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An Exercise in Formal Indication (59 Pp.) Seo, Hyo Won, M.A. May 2021 Philosophy Anxiety And Death In Being And Time: An Exercise In Formal Indication (59 pp.) Thesis Advisor: Kim Garchar Iain Thomson (2013) writes that no scholar has methodically thematized and addressed Heidegger’s treatment of existential Angst about the global collapse of Dasein’s identity- defining projects called death. This lack of attention has resulted in a tradition of conflating death and demise. This thesis revisits, in the spirit of the method of formal indication, what Heidegger meant by death as a way of being Dasein. I contend that equal consideration of underlying existential Angst can offer aid in the way of understanding not only the distinction between death and demise, but also the kind of entity Dasein is. This analysis will be followed by an examination of how these contentious notions of death and anxiety were taken up by Heidegger’s first existential phenomenologist audience. Anxiety And Death In Being And Time: An Exercise In Formal Indication A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Hyo Won Seo May 2021 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by Hyo Won Seo B.A., Converse College, 2019 M.A., Kent State University, 2021 Approved by ____________________________________, Advisor Kim Garchar ____________________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy Michael Byron ____________________________________, Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Mandy Munro-Stasiuk TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTERS I. A Formal Indication of Death and Its Impediments ................................................4 1.1 Toward a Definition of Formal Indication .............................................4 1.2 Commentaries on Formal Indication .....................................................8 1.3 Demonstration of Formal Indication ....................................................18 1.4 Challenges of a Formal Indication of Death ........................................20 Conclusion .................................................................................................24 II. The Phenomenology of Death in Being and Time .................................................26 2.1 The Controversy...................................................................................26 2.2 The Apparent Ambiguity of Anxiety ...................................................30 2.3 Anxiety Formally Indicated .................................................................32 2.4 Anxiety and the Call of Conscience .....................................................36 Conclusion .................................................................................................39 III. The Reception of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Death .....................................41 3.1 Camus on Heidegger ............................................................................42 3.2 Sartre on Heidegger .............................................................................47 3.3 Merleau-Ponty on Heidegger ...............................................................52 Conclusion .................................................................................................55 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................................................................................................57 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to start off by thanking my parents, Misook Geum and Jaehwan Seo, for supporting me all these years. I thought of the sacrifices you have made for me in the moments when I felt ineligible to write the very work I conceived. I want to thank my dear friend, Laney Milham, for her prodigious patience; the times in our dorm room when you would set down whatever you had been doing to listen to me vent about some treatise I had read constitute some of my happiest memories. I am incredibly lucky to have several such friends: Margaret Harper Jenkins, who is a philosopher if ever there was one; Carolyn Kerecman, whose way with words rivals her way with a blank canvas; and Nadet Najjar, who is always good for a lively chat at 3 a.m. The faculty, staff, and graduate students of the Department of Philosophy at Kent State University have also been invaluable in the cultivation of my identity and of this thesis. I want to thank Dr. Kim Garchar for going above and beyond as my thesis advisor. I hope to pass on your compassion to my students. I am grateful for the additional guidance from Dr. Anthony Fernandez, Dr. Polycarp Ikuenobe, and Dr. Mark Bracher as members of my thesis committee. I am also indebted to Dr. Smaranda Aldea, Dr. Deborah Barnbaum, Dr. Jung-Yeup Kim, Dr. Frank Ryan, Dr. Deborah Smith, and Dr. Gina Zavota for assisting me in numerous other ways. I want to express my gratitude to my everlasting cohort: Hyeon Sop Baek, Tirza Ben-Ezzer, Ryan Farrell, Colin Geatz, Joseph Klein, Najii Wilcox, Jared Smith, Nicholas Charles, and Griffin Werner. v Anxiety and Death in Being and Time: An Exercise in Formal Indication INTRODUCTION The preconception that Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is an impenetrable text is due in part to the notion of death advanced in Division II. Iain Thomson (2013) writes that Heidegger’s phenomenology of death as the global collapse of Dasein’s (being-in-the-world’s) identity-defining projects has yet to be methodically thematized and addressed.1 This lack of scholarship has resulted in an unyielding tradition of conflating “death” with what Heidegger labels “demise,” and worse yet physiological perishing. In this thesis, I offer an exposition of death that takes the mood of anxiety into considerable account. Heidegger presents anxiety in Being and Time as the catalyst of death, i.e. death occurs when Dasein confronts, rather than represses, the anxiety it has toward the existential breakdown of its projects. My assessment begins, thus, by addressing the question, “How does Heidegger actually characterize the death of Dasein and what role does anxiety play in this account?” I then examine how the French existential phenomenologists took up these basic underpinnings of Being and Time. Chapter One, “Formal Indication of Death and Its Impediments,” introduces formal indication then addresses the potential challenges of analyzing the particular phenomenon of death. Formal indication, put simply, is the ability to point to a phenomenon without the influence of conceptual or theoretical baggage. This can involve selecting “blank” terms that will 1. Thomson, Iain, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 279. 1 still manage to indicate phenomena. Heidegger uses the term “Dasein” to refer to human existence, for instance, as it does not inherently come with such preestablished baggage. Pieces by Matthew Burch2 and Jonathan O’Rourke3 help illustrate the contemporary debate regarding formal indication and its entanglement with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method. I spend the second half of Chapter One discussing the issues that may stand in the way of this specific formal investigation. Such challenges include (1) being swayed by the ordinary uses of the words “anxiety” and “death,” and (2) as borrowed from Thomson, being unable to personally experience the rare and disturbing phenomena of anxiety and death in order to judge what exactly they mean to Heidegger.4 I attempt to spell out what Heidegger means phenomenologically by death in relation to anxiety in Chapter Two, “The Phenomenology of Death in Being and Time.” In death, Dasein finds itself cut off from its worldly framework of self-understanding and finds itself alone with itself. Dasein comes to experience itself as a brute, primordial existential projecting, independent of any projects to project itself into. Indeed, it is only when a project goes wrong or collapses that Dasein becomes aware of its having been projecting. Only Dasein can ask what it means to be as such, so death is an end distinctive of Dasein’s being. That is, death is a way of being Dasein that is furthermore the embodiment of the possibility of the impossibility of existence. Its life projects foreclosed, Dasein finds itself world-hungry yet unable to project into life projects which ordinarily would constitute its world. It flees from anxiety and death, of having to be around to live through death. 2. Burch, Matthew, “The Existential Sources of Phenomenology: Heidegger on Formal Indication.” European Journal of Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2011): 1–21. 3. O’Rourke, Jonathan, “Heidegger on Expression: Formal Indication and Destruction in the Early Freiburg Lectures.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 49, no. 2 (2018): 109-125. 4. Thomson, Iain, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 261-62. 2 In the third and final chapter, “The Reception of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Death,” I examine how Heidegger’s early existentialist, phenomenologist readers took up the concepts I explicate in Chapter Two. Heidegger’s first critical audience of Being and Time sought to “revise Heidegger’s
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