THE EVENT OF DEATH: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ENQUIRY

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2 MARTINUS NIJHOFF PHILOSOPHY LIBRARY VOLUME 23 For a complete list of volumes in this series see final page of the volume.

3 The Event of Death: A Phenomenological Enquiry by Ingrid Leman-Stefanovic 1987 MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBLISHERS a member of the KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LANCASTER

4 IV Distributors for the United States and Canada: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Assinippi Park, Norwell, MA 02061, USA for the UK and Ireland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, MTP Press Limited, Falcon House, Queen Square, Lancaster LAI lrn, UK for all other countries: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, Distribution Center, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Leman-Stefanovic, Ingrid. The event of death. (Martinus Nijhoff philosophy library ; v. 23) Bibliography: p. 1. Death. I. Title. II. Series. BD444.L ' ISBN-13 : DOl: / e-isbn-13: Copyright 1987 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Softcoverreprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, P.O. Box 163, 3300 AD Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

5 Dedicated to the memory of my mother Katya Grib Leman

6 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION XI PART ONE: ONTOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE PHENOMENON OF DEATH: A Heideggerean Interpretation INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE: INDIVIDUATION AND TEMPORALITY A. Transcendence as the Key (i) The Necessity of Individuation as Revealed in the Meaning of Transcendence: Lessons from Kant (ii) The Meaning of Transcendence as Temporality.. 28 B. Temporality as the Meaning of Individuation (i) Heidegger's Understanding of Individuation as Grounded in Care (ii) Temporality as the Meaning of Care CHAPTER TWO: TEMPORALITY AS THE MEANING OF BEING-TOWARDS-DEATH A. Inauthentic Understanding of Death B. Temporality and Authentic Being-towards-Death (i) Existentiell Attestation of Potentialityfor-Being-one's-Self (ii) Ontological roots: the temporal structure of Advancing Resoluteness C. Historicity and Being-towards-death

7 VIII CHAPTER THREE: DEATH, TIME AND APPROPRATION A. The Development of Heidegger's Thought B. The Later Heidegger on Time and Appropriation C. Death in History, Poetry and Language D. Death and the Emergence of Being in the Essence of the Thing CHAPTER FOUR: A PROJECT BEYOND HEIDEGGER PART TWO: DEATH AS AN ONTIC E-VENT: coming to terms with the phenomenon of death as a determinate possibility. INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE: REFLECTING ON ONE'S OWN DEATH: A. The Intelligibility of the Phenomenon of My Own Death as a Determinate Event B. A pre-reflective awareness of a determinate possibility: a phenomenology of imagination C. My Own Death as a Determinate Possibility: Reflections on Terminal Illness (i) My Own Death, against the backdrop of Being-there (ii) Some Patterns of a Terminal Illness ( iii) Implications regarding the analysis

8 XI CHAPTER TWO: THE DEATH OF THE OTHER A. Solicitude: condition of the possibility of an ontological awareness of the ontic e-vent of the death of the Other (i) (ii) ( iii) ( iv) A Heideggerean perspective Heidegger on Solicitude The Relationship of Authentic Solicitude: Beyond sein und zeit The In-finitude of Authentic Solicitude B. The E-vent of the Death of the Other (i) (ii) ( iii) (iv) Understanding of the Potentialityfor-Being of Others Solicitude as a projection of our Beingtowards-Death: the temporal roots of the Belonging-together of Death and Love A Death Recovery CHAPTER THREE: THE PHENOMENON OF IMMORTALITY A. The Possibility of my own Immortality B. The Immortality of the Other

9 x PART THREE: ONTIC/ONTOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE: ONTOLOGY AS CONCRETE CHAPTER TWO: IS PHENOMENOLOGY STILL TOO METAPHySICAL? Bibliography Key to abbreviations

10 I N T ROD U C T ION "Before he is 'cast into the world', as claimed by certain hasty metaphysicians, man is laid in the cradle of the house.. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact... "1 In this quote, Gaston Bachelard points to a most cornmon sin of philosophers: a sin of over-generalizing and abstracting to the point that their grand systems become irrelevant to the concrete facts of daily existence. Before I can be seen to be simply "thrown" in-the-world, let us remember that I am thrown within a definitive situation, among essents, among significant Others, "in the cradle of the house", as Bachelard notes: let us beware of our over-intellectualizing existence to the extent that we lose sight of the concrete, lived moments which, explicitly and implicitly, make our lives meaningful. This book is on the topic of death, not as it relates to grand metaphysical schemes of the ultimate purpose of the uni- 1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 7.

11 XII verse, but as it relates to the concrete, ontic realities of the phenomenon of death, as it appears to human consciousness. This is not to say that the book commits no sin: in fact, it commits a most serious "sin" of attempting to address more than one audience; an audience of those well-versed in the phenomenological thought of Martin Heidegger, as well as those who approach the Heideggerean ontology for the first time or with little background! Let me speak first, to the latter group. Heidegger's central conviction and essential objective was to "raise anew the question of the meaning of Being". At first glance, this appears to be the most serious sort of abstraction and generalization one could imagine, but in fact, as this book attempts to show, this is not necessarily so. In Part One, we deal exclusively with Heidegger's Interpretation of the phenomenon of death, specifically within the context of his ontological quest for the meaning of Being. We describe how it is that man is the only one who can ever be engaged in this quest, how his individuation is defined by Being, and how it is that the phenomenon of Being-towards-death reveals the authentic temporal roots of man as essentially finite. While there are a number of excellent books already in print summarizing Heidegger's views on death, Part One of this book is meant to not only introduce these views once again in a somewhat different

12 XIII form, but it is also meant to set the foundation, particularly through the discussions of individuation, transcendence and temporality, for a firm understanding of Heidegger's ontology, without which subsequent chapters lose their significance. Those "well-versed" in Heidegger's work, however, may wish to pass immediately to Part Two, where we go-beyond Heidegger, hopefully yet remaining faithful to his central Thought, to unfold the special signifiance of concrete, determinate ontic events of death as revealed to the terminally ill patient, and to those who survive the death of someone whom they love. It should be clear that we are heading in Part III to a rethinking of the meaning of the Ontological Difference itself. Part of the incentive to do so carne to me in the form of a challenge posed a number of years ago by Thomas Langan2 in his article on "Transcendence in the Philosophy of Heidegger": a challenge (quite inadequately addressed to date) to explore the factuality of contingent existence in such a way as to "fulfill the basic program of a concrete, phenomenological philosophical structure outside of all arbitrary metaphysical limits".3 2 I am grateful to Professor Langan for his review of major portions of this manuscript, for his suggestions, and for his support of the entire endeavour. 3 Langan, Thomas, "Transcendence in the Philosophy of Heidegger", in New Scholasticism, Vol. XXXII, 1958, p. 60.

13 XIV In this unique article, Professor Langan suggests that only if concreteness is explored without being understood as simply equivalent to limiting particularity, "this development will be the unmistakeable indication that the philosophy of Heidegger has at last become the fundamental ontology by rooting itself firmly in Being."4 Citing Levinas' criticisms to be "basically just", the article points out how: "Side by side with the awareness that every phenomenological analysis must arrive at an encounter with the brute existence of the things that are, another current of Heidegger's thought manifests a conception of being as a general form, vague as the Plotinian One, as indefinite as the Platonic Good, a kind of Great Light which spreads its illumination over the things that are and, while being none of them, while being no-thing, while, properly speaking, not being at all, brings all to be... -Not that this conception is without value. It manifests a vivid awareness of the fundamentalness and transcendent mystery of the ontological fundament of all things... But does the fundamentalness of being and its transcendent mystery, to avoid being identified with a particular seiende, have to be expressed as something grounded in non-particularity?"5 Professor Langan proposes then, that "what is lacking in Heidegger's philosophy is a fundamental phenomenological analysis of the conditions of Seiendheit in relation to the unlimited existence of its ontological ground, das Sein", and therefore, 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid, p

14 xv "the very foundation of Heidegger's thought becomes anti-particularistic before the conditions of particularity have been submitted to a thorough phenomenological investigation."6 The specific challenge, then, in response to which this book was written, was brought home by Professor Langan when he wrote: "... the assertion that das Sein 'hides itself', that it transcends in its essential nature our direct knowledge, does not justify the assumption that das Sein cannot be explored phenomenologically through the partial revelations of the Seienden. The question should be rather how."7 That question, of course, was the crux of the matter. How was one to begin to explore the essence of "concreteness" in such a way as to remain faithful to the rich Heideggerean insights, and therefore avoid the representative limits of metaphysical structure? The advice of Heidegger was helpful here. He is reported to have said in the Der Spiegel interview that even for him, "the greatness of what is to be thought is too great. Perhaps we might bring ourselves to build a narrow and not far-reaching footpath as a passageway."s The clue, then, as I saw it, was to explore one particular, concrete event, the event of death, in 6 Ibid, p Ibid, p. 57. S Heidegger, M. "Only a God Can Save Us", p. 284.

15 XVI the hope of providing some "passageway" to the general problem of the essence of concreteness, as posed by Professor Langan, and as required, in my view, by the original Heideggerean enterprise. Perhaps one of the most startling revelations to me has been how very fundamental (-even more than I initially expected) the description of the ontic moment can be for an understanding of the ontological. Not only is Time seen to pervade the structures of mourning the ontic event of the death of the Other, and of eventual Recovery. What also emerges is how Dasein's transcendence as a happening or a coming to pass of ontological comprehension is essentially modified by virtue of the ontic event: in fact, if primordial Time is, as Heidegger describes, "forming in advance the pure aspect of succession which serves as the horizon", this book uncovers how an ontic event can change the very form of the "forming in advance". Certainly, Time remains the transcendental horizon, but for the terminally ill patient, that horizon now has an end in view; and that end is going to change the meaning of the horizon itself. This book, then, is a book about Death; but it is also a book which raises some fundamental questions about the meaning of the relationship between ontology and the concrete, determinate ontic event, as much more than simply an inauthentic covering up of Being, but rather, as a revelation of Being itself.