Death is an interesting subject to me, and I found it to be one of the best parts of Heidegger’s reading. Hopefully that does not sound morbid but I do believe it is an important subject that we seem to neglect in the west (and perhaps other parts of the world). Heidegger writes of “Being-toward-death” or in other words the human that is on his way to his inevitable death. Death is the only end and it is a very profound thing to think about. One day this thing that “I” am, this “Me” will one day cease to exist. Now many of my peers find this thought scary but it has a powerful effect on me, and somehow makes life seem a bit more significant. That is my understanding of what Heidegger might be trying to say, though i’m no expert. He speaks of the “they” or the other beings who are not “you” and he explains that the they tranquilize the Da-sein (the individual being) by saying death is nothing to worry about. They tempt the being-toward-death with illusions that death might not happen, and that you can continue to live your everyday life. The “they” make it a social faux pas for the Da-sein to even think about death.
Another thing Heidegger mentions, is that death is something only experienced by the Da-Sein, and the they never truly experience it. He says that people are always just “there.” As someone in class brought up, you can never really experience death until you die, until then it is just a phenomenon. Everything we know about death is from what we’ve seen, read, or heard. Another interesting point brought up by the lecturers in class is that once the Da-sein dies, it’s death becomes a part of the “they.” I can understand this by the knowledge that when people die, they no longer exist yet we have funerals and grieve for them. The irony is that these events are for ourselves or the “they” who have lost someone. We are the ones who are sad and require funeral services to help us in the grieving process. The Da-sein no longer exists to need such trivialities.
I find this all very relatable to American culture and perhaps i’m not the only one. Death is a very taboo subject here (other places too I suppose), and we never properly discuss it. Instead we worry about finances, or trivial drama about being called nasty things. We are sedated by material possessions and lousy entertainment. But when death comes around we are devastated. It should really be something we acknowledge in our day to day life and realize as an ultimate end to our time here on earth. Perhaps this understanding of death allows us to be “authentic” as Heidegger calls it.
Now authenticity is a difficult thing to talk about, but Heidegger claims that the being-toward-death must acknowledge and understand his death in order to be authentic. Does this mean he has to experience it? No matter how hard I try to prepare for death, I know that I will never be prepared. On the other hand, I do understand that death is the end of the road so does this make me authentic? Perhaps it makes me authentic in one respect, however authenticity is such a broad topic. I have difficulty believing i’m ever authentic. Or maybe it’s more true to say that i’m always authentic, because everything I do is my own doing (or choice), even if the things I do are not how I would act ordinarily. This might be a more semantical approach to authenticity because I don’t believe Heidegger is specifically talking about this kind of authentic existence, but a more primitive or stripped down authentic existence which is merely concerned with “being” and “death.”
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