Anne O’Byrne
Even if Dasein is “assured” in its belief about its “whither,” or if, in rational enlightenment, it supposes itself to know about its “whence,” all this counts for nothing as against the phenomenal facts of the case: for the mood brings Dasein before the “that it is” of its “there,” which, as such, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma. (BTMR, H. 136)
Death is everywhere in Being and Time , and it would be difficult to understand Heidegger’s work or make any claim about his thinking without having undergone that text and its unrelenting confrontation with our mortal finitude. Our being is being-toward-death, and our mode of being in time is essentially futural as we project ourselves on the certainty of our own deaths. For Heidegger, famously, death is our ownmost, nonrelational possibility that is certain and not to be outstripped (BTMR, H. 264). Much has been written about this and anything that has been written about birth in Heidegger’s work has had to take this overwhelming emphasis into account.1 Yet what happens if, now, we take birth and death together, and take seriously the and that holds them in relation and that requires us to talk of coming to be and passing away, of emergence into the world and leaving it, and, moreover, to talk of them in the same breath? After all, this is the condition of finitude. We are finite by virtue of having an end and a beginning.
What interested Heidegger was never the phenomenon of death or of birth but, rather what death and eventually birth had to do with the sort of beings we are. That is to say, death and birth happen, and they are the object of empirical study by biologists and anthropologists who assign them meaning in specific physical and cultural contexts, but they have no being and are not beings. Neither ever is. From the point of view of ontology, birth and death are relevant only as the concrete instantiation of our natal and mortal mode of being. In Being and Time’s existential analytic, the being under consideration is “each time mine” and mortality or being-toward-death shows the futural character of my temporal being. Yet I have argued elsewhere that natality or being-toward-birth complicates that temporality and also points to our being-with others, making the being in question essentially plural.2 It is a matter of our being. Then, when we turn to thinking mortality and natality together, the and shows us stretching along between birth and death, not as though strung between discrete points that mark the ends of our finite existence, but as actively stretching along, making us open to the most intimate extremities of existence. It is not a matter of adopting an open stance or attitude, or of deliberately taking up a more or less open mode of living; rather, Dasein is being-open. Thomas Sheehan has argued that Heidegger’s theme, late and early, is “our finitude as opening up the world/clearing/open that we essentially are.”3 If so, our birth, growth, and death show how we are essentially open beings.
Pursuing this thought through and beyond Being and Time means following a series of displacements. Jemeinigkeit—the mine-ness of the being that is at the center of the investigation of Being—is set in place in the opening lines of S.9 of Being and Time: “We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed. The being of any such entity is each time mine” (H. 41). The initial aim of the work is to make us perplexed about Being, and the seat of that perplexity will be the being that is a question for itself, the being we have long thought that we know best of all. The first task is to displace that familiarity, and pushing aside the terms subject, self, human, rational animal, etc. in favor of Dasein is Heidegger’s opening move. In the course of division one of Being and Time he goes on to reorder our understanding of time such that we may no longer think of ourselves as moving through a series of presents away from the past into the future, from birth to death. He writes: “[t]he non-relational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Dasein down to itself” (H. 263); “when Dasein exists, it is already thrown into this possibility” (H. 251); authentic being-toward-death is a project in that Dasein projects itself upon it as an eminent possibility of its own (S, 53); “the authentic future is the toward-oneself . . . existing as the possibility of a nullity not-to-be-bypassed” (BTMR, H. 330). Indeed, he argues that Dasein’s temporality is predominantly futural as we project ourselves upon our possibilities of being. This is how—very briefly put—death permeates our existence. The future orients our existence; death, mortality, and futuricity dominate the work.
Yet, throughout division one, the place of birth and natality is held open by the thought of thrownness. Heidegger writes: “Thrownness is neither a fact-that-is-finished nor a Fact that is settled” (H. 179). Far from it. We are thrown into the world and this— not death—is the source of our constantly disruptive existential anxiety. “Anxiety is anxious about naked Dasein as something that has been thrown into uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit]. It brings one back to the pure ‘that-it-is’ of one’s ownmost individualized thrownness” (H. 343). Reading this in natal terms allows us to make concrete and explicit what otherwise remains hidden in the folds of the text. First, in our natal thrownness we come face to face with the fact that we once were-not-yet, and with the contingency of our having come to be at all. There is every reason to be anxious about naked, thrown Dasein because there is no reason for its having been thrown. We could very easily have never come to be. Second, we arrive new into a world that is already old, and our arrival is a moment of possibility and renewal but also, inevitably, disruption.4 Thus, third, making the world our world is a task, and it will turn out to be a shared task. Put another way, we receive the historical task of making the past our past despite its being irrevocably gone and thoroughly inappropriable.5
How does this come to be a shared task? What does birth have to do with opening Dasein to plural being? For most of Being and Time Heidegger holds off the first person plural. Dasein is singular, and both its death and birth are presented as above all having to do with its individuality. While he does attend to Mitsein [being-with] and even acknowledges that Dasein and Mitsein are co-originary, the problem of plural Dasein emerges fully only once birth is explicitly addressed for the first time in division two. The context is Heidegger’s approach to the historical (and eventually political) character of our being.6 He writes in Section 72:
The question [of the wholeness of Dasein] itself may . . . have been answered with regard to being-toward-the-end. However, death is, after all, only the “end” of Dasein and formally speaking, it is just one of the ends that embraces the totality of Dasein. But the other “end” is the “beginning,” “birth.” Only the being “between” birth and death presents the whole we are looking for. (H. 373)
The wholeness of Dasein will continue to elude Heidegger precisely because of the unpredictable, disruptive newness that he can no longer ignore once he opens up the question of birth. Birth cannot be accounted for using terms borrowed from the characterizations of death, nor even thrownness. Thus Heidegger’s own schema is displaced. Rather than nonrelational, birth is ur-relational, since no one is born alone. Birth is not our ownmost, since it is an event and an experience for others—notably our mothers— before we can call it our own. It does not mark us as futural so much as subject to a syncopated temporality where we can only catch up with our birth after the fact. We only ever encounter ourselves as having always already been born, and we are always already with others.
Such displacements are inevitable once we grasp the dynamic character of Dasein’s lived existence. According to the metaphysical opposition between the finite and the infinite, to be finite is to lack perfection and find oneself subject to limitations. If we follow Heidegger’s lead in setting aside this opposition, finite being emerges instead as being in the mode of openness and dis-closure. Death and birth are limits toward which we are. Concretely, natal, mortal being means we encounter ourselves in specific contexts at specific points in lives that are marked by growth, development, and deep transformation.7 This is what is signaled by the and of birth and death.
At this point in his opus, in the late sections of Being and Time where the pursuit of a complete account of Dasein is once again derailed, Heidegger does not pursue these indications and the account of historicity famously passes from individual Dasein to the being of a people [Volk]. Yet there are signs that he understood it early on. In his lectures of the War Emergency Semester of 1919 Towards the Definition of Philosophy (TDP, GA 56/57, 63–76 (German), 53–64 (English)) he urged his students to take up formal indication as a means of philosophizing in a way grounded in life, specifically one’s own life. In 1926, life and change become explicit concerns as he broaches the ontology of life and Dasein in terms of the Aristotelian concepts of dunamis and energeia (BCAP, GA 22). Yet in the period of Being and Time he broadly sets aside the concern by distancing himself from anthropology and the tradition of life philosophy, and by establishing the ontological difference. Not only that, but soon after Being and Time both these strategies begin to break down. The 1928/29 lectures Einleitung in der Philosophie show him sketching a phenomenology of childhood and human development (GA 27, 123–49) and thinking through Dasein’s disclosedness [Erschlossenheit] alongside Dasein’s being-with [Mitsein]. In the 1928 lecture course The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, he acknowledges that the struggle to prevent ontological enquiry slipping back into the realm of merely ontic observations has become difficult to sustain, indeed, so difficult that he suggests abandoning the ontological difference in favor of what he names metontology. He writes:
[W]e need a special problematic which has for its proper theme beings as a whole. This new investigation resides in the essence of ontology itself and is the result of its overturning, its μεταβολή [metabole]. I designate this set of questions metontology . And here also, in the domain of metontological-existentiell questioning, is the domain of the metaphysics of existence (here the question of an ethics may properly be raised for the first time). (MFL, 157; GA 26, 199)8
Metontology disappears from Heidegger’s work after this lecture course, but it marks a stage on his way to a transformed philosophy that comes together in the mid-1930s and comes most clearly to light in the publication of “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1950. By this point, any metaphysics of existence seems to have been definitively left behind, and Dasein, mineness, ourness, and birth and death are displaced. He writes in the same period, in Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), that the shift in his vocabulary from Sein [being] to Seyn [be-ing] is meant to indicate that Sein is no longer thought metaphysically.
Yet, as I mentioned earlier, Heidegger’s concern was never with the phenomena of birth and death but, at least for a period, with the natal, mortal, living mode of being. Studying birth and death has led us to finitude and the openness of finite being, and there are good reasons to think that this remains central to his later thinking, whether or not we agree with Heidegger’s own assessment of that thinking as post-metaphysical. Thomas Sheehan makes one version of this argument based on Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, where he sees Heidegger’s deepest interest in dehypostasized being emerge as an interest in our being open, together. He writes:
Human openness is always co-openness (Mitdasein). Our sociality—co-extensive with finitude, and its first gift—is what makes it possible and necessary to take-as and to understand “is.” Our sociality is die Sache selbst. (Sheehan, 199)
Peter Sloterdijk makes another version based on the “Letter on Humanism” (1949) and in his essay “Domestikation des Seins: die Verdeutlichung der Lichtung” [The Domestication of Being: The Clearing up of Clearing].9 Focusing on the use of Lichtung (which could be translated as clearing, lighting, or lightening), he avoids the interpretation that understands it as a clearing into which a being might step and instead argues in frankly anthropological and biological terms for an natal understanding of Lichtung as an open-ended Menschenwerdung [becoming-human]. The dwelling is the place of becoming-human; our bodies are the site of Lichtung and; brains are the Lichtungsorgane par excellence (Nicht gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger, 195–6). Thanks to our neotenie—the fact that we are born prematurely and in need of years of care—our becoming-human happens in a plural context.10
Birth and death, then, can show us a new version of Heidegger, but it is one that part of us may find disappointing. Is everything that is radical about Heidegger’s work now in danger of being domesticated? Will all the shattering insights of fundamental ontology and beyond be retrieved not as metaphysics but as anthropology? This is a real worry only if we insist on an opposition between domesticity and radicality. If we regret the radicality of Heidegger’s work it may be that what we miss is the high loneliness and existential courage that comes with broaching Being, or the feeling of purity that is the reward for resolutely pursuing the question past all theological, scientific, and quotidian distractions.11 When it turns out that the root of us all and of each one of us is in the domos, the oikos that is the scene of our first coming to be and that is our first world, we fear that existential courage might look less like standing out into the gathering storm and more like standing up to one’s parents. Yet there is high art there—perhaps less Caspar David Friedrich and more Jan Vermeer—and poetry, and philosophy too.
1 On birth in Heidegger, see Artur Boelderl, Von Geburts wegen: unterwegs zu einer philosophischen Natologie (Wurzburg: Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2007); Lisa Guenther, “Being-from-others: Reading Heidegger after Cavarero,” Hypatia 23.1 (Winter 2008), 99–118; Leslie MacAvoy, “The Heideggerian Bias Toward Death: A Critique of the Role of Being-Towards-Death in the Disclosure of Human Finitude,” Metaphilosophy 27.1–2 (January 1996), 63–77; Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Christina Schües, Philosophie des Geborenseins (Freiburg: Alber, 2008).
2 See O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude.
3 Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 34.2 (2001), 183–202.
4 See Felix Ó Murchadha, “Future or Future Past: Temporality between Praxis and Poiesis in Heidegger’s Being and Time,” Philosophy Today 42.3 (October 1998), 262–9.
5 See Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (London: Athlone Press, 1996).
6 Karl Löwith is reported to have once asked Heidegger about the link between his philosophy and his politics and was told in reply that the link was historicity.
7 See David Wood, “Reading Heidegger Responsibly: Glimpses of Being in Dasein’s Development,” in ed. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Heidegger and Practical Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 219-36.
8 As both William McNeill and Steven Galt Crowell argue, metontology does not ever happen, but is a provocative, revealing attempt. See William McNeill, “Metaphysics, Fundamental Ontology, Metontology, 1925–35,” Heidegger Studies 8 (1992), 63–81 and Steven Galt Crowell, “Metaphysics, Metontology, and the End of Being and Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60.2 (March 2000), 307–31.
9 Peter Sloterdijk, “Domestication des Seins: die Verdeutlichung der Lichtung,” in Nicht gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2001), 142–234. My thanks to Nathan Van Camp for this reference.
10 A third version, less focused on a specific text of Heidegger’s, is Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
11 See Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research.”
Anne O'Byrne - Birth and Death
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