Being‐Towards‐Death and Owning One's Judgment

Heidegger's discussion of 'Being-towards-death' occupies a prominent position in his reflections on authenticity.But this discussion has been the target of some of his fiercest critics, 1 and poses his sympathetic readers some of their greatest challenges.This paper will offer a novel interpretation of the discussion as contributing to the articulation of a notimplausible account of self-knowledge and self-acknowledgement.It has often been noted that the term typically translated as 'authenticity'-Eigentlichkeit-could be translated more literally as 'ownness' or 'ownedness'; and my reading reveals Eigentlichkeit to be the 'owning' of one's own judgment, an 'owning' that manifests itself in a distinctive relationship to one's death.The reading builds on a comparison of Heidegger's discussion with an examination in his lectures of St Paul and, in particular, of his remarks on the Last Judgment in the letters to the Thessalonians.Others have suggested a connection might be found there; 2 and what I offer here is a suggestion of my own about just what that connection might be.I propose that Heidegger sees in St Paul's remarks an understanding of what it is to be willing to stand before God, and that this provides a model for Heidegger of an understanding of what it is to be willing to stand before oneself.The (confused) desire to escape God's judgment is a desire to avoid what one takes to be the facts about oneself and manifests itself in a distinctive relationship to the Last Judgment; alienation from one's own judgment is the avoidance of the same facts and can be identified, I argue, with Heideggerian inauthenticity and its distinctive mode of Being-towards-death.Sec. 1 sets out some of the principal puzzling features of Heidegger's discussion of Being-towards-death; Sec. 2 presents my reading of Heidegger's discussion of St Paul; and 1 In addition to Edwards' well-known criticisms (see his 1979 and 1989), Philipse claims that 'Heidegger's allegedly deep analysis of death does not contain significant philosophical insights', and is merely 'a mesmerizing play with words' (1998: 354). 2 Cf., e.g.McGrath 2006: 196 and Tonning 2009: 147.Young (1997: 67) suggests an analogy also, though without reference to Heidegger's discussion of St Paul. The Possibility of Impossibility Claim (PIC)Heidegger insists that '[d]eath is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein' (SZ 250).'It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every way of existing', 'the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all' (SZ 262). 6 The 'Not an Event' Claim (NEC) Heidegger insists that death is not 'an oncoming event', 'some impending event encountered environmentally' (SZ 254, 250).More specifically, he distinguishes death (Tod) from perishing (Verenden) and demise (Ableben). 7 In what follows, I adopt Blattner's proposals that 'perishing' refers to 'something like the cessation of lifemaintaining organic functions', and 'demise' to 'the end of [Dasein's] pursuit of tasks, goals, and projects, an ending that is forced by organic perishing ' (1994: 54).Heidegger's familiar concern to distinguish Dasein from the 'merely living' provides us with a reasonably clear sense of why Dasein's death might be unlike 'perishing '. 8 But what such a death might be that it is distinct from demise is a much more difficult question.I will also give labels to more complex clusters of remarks. 9It is tempting here to shift to talk of 'motifs' but, for simplicity, I will continue with talk of 'claims': 5 Cf. also SZ 264, and SZ 250 and 263 quoted below.References to Heidegger's work use acronyms given in the bibliography, followed by page numbers.I use the established translations of Heidegger's works in most cases.As the two available translations of Sein und Zeit also give the pagination of the German original, I give references to the latter, though generally I follow the translation of Macquarrie and Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). 6Cf. also SZ 255, 266, 306 and 329. Cf., e.g., Cf., e.g., SZ 58. 9 In suggesting that these remarks form such clusters, the labels I use here run the risk of being interpretively-loaded; but the remarks in question will be given a more fine-grained reading in what follows.