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

Hyo Won Seo

May 2021

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

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.

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.

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 phenomenology of death by drawing on their own experiences,”5 thereby avoiding the call to detached scholarly objectivity. Such personal experience, despite the rarity and anguish of it all, appears necessary to properly critique Heidegger’s phenomenology of death.

5. Thomson, Iain, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 262.

Chapter 1: A Formal Indication of Death and Its Impediments

Introduction

I begin this chapter by laying the groundwork for a definition of formal indication, a method that Heidegger employs throughout Being and Time yet does not explicitly characterize.

I operate under the working definition that formal indication is the method of pointing at phenomena without the influence of conceptual and theoretical baggage. This definition is fine- tuned in the second section of the chapter in which I survey competing perspectives on what

Heidegger means by formal indication. Since many scholars focus solely on how to properly interpret the method rather than how to put the method to use, I next discuss a contemporary application of formal indication to gendered and trans ways of life. Having reanimated the method, I conclude with a discussion of the several obstacles in the way of a formal indication of

Heidegger’s concept of death.

1.1 Toward a Definition of Formal Indication

Formal indication [formale Anzeige] is the method Heidegger uses in Being and Time to approach phenomena. It is, in short, the method of identifying phenomena without involving conceptual and theoretical baggage. The fundamental task of Being and Time is to use formal indication to identify the meaning of Being. Specifically, Heidegger wants to begin by disclosing the Being of an entity called “Dasein” (“being there”). Heidegger argues in the Introduction that

4 the question of the meaning of Being6 must be (re)formulated prior to any analysis of Being itself.7 This is because we no longer know what we mean by the word “Being,” much less know how to inquire into what we mean by it.8 Heidegger claims that Plato and Aristotle were the last figures of the Western philosophical tradition to adequately investigate the question of the meaning of Being. Since then, various dogmas have taken root: (1) Being is “the most universal and the emptiest of concepts,”9 and therefore cannot be properly defined. Those who subscribe to this view claim that the meaning of every word gains clarity with each use, for understanding is built into our basic conception of entities. (2) The concept of Being, much like the sentiments that “‘the sky is blue’ or ‘the door is shut’,” is self-evident. The meaning of Being hardly matters when the word can effectively be used and “understood,” unreflectively, by everyone.10

Heidegger’s response to the first dogma is that the concept of Being is actually the darkest and most neglected one of all. Few concepts escape the dark; there are only “higher” and

“lower” concepts. The universality of Being transcends any conceptual hierarchy of class or genus. Due to this “supreme universality,”11 Being cannot be derived from any other concept nor be classified as an entity. Rather, “Being” refers to the Being of entitites. It thus cannot be defined as an entity of traditional logic, but the question of its meaning remains. As for the second dogma, Heidegger objects that living in a nevertheless blind understanding of Being is not to be mistaken for having the meaning of Being at our disposal. Being remains just as hidden

6 “Being” when referring to the substantive Sein will be capitalized in keeping with major translations of this text. This distinguishes Being from the mere being of non-Dasein entities. 7 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 19. Page numbers correspond to the translation, rather than to the pagination of the later German editions of Being and Time. 8 I use “we” or “us” to refer to Dasein entities as Heidegger does. As I soon discuss, “Dasein” refers to those whose own existence is at issue for them, i.e. anyone to whom Heidegger’s analytic of existence would be applicable and of use. 9 Heidegger, Being and Time, 21. 10 Heidegger, Being and Time, 21-23. 11 Heidegger, Being and Time, 23.

5 as it was after the ancient philosophers did their investigations.12 “[I]t is a dubious procedure to invoke self-evidence,” Heidegger concludes, “if indeed the ‘self-evident…is to become the sole explicit and abiding theme for one’s analytic.”13 For these reasons, we must begin by formulating the structural items of the question of the meaning of Being. One of the few notions we should uphold as self-evident when it comes to Being is that

[W]e have no right to resort to dogmatic constructions and to apply just any idea

of Being and actuality to this entity, no matter how ‘self-evident’ that idea may be;

nor may any of the ‘categories’ which such an idea prescribes be forced upon

Dasein without proper ontological consideration.14

At the outset, we know that the question of the meaning of Being is unique. This is because the object of our question—the meaning of Being or the Being of entities—is already available to us. Inquiry into the meaning of Being arises from a preexisting familiarity with the concept of the meaning of Being. However, living in a blind understanding of Being has given us a mere “vague average understanding” of what the “is” in “What is ‘Being’?” could possibly indicate. To interpret this general sense, Heidegger states that the concept of Being embedded in the question of the meaning of Being must first be developed. We know that the concept of

Being is not itself an entity; entities have Being. Which entities, then, should be prioritized in our inquiry into Being?15 According to Heidegger,

12 Heidegger, Being and Time, 21-23. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time, 23-24. 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, 37. 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 25.

[T]o work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the

inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an

entity’s mode of Being…This entity which each of us is himself and which

includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the

term “Dasein”.16

The formulation of the question of the meaning of Being will thus take the entity called Dasein as its guiding example. Dasein is unlike all other entities in that its Being not only matters to it in the first place, but is also an issue for it. This concern with its own Being is constitutive of its

Being. That is, “Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being.

Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological.”17 Dasein is the only entity that can question its own Being. Heidegger uses “ontical” when dealing with entities and reserves

“ontological” for inquiry about Being. While all entities are ontic, only Dasein is capable of understanding what it means to be in general in addition to what it means to be itself. An ontical inquiry would be concerned about the physical or social features of a cup for instance, e.g., the size of the cup or who made the cup, whereas an ontological inquiry would ask about what it means for something to be a cup. In addition, only Dasein can comport itself toward and understand itself in terms of the kind of Being called existence.18 “Dasein” is thus “a term which is purely an expression of its Being”19—Being is an issue for Dasein as part and parcel of its

16 Heidegger, Being and Time, 26. 17 Heidegger, Being and Time, 32. 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, 32. 19 Heidegger, Being and Time, 33.

Being, and Dasein has a relationship toward that Being insofar as it understands itself in its

Being.20

Heidegger reminds us that the aim of his existential analytic of Dasein is not to compose an entire philosophical anthropology. A formal indication of Dasein “merely brings out the

Being of the entity, without Interpreting its meaning.”21 Heidegger further contends that any investigation of a thing that is deeply obscure must try not to overestimate the results. We must keep in mind that although Dasein is the closest to us in that we are Dasein, it nevertheless is

“ontologically that which is farthest.”22 What Heidegger means by this is that Dasein, if anything, is too close to us for us to make out its meaning.23

This concludes my exposition of Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein. That Being is considered the emptiest of concepts allows it to be filled in through formal indication. It will suffice to get us through the next section of this chapter, which considers how else formal indication has been interpreted. This is followed by a discussion of a contemporary application of formal indication and the challenges specific to a formal indication of the concept of death.

Following this discussion, I will round out the above exposition in light of what will be determined as the most appropriate interpretation of formal indication.

1.2 Commentaries on Formal Indication

Heidegger asserts that fundamental questions of philosophy, such as the meaning of

Being, must be treated phenomenologically if they are to get at the things themselves.

“Phenomenology” signifies a “methodological conception” that focuses on the how of research

20 Heidegger, Being and Time, 32. 21 Heidegger, Being and Time, 38. 22 Heidegger, Being and Time, 36. 23 Streeter, Ryan, “Heidegger's formal indication: A question of method in Being and Time.” Man and World, vol. 30 (1997): 416.

8 rather than objects according to subject matter.24 Phenomenology is the process or method of allowing that which shows itself to be seen from itself, an allowing of that which has been covered up to manifest in itself.25 As straightforward as the particular methodological conception of formal indication may appear, there is ongoing disagreement over what exactly Heidegger means by formal indication, let alone anxiety and death.

Heidegger scholar Theodore Kisiel defines formal indication in The Genesis of Being and

Time as

[T]he methodic use of a sense which is conducive to phenomenological

explication…It points the way and guides the deliberation…But even though it

guides the phenomenological deliberation, contentwise it has nothing to say.

Methodological considerations must make it clear how the formal indication, even

though it guides the deliberation, nevertheless interjects no preconceived opinions

into the problems, in no way prejudices the content of the explication.26

Here, Kisiel emphasizes the mere revelatory and referential nature of formal indication. If formal indication had something to say, it would weigh the phenomenological explication down with philosophical baggage. Cameron McEwen, in his review of Kisiel’s book, states that the leading question of Heidegger’s work is “how to begin?” Kisiel’s book is useful for Heideggeran scholarship, he argues, because it attends to this problem of formal indication when few other

24 Heidegger, Being and Time, 50. 25 Heidegger, Being and Time, 58. 26 Kisiel, Theodore, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (U of California P, 1995), 164.

9 works in American Continental philosophy do.27 Kisiel’s view that formal indication merely guides conceptual explication without influencing it is similar to Ryan Streeter’s account of formal indication. Streeter’s project is reviving formal indication in American scholarship by drawing attention to Heidegger’s Winter Semester course of 1921/22, “Phenomenological

Interpretations of Aristotle,” and Husserl’s own use of the term “indication.” Streeter echoes

Kisiel in claiming that in neglecting the question of the meaning of Being, we “contaminate the project of thinking from the start.”28 Streeter details how for Heidegger, a phenomenological investigation of the meaning of Being must be hermeneutical in nature. Heidegger devised formal indication while mindful of the risk of masking precisely that which a method like this is created to uncover.29 According to Streeter (writing in the late 1990s), formal indication has only recently begun to gain the attention of American scholars. These scholars seek to understand what Heidegger wanted to accomplish with Being and Time and reconcile the conceptual and methodological gaps left by his hasty composition. Streeter attributes the lack of awareness of formal indication to inconsistent English translations of already sparse references to the method.

Streeter then explicates Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, observing as I have that a formal indication of Dasein is the right starting point for examining the matter of human Being. Streeter emphasizes that for Heidegger, the “essence” of a human is not any brute fact, but is to be found in existence. “Thus, for perhaps the first time in the western tradition, existence can be said to precede essence.”30 Streeter then explains why Dasein must be understood by formal indication and not by sheer thematic or conceptual analysis. Dasein demands a more thorough, ontological

27 McEwen, Cameron, “Review: On Formal Indication: Discussion of ‘The Genesis of Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’.’” Research in Phenomenology 25 (1995): 226-227. 28 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 413. 29 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 414. 30 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 414-415.

10 comprehension than the mere object, for Dasein finds itself always in a state of “ever- incompleteness” that will be laid out in later chapters:

Dasein is essentially incomplete, for it always finds itself in a context in which it

seeks possibilities for itself, and never does it have all its possibilities fulfilled

such that it can rest comfortably in them and thus cease to project…any formally

indicating Dasein (in this case, Heidegger) can never hope to correctly and

comprehensively project all of what needs to be projected in any investigation so

as to settle an issue once and for all…the constitution of that which each of us in

each case is.31

This incompleteness is why Heidegger repeatedly points out in Being and Time that he is formally indicating Dasein, recapitulates what he has formally indicated thus far, and asks whether his interpretation resonates with who we find ourselves to be.32 In this spirit of formal indication, Heidegger concludes Chapter 6 of Division II reflecting on his analytic of Dasein as having disclosed Being in a “preliminary way.”

Being and Time, however, does not endorse an impossibility of completeness. In his earlier Winter Semester course of 1921-1922, Heidegger portrays how to phenomenologically gain access to the object of philosophical inquiry. The focus here is on the most original mode of access by which one comes to apprehend objects pre-reflectively the how, rather than the what of the objects themselves. This is because philosophy, for Heidegger, is an ongoing enactment

31 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 416-417. 32 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 417.

(putting into practice) of the object of investigation.33 Philosophy, as a kind of comporting of oneself to something, denies philosophical pontification and performance (repeating others’ thoughts, arguing for the sake of arguing, theorizing without doing one’s research, and so on).

The content of the object matters only to the extent that it is bound up with the fulfillment of the definite direction that gets indicated by the investigation. Formal indication leads to, not begins with, a “positive yield”34 of the concrete. Streeter claims, “Formal indication is certain in its direction and sure to lead directly into the concrete experience of that to which it points, if one follows its cue.”35 Formal indication is thus incomplete in the sense that it yields a positive, firm direction and comports one to something. In order to be complete, formal indication needs to be done “by the one for whom the indicating is done,” i.e., the one, who in having the Being of

Dasein, can call oneself into question.36

In his discussion of how formal indication requires the philosopher to do more than theorize, Streeter refers to Daniel Dahlstrom’s “Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as

Formal Indications.” This piece is concerned with formal indication as an appropriation of the method of Christian theology. Dahlstrom recounts how Heidegger claims in early lectures to not have a methodology, but uses the method called formal indication.37 Dahlstrom gathers from

Heidegger’s infrequent remarks on the method (four times in the whole of Being and Time to be exact38) that

33 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 418-419. 34 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 419. 35 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 419. 36 Streeter, “Heidegger’s formal indication,” 421. 37 Dahlstrom, Daniel O, “Heidegger's Method: Philosophical Concepts as Formal Indications.” The Review of Metaphysics 47, no. 4 (June 1994): 779. 38 Oliveira, Nythamar, “Heidegger, Reification and Formal Indication.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 4, no. 1 (July 2012): 38.

[Heidegger] regards the “formal indication” as a revisable way of pointing to

some phenomenon, fixing its preliminary sense and the corresponding manner of

unpacking it, while at the same time deflecting any “uncritical lapse” into some

specific conception that would foreclose pursuit of “a genuine sense” of the

phenomenon.39

So, one has to both correct the way a phenomenon is regarded prior to unpacking its genuine sense and also prevent further misinterpretation. Dahlstrom also draws our attention to the

1921/1922 lectures, which depict philosophizing as a way of radically comporting oneself to an original comportment, i.e., a pre-ontological or pre-discursive comportment, in which what the object of investigation is freely emerges in a pre-reflective manner. Philosophy has to enact, not merely theorize about, its object unthematically. A philosophical concept as formal indication is

“formal” and therefore “empty” due to pointing in the direction of something the philosopher must fulfill.40 Heidegger uses the term “formal” to stress that the philosophical concept qua formal indication is not arbitrarily predetermined, but rather empty. The term “indication” is used to emphasize that the concept’s pointing is preliminary, awaiting a philosopher to carry out what is signaled.41 To do this carrying out is to live a philosophical life.42 Specifically,

“Philosophizing is a way of being-in-the-world that at the same time aims at determining this way of being.”43 As I will discuss in the next chapters, formal indication of the concept of

“death,” for example, points to a possibility for human Dasein to understand itself as it shuts down the notion of death as demise or physiological perishing.

39 Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method,” 780. 40 Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method,” 782. 41 Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method,” 783. 42 Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method,” 787. 43 Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method,” 789.

Leslie MacAvoy writes more recently in an article on Being and Time that scholarship on formal indication following Kisiel’s Genesis can be divided into two groups. The first group maintains that formal indication is a method for performing a hermeneutics of facticity. However, the logic of this connection between formal indication and hermeneutics is not made explicit by this group of scholars in MacAvoy’s view. The second group focuses exclusively on formal indication and where it appears in Heidegger’s work. MacAvoy aims to close the gap between these two groups by arguing that formal indication in Heidegger’s phenomenology is indebted to

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. I will not give an account of this indebtedness here as an adequate explication of Husserlian phenomenology would lie outside the scope of the investigation at hand. She first presents the groups’ competing definitions of formal indication.

Group “B” views formal indication as a “way of using concepts to indicate or signal certain phenomena in such a manner that they gesture toward, but never definitively give, the phenomena.”44 These empty and formal concepts are fulfilled by philosophizing in the direction they indicate. This definition, as we have discussed, is indeed grounded in Heidegger’s texts and lectures. Heidegger has claimed, in The Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle for instance, that formal indications and definitions of concepts do not fully give, overestimate, nor thematize their objects. Having nothing to say contentwise, they merely guide us toward the task of the concrete actualization of their concepts.45 The formal indication must be just determinative enough to guide the investigation without biasing it. MacAvoy elaborates that this empty pointing of the object, which may be construed as a sort of intention, is a kind of inauthentic grasp of the object. To authentically have the object would be to follow the direction for fulfillment signaled by the formal indication. Thus, formal indication is both a kind of empty

44 MacAvoy, Leslie, “Formal Indication and the Hermeneutics of Facticity.” Philosophy Today 54 (2010): 84. 45 MacAvoy, “Formal Indication and the Hermeneutics of Facticity,” 84.

14 intention or starting point and a guiding method of phenomenological analysis. According to

MacAvoy, this definition of formal indication by Group B importantly aligns with Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation.46

Group A’s definition of formal indication is once again that it is a method for the hermeneutics of facticity. Formal indication helps us self-interpret our factical lives. This, however, is what MacAvoy calls the weak thesis. The strong thesis, on the other hand, is the claim that formal indication is the “method by which Husserl’s phenomenology is transformed into a hermeneutics of facticity or a hermeneutic phenomenology.”47 The methodological difference between Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, then, is formal indication.48 MacAvoy defends the weak thesis over against the strong thesis, emphasizing that Heidegger challenges the privileging of theoretical attitudes and views factical life as the starting point of philosophizing.49

Matthew Burch’s take on this debate regarding formal indication’s ties to Husserl in that

Heidegger presents a refinement of Husserl’s phenomenology. Burch acknowledges Kisiel in

Genesis as representative of the view that formal indication constitutes a break with Husserl, and

Steven Crowell as championing the view that the method advances Husserl’s phenomenological method.50 Kisiel, according to Burch, asserts that Heidegger uses formally indicative concepts to point out our historical situation so that we can “make it our own.” That historical situation is specifically the “Event of Being,” the topic of philosophy in Heidegger’s view. Kisiel contends that for Heidegger, we fully become our ownmost Dasein by reflecting on our historical moment.

Formal indication is the tool Heidegger uses to persuade us to do so in a “non-reflective

46 MacAvoy, “Formal Indication and the Hermeneutics of Facticity,” 85. 47 MacAvoy, “Formal Indication and the Hermeneutics of Facticity,” 86. 48 MacAvoy, “Formal Indication and the Hermeneutics of Facticity,” 86. 49 MacAvoy, “Formal Indication and the Hermeneutics of Facticity,” 87. 50 Burch, “The Existential Sources of Phenomenology,” 258.

15 phronesis.” Crowell, on the other hand, takes formal indication as Heidegger’s attempt to refine, not jettison, Husserl’s phenomenology.51 Burch describes formal indication as

[T]he intensification of Dasein’s own mode of self-awareness—a kind of

heightened ‘wakefulness of Dasein for itself’. Dasein possesses a familiarity with

its being and a motive to clarify that being, and formal indication merely

cultivates these features of pretheoretical life…This is why Heidegger insists that

formal indication is categorical research: it articulates the inner differentiation—

or categorical structure—of life itself…52

Formal indication here is a tool to use Dasein’s self-awareness to inform the structures that prop up everyday experience. Moreover, formal indication “secures against theoretical ruinance,”53 against that theoretical attitude which, as MacAvoy addresses, distorts ordinary self-awareness.

Burch concludes by stating that the Husserl-Heidegger debate goes beyond formal indication— the overarching questions are “Who is the real Heidegger?” and “Which Heidegger is worth our time?”.54 In any case, formal indication is Heidegger’s development of Husserl’s method to get at the Being of Dasein. In fact, “it is nothing other than the phenomenological analysis of

Dasein.”55

Jonathan O’Rourke further distances formal indication from the congested Husserl-

Heidegger debate. Formal indication is best understood, he suggests, in relation to Heidegger’s other key methodological term, “Phenomenological Destruction.” This is because both terms

51 Burch, “The Existential Sources of Phenomenology,” 259-260. 52 Burch, “The Existential Sources of Phenomenology,” 262-263. 53 Burch, “The Existential Sources of Phenomenology,” 270. 54 Burch, “The Existential Sources of Phenomenology,” 272. 55 Burch, “The Existential Sources of Phenomenology,” 275.

16 develop out of the same problem set concerning intuition and expression, and both act as counter-movements to one another.56 O’Rourke agrees with many of our earlier commentators that formal indication points toward its phenomenon, the “formal” being the enactment we must carry out. “In this way, it is a performative concept. It amounts to an injunction to the reader to comport themselves toward the phenomenon.”57 Furthermore, formal indication is Heidegger’s solution to the problem of expression presented in the 1919 Kriegsnotsemester. In short, the problem gets at the objectifying nature of expression in phenomenology. “Putting the results of phenomenology into language necessarily limits its scope outside of the subjective, and this includes above all the life-stream.”58

As a final commentary, Lawrence Hatab poses a call, similar to McEwen and Streeter’s, for the revival of formal indication. Hatab also observes that Heidegger explicitly discusses formal indication in his lecture courses, though not in Being and Time. Hatab departs from other commentators on formal indication, however, by taking the following stance:

I have never been able to understand why Heidegger did not provide an explicit treatment

of formal indication in Being and Time, as he did in some of the surrounding lecture

courses. In any case, what I have to say may amount to a departure from Heidegger’s

thinking…I read every basic concept in Being and Time as a formal indication. Some

concepts are nothing more than indications of something factical, while others gather a

focal meaning of factical experience.59

56 O’Rourke, “Heidegger on Expression,” 109. 57 O’Rourke, “Heidegger on Expression,” 115. 58 O’Rourke, “Heidegger on Expression,” 110. 59 Hatab, Lawrence J, “The Point of Language in Heidegger's Thinking: A Call for the Revival of Formal Indication.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 6 (2016): 13.

Here, Hatab interprets the meaning of the term “formal” as “gathering the focal meaning of living experiences,” and “indications” as a “pointing to engaged circumstances and practices that cannot be fully captured in, or exhausted by, formal concepts.”60 He supports his claim with the example of Being. The verbal substantive “being” points to factical life, but the numerous meanings of the verb “to be” points to what Hatab calls “factical language” as well. Factical language refers to concrete oral usage of words. In Hatab’s view, formal indication points not only to factical being-in-the-world, but also to factical language.61

The authors I have covered in this section have noticeably tried to understand

Heidegger’s method of formal indication without putting it to work. In the spirit of Hatab’s call for a revival of formal indication, I will spend the following section examining a contemporary application of formal indication by James Edward Zubko, Jr. in his dissertation, “Ways of Being,

Seen and Unseen: Concepts, Practices, and the Emergence of Trans Ways of Life.”

1.3 Demonstration of Formal Indication

In the Introduction to his dissertation, Zubko states that he invokes formal indication, “a method developed in order to arrive at concepts adequate for [Heidegger’s] ontological analysis of Dasein,” in order to “avoid the potential pitfalls of using concepts with specific connotations.”62 Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein can inform how social possibilities are disclosed, i.e., how people access or get into possibilities and how we become aware of possibilities for living.63 Zubko begins his first chapter by distinguishing Heidegger’s ontology from other metaphysical frameworks. The object of Heidegger’s inquiry is unique to human

60 Hatab does not capitalize this term or specify why. It is capitalized here for continuity. 61 Hatab, “The Point of Language in Heidegger’s Thinking”, 39. 62 Zubko, James Edward, Jr, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen: Concepts, Practices, and the Emergence of Trans Ways of Life.” PhD diss., The University of Memphis (2020), 13. 63 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 28.

18 entitites (for whom Being is an issue).64 Heidegger’s notion of possibility is also unconventional; unlike logical or modal possibility, it is a “fundamental feature of human ontology…it is something that always characterizes human life.” Zubko uses formal indication in this chapter specifically to discover concepts of gendered ways of life and trans ways of life, deliberately using the term “trans way of life” to “indicate the fact that gender can be thought of as a way of being connected to certain possibilities for living in a determinate manner.”65

Zubko argues that gender could fall under one of the ways that Being is an issue for human beings. The take-away here is that we can better understand what gender does; what is not meant by this is that gender is ontologically embedded in the Being of Dasein, that gender stands to be defined, or that gender is the sole object of the inquiry at hand.66 Zubko proposes an approach to the term as a formal indication. As mentioned, Zubko defines formal indication as a method to arrive at adequate concepts for an ontological analysis of Dasein. Heidegger, Zubko says, “uses the method of formal indication to avoid deploying concepts with certain metaphysical implications.”67 Zubko acknowledges that formal indication demands a comportment of enactment: it is an “invitation to the listener to fill in the content that the concept indicates,” drawing from one’s own factical life.68 Zubko then applies this explication of formal indication to gender, asking “What would a formally indicative concept of gender look like?”.69

The everyday, pre-reflective, and unthematic understanding of gender is that it is the “social correlate of sex” or the “stand-in concept for biological sex.” Sex is understood to be split into

64 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 39. 65 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 13. 66 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 41. 67 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 42. 68 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 43. 69 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 49.

19 male and female, while gender is dived into masculinity and femininity.70 Trans ways of experience indicate that this everyday understanding of gender “does not serve as an adequate formal indication”—it does not signal anything important about the phenomenon of gender.71

Zubko thus suggests the alternative approach of “taking trans existence as primary and deploying the three moments of formal indication to the concept ‘gender’.” These three moments are affirmation (of a Dasein’s way of life involving some embodiment, understanding, and intelligibility), deflection (of concepts of gender that connect sex and gender), and deferral (of decision regarding gender to each Dasein).72 A formal indication of gender thus can be useful for evaluating our practices regarding gender and the gender binary. It tells us that “some possibilities are readily available to those who adhere to gender norms associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.”73

1.4 Challenges of a Formal Indication of Death

I conclude this chapter by taking note of some challenges that setting Zubko as our example and carving out a formal indicative notion of death will present us, as identified in Iain

Thomson’s “Death and Demise in Being and Time.” It will later become apparent that these are not far removed from the trials of establishing a formal indication of gender.

What Heidegger means by “death” has been so contentious that, in Thomson’s words, “to say that the meaning of ‘death’ in Being and Time is controversial is to strain the limits of understatement.”74 Thomson sets out four possible reasons why in his chapter in The Cambridge

Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time: (1) Heidegger has riddled the text with obscure and

70 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 50. 71 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 52. 72 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 54-56. 73 Zubko, “Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen,” 56. 74 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 260.

20 non-commonsensical terminology, haphazardly using ordinary words to refer to non-ordinary meanings. Heidegger’s declaration in Division II that death is the possibility of an impossibility is the standard example (we will return to this statement in Chapter Two), though we may also simply refer to his characterization of death as something one can live through. (2) Death occupies a central role in the overall text. It is the fulcrum, so to speak, of Heidegger’s entire ontological project in Being and Time. For instance, Death discloses Dasein’s “futurity” and an understanding of it also allows one to understand authenticity. (3) Death is a matter of an incredibly demanding nature. The phenomenological method does not neatly apply; one has difficulty personally experiencing the phenomenon for themselves, i.e., such a person cannot contest nor confirm Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of death by appealing to their own experience. The phenomenon is not only rare, but also anguishing. (4) The scholarship is polarized. Secondary literature on the topic has become divided into two staunchly opposed camps. The first, larger camp interprets Heidegger’s “death” as what one normally means by

“death,” i.e., demise, decease, or mortality. Thomson has in mind here the likes of Edwards,

Hoffman, and Mulhall, along with “most traditional scholars, critics, and readers of Being and

Time.”75 The other, less traditional camp rejects “death” in the ordinary sense, taking it to mean something akin to an existential world collapse. Before these two camps formed, Heidegger’s first critical existentialist audience, e.g., Camus and Sartre, emerged in the 1940s. These readers sought to “revise Heidegger’s phenomenology of death by drawing on their own experiences,” thereby avoiding the call to the detached “quest for scholarly objectivity.”76 Only by such subjection to personal experience can one critique Heidegger’s phenomenology of death.

75 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 263. 76 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 262.

Thomson aims to solve the deadlock by getting clear on the phenomenological method at hand in order to parse through death as not demise, but an existential-ontological phenomenon.

He intends neither to conflate this kind of death with mere life-ending (as do those in the first camp), nor treat demise and death as mutually exclusive (as do those in the second camp).77

Having motivated the controversy, he makes the following promise:

What I shall show is that if we understand the phenomenological method Being

and Time employs, then we can see exactly how Heidegger is able to move from

our relation to the event we ordinarily call death (which he calls “demise”) to that

ontological phenomenon, revealed in world collapse, which he calls “death.”78

Thomson attempts to follow up on his promise to use Heidegger’s phenomenological method as a starting point in a section titled “Heidegger’s Bridge from Demise to Death: Formal Indication.”

He begins by stating that what Heidegger means by death is not mere demise, but Dasein’s experience of existential world collapse that is spurred by its confrontation with its anxiety about the dissonance between itself and its world.79 Thomson goes on to argue that the distinction between death and demise only go so far “of methodological necessity.”80 The phenomenological method he is referring to is formal indication, which is the crux of what he calls the overarching method of “phenomenological attestation.” Thomson then defines formal

77 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 260-264. 78 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 263. 79 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 274. 80 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 275.

22 indication as “the pivot that allows Heidegger to move from the ontic to the ontological level of phenomenological analysis.”81

Rather than applying this method to show us exactly how Heidegger shifts from the everyday event of demise to the ontological phenomenon of death, however, Thomson opts to give a brief overview in the form of a table. There are six entries that correspond to Heidegger’s six structural characteristics of death: “End,” “Ownmost,” “Non-relational,” “Certain,”

“Indefinite,” and “Un-surpassable.” These are listed under three columns: “Shared formal structures,” “Demise (ontic),” and “Death (ontological). “Ownmost” in terms of ordinary demise signifies that “No one can take demise away from me, in the sense that no one can demise in my place. (Even if someone sacrifices his or her own life for me, I myself will still have to demise in the end.)”82 That is, we tend to interpret ontic demise as simply death, or as the mere cessation of one’s life. This same formal structure applied to Heidegger’s version of death, however, renders the more substantive analysis that

My very being is at issue in death. When my worldly projects break down in

death, I can experience myself (lucidly in death or explicitly in authentic death) as

a being whose world is made meaningful by projecting in projects. In death, I

discover this projecting (or disclosing) as the most basic aspect of my self (as

“stronger than death”), for I recognize that this projecting can survive the collapse

of any and all my particular projects.83

81 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 276. 82 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 277. 83 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 277.

I will parse this rather dense interpretation of the phenomenon of death in the next chapter, but we should be able to already discern that Heidegger is referring to death as a sort of lived experience. For now, Thomson has given us a glimpse of how Heidegger uses formal indication to achieve phenomenological analysis at the ontological level by distilling the formal structures of familiar, ontic phenomena in a way that will inform the corresponding ontological phenomena.

Conclusion

This chapter has introduced the method of formal indication and its potential to shed light on the concepts of anxiety and death in Being and Time. Formal indication is primarily utilized in the text to identify the meaning of the Being of entities such as Dasein and of Being in general, which are arguably the emptiest and most formally indicable of concepts. A review of the literature on formal indication revealed that it may be just as controversial as any phenomenon it may be used to point at. Interpretations range from formal indication as a guide for phenomenological deliberation to formal indication as a performance of a hermeneutics of facticity. Taking up Hatab’s observation that every basic concept in Being and Time can be read as a formal indication rather than a select few, I turned to Zubko’s demonstration of a formal indication of gender and trans ways of experience based on the question of what a formally indicative concept of gender, as opposed to an everyday understanding of gender in terms of biological sex, would entail.

This chapter addressed on its final note the challenges set forth by Thomson of investigating a formal indication of death in the manner demonstrated by Zubko. The controversy surrounding Heidegger’s notion of death, Thomson contends, has been perpetuated by four factors: difficult terminology sometimes disguised as everyday speech, the significance

24 of the concept to the entire ontology of Being and Time, the troublesome demands made by death on those wishing to investigate it, and the lack of consensus in the scholarship. Although

Thomson supplies us with insight on the controversy and how it came about, he does not venture to approach Heidegger’s notion of death as the formal indicative concept that it is. In the next chapter, I will attempt to round out his table of shared formal structures between demise and death by diving into Division II of Being and Time.

Chapter 2: The Phenomenology of Death in Being and Time

Introduction

The previous chapter has laid the groundwork for a formal indication of the Being of

Dasein as a how of being, for to be Dasein is to take issue with one’s self. In his 1923 lecture course, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger expresses that a fundamental account of the meaning of the Being of Dasein is neither a task to mark off nor his ultimate goal.

Since hermeneutical investigation is not itself a philosophy, but rather the interpreting of facticity, relevant questions are to be asked indefinitely.84 Whenever the means to get at the Being of

Dasein is worked out, Heidegger intends to move on to another question.

The account of the meaning of the Being of Dasein we receive in Being and Time has been undermined by the controversy surrounding what Heidegger means by “death.” This chapter aims to sort out the dispute by first recapitulating the structure of the controversy according to Iain Thomson, then pointing out an underlying ambiguity that, when formally indicated, may shed light on the intended concept of death.

2.1 The Controversy

Thomson has established for us four origins of the controversy over what Heidegger has in mind regarding the concept of death. Inscrutable language, the stakes of having an entire

84 Heidegger, Martin. Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren. Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 14-15.

26 ontology rest on a single concept, the call to personally undergo the phenomenon of anxiety and death, and conflicting scholarship all have made a consensus on the matter distant. Perhaps the easiest of the obstacles to sort out is the view that the concept of death refers to what people ordinarily mean by “death” in everyday speech, rather than to an “existential phenomenon that stands revealed when our everyday worlds collapse.”85 The issue with this state of affairs, for

Thomson, is that neither position encompasses that death is both existential world collapse and tied to demise.86 While those who subscribe to the former view conflate death with demise, those who believe in the latter are adamant that demise and death are utterly incompatible.

Perishing, for Heidegger, is the end of one’s physical body and biological life. This physiological end causes Dasein to demise, to lucidly experience the terminal collapse of its intelligible worlds. Insofar as Dasein does not merely live, it does not perish.87 Death, unlike demise, is something one can live through. Specifically, death is an end uniquely distinctive of our Being-there, of Dasein. In death, Dasein is able to take itself as a whole—it is no longer projecting into its future-oriented, worldly projects. “We experience,” Thomson later states, “our intelligible world as having ended.”88 One does not need to experience the end of one’s intelligible world in demise in order to die, for “Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is.”89 Death is a way to be for Dasein, that is ingrained in what it means to be Dasein.

When there are no more worldly possibilities to project ourselves into, we experience ourselves as brute projecting, and death as “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all.”90 In this apparently paradoxical statement, “possibility” means existential possibility, i.e.,

85 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 263. 86 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 263. 87 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 264. 88 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 266. Emphasis mine. 89 Heidegger, Being and Time, 289. 90 Heidegger, Being and Time, 307.

Being-possible for Dasein, rather than something that could happen to Dasein. Being-towards- death is the one possibility that does not allow for any other possibilities before it. The possibility of death comes first insofar as it is one Dasein has as soon as it is.

The breakdown of Dasein’s projects occurs when Dasein confronts, rather than represses, its anxiety in the face of death. Until I discuss the ambiguity of the term in Section IV, I will employ the concept of anxiety as Heidegger does: the structural feature which reveals the

“uncanniness”91 (Unheimlichkeit) of there being no life project to project upon. Regardless of the loss of our projects, we continue as the possibility of mere projection into the impossibility that is death. This loss does not end our “ability-to-be” an inability-to-be in our self-understanding of our brute projecting into projects. That is, we fundamentally embody a possibility of an impossibility. In language I find reminiscent of the Camusean absurd as the offspring of divorce between humankind’s expectations and reality, Thomson characterizes our uncanny “not-Being- at-home”92 in the world as

the fundamental lack of fit between our underlying existential projecting and the

specific existentiell (or everyday) worldly projects in terms of which we each

flesh out our existence and so give shape to our worlds…there can be no seamless

fit between Dasein’s existing and the projects that allow us to make sense of our

existing by giving content to our world, and thus no one right answer to the

question of what we should do with our lives.93

91 Heidegger, Being and Time, 233. 92 Heidegger, Being and Time, 233. 93 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 270-271.

We experience ourselves as projectlessly projecting in a world that no longer accommodates what we think we ought to be doing with our lives.

Having distinguished death from demise and perishing, Thomson then asserts that death and demise are in fact “intimately related.”94 Thomson argues that this connection is the direct result of formal indication. According to Thomson,

‘formal indication’ enables Heidegger to extract from the ontic phenomenon

under consideration only its formal structures, which he then fleshes out quite

differently in his analysis of the corresponding ontological phenomenon…By

providing a bridge from the ontic to the ontological in this way, formal indication

allows Heidegger to present an ontological interpretation that is not simply

arbitrary or idiosyncratic.95

According to this, formal indication allows Heidegger to move from the everyday phenomenon of demise to the guiding formal structures of the corresponding ontological phenomenon of death.

In a formal indication of death, one begins with an analysis of the everyday understanding of demise and only then evaluates how the ontological phenomenon of death that is revealed

“conditions”96 the familiar, ontic phenomenon of demise, i.e., affects our everyday dealings with the ontic counterpart to death with which we are already well familiar. Thomson concludes the piece by returning to the concept of anxiety about the disclosed self as a projectless projecting in the face of death. In Thomson’s words, “no interpreter has explicitly thematized and addressed”

Heidegger’s striking claim that our fear of demise is merely a common way of repressing our

94 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 275. 95 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 276. 96 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 276.

29 anxiety about living through the loss of our world.97 Thus, to properly address Heidegger’s claim,

“we need to muster the courage to confront our anxiety about death.”98

The following section takes a step toward mustering that courage to analyze our confrontation with our anxiety about death. If the controversy surrounding death is to be resolved between the two camps, we must first sort out the ambiguity of anxiety and the courage one is said to have for anxiety.

2.2 The Apparent Ambiguity of Anxiety

According to Thomson, Heidegger expresses that confronting our existential anxiety reveals the uncanny dissonance between our brute projecting and our worldly projects. Our fear of demise is just one way of repressing our anxiety before the experience of existential world collapse in death. William Blattner offers a slightly different ontological account of anxiety in

“The concept of death in Being and Time.” Like Thomson, Blattner argues that Heidegger’s concept of death as the possibility of the impossibility of Being is severely misunderstood.

Blattner spells out the apparent paradox: if death is a possible way to be Dasein and Dasein’s possibilities are possible ways to be Dasein, then death is a possible way to be Dasein in which

Dasein, by taking it over, is not able to be.99 Furthermore, “possibilities” in terms of ways of

Being Dasein refer to “for-the-sakes-of-which.” For-the-sakes-of-which are the possibilities of

Being that Dasein projects itself upon and understands itself in terms of.100 If Dasein’s for-the- sakes-of-which are the “primary bearers of the term ‘possible,’” Blattner asks, then how is the

97 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 279. 98 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 282. 99 Blattner, William, “The concept of death in Being and Time.” Man and World 27 (1994): 50. 100 Blattner, “The concept of death in Being and Time,” 52.

30 possibility of death for Dasein any different than, say, the possibility of being a student?101 Again, how is death a distinctive way of Being Dasein in which Dasein is not able to be? Blattner solves this issue by separating death from demise, the terminal collapse of a human life more complex than mere physiological termination. Demise is perishing “in so far as it is modified by Dasein’s distinctive way of Being. Dasein’s demise is the end of its pursuit of tasks, goals, and projects, an ending that is forced by organic perishing.”102 Thomson’s earlier interpretation of Heidegger that Dasein never perishes qua Dasein could thus be construed as Dasein never (merely) perishes qua Dasein. Death, in contrast, is a possible way for Dasein to be in which it actually experiences its intelligible world as having ended.

Despite aligning with Thomson on these matters of possibility and demise, Blattner defines death as a condition in which “Dasein is anxiously unable to understand itself by projecting itself into some possible way to be.”103 He later continues, however, that “Inauthentic

Dasein misunderstands death as being demise, hence does not come face to face with death, and thereby evades anxiety about death.”104 We are given, in these passages, two competing significations of what anxiety is in relation to death. In the first, we are told that anxiety is part and parcel with death. Death is the anxiety of Dasein not being able to understand itself as it once had. Thomson, too, characterizes anxiety both as the phenomenon in which “we experience ourselves as radically ‘not-at-home’ in the world of our everyday projects”105 and as that which reveals this very uncanniness. The second statement portrays anxiety as a mood about Dasein which, when confronted, discloses it as no longer able to understand itself in terms of its projects. Thomson also expresses this second view when he states,

101 Blattner, “The concept of death in Being and Time,” 53. 102 Blattner, “The concept of death in Being and Time,” 54. 103 Blattner, “The concept of death in Being and Time,” 49-50. 104 Blattner, “The concept of death in Being and Time,” 55. 105 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 261.

By ‘death,’ we have seen, Heidegger means the experience of existential world

collapse that occurs when we confront the ineliminable anxiety that stems from

the basic lack of fit between Dasein and its world, an anxiety that emerges from

the uncanny fact that there is nothing about the structure of the self that can tell us

what specifically to do with our lives.106

Similarly, he refers to the affective attunement of real anxiety as “the phenomenon by means of which we first encounter what Heidegger means by ‘death’.”107 Given the apparent ambiguity of what Heidegger means by “anxiety,” I reevaluate Heidegger’s formal indication of anxiety in the following section.

2.3 Anxiety Formally Indicated

Heidegger develops formal indication in Being and Time as his standard method of approaching phenomena. As mentioned earlier, formal indication is the method of understanding phenomena without stringing along the usual conceptual and theoretical baggage. And the question of the meaning of Being must be settled before any inquiry into Being itself.

Heidegger goes on to formulate the structural items of the question of the meaning of

Being. Dasein is established as unlike all other entities in that its Being not only matters to it, but is also an issue for it. Dasein is the only entity that can question its own Being, for this concern is constitutive of its Being.108 Heidegger reminds us that the aim of his existential analytic of

Dasein is not to compose an entire philosophical anthropology. A formal indication of Dasein

106 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 274. 107 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 261. 108 Heidegger, Being and Time, 32.

“merely brings out the Being of the entity, without Interpreting [sic] its meaning.”109

Furthermore, any investigation of a thing that is deeply obscure must try not to overestimate its results. We must keep in mind that although Dasein is closest to us in that we are Dasein, it nevertheless is “ontologically that which is farthest.”110 Dasein, if anything, is too close to us for us to make out its meaning.

Heidegger formally indicates the concept of anxiety following his preliminary analysis of

Dasein. I suggest that a formally indicative concept of anxiety will be revealed as similar to the neglected notion of the call of conscience as illustrated by Mariana Ortega and discussed in the following section.

Anxiety is first and foremost an affective attunement. In Division I, Chapter 5 of Being and Time, Heidegger introduces state-of-mind [Befindlichkeit] as the first structural feature of

Dasein, followed by understanding and discourse. Much like Zubko’s earlier conception of gender, the three primordial structural features of Dasein are not properties with determinate features: “the characteristics [of Dasein] are not properties of something present-at-hand, but essentially existential ways to be.”111 The three features are thus distinguished conceptually, rather than “in the sense of a dissolving or breaking up.”112

Befindlichkeit may be referred to as “attunement,” “disposedness,” “affectedness,” and

“findingness,” though what Heidegger means is closest to “how one finds oneself-ness” in the world. I will refer to Befindlichkeit as “situatedness” to the extent that we find ourselves situated in the world. Specifically, we find ourselves embedded through moods. Heidegger contends that

“What we indicate ontologically by the term “state-of-mind” is ontically the most familiar and

109 Heidegger, Being and Time, 38. 110 Heidegger, Being and Time, 36. 111 Heidegger, Being and Time, 172. 112 Heidegger, Being and Time, 170.

33 everyday sort of thing; our mood, our Being-attuned.”113 Situatedness is ontologically a being of moods, whereas moods themselves are ontic. The mode of situatedness of fear, for instance, may be one concrete way in which we can be attuned toward the world. Talking about being attuned toward the world as such, the being of moods, would be ontological.

Heidegger’s “mood” differs from the way we use the term in everyday speech. We tend to say that someone is in a good or bad mood, as though a mood is something we sometimes have or don’t have. For Heidegger, mood is something that we always have. Even the “pallid, evenly balanced lack of mood”114 we may have as we go about our day is a mood. Mood is the primary way in which we are essentially disclosed, i.e., open to ourselves. Moreover, the

“primordial disclosure belonging to moods” precedes the “possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition.”115 Heidegger rejects the traditional philosophical accounts of gaining a sense of our world perceptually, cognitively, or volitionally, rather than by being in a mood. It is only when Dasein’s Being is unveiled to itself in a mood that we can psychically reflect on our experiences. “Only because Dasein is anxious in the very depths of its Being,” for instance,

“does it become possible for anxiety to be elicited physiologically.”116 Our moods, despite being troublesome, cannot be detached from our attempts to understand things.

The world is therefore disclosed to us “moodwise”117 and not through pure knowledge.

Moods disclose to us that our “Being has become manifest as a burden.”118 This is to say that

Dasein cannot take its identity for granted. It must constantly behave in certain ways in order to maintain its identity. Moods, in other words, disclose Dasein in its thrownness, i.e., its being

113 Heidegger, Being and Time, 172. 114 Heidegger, Being and Time, 173. 115 Heidegger, Being and Time, 173. 116 Heidegger, Being and Time, 234. 117 Heidegger, Being and Time, 173. 118 Heidegger, Being and Time, 173.

“delivered-over” to the fact “that it is.”119 Thrownness refers to the fundamental condition of

Dasein in which it is not at liberty to shape the factical worlds it finds itself in. Dasein encounters itself as the kind of Being not embedded in a world of brute facts, but in a world that is sociocultural, has claimed certain societal values, and demarcates a range of possibilities for identities that Dasein can viably take on. The possibility of becoming a medieval knight, for instance, is not available to me in the current cultural context.

The burden of Being orients us away from the burdensome-ness of having to constantly maintain our identities.120 “The way in which the mood discloses,” he says, “is not one in which we look at thrownness, but one in which we turn towards or turn away.”121 In fear, for example, we flee from actively choosing who to take ourselves to be. Heidegger calls Dasein’s “fleeing in the face of itself and in the face of its authenticity” a falling into the public world of “the they”

(das Man).122 Anxiety, on the other hand, brings us directly before the burdensome-ness of Being.

In Division I, Chapter 6, Heidegger conveys anxiety as disclosing Dasein in a manner that simultaneously makes Dasein accessible.123 “That in the face of which one has anxiety [das

Wovor der Angst] is Being-in the-world as such,” the basic state of Dasein.124 Thus, that about which anxiety is anxious, Being-in-the-world as such, is equal to that in the face of which it is anxious, its basic state of Being-in-the-world as such.125 We are not anxious, then, in the face of the ready-to-hand or the present-at-hand.126

119 Heidegger, Being and Time, 174. Emphasis mine. 120 Heidegger, Being and Time, 173-174. 121 Heidegger, Being and Time, 174. 122 Heidegger, Being and Time, 229. 123 Heidegger, Being and Time, 226. 124 Heidegger, Being and Time, 230. 125 Heidegger, Being and Time, 233. 126 The situatedness of fear and anxiety are often conflated. Where the two differ, as Heidegger details on pages 230-31 of Chapter 6, is that in the face which Dasein is anxious or afraid. That in the face of which Dasein is

Also in Division I, Chapter 6, we are given the source of Thomson’s third reason for the controversy surrounding death, to which I said I would return. According to Thomson,

Heidegger requires us to adjudicate the issue of death by undergoing the rare and anguishing phenomena of anxiety and death for ourselves. Not only is “‘real’ anxiety” rare, but real anxiety radically individualizes.127 How, then, is Dasein to muster courage for a mood that is rare, individualizes, and is unbearable? A possible solution may be found in Mariana Ortega’s work on the concept of the call of conscience in Being and Time.

2.4 Anxiety and the Call of Conscience

Ortega argues that inauthentic Dasein can become authentic because it has the possibility to understand the call of conscience, and as a result, its Being-guilty.128 Thus, among other things such as death and anxiety, there is an ethics that is hidden in the existential analytic of Being and

Time. Section I, “The Call of Conscience (Gewissensruf) as Self-Awakening”, opens with the claim that it is unclear how Dasein “enacts” authenticity while dominated by das Man.129

Heidegger maintains that the anticipation or possibility of authenticity is constitutive of Dasein’s

Being. Dasein transitions from the everyday understanding of death as something present-at- hand to understanding death as its ownmost possibility of no longer Being-in-the-world. As we have learned, “We can anticipate our own death because, according to Heidegger, we have the basic Befindlichkeit of anxiety which discloses our Being-towards-death.”130 Ortega thus understands anxiety as something which reveals our not-Being-at-home in the world, not as afraid are entities within-the-world (those with the Being of Dasein) while that in the face of which one is anxious is indefinite, unhomelike, “nowhere” (Being-in-the-world itself). 127 Heidegger, Being and Time, 234. 128 Ortega, Mariana, “When Conscience Calls, Will Dasein Answer? Heideggerian Authenticity and the Possibility of Ethical Life.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13, no. 1 (2005): 15-16. 129 Ortega, “When Conscience Calls,” 17. 130 Ortega, “When Conscience Calls,” 17.

36 something interchangeable with death. The call of conscience, she continues, prompts the ontic possibility of authenticity called “resoluteness,” which calls Dasein to its understanding of its

Being-guilty.131 The call of conscience is thus a resolute “mode of disclosure”—“Dasein is both the caller and the one called.” The mode of disclosure is silent so that Dasein may hear it in the

“hubbub” of das Man’s “idle talk.”132 How exactly does Dasein hear this silent summons to its

Being-guilty? “Does Dasein suddenly hear the call? Is it a matter of change or luck?”133 These questions cannot be answered with an ontic account, e.g., we hear the call simply when we contemplate the meaning of life. Rather, Dasein hears the call to authenticity because it calls to itself—it is already guilty.134 Here, there lies a parallel between the call of conscience and the phenomenon of anxiety. There is a similar circularity in the way that one has anxiety in the face of Being-in-the-world as such while that about which anxiety is anxious is also Being-in-the- world as such. Dasein is the source and recipient of both the call of conscience and the mood of anxiety. Courage for anxiety is perhaps brought about by the same mechanism; courage is a possibility that Dasein always and already has.

Ortega emphasizes that one should not expect to find an ontic or practical “list of things to do or a recipe for action” in Being and Time.135 To ask for such a list would be to disregard what is ontological about our existence. Dasein is constantly “taking action” in response to the call of conscience.136 As a result, one will not find in Being and Time the key to how we should comport ourselves toward death. We are already and always Being-toward or acting toward

131 “Being-guilty” is formally indicated by Heidegger on pages 328-29 of Division II, where he asserts, “the idea of ‘Guilty !’ [sic] must be sufficiently formalized so that those ordinary phenomena of ‘guilt’ which are related to our concernful Being with Others, will drop out.” Existential guilt is “Being-the-basis of a nullity”—Dasein is a Being thrown into existence as the entity that it is. 132 Ortega, “When Conscience Calls,” 18. 133 Ortega, “When Conscience Calls,” 19. 134 Ortega, “When Conscience Calls,” 19. 135 Ortega, “When Conscience Calls,” 21. 136 Heidegger, Being and Time, 347.

37 death. Death is not something present-at-hand that we need a list of ways to cope with; neither are we anxious in the face of anything present-at-hand. Ortega later argues that the existential ethics in Being and Time discloses a responsibility to be authentic not only to ourselves but also to others:

conscience ultimately discloses one’s freedom as well as one’s responsibility.

Since this experience of authenticity involves individuation (vereinzeln) and also

Being-one’s-self, it would seem that we could read Heidegger’s story and think of

the Sartre of Being and Nothingness…although it is true that conscience leads to a

disclosure of my freedom, I am not alone. In Heideggerian terms, Dasein is

already in a world that it shares with others…we are faced with concrete

possibilities and situations that include others.137

This passages encapsulates the analogies between the call of conscience and the courage for anxiety. I had mentioned that real anxiety, for Heidegger, individualizes. In light of the above, we may also read anxiety as leading to a disclosure of our freedom to be authentic toward death.

Heidegger states that “as Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the

‘world’…Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-the-world” with others.138 Death, too, is something which is shared in some sense. In Division II, Chapter 1,

Heidegger discusses how “those who remain” can at best be with the deceased through mourning and solicitude, even if the deceased is no longer in the same world as those who remain.139 A courage for an anxiety that is always in action thus discloses death as a radical individuation in a

137 Ortega, “When Conscience Calls,” 24. 138 Heidegger, Being and Time, 233. 139 Heidegger, Being and Time, 282.

38 world that is shared with others. The rare courage for anxiety is enacted because Dasein is already and always anxiously acting toward death.

When merged with the call of conscience, anxiety takes on a new formally indicative definition as that which discloses our being existentially homeless in a world nevertheless shared with others. We must muster courage for anxiety in the face of death, but not demise, because our everyday fear of terminal demise is our anxiety in the face of living through death in disguise.

We are not anxious or in need of courage in the face of demise, but rather, demise distorts our anxiety in the face of death into fear. How do we muster courage for death when it is rare and unbearable? We recognize that we are individualized in world of entities within-the-world and that our ownmost deaths are entwined with these other entities. When we demise, however, we do not undergo individualization; our intelligible worlds have terminated along with the grounds on which to develop courage for anxiety in the face of something we must live through.

Conclusion

The concept of death, on which the entire ontology of Being and Time is said to rest, remains ill-defined. This is because what Heidegger means by Dasein’s courage for anxiety in the face of death also lacks consensus. In the previous chapter, I considered formal indication as the method which will shed light on the matter. This involved choosing among the many iterations of the definition of formal indication and then establishing Zubko’s formal indication of gender as our guide. This chapter attempted to reconstruct the notion of anxiety by using the method. I filled in the arguably empty concept of anxiety with a formally indicative definition using Ortega’s interpretation of the call of conscience. That anxiety discloses both our individualization and Being-in-a-world shared with other Dasein entities constitutes an important

39 distinction between the phenomena of death and demise. Without this distinction, the debate surrounding death is bound to continue. In the next and final chapter, I will examine what

Heidegger’s initial existentialist audience made of this ambiguity of anxiety and death.

Chapter 3: The Reception of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Death

Introduction

In light of what we have just examined of Being and Time, it is no wonder that that the book’s first existentialist audience provides conflicting accounts of what Heidegger means by anxiety and death. In Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927-1961,

Ethan Kleinberg analyzes how Heidegger’s French audience absorbed and expanded Being and

Time during the first phase of its reception between 1927 and 1961. These French intellectuals— the “generation of 1933”140—gravitated toward Heidegger’s philosophy and away from the neo-

Kantian rationalism favored by the French government. This was due to their desire for an academic and philosophical tradition that would prepare them to deal with their increasingly troubled day-to-day existence.141 This is in keeping with an argument Thomson makes in his digest of the death debate, which goes, “Because it is only by relying on such personal experience that one can advance either an internal confirmation or an immanent critique of

Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, the post-existentialist interpretations of Heidegger seem to me to have made a significant step backward in this critical regard.”142

This particular audience became drawn to Being and Time as it was brought over to

France by foreign intellectuals, and they would eventually each produce different readings of that

140 Kleinberg, Ethan, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France 1927-1961 (Cornell UP, 2005), 5. 141 Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 7. 142 Thomson, Iain, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 262.

41 same work.143 Kleinberg rightly asserts that these conflicting understandings of Being of Time are due to a tension inherent in the structure of the work. French readers were far less interested in Division I of Being and Time, the sections on the collective existential structures of Being, than they were in Division II, “where Heidegger’s concern with the actual conditions of human existence came to the fore.”144 This constitutes what Kleinberg considers the first of three readings of Heidegger in France.145 In this final chapter, I catalogue the varying interpretations of the likes of Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in an effort to understand why they took up Division II of Being and Time as they did and to locate where they went astray.

3.1 Camus on Heidegger

Camus’s relation to Heidegger is not immediately evident. He begins his 1942 essay “The

Myth of Sisyphus” by declaring that suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical problem.”146

He then claims that solving the issue of suicide is tantamount to answering the question of whether life is worth living. Other matters, which neither endanger nor enrich our physical or philosophical lives, are mere games to be set aside. He first considers the reasons an individual might have for electing suicide, but is ultimately unable to isolate a singular cause. What dying voluntarily amounts to, however, is “confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it,” or recognizing that living is “not worth the trouble.”147 For Camus, suicide is the act of abdicating what one recognizes as a life of habit and futile suffering.

143 Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 10. 144 Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 11. 145 Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 11. 146 Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien (London, Paris: Hamish Hamilton, Gallimard, 1942(1955)), 3. 147 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 5.

Camus considers the problem of suicide as riddled with inconsistencies. Those who commit suicide, for instance, often do so believing that life has meaning. On the other hand, philosophers who endorse suicide do not perform it themselves. Camus muses that Arthur

Schopenhauer “is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table.”148 What accounts for these discrepancies is that our bodies reject annihilation, cultivating false hope of different lives on greener pastures. Such inconsistencies have led some to believe that the opinion one has about life is unrelated to their actions toward it.

Conversely, some maintain that a meaningless life constitutes a life not worth living. Camus is determined to show in the midst of this confusion that both suicide and hope are contingent on, though not compelled by, the feeling of absurdity.

Camus denies, however, the possibility of truly knowing the absurd. Playing the role of a privileged spectator, he ponders the absurd’s development and effect on our day-to-day existence.

The absurd appears to be born when we awaken our consciousness and address the void. By asking “Why?” we break from the humdrum rhythm of life and cease to anticipate the future. We experience for the first time a “revolt of the flesh”149 that makes us critical of man’s inhumanity within an even more inhuman world. In doing so, we cease to fear the “cruel mathematics”150 of time carrying us on a conveyor belt to our graves.

In light of this, Camus asks whether one should fight or take flight, to die or to hope. The deciding factor is humankind’s disposition to claim the world as our own by achieving familiarity, unity, and the absolute. If the “essential impulse of the human drama”151 is to sentimentalize the true apprehension of reality, then man, being mortal, is doomed to fail.

148 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 7. 149 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 14. 150 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 16. 151 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 17.

Surrounded by reflections of his unintelligibility, he must acknowledge his function as accessory to the absurd. The sooner he leaves the “royal road of reason”152 and learns that all that binds him to the world is the absurd, the sooner he can live to the fullest.

Camus is assured that the absurd abolishes discretions of both physical and philosophical suicide. Everything outside of one’s own frame of reference is subterfuge, resembling alluring invitations to make illogical leaps of faith. To persist in the present then is to “live without appeal,”153 to give life value by accepting its lack of value. This entails a lifelong revolt between a hopeless man anxiously aware of his mortality and his void, which demands a willingness to contemplate one’s own humiliating fate. Suicide, in contrast, is “acceptance at its extreme,”154 the undisciplined, irrevocable repudiation of one’s innocence given the situation, volition, and dignity. “That privation of hope and future means an increase in man's availability,”155 namely humankind’s disposal to persist in the here and now.

Camus acknowledges that others have previously tended to the theme of man’s affiliation with the absurd. Jaspers and Chestov remark on the failure of true knowledge and the mere appearance of ontology. Kierkegaard, as though “a man crucified and happy to be so,”156 embodies the absurd through each of his frenzied works. Most significantly, the method of

Husserl and the phenomenologists “disappoints hope.”157 Heidegger, for instance, portrays the lucid man as anguished by the transience of his existence. Camus identifies in these thinkers a shared refusal to offer consolation to human nostalgia. A man desiring happiness and reason must understand the disproportion between what he desires and the reality he faces—the extent

152 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 23. 153 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 60. 154 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 54. 155 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 57. 156 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 26. 157 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 27.

44 of which determines the level of absurdity. The absurd is the perpetual offspring of a divorce between these two elements. Hence, it can only exist within the confines of the human mind and the world as the individual’s frame of experiential reference. The “odd trinity”158 of the absurd precludes the option of suicide, for the balance would not survive the destruction of the self; the absurd has meaning so long as one is consciously dissatisfied with it. For Camus, this conscious negation forever binds us to the absurd. “The very thing that crushes me”159 therefore must be preserved through persistent lucidity.

However, Camus also makes the assertion that the same likes of Chestov, Jaspers, and

Heidegger commit philosophical suicide by instead deifying the thing that crushes them as a means of escape. They allege that the absurd justifies, not invalidates, the existence of the transcendent and that thus it is something godlike. Chestovian philosophy, for example, claims that the solution to the absurd is an incoherent God. Neither Kierkegaard nor Husserl respect the equilibrium, for the former wishes to be cured of the human condition and the latter eternalizes reason. Heidegger is singled out in the following passage:

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is

humiliated. The only reality is “anxiety” in the whole chain of beings. To the man

lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that

fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the

lucid man “in whom existence is concentrated”…This is to conclude at the end of

158 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 30. 159 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 31.

his analyses that “the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with

anguish.”160

Camus correctly identifies anxiety as heavily figuring into Heidegger’s ontology, but fails to distinguish between anxiety, fear, and what he calls anguish. Heidegger also diverts from the view that the lucid man faces a perpetual climate of the world no longer having anything to offer; for him, we are anxious in the face of having to actually live through the loss of our world.

Camus’s misconception of Heideggerian anxiety is all the more apparent as he continues,

This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the

world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom

when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the

mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd.

The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and “existence then delivers

itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness.”161

In the above, Camus reads Heidegger as privileging anxiety over and above other existential features of Dasein. However, as we have covered in the previous chapter, existential anxiety is part and parcel with Dasein’s Being-toward-death, its not-Being-at-home in the world, its being thrown into a world already formulated. It can only receive the amount of attention it does because it operates in conjunction with so many other basic structural features of Dasein. Indeed,

160 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 28. 161 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 29.

I have shown that anxiety warrants even more attention if we are to understand what Heidegger means by death as a way of Being Dasein.

There are still several correlations between the Camusean absurd and Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s existential homelessness. The absurd—the tension between our desire to make sense of the world and the world’s unresponsiveness—can be viewed as analogous to Dasein’s fear of demise as being a repression of Dasein’s anxiety before its experience of existential world collapse in death. And like many scholars, Camus seems to regard anxiety as a mood that discloses Dasein’s uncanniness, rather than as something part and parcel with death itself. Yet,

Heidegger’s anxiety is not meant to be everlasting and certainly not cold toward the human condition—it is a mood, when confronted, that reveals the uncanny dissonance between our brute projecting and our worldly projects. It is likely that the ambiguity of what anxiety is in relation to death for Heidegger has caused this misunderstanding—and not only for Camus, but for Sartre as well.

3.2 Sartre on Heidegger

The tension Kleinberg points out as being inherent in Being and Time evidently led Sartre astray in his reading of Heideggerian death and anxiety in Being and Nothingness. According to the translator’s introduction to the book, Sartre criticizes Heidegger for neglecting the structure of consciousness and the presence of Nothingness in not just certain occasions, but also in everyday situation.162 Sartre is able to take this position because he understands first and foremost that that human existence is ontic-ontological—“it can always pass beyond the

162 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Estella Barnes (United States: Washington Square Press, 1992), xxviii.

47 phenomenon toward its being.”163 Moreover, Sartre acknowledges that the existence of Dasein is a how of Being insofar as Dasein takes issue with its self. Sartre appropriates Heidegger’s conception of Dasein to formulate the following characterization of consciousness:

“consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.”164 And phenomena are disclosed to consciousness in precisely

Heidegger’s pre-ontological manner.

According to Jean Hyppolite, the above criticism constitutes “a masterly misinterpretation of Heidegger.”165 Heidegger would go on to write to Jean Beaufret that his speculative, existential-ontological philosophy is unlike Sartre’s atheistic, humanistic philosophy

“in which man, as liberty, gives unto himself his mode of being in the world and rejects any fossilized form of existence.”166 However, as I have portrayed Camus, Sartre recognizes in Being and Time a shared commitment to asking the question of the meaning of the being in the appropriate way. He alludes to Dasein’s Being-toward-death: “For Dasein there is even a permanent possibility of finding oneself ‘face to face’ with nothingness and discovering it as a phenomenon: this possibility is anguish…for Heidegger the being of human reality is defined as

‘being-in-the-world’.”167 Sartre also ties his conception of the lie to Heidegger’s das Man, saying

“The lie is also a normal phenomenon of what Heidegger calls the ‘mit-sein.’ It presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other, my existence for the Other, and the existence of the Other for me.”168 In the eyes of Marjorie Grene, “‘The essence of man is his existence.’ This Sartrean aphorism condenses into a few words the many-vectored ramifications of…the central

163 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 7. 164 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 24. 165 Hyppolite, Jean, “A Chronology of French Existentialism,” Yale French Studies, no. 16 (1955): 100. 166 Hyppolite, “A Chronology of French Existentialism,” 100-01. 167 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 50. 168 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 88.

48 conception of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world.’ The leap beyond this to…Being in Heidegger is a leap from firm ground into an abyss.”169

Sartre later begins departing from Heidegger’s views by finding fault in Dasein’s Being as care, which Sartre interprets as Dasein’s escaping itself by projecting itself into its possibilities.170 Sartre summarizes his critique:

Heidegger endows human reality with a self-understanding which he defines as an

‘ekstatic pro-ject’ of its own possibilities. It is certainly not my intention to deny

the existence of this project. But how could there be an understanding which

would not in itself be the consciousness (of) being understanding? This ekstatic

character of human reality will lapse into a thing-like, blind in-itself unless it

arises from the consciousness of ekstasis.171

In Sartre’s view, Heidegger strays too far into future ekstasis when he should focus on the present ekstasis. Most importantly, Sartre also takes issue with Heidegger’s conception of death.

In the section titled “My Death,” he gives an accurate reading of Dasein’s existence as Being- toward-death but then takes a turn toward referring to death as something akin to demise.

He begins, “[Dasein] is a project and an anticipation of its own death as the possibility of no longer realizing presence in the world. Thus death has become the peculiar possibility of the

Dasein…”172 However, Sartre goes on to reason that “Inasmuch as Dasein determines its project toward death, it realizes freedom-to-die and constitutes itself as a totality by its free choices of

169 Grene, Marjorie, “The German Existentialists,” Chicago Review 13, no. 2 (Summer 1959): 55. 170 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 134. 171 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 120. 172 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 682.

49 finitude.”173 With this claim, Sartre betrays an inadequate understanding of what Heidegger means by death. “By interiorizing death,” he says, “it serves our own ends.”174 Here, Sartre is accusing Heidegger of reasoning in bad faith in his depiction of death as an expected phenomenon. His argument is that (1) Heidegger claims that each death is that of a certain individual. That is, no one can undergo my death for me. (2) Dasein attains authenticity in the midst of Das Man by freely projecting itself toward its “final possibility.”175 Sartre concludes, (3)

This thinking is circular—“How indeed can one prove that death has this individuality and the power of conferring it?” That is, if an individual Dasein’s death is its own, how can it prove that its death has individuated it? Furthermore, is death truly the only thing I can project for myself and no one else? What about love? Can no one love for me?

The above critique of Heidegger’s notion of death reveals that Sartre considers

Heideggerian death to be something one awaits, i.e. literally can anticipate. Heidegger seemingly conflates death with demise and argues, according to Sartre, that death is something which will

“overtake me…a possibility which is characterized and distinct…the event which concerns only the for-itself,”176 rather than existential world collapse. In actuality, Sartre appears to be the one who conflates demise and death. According to Walter Kaufmann, Sartre’s criticism of Heidegger is that Heidegger views Being out for death as the only path to authentic Being. Only in death does Dasein cease to be outstanding or incomplete. Kaufmann depicts Sartre’s response as

“Nobody can love for me or sleep for me or breathe for me. Every experience, taken as my experience, is ‘something which nobody can do for’ me.”177 From Thomson’s table of shared formal structures between death and demise in the previous chapter, we know that the formal

173 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 682. 174 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 682. 175 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 683. 176 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 683. 177 Kaufmann, Walter, “Existentialism and Death,” Chicago Review 13, no.2 (Summer 1959): 85.

50 structure of “ownmost” when applied to demise yields the everyday understanding that “No one can take demise away from me, in the sense that no one can demise in my place. (Even if someone sacrifices his or her own life for me, I myself will still have to demise in the end.)”178

The formal structure of “ownmost” when applied to ontological death, however, gave us the view that “My very being is at issue in death”179 and so on. Given that Kaufmann’s characterization of Sartre’s critique of Heideggerian death and the everyday notion of demise as simply death, we can gather that Sartre, not Heidegger, regards demise and death as one and the same phenomenon.

We are aware from the previous chapter that Heidegger treats death as not an event that befalls Dasein. Heidegger views death instead as the possibility of the impossibility of existence, a possibility that Dasein has as soon as it is. It is a distinctive way of Being Dasein in which

Dasein is no longer able to be. Compare this conception to what Sartre argues is the actual meaning of death: “At bottom it is in no way distinguished from birth, and it is the identity of birth and death that we call facticity.”180 On the basis of this definition of facticity, Sartre goes on to say,

Death is in no way an ontological structure of my being…[It is] nothing but a

certain aspect of facticity and of being-for-others—i.e., nothing other than the

given. It is absurd that we are born; it is absurd that we die…It is therefore an

external and factual limit of my subjectivity!181

178 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 277. 179 Thomson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time,” 277. 180 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 698. 181 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 699.

For Sartre, death is a contingency rather than a way to be for Dasein. This is made more evident by his claim that “we never know when we shall die.”182 It is far from, as Heidegger contends, that ontological phenomenon Dasein lives through and in terms of which it can take itself as a whole.

3.3 Merleau-Ponty on Heidegger

We have seen in the previous chapter that in Heidegger’s view, Being-in-the-world is “a way in which Dasein’s character is defined existentially.”183 Dasein is an entity which has Being- in-the-world as its way of being. Dasein is only insofar as it engages with the world through the mode of being of concern and understands itself in terms of possibilities of engagement with the world. Moreover, Dasein is said to be thrown into the world in that it finds itself already situated within concernful dealings and must thus always be oriented toward the world in some manner.

Dasein encounters things in the world in its average everydayness—“the kind of Being which is closest to Dasein.”184 A fundamental aspect of the everydayness of Being-in-the-world is moods, e.g., fear and anxiety, which are ways in which Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is disclosed to

Dasein. As ontologically prior to our encounters with the world, moods determine how the world discloses itself to Dasein and how Dasein comports itself in turn. In anxiety, Dasein experiences itself as not at home in the world. It finds itself unable to understand itself in terms of its everyday worldly projects.

Merleau-Ponty, “an original disciple of Sartre,”185 likewise focuses on the notion of situatedness in “The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology.” He, however, emphasizes

182 Kaufmann, “Existentialism and Death,” 86. 183 Heidegger, Being and Time, 92. 184 Heidegger, Being and Time, 93. 185 Hyppolite, “A Chronology of French Existentialism,” 100.

52 more the importance of one’s body as the seat of perception and experience (that is not to say that he conflates one’s physical body with one’s experience of that body). He seeks an account of perception that will account for cases of phantom limb pain and anosognosia by combining the psychological and physiological conditions of the living body as experienced in a given moment.

According to Merleau-Ponty, the world is something our bodies are oriented toward: “I cannot understand the function of the living body…except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world.”186 Also, Being-in-the-world is synonymous with what he calls the “preobjective view.” Merleau-Ponty argues that our reflexes “adjust themselves” prior to objective stimuli to a given “global presence of the situation”187 that is to be risen toward. The preobjective view determines “what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.”188

There is an underlying contrast between these two conceptions. For Merleau-Ponty, the preobjective view is a matter of life and death, whereas we know that for Heidegger, Dasein does not “die” insofar as it has death and being-in-the-world as part of the essential structure of its existence. According to Merleau-Ponty, our being-in-the-world is “a margin of almost impersonal existence, which can be practically taken for granted, and which I rely on to keep me alive.”189 For Heidegger, the loss of one’s preobjective reflexes would not be the equivalent of

Dasein no longer being “alive.” Merleau-Ponty views the body as a vehicle through which we rise toward the world; for Heidegger, being-in-the-world is an existential orientation, an ontological structure of the meaning of the being of Dasein. Heidegger states in Division II,

Chapter 1 that “Factically one’s own Dasein is always dying already; that is to say, it is in a

186 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 428. 187 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 429. 188 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 429. 189 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 432.

Being-towards-its-end…[it] already has the definite character of Being-towards-death, even when it is not explicitly engaged in ‘thinking about death’.”190 And as we have seen, Dasein cannot go beyond its possibility of death no matter how it tries to escape it, for death is the possibility of the impossibility of Dasein.

To put Merleau-Ponty’s flawed interpretation of Heidegger into other words, “while

Merleau-Ponty begins his philosophy with experience and the affects within it, Heidegger uncovers the structure that makes said affects possible within experience.”191

Despite these contrasts, there are several resemblances between the two perspectives.

Similar to Heidegger’s conception of worldhood, Merleau-Ponty views the world as the horizon of possible projects our living bodies can take on. Another similarity is that for both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the world is constant—it is a permanent feature of our human existence. The world is, in other words, the correlate of the individual; we are already situated in the world prior to any taking-place of the so-called reflex arc. For example, a cup is not given to us as an object in the world, but as something to be picked up given that it is a part of a state of affairs. The preobjective view is sedimented in our bodies; we know how to do something even if we are unable to rationalize or articulate how we are able to do it. With the phantom limb phenomenon, however, one knows discursively that their limb is gone yet does not habitually realize it. Being- in-the-world is therefore an underlying, impersonal existence that grounds us. It is disclosed to us, much like when it comes to Heidegger’s moods, when there is a disconnect between the habitual and the objective.

190 Heidegger, Being and Time, 298-99. 191 Bannon, Bryan E, “Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Ponty's Relational Ontology,” Research in Phenomenology 41, no. 3 (2011): 340.

Conclusion

I set out in this final chapter to consider the consequences of the various ambiguities in

Being and Time, namely, the lack of clarity regarding how the method of formal indication functions and how death is distinct from demise and anxiety. There is indeed an inherent tension rooted in the text, as Kleinberg notes, that has set off and perpetuated the current controversy surrounding the meaning of death. There was also tension soon after the publication of Being and

Time. Camus, who writes of the absurd being born of the divorce between a man’s desire for happiness and reason and his reality, compares himself to Heidegger in the same work. He groups Heidegger with those who do not respect this absurd trinity, but rather glorify anxiety in the face of the absurd. Sartre more famously criticizes Heidegger for eschewing the everyday matter of death as a contingency while promoting Dasein’s escape through projecting into its possibilities. Finally, Merleau-Ponty mistakenly aligns his preobjective view with Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world. In any case, Heidegger’s work on death regardless of its inherent ambiguities made an indelible mark on its first audience. Kaufmann makes the important observation that

if existentialism is widely associated not merely with extreme experiences in

general but above all with death, this is due primarily to Heidegger who discussed

death in a crucial 32-page chapter of his influential Being and Time (1927). Later,

Sartre included a section on death in his Being and Nothingness (1943) and

criticized Heidegger; and Camus devoted his two would-be philosophic books to

suicide…It was Heidegger who moved death into the center of discussion.192

192 Kaufmann, “Existentialism and Death,” 75.

It is unfortunate that the debate over what Heidegger means by death rages on to this day and has caused audiences much confusion. So long as death remains in the center of discussion, however, the better we can draw from our factical lives to treat it as a formally indicative concept and the better we can understand its relation to the equally ambiguous concept of anxiety.

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