Man and Death

PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEATH
Pius G. Morados

It is never certain that we will be born; but once we are born, it is absolutely certain that we will die.

We fear death and we use all our strength to forget it. We avoid what reminds us of it, we call morbid any thought of it. We cultivate the habit of thinking always of death as something that concerns others, only others, and we live more or less as the fools of our own blind faith. In this domain as in all others, however, repression and insincerity profoundly disturb conscience and life. The world at large sees us as people immensely ourselves, for that is the face we show; but secretly we are ceaselessly measuring how near the abyss has come towards us and we find ourselves – sometimes more, sometimes less – aghast at the thought of it. There is no use of lying to ourselves or pretending that is all a charade. All without exception begin through birth and end in death. It is simpler, courageous, and more human to reflect serenely on the mystery of death, which cannot but be my death.

1. To be human is to be in the world. Man is primordially directed towards the world and has the power to be in the world. His being in the world consists in being alongside with things and in being with others.

Through his being in the world, and involvement in it, man has the power to be. Man realizes his own possibilities, constantly actualizes his potentialities of existence, and so is always ahead of himself or of what he actually is.

While being, he is also always becoming.

2. Care is the fundamental structure of Dasein. As project it always comports itself towards its potentiality for being. There is always something still outstanding in man. As long as man exists in the world, his potentiality for being is never exhausted.

As long as man exists in the world, his potentiality for being is never exhausted. There is always something to be settled yet in man. As long as he is, man never reaches his wholeness, he is always has an unfinished character.

3. Man reaches his wholeness is death. He then loses his potentiality for being. There is no more outstanding in man, everything is finished, settled for him. He is no longer being there.

Death is the transition of man from Dasein to no longer Dasein.

4. There is no possibility of experiencing this transition. No one has ever come out alive from death to tell us about death. Our first experience of death is the death of others. This does not necessarily give us the objective knowledge about death even if we are beings with others; for the death of another person makes him no longer a person but a thing, a corpse, although he may be the object of concern for those who remain behind. We have no way of knowing the loss of being that the dying man suffers; in other words, we never experience the death of another person as he himself has experienced it.

“My death is absolutely certain, but its modalities are wrapped in uncertainty and it has the unique character of being completely inexperienciable. Those who break the seal of its secret do not return to tell us either how the trial is offered, or how they have met it, or how we in our turn must face up to it. Being strictly personal, death is an act in which the experience of others can give us strictly personal, death is an act in which the experience of others can give us but very feeble help.”

No one can take my dying away from me. Death is always mine. It is a peculiarity of my being in which my own being is an issue. Mineness and existence are constitutive of death.

5. Death is the possibility of man, a “not yet” which will be. And what is unique in this possibility is that it has the character of “no-longer-Dasein” or of “no-longer-being-there”, and belongs to the particular man, his very own, non-representable.

As long as man exists, he lacks a totality, a wholeness, and this lack comes to its end with death. The lack of totality of man is not the lack of togetherness of a thing which can be completed by piecing together entities or parts. This “not yet” of man is something that is already accessible to him. Dasein, as long as it is, is already, is already its “not-yet” or its end. This may be likened to the unripeness of the fruit which contains as its end its ripeness. There is however, a big difference between the ripeness of the fruit and the death of man; namely, with the fruit, the ripeness is the fulfillment of its being. In the case of man, on the other hand, in death, man may or may not arrive at his fulfillment.

“So little is the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with death, that Dasein may well have passed its ripeness before the end. For the most part, Dasein ends in unfulfillment.

6. Dasein, as long as it exists, is already its end. This end is not to be understood as “being-at-an-end” but as “being-towards-the-end”. Phenomenology of death is not a description of death or an afterlife but of man as being-towards-his-end or a being-towards-death. If man is a being-towards-death, and his being in the world has the fundamental structure of care, then the end of man must be clarified in terms of that basic state.

7. Being-towards-death and Care – Man, in being ahead of himself, as project, comes to the disclosure of his extreme possibility, the possibility that he will no longer be there. Death is the uttermost “not-yet” of man, something towards which he comports himself. Death is not just something that happens to man; it is something impending. The impending is not that of the coming of the storm, or of the arrival of a friend, or a journey one is going to undertake. The impending death is distinctive, because it is the possibility which is own most.

Death is mine, something that I have to take over myself. In death I stand before myself in my ownmost potentiality for being, because the issue in death is no other than my being in the world. Death is the possibility of my no-longer-possible, of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there., the possibility of being cut off from others and from things. And this possibility that must be, something that I cannot outstrip.

This possibility of my absolute impossibility is not just obtained in my rare moment. As soon as I am born into the world, I am already thrown into this possibility. I may not be aware of it, but the fact that I exist in the world, I exist with the possibility of death.

8. The possibility of death is revealed only in the basic mood of man, anxiety in the experience of dread, wherein man comes face to face with his potentiality for being. Anxiety is not fear, because fear is concerned with something determinate which threatens my immediate involvement of things. Anxiety is of something indeterminate: what I dread is not entity, but the world itself, my being-in-the-world.

Many are indeed ignorant of death as the possibility which is ownmost, nonrelational and cannot be outstripped. They are engrossed in immediate concern with things, thus covering up their own being-towards-death, fleeing in the face of it. The fact remains that they are being-towards-death, that man is dying even in his “falleness”, in his being absorbed in the everyday world of concern.

9. Everyday Being-towards-death – inauthencity – In the publicness of everyday concern, death is known as a mishap that frequently occurs. The self of the public, the impersonal “they” talks of death as a “case of death”, an event that happens constantly. The “they” hides death by saying, “People die… one of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us.” The “they” realizes that death is something indefinite that must be arrive ultimately, but for the moment, the “they” says, it has nothing to do with us. It is something not yet present-at-hand, and therefore offers no threat. The “they” says “one dies” but the one is nobody, no one will claim that it is I. In this way, the “they” levels off death, makes it ambiguous, and hides the true aspects of this possibility, the mines, nonrelational, and that which cannot be outstripped.

10. Everyday being towards death is a falling, a constant fleeing in the face of death. The everyday man is constantly evading death, hiding it and giving new explanations for it. The everyday man, even in his falling, attests to the fact that he is a being-towards-death, although he assures himself in the inauthentic, impersonal “they” that he is still living. Even in the mode of tranquilized indifference towards his uttermost possibility of existence, man still has his ownmost potentiality of being an issue.

11. The impersonal “they” is also certain of death. The “they” says, “Death certainly comes, but not right away.” There is at the same time a denial of certainty which seems only an empirical certainty derived from several cases of other people’s death. As long as man remains on this level of certainty, death can never really become certain for him.

Though man may seem to talk only of this empirical certainty of death in the public, he is really at the bottom aware of another higher certainty than that of the empirical and this is the certainty of his own death. The inauthentic man, however, evades this higher certainty in carefreeness, in an air of superior indifference. He stops worrying about death and busies himself in the urgency of concern, deferring death as something later. He covers up the fact that death is possible at any moment. The inauthentic man confers a kind of definiteness upon this indefiniteness of death by intervening it with urgent matters of the everyday. He cannot flee from death, however, because he derives the certainty of death from the fact that being thrown into this world is being-towards-death. Death is ever present in the very being of man.

12. Authentic Being-towards-death – The authentic response of man to his awareness of being-towards-death is not evasion, of covering up death’s true implication, nor of giving new explanations for it. Man must face the possibility of death as his possibility, the possibility in which his very existence is an issue. Facing this possibility is not actualizing it or bring it to happen. That would be suicide and suicide demolishes all the potentialities of man instead of bringing them into a whole reality. Nor does it mean that man must brood over death, calculating it; for death is not something one can have at his disposal.

The authentic being-towards-death is anticipation of this possibility by which man comes close to death, not by making it actual but by understanding it as the possibility of impossibility of any existence at all for him. Anticipation reveals to man that death means the measureless impossibility of existence. This projection of his utmost possibility will provide him with a vision of his own present existence, the latent possibilities lying before him.

13. In authentic being-towards-death, man realizes that death is his ownmost possibility and thus the awareness comes to him of his potentiality for being, for fulfilling his own being. He must therefore wrench himself away from the impersonal “they” and make himself an individual, alone.

Death individualizes man, because death does not belong to everybody but to one’s own self. This individual by death reveals the “there” man, his being-alongside-things (concern) and his being-with-others (solicitude). It reveals to man that his concern and solicitude is nothing when his ownmost potentiality for being is itself an issue in death. This does not mean cutting himself off from all relationships but rather projecting himself upon his ownmost potentiality for being instead on the “they” self.

The authentic man does not outstrip death. His anticipation does not evade death. It accepts this possibility and in accepting man frees himself. By his anticipation man frees himself, he is free for his own death, he is delivered from becoming lost in possibilities.

BIRTH. My birth is something for which I do not have the slightest responsibility. I carry no memory of it. The temporal, local, racial, family and circumstances of my birth have greatly influenced the whole course of my destiny, but it was entirely independent of me. Whether under a blessing or a curse, my birth took place and I could not shape its pattern. It is eternally what it has been, for it belongs to the past.

DEATH. My death lies inescapably before me, but it has not yet come. It will be and I may therefore expect it and prepare for it. My liberty, which could not intervene in my birth, can now be exercised in this at least: that I may at this moment bring about my own death.

14. Man can thus understand and choose among the possibilities in the light of this extreme possibility. In authenticity, man guards himself from falling into the ambiguous “they” and he is now free to be himself, the person he himself wants to be. His possibilities are now open before him, determined by his end and understood, thus, as finite.

The indefiniteness which goes with the certainty of death calls for authentic Dasein to open itself to the constant threat arising from its being in the world. The state of mind that is open to this constant threat is anxiety. What he is anxious about is no other than his potentiality for being. Anxiety individualizes man, and in individualizing him, makes him become certain of the totality of his potentiality for being.

Sources:

“Martin Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Death” by Manuel Dy Jr.

Notes from the “Phenomenology of Death” by Ranilo Hermida