Episode description

Johannes A. Niederhauser argues that death is a central notion in Martin Heidegger’s work on the questions being and time, and even takes us to the core of Heidegger's entire thinking path.  Thus, Heidegger is not merely approaching death as an existentialist problem, of how to become authentically mortal.  Heidegger is suggesting that the abstract concealment and exploitation of death is how the modern project attempts to bring in and enforce a different way of being human, an inhuman way of being human.  This is achieved via the exclusive absolutization of technical knowledge, which would perceive everything, even death, as a problem to be solved.  In contrast to this view, Niederhauser suggests that we must view death as an "utter non-availability".  This involves that we think the relationship between technology and death, and also language and death, in terms of the way death limits the powers of both to "make available".  From these ideas, he suggests it may be possible to “dwell in death” (as a cut), and in so doing overcome death's abstract concealment, by confronting the irreducible and singular personal relation to our concrete death, i.e. “that we have to die”.  What is to be “won” in this dwelling is potentially a real human ethics that can seriously entertain the question "what does it mean to die well?", thereby transcending epistemic instrumentalization of rationality.  What does it mean to become the type of being that, instead of unconsciously desiring to control, manipulate, eradicate or possess death with instrumental rationality, becomes the type of being that can really be, and that can really ground a new world in or as time.