Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 59 页

2.2 Death, Temporality and Historicality: Being and Time

‘Being-in-the-world’, Heidegger declares at the opening of his analysis of care, ‘is a structure which is originarily and constantly whole.’⁷² Yet the entire chapter devoted to care (chapter 6 of the first division) never analyses the meaning of the whole or the totality as such. This task is left to the opening section of the second division of Being and Time (§45), which reminds the reader that existence ‘formally indicates that Dasein is as an understanding ability-to-be which firstly ‘raise[s] the question of this entity’s ability-to-be-a-whole [Ganzseinkönnen].’⁷³ As such an ability-to-be, there is thus some sense in which Dasein is necessarily not yet, some sense in which it is necessarily still outstanding, to which an ‘end’ belongs. But the issue for Heidegger is not the actual realisation of this end, such that Dasein ontically ‘completes’ its own ability-to-be-a-whole, but rather the end which defines – which is – this open ability, this possibility of being-a-whole. In short, this end of being-in-the-world is death [Tod], and it is an end which ‘limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein.’⁷⁴ This is, as we will now examine, a distinct existential-ontological conception of death, which only exists as a possibility – Dasein’s pure, ‘ownmost’ [eigenst]⁷⁵ possibility – and hence ‘is only in an existentiell being towards death.’⁷⁶ In other words, the existential structure of this existentiell being makes up Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole, such that this structure is modally divided between an authentic being-towards-death (anticipation) and an inauthentic everyday evasion in the face of death (awaiting).

Heidegger differentiates his conception of death from both ‘perishing’ and ‘demise’ at an analogous level to his dissociation of Dasein from both the present-at-hand and the readyto-hand. Perishing is the biological end of life: the heartbeat stops. But since perishing is a category of the ontology of life which – as Heidegger wants it – is subordinate to the ontology of Dasein,⁷⁷ the end of Dasein from the standpoint of its existence as a living entity is not its perish but rather its demise. Strictly speaking, Dasein never perishes, but it certainly demises, but only so long as this demise is understood as the end of its life, not its death. The primary problem, however, with perishing and demise is that they situate death at the level of beingat-an-end [Zu-Ende-sein] rather than being-towards-the-end [Sein zum Ende]. For Heidegger, these conceptions of death operate with a conception of end which displaces the fact that the end is already always there [da], such that Dasein’s understanding ability-to-be-a-whole is, one might say, already always constituted by an understanding inability-to-be-a-whole. Comparing the not-yet of Dasein to a piece of ripening fruit, he suggests that ‘…as long as any Dasein is, it too is already its “not yet”.’⁷⁸ Heidegger never uses the word, but there is an implicit concept of totalisation being developed here, such that being-towards-death totalises precisely because it is not nor can never be a totality (in the ordinary or so-called preontological sense of the term). This is also the unique way in which Heidegger’s conceptions of death and the end dovetail with a particular conception of the limit [Grenze].⁷⁹ As White explains, ‘We are interested in why and how the possibilities are thus limited’⁸⁰, and ‘death delineates and delimits Dasein’s possibilities as an understanding able-to-be.’⁸¹ Or as Blattner states, ‘it is a limit-situation in which the ability-to-be is stifled.’⁸² The conception of death which is appropriate to the entity that is its possibilities is the fundamental limit of those possibilities, but what kind of limit is this?

⁷² Heidegger, SZ, 240 (BT, 225).

⁷³ Heidegger, SZ, 307, 310 (BT, 274, 276).

⁷⁴ Heidegger, BT, 277. Following Macquarrie and Robinson, Ganze will be translated as ‘whole’, whereas Ganzheit will be rendered as ‘totality’. Heidegger rarely uses the technical term Totalität for totality.

⁷⁵ White prefers to translate eigenst as ‘most proper’ rather than ‘ownmost’, so as to resist the reduction of Dasein to individual persons. See White, ‘Dasein, Existence, and Death’, 332. However, she does not mitigate the overt individualism of other dimensions of Heidegger’s analysis of death, particularly his depiction of the ‘in each case mineness’ of death.

⁷⁶ Heidegger, BT, 277.

⁷⁷ Ibid. 291.

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