The Event of Death: a Phenomenological Enquiry

Building upon the "preliminary conception of Phenomenology" introduced by Heidegger in section II of the Introduction to Sein und zeit,l one may say that a phenomenology of death would mean: "to let death, as that which shows itself, be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. " Does this mean then, that a properly phenomenological d- cription of death may reveal to us what death as a factical event is like "in the very way in which it shows itself from itself"? Although I cannot experience my death in order to describe it, may some kind of phenomenologica'l inference or "extrapolation"2 be the condition for a unique and privileged revelation of what it is like to be dead? There is an important element of phenomenological descr- tion which renders such an extrapolation implausible, and it involves what Husserl originally called the reduction to signi- cance or meaning. It can never be true for the phenomenologist, 1 Heidegger, Martin, Sein und zeit, p. 34. e. t. page 58. 2 Henry W. Johnstone Jr. thinks that while one cannot extrapo­ late from the experience of sleep to the experience of death, it may be possible to extrapolate from the phenomeno­ lQgy of sleep to the phenomenology of death. Cf. H. W. John­ stone Jr. , "Toward a Phenomenology of Death", in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 1975, pages 396-7. Cf.

Contenu

One: Ontological Roots of the Phenomenon of Death: A Heideggerean Interpretation.- One: Individuation and Temporality.- A. Transcendence as the Key.- (i) The Necessity of Individuation as Revealed in the Meaning of Transcendence: Lessons from Kant.- (ii) The Meaning of Transcendence as Temporality.- B. Temporality as the Meaning of Individuation.- (i) Heidegger's Understanding of Individuation as Grounded in Care.- (ii) Temporality as the Meaning of Care.- Two: Temporality as the Meaning of Being-Towards-Death.- A. Inauthentic Understanding of Death.- B. Temporality and Authentic Being-towards-Death.- (i) Existentiell Attestation of Potentiality-for-Being-onef's-Self.- (ii) Ontological roots: the temporal structure of Advancing Resoluteness.- C. Historicity and Being-towards-death.- Three: Death, Time and Appropration.- A. The Development of Heidegger's Thought.- B. The Later Heidegger on Time and Appropriation.- C. Death in History, Poetry and Language.- D. Death and the Emergence of Being in the Essence of the Thing.- Four: A Project Beyond Heidegger.- Two: Death as an Ontic E-Vent: Coming to terms with the phenomenon of death as a determinate possibility.- One: Reflecting on One's own Death.- A. The Intelligibility of the Phenomenon of My Own Death as a Determinate Event.- B. A pre-reflective awareness of a determinate possibility: a phenomenology of imagination.- C. My Own Death as a Determinate Possibility: Reflections on Terminal Illness.- (i) My Own Death, against the backdrop of Being-there.- (ii) Some Patterns of a Terminal Illness.- (iii) Implications regarding the analysis.- Two: The Death of the Other.- A. Solicitude: condition of the possibility of an ontological awareness of the ontic e-vent of the death of the Other.- (i) A Heideggerean perspective.- (ii) Heidegger on Solicitude.- (iii) The Relationship of Authentic Solicitude: Beyond Sein und Zeit.- (iv) The In-finitude of Authentic Solicitude.- B. The E-vent of the Death of the Other.- (i) Understanding of the Potentiality-for-Being of Others.- (ii) Solicitude as a Projection of our Being-towards-Death: the temporal roots of the Belonging-together of Death and Love.- (iii) A Death.- (iv) Recovery.- Three: The Phenomenon of Immortality.- A. The Possibility of my own Immortality.- B. The Immortality of the Other.- Three: Ontic/Ontological Implications.- One: Ontology as Concrete.- Two: Is Phenomenology still too Metaphysical?.- Key to abbreviations.