An Ontological Study of Death: From Hegel to Heidegger

5. Heidegger: The Ontology and Onticity of Death

229 5 Heidegger The Ontology and Onticity of Death [D]eath [is] the highest and utmost testimony of being. —Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger’s analytic of death in Being and Time forms the culmination of the literary and philosophical thanatology that I have discussed in the foregoing chapters of this study. His understanding of human finitude as a supreme possibility of existence that both intimates freedom and reveals selfhood has obvious precedents in the works of Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Rilke. Numerous parallels with respect to main ideas, specific terms, and even minor motifs exist between Heidegger’s views and those of his predecessors. Whether this means that Heidegger was directly influenced by their writings remains difficult to say or at least to prove conclusively. As I will demonstrate below, while it is clear that he was reading these authors throughout his early academic career, his tendency to obscure the deeper sources of his thought makes it impossible to stake any definite claims in the realm of intellectual property. Furthermore, Heidegger’s own belief that thinking ultimately stems from being rather than from individual beings effectively immunizes him from all ontic-positivistic inquests into his reading background—to say nothing of his political past. But overall I am concerned less with the question of influence than with the factical implications of Heidegger’s analyses. For Heidegger, ontology must in the end be grounded in onticity and his formal existential sketches similarly require existentiell attestation if they are to be more than just arbitrary constructs. I hold that such factical testimony can be further concretized in examples from literature and nonabstract philosophies such as Nietzsche’s and the early Hegel’s. I am therefore interested in determining whether such works as the Phenomenology of Spirit, The Death of Empedocles, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and the Duino Elegies can provide “pre-ontological evidence” (BT 405) of an authentic and inauthentic being-toward-death. Heidegger himself finds prior corroboration of Dasein’s basic care-structure in the ancient cura fable, which Herder and Goethe have taken up in the poem “Das Kind der Sorge” (The Child of Care) and Faust II respectively (see BT 184–85; 405). In calling attention to this mythological-anthropological text and its literary transformations, Heidegger suggests that at various points in its history Dasein has in fact been able to understand itself according to the existential classifications—the so-called Existenzialien— of fundamental ontology. Other allusions to literature occur in his exposition of death and similarly serve to substantiate his ontological models. He cites, for instance, Johannes von Saaz’s The Bohemian Ploughman as an exemplification of being-toward-the-end (see BT 228; 408) and later refers to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich in the context of an inauthentic being-toward-death (see BT 235; 409). Robert Bernasconi has examined the function of Tolstoy’s tale as a “literary attestation” of Dasein’s relation toward its end. Bernasconi correctly observes that the story not only illustrates Dasein’s everyday attitude toward death but, as Heidegger’s footnote clearly states, “the shattering and the collapse” of this inauthentic outlook.1 It is my contention that Heidegger could just as easily have mentioned works by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Rilke, and even the more theoretical Hegel as documentary proof of the formal structures of existence outlined in Being and Time. Indeed, these sources inform his ontology of death far more than do the writings of Tolstoy and Johannes von Saaz. Throughout my discussion of Being and Time I 230 An Ontological Study of Death will point out various connections to the texts dealt with thus far. For reasons of space, I cannot scrutinize all the parallels aligning Heidegger with his forerunners but must leave some to the power of suggestion based on my comments in the previous chapters, where I anticipated several of these links in a gradual effort to bolster the ever-widening thematic web that extends from dialectical to existential conceptions of death. In the end, I believe that my approach lends support to Herman Philipse’s theory about the underlying patchwork structure of Being and Time. According to Philipse, “Heidegger’s philosophy is a patchwork made out of many different materials that Heidegger borrowed from others and transformed to suit his purposes, materials that do not fit together very...