject’ that perceives ‘objects’, rather, Dasein has an ontological “being-in-the-world” where its being (specifically, its understanding of that being) is formed by ready-to-hand and present-at-hand entities that ‘anchor’ its life projects; these entities are “given meaning” by Dasein which is projected unto its world (as in, a student has a different meaningful relationship to a pencil (and equipment in the world) than an artist does), and in turn, the entities that ‘arise’ in its world will influence what life projects Dasein takes on. Heidegger writes that “Dasein understands itself in terms of that which it encounters in the environment and that with which it is circumspectly concerned” (439). For example, someone who grows up around musicians and instruments may develop a life project of being a guitarist, whereas a rural child would more likely take on some life project involving nature. These entities relate to us via our circumspective concern, or care, where our life projects give Dasein a ‘lens’ to equip various entities and overlook others. This is like how an architect would see the fine details of a building’s structural design that other people wouldn’t notice. Yet that architect might miss the way the building feels crowded, dank, or dirty.
Death and demise can only be introduced with reference to Dasein’s ontological temporal significance, and one of the ways that Heidegger incorporates temporality into his model of Dasein is through his concept of mood (or ‘attunement’). Mood builds off of the relationship between Dasein and world, and it is precisely because of our mood that Dasein is able to have a ‘care’ towards its life projects in the first place. Heidegger writes that “we are never free of moods” (175) to mean that our mood is the ‘prescription’ for the aforementioned lens that Dasein uses to understand its world. For example, a tennis player, after losing many matches in a row, may develop a ‘bad mood’—this mood will impact whether or not they decide to continue with the sport, and, further, is a prime example of how Dasein faces its ownmost possibility of “no-longer being-able-to-be-there” (294), that is, its ‘null basis of being’. “In [Befindlichkeit], Dasein finds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possibility of its existence” (310); because Dasein’s understanding of its world is in a way “contingent” on (or ‘self-guided’ to become) itself, Dasein’s ownmost possibility is ‘nothing’ when it is separated from its life projects. For example, the tennis player who quits the sport (after having sunk so much time and energy into it) may feel ‘directionless’—Saturday becomes just like any other day, where prior it was ‘game day’ or ‘practice day’.
When things in our world lose this ‘personalized’ significance to us, we come face to face with the ‘nothing of our possibility’, as we realize that we could decide to not be engaged with our current life projects, or that we could be engaged with any other project instead. The tennis player’s past has an ‘inertia’ to it that pushes Dasein towards (or away from) their life projects; when the player considers whether to continue with the sport, they will reflect on the times that they won or lost, and make a decision on their present actions. This is what Heidegger means by historicity, as our being (in the present) is formed by how our past decisions moved us forward. Dasein also has an element of ‘thrown-ness’ in the sense that Dasein has a past that it was not able to choose—both in the sense that Dasein doesn’t choose to be Dasein, and other various ‘ontical’ qualities, such as bad eyesight, being dyslexic, or being poor. Dasein was thrown into its world, and must come to understand that world. Heidegger writes that “The thrown-ness of [Dasein] belongs to the disclosedness of the ‘there’ and reveals itself constantly in [Dasein’s] current [mood]. This [mood] brings Dasein… face to face with the fact ‘that it is, and that it has to be something with a potentiality-for-Being as the entity which it is’” (321). By “the disclosedness of the ‘there’”, he means that we are thrown into a world that already has names for things (Dasein can’t decide what a ‘table’ is called, for example). While this explains how Dasein is constantly engaged with its past, it should not be assumed, however, that historicity is Dasein’s grundstimmung, or ‘fundamental mood’, as it is secondary to Dasein’s fundamental relationship to futurity.
Heidegger calls the relationship between Dasein and its future ‘being-towards-death’. To explain this, we shall clarify precisely what Heidegger means by ‘death’, which itself may more easily be understood by beginning with what death is not, that is, demise and perishing. Heidegger firstly writes that “the ending of that which lives [is] called ‘perishing’” (290); when a tree can no longer produce sugar from photosynthesis to feed itself, and its biological process brings it to an ‘end’, it perishes. Demise is similar in that it does involve this ‘biological’ aspect of Dasein reaching its end, but, because Dasein has a unique ontico-ontological level of understanding itself (and projecting itself into the world with its life projects, which a tree cannot do), it does not “simply perish” on the basis that its end is not just the ceasing of its biological function—Dasein’s end is primarily the end of its world, and demise can ‘cut this short’, as someone could demise before their world ends. In an opposite way, one may also say that plants can and only perish because of how the tree has been disclosed in our world (i.e., we structure a science, namely biology, that describes the ‘end’ of the tree, but this tells us nothing about the tree’s phenomenological experience of its perishing (if there is any), only what we observe).
Heidegger writes, “Dasein too can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish” (291). He is explicitly highlighting how Dasein has two distinct relationships to ‘death’, one being its demise, and the other being its existential death. Dasein “ending without authentically dying” would be like when someone demises in their sleep, and is does not ‘meet’ or ‘witness’ the impending horizon of demise (which, otherwise, may result in facing existential death). Dasein has existential death as a possibility because Dasein it is ontico-ontological: it is an entity that is fundamentally concerned with its own being. This is also how we can make sense of what Heidegger means by “the ‘end’ of being-in-the-world” is death” (276-7), as existential death places Dasein, aware, amongst a world that is ‘grounded’ in “the abyss of meaninglessness” (194); Dasein’s ‘pre-death’ world is what ends here, although the entities in that world (and Dasein itself, of course) still ‘physically persist’, but Dasein’s world becomes “uncanny”, and we must learn (or be ‘called forth’ by the world, and pulled into it by a new project) to make sense of it again to get out of death and reconnect with the world. This reconnection is, finally, how Dasein gains understanding, and is why Dasein is a “future-oriented” entity. Further, ‘Abyss’ here is the translation of the original German ‘abgrund’, which literally could be heard as ‘off’ (ab-) ‘ground’ (-grund), or even ‘absent-ground’. Thus, when Heidegger later describes Dasein as the “null basis for its null projection” (333), we know that he means Dasein, the entity whose being is ‘wholly nothing’, projects that ‘nothing’ onto a world that is ‘nothing’ (when without meaning, of course). Put simply, Heidegger writes that “death is a possibility-of-being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. In death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-being” (294).
Finally, and perhaps most importantly to the distinction between death and demise, is the fact that Heidegger’s concept of death and being-toward-death inherently structures Dasein’s relationship to demise. He writes that “anxiety in the face of death must not be confused with fear in the face of one’s demise” (295). He’s stressing here that the two concepts are distinct, yet our fear of demise is sometimes thought of as a ‘driving force’, or ‘root cause’ for our actions and conditions. While this could be true, on some disclosed scientific level, Dasein’s fear of existential death is what bases the fear of demise ontologically. We fear death because we would have to, again, come face to face with our inner ownmost ability-to-be. No one can bare-witness to their own demise, as we have no phenomenological evidence to say what happens after our demise. However, as Dasein demises, it could still ‘witness’ it, as it happens. That being said, our demise could be unlike anything we’ve ever known, and at that moment, we could face an existential death—as we demise, we would simultaneously witness the collapse of our intelligible world. The fear of demise is fundamentally a fear of death, and outlines a response to the Epicurean notion that “where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not”. Heidegger’s philosophy would contest this most apparently as something like ‘when death is here, Dasein is here, too.’
Heidegger’s philosophy of death is one that views death as possibility. Death should not be boiled down to the relationship between Dasein and its demise. Instead, it should be understood that existential death has a more ‘relevant’ or immediate relationship to Dasein and its world—we must accept that death could come at any moment, and the meaning of the entities I surround myself with, or those that ‘just happen’ to surround me in my thrownness, could all collapse. Heidegger doesn’t expect us to stay in this ‘nullity’ forever, but to precisely form understanding and to make new meaning on our world. A properly ‘existential’ understanding of death, then, is necessary to doing justice to Heidegger’s work, as it influences how we come to understand temporality, world, and care.
Citations
Heidegger, M., Macquarrie, J., & Robinson, E. (1962). Being and time. [San Francisco, Calif.], HarperSanFrancisco.
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