Several months ago, I posted a five-part series discussing intersections of Division One of Heidegger’s Being and Time
Although Heidegger seldom if ever mentions Thomas Aquinas in Being and Time, the opening section often brings to mind Thomas’s doctrine of analogy and the philosophical problems that come up when philosophy abandons the analogical character of Being. ?For Thomas, there are certain realities, most of them divine, that do not participate in the same order of being with mortals. ?Therefore the words we use to talk about them and the concepts that we develop to make sense of them must stand analogous to the realities rather than simply pointing unmediated to them. ?So when we call God just, there is a genuine relationship between the justice of a good king and God’s ordering Creation, but one is not simply the other writ small (or large). ?And when we talk about the consummation of the Resurrection, there is a genuine relationship between that reality and the sowing of a seed, but there aren’t processes that translate literally.
In Being and Time, Heidegger analyzes the character of death, noting that one’s own death is impossible to conceive precisely because all of our tools, language included, are suited primarily to everyday life and only later, with a change in orientation, become modes of speculation. ?So death, for Dasein (which, remember, translates most readily as “there-being” in the sense of “there is a person named Gilmour” rather than “there is the road, and here is the sidewalk”), can only be a negation and an utter negation, a not-existing for a being who can only conceive of existing.
Several objections immediately pop up, and Heidegger does address some of them. ?One might object that, at a funeral, a group of people (sometimes quite large) experiences death together. ?Heidegger notes that the actual body of phenomena that we call experience only apply to the people still living; the departed is still with us, but there’s no good reason to say that we’re still with the departed. ?We can “be alongside” them, but that’s still our being, not the departed’s (282). ?Likewise, one might object that there might be life after death, but Heidegger replies to this by saying that even if there is something that lies beyond, it lies beyond the phenomenon called Death, which remains a negation (292), and although he does not make the next move, a responsible Christian thinker could, I think, appeal to the doctrine of analogy and say that any teaching on whatever does come after must, like 1 Corinthians 15, engage in the speculative and often frustrating activity of comparison on analogous but not univocal planes of being.
The ethical implications of this human ontology have to do with ordering one’s life as a being that will cease. ?Heidegger grants that everybody (or almost everybody) “knows” that she or he is going to die, but he notes that popular consciousness (which he signifies with the German “das Man“, a rough analogy to “one” in the phrases “every-one knows that people die” and “one should not dwell on that”) treats death as a disease that one “catches” at a discrete moment in time, untroubled by it at other times. ?Heidegger prefers to imagine authentic Dasein as Being-towards-death, a life that is ordered not as if life and death have nothing to do with one another but in a way that resolutely faces the always-present possibility of non-existence.
What that resoluteness looks like will be the matter for the next post.
I will say, before I get there, that Heidegger does not seem to be advocating a black-T-shirt-and-beret kind of “dwelling on death” that existentialists sometimes get pegged with. ?In fact, he notes at one point that an existence always out to get itself finalized denies the potential character of death (305-306), its character of simultaneously?lurking around the next corner and deferring itself for another thirty years. ?As a Christian, I have to think about the way that our Scriptures talk to each other about such things, on one hand confronting the hearer with parables about a man whose life will be demanded of him “this day” (that has to be in Luke, no?) on one hand and detailed instructions about how the old men (presbyteroi/elders) are to teach and guide the young for the sake of perpetuating the apostles’ teaching on the other. ?Once again, I find Heidegger to be the honest sort of atheist, one who really does table questions that are best left to theolgians and sticking to the contours of human existence as human reason can apprehend it. ?If we Christians can (with a suitably critical eye) appropriate the best of these thoughts, I can’t but think that we’ll have good opportunities to rethink (and certainly re-pray) our own stances towards thanatos, the demise of life as we know it, before we start speculating on the order of things afterwards.
I look forward to reading more. I’ve been pondering the whole problem of universals thing lately (even to the point of posting on Theologica! Who would have thought?) and bandying about the “realist” vs “nominalist” positions. So far the best I can come to is while realism may be the meta-narrative (I know, not very post-modern) nominalism seems to be where we live. Not that Heidegger or your post address this. Just that both are thought provoking.
Joe
I was wondering where the connection was going to be, but you cleared that up nicely.
Hegel actually does more work with universals than does Heidegger. His fascinating move is to locate universals in the particular entity. But that’s for another post and another day, no?