Death is non-substitutable, irreplaceable, and unshareable. Dasein owns its relation to death in a privileged, first-person way. To be sure, that is true not only of the relation to death. For Levinas, responsibility overcomes the solitude of Dasein. Death is a social event. A dying being is always in relation with the Other, and in an ethical bond. And This question -the question of death- is unto itself its own response: it is my responsibility for the death of the other.
The passage to the ethical level is what constitutes the response to this question. The turning of the Same toward the Infinite, which is neither aiming nor vision, is the question, a question that is also a response, but in no way a dialogue of the soul with itself. A question, a prayer—is this not prior to dialogue? The question contains the response as ethical responsibility, as an impossible escape GDT, p. Accordingly, Derrida writes:.
For Chanter Heidegger does not seem to explore the connotations of the issue of death on the basis of substitution. She writes that Heidegger, by prioritising the idea of the individualisation of Dasein through death, misses the moral issue of the act of substitution of oneself for another.
Heideggerian subject, attaining authenticity in being-towards-death, is resolute and free towards death in its authenticity, and through anticipation Dasein recognises that it is lost in das Man :. In patience the imminence of defeat, but also a distance in its regard, coincide. The subjectivity of a subject is vulnerability, exposure to affection, sensibility, a passivity more passive still than any passivity, an irrecuperable time, an unassemblable diachrony of patience, an exposedness always to be exposed the more, an exposure to expressing, and thus to saying, thus to giving.
Saying, the most passive passivity, is inseparable from patience and pain, even if it can take refuge in the said, finding again in a wound the caress in which pain arises, and then the contact, and beyond it the knowing of a hardness or a softness, a heat or a cold, and then the thematization OB, p.
In Levinas, I cannot accept death or affirm it this way because if I can, I am trapped in solipsistic self-realisation. For Heidegger, the mood which properly allows Dasein to be disclosed to itself is anxiety. It is, for instance, different from the mood of fear, which Heidegger explains as inauthentic in his ontological-existential analysis, as fear is directed at a definite object whereas the object of Angst is always indefinite, a nothing.
As such, does not have the capacity to suspend Dasein face to face with death as its own utmost possibility. Anxiety is anxious about the potentiality-for-Being of the entity so destined [ des so bestimmten Seienden ], and in this way it discloses the uttermost possibility. Anticipation utterly individualizes Dasein, and allows it, in this individualization of itself, to become certain of the totality of its potentiality-for-Being.
For this reason, anxiety as a basic state-of-mind belongs to such a self-understanding of Dasein on the basis of Dasein itself. Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety BT, The subject, thus, is able to conceive its Being-in-the-world, thrownness and nullity within the state of mind of Angst , and through a crisis in meaning-making, reaches freedom towards death. What anxiety gives is both the presence as existence and the realisation of a futurity of not existing. Dasein faces the possibility of its termination, as well as its factical possibilities.
It is not the fear of death, but anxiety in front of being-able-not-to-be. Anxious Dasein sees its world and experiences it as being uncanny.
The meanings produced by the significance of das Man collapse, as Dasein is ushered into a new opening. Through the alienation of anxiety, Dasein understands itself as fallen, becomes an individual, singular and unique in its own possibilities.
In short, anxious Dasein faces itself, its possibilities, and its own termination — the subject-object encounter. However, for Levinas, one cannot efface the negative character of death in anxiety:. This is a domain in which the relation is in no sense an adequation. A nothingness impossible to think. The there is is not something that the subject traverses through death — death is powerless in the face of il y a.
Levinas questions Heideggerian ontology which conceives evil as a deficiency and lack of being:. Is not the fear of Being just as originary as the fear for Being? It is perhaps even more so, for the former may account for the latter. We shall call it the fact that there is. In it subjective existence, which existential philosophy takes as its point or departure, and the objective existence of the old realism merge.
It is because the there is has such a complete hold on us that we cannot take nothingness and death lightly, and we tremble before them. The fear of nothingness is but the measure of our involvement in Being. Existence of itself harbors something tragic which is not only there because of its finitude. Something that death cannot resolve EE, p. There is a certain neutrality and indifference to death. The il y a has no exists, it is cold and depersonalised.
Horror is associated with the night and the nocturnal. When night is dissipated with the first rays of the sun, the horror of the night is no longer defineable.
In a similar manner, the Levinasian night with its dancing, insinuating shadows, hosts the horror of the asymptotic il y a. When Levinas approaches the Heideggerian concept of nothingness as something to transcend, overcome, he also contests Being as still the mirror image of nothingness.
These are the characteristics nausea shares with anxiety, but it differs from it as to how it relates to the idea of nothingness and manifest nothingness differently: In the nothingness of anxiety there alone rises up the original opening of the being as such, that means: that it is a being and not nothing.
The essence of this nothingness, which is our original experience of negation, lies in that it carries, before all else, the Dasein before beings as such ibid.
The body experiences nausea in the face of nothing encountered as pure being, being with no exists, the ultimate entrapment. The absolute futurity of death in Levinas is ultimately the transcendent futurity of the Other, of whose face reveals infinity.
And with this signification we shift from phenomenology to ethics, because for Levinas inter-subjectivity, the relation to the other person, my relation to you, is first significant as an ethical relation. Nothing could be farther from the ontological analysis of Heidegger which left ethics and other persons behind as merely ontic or inauthentic Cohen, , p. This is why the Levinasian instant as a naked urgency appear as the il y a , and existing is prior to living in the world. The subject experiences horror in the face of the there is which comes before any experience of the world, and to which death not a solution, and finds its reflection in the transcendent futurity of the Other.
In dying for the Other, Levinas sees the ultimate morality and ethical subjectivity. Thus, with the ethical turn, Levinas enters and provides a broader philosophical space within which a multifaceted account of death is revealed.
Chanter, T. Cohen, Richard A. Critchley, S. John E. Nelson, NY: Suny Press. Heidegger, M. Levinas, E. T o try and compress dense pages of Being and Time into eight brief blogs was obviously a difficult exercise from the start. But, I must admit, this was also part of the attraction. Despite the limits of this virtual medium, I hope that something of the book has been conveyed in a way that might encourage people to read more and further.
Being and Time is extraordinarily rich, difficult and systematic work of philosophy that repays careful reading and rereading. That Heidegger continues to arouse controversy and heated misunderstanding is evidenced by some of the responses to these blogs.
All I would ask is that Heidegger's detractors you know, the "this is bullshit" brigade take the trouble to read his work with a little care and to pause before reacting. Although there is so much more we could say about division two of Being and Time, there is one final topic that I'd briefly like to explore and which some readers think is the climax of the book: temporality.
Let me begin by describing what Heidegger is trying to avoid in his discussion of time. Firstly, he is trying to criticise the idea of time as a uniform, linear and infinite series of "now-points". On this model, which derives ultimately from Aristotle's Physics , the future is the not-yet-now, the past is the no-longer-now, and the present is the now that flows from future to past at each passing moment.
This is what Heidegger calls the "vulgar" or ordinary conception of time where priority is always given to the present. Heidegger thinks that this Aristotelian conception of time has dominated philosophical inquiries into time from the ancient Greeks to Hegel and even up to his near contemporary Bergson.
Secondly, he is trying to avoid any conception of time that begins with a distinction between time and eternity.
On this understanding of time, classically expressed in Augustine's Confessions, temporality is derived from a higher non-temporal state of eternity, which is co-extensive with the infinite and eternal now of God.
In order to understand what Heidegger means by temporality, we have to set it in the context of the existential analytic of Dasein that I have sought to describe.
The discussion of being-towards-death in blog six led to the idea of anticipation, namely that the human being is always running ahead towards its end. For Heidegger, the primary phenomenon of time is the future that is revealed to me in my being-towards-death. Heidegger makes play of the link between the future Zukunft and to come towards zukommen. Insofar as Dasein anticipates, it comes towards itself. The human is not confined in the present, but always projects towards the future.
But what Dasein takes over in the future is its basic ontological indebtedness, its guilt, as discussed in the previous blog. There is a tricky but compelling thought at work here: in anticipation, I project towards the future, but what comes out of the future is my past, my personal and cultural baggage, what Heidegger calls my "having-been-ness" Gewesenheit.
But this does not mean that I am somehow condemned to my past. On the contrary, I can make a decision to take over the fact of who I am in a free action. This is what Heidegger calls "resoluteness".
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