The Death Of Dasein As A Poiesis

In order to investigate Heidegger’s philosophy about technology I have started with his article “The Question Concerning Technology” and I have contemplated about what kind of a relationship we are dealing with when the technology is at the stake. However, I have always found myself as being drifted toward the investigation of more rooted Heideggerian terms, namely Dasein and the death. It is good to clarify that my aim here is neither combining different works of Heidegger by mixing his early and later periods which are interpreted as philosophically differentiated nor revising his two dominant notions which are Dasein and the death in the light of his concerns about technology, but I have to admit that I end up with a paper arguing that my interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy about the modern technology may show something which makes the death of Dasein very special.

Since, my research has followed a kind of reverse path from Heidegger’s technology to Dasein and the death, I would like to present my opinions in a more helpful and concrete way by starting to explain dominant notions at the first hand and then move on how technology is related to us in many aspects in order to defend my argument. In the course of the paper, I will try to constitute my opinions step by step even though sometimes it gives the feeling of being lost or irrelevance. However I believe that they all have a supportive quality in order to understand that how Dasein’s death can still reveal itself as a poesis regardless of the enframing essence of modern technology as it is claimed in Heidegger’s article “The Question Concerning Technology”.

First of all, I would want to present Dasein as a being in the world who is dealing with its everydayness which will be explained in details later on and I will try to move on the reason why the death has a significant role in its mode of being in the world. We can start to contemplate about Dasein by thinking of it in a simple and usual way such as imagining a person who is dealing with human or non-human entities in his daily life. Let’s assume that he thinks about his life and tries to decide his profession in the future. As every person in a society, he is allowed some possibilities. When he asks himself that question: “What do I do with my life?”, and when he runs over the options which are certain for his, he can show his awareness about the issue. There may be several possibilities for his future occupation such as being a lawyer, scientist, artist, or philosopher which can be chosen by him. According to Heidegger, these possibilities create a horizon, and the horizon is defined as “ the openness that surrounds us” by Heidegger. Although the meaning of the term “openness” may need to be discussed deeply, for the sake of this paper I will use the word horizon in a narrow sense as openness containing many possibilities for oneself. Horizon has a stretch but it surrounds us. Since the horizon has been produced by that man who tries to decide about his future occupation, the possibilities which occur in this horizon come from the world that he is already in and it would not be wrong to say that in one sense the horizon is he.

Among various professions, he has to choose one of them by projecting himself into one of these possibilities, then he can go for that possibility. He performs this horizon and chooses the possibility of being a lawyer, in other words he projects himself as a lawyer. Then he enrolls in a university to be a lawyer, takes some related courses, and he organizes his everyday life in accordance with his decision. At the end, he can become a successful lawyer and in that case what approaches for this man from the future is he, himself; because it was himself projected into this possibility before.

Regarding that point in the future, he stretches out his horizon. He has the capacity to be beyond himself, thus he looks upon himself from that point in the future. In this case, we can say that Dasein is ahead of oneself in terms of time. No matter which possibility we encounter or engage in, we always find this peculiar structure of being ahead of oneself. Here, I can claim that the notion of being ahead of oneself obviously refers to the notion of future. Due to this capacity of Dasein to be ahead of oneself, Dasein is not stuck in present and future has a certain role for one’s life, because the capacity of being ahead of oneself has its roots in future.

However, according to Heidegger, even if Dasein has the capacity to be beyond himself, it is not the case that oneself steps beyond his horizon. From my point of view, this claim seemed a little bit controversial at first, because I could not comprehend how it is impossible to step beyond the horizon. I tried to argue against that view by thinking about some possibilities which are out of horizon. For the above example I tried to find possibilities relatively above/out his horizon, I suggested a possibility like being a judge after his lawyer career. This could be a possibility which is out of his horizon in the example, since it needs a further education and also time, being a judge did not seem as possible as being a lawyer. At least I thought that they could be in different horizons. However, when I project the possibility of being judge, it has already contains being lawyer in its horizon. So, I realized that the only thing I did by trying to suggest out of horizon examples was stretching the first and the same horizon over and over again. At the end, I have found my answer which is not postulating the horizon but it allows a person to step beyond one’s horizon of possibilities. The answer is purely and simply death. I would want to specify that this conclusion is very fundamental for my argument and throughout the paper there will be places that I elaborate it more and I will make reference to this point afterwards.

I have tried to state how in our  daily life we live in a realm of possibilities and we engage in activities in terms of creating a horizon and projecting ourselves to the future. In that case we forward along the time, however, Heidegger claims that here we operate vulgar temporality not primordial temporality. And these notions are extremely related to Dasein’s two modes of existence of being in the world. If you have already taken being as if it is an already understood notion, then you presume and you do not question what is “exist”. But while we are questioning the existence of Dasein, here the authentic and inauthentic modes of it appear. I would try to explain these modes together within the explanation of primordial temporality and vulgar temporality as I have mentioned.

In the average everydayness you are in the inauthentic mode of being in the world. Inauthentic mode is everyday mode of our being in the world when we are lasting in a community of human beings. On the other hand, temporal structure of our everyday life looks different from the temporal structure of the horizon. We are thinking in the framework of vulgar time which present takes the priority, and vulgar time covers up primordial temporality. But, then how are we able to think of the horizon? What makes it possible to link a relation between Dasein who thinks in the framework of vulgar temporality in his/her daily life and the horizon which has a different temporal structure? Answer can be found in Simon Critchley’s interpretation in his article: “ Time should be grasped in and of itself as the unity of the three dimensions – what Heidegger calls “ecstases” – of future, past and present… Temporality is a process with three dimensions which form a unity.” Based on this opinion I would like to construe a possible answer to my question, in order to think of a horizon we do not have to do something different than we always do while thinking in our daily life, since Dasein is experiencing these ecstases together in a unity via the process of temporality. In addition to this explanation, we can add that within this certain temporality, future has a kind of certain primacy in terms of primordial temporality.

On the other hand, we have seen that the vulgar temporality covers up the primordial temporality and thus one can think that people who engage everyday activities and deal with vulgar temporality may never find out the primordial temporality in their life. There could be an explanation in William D. Blattner’s statement which is “… originary temporality is Dasein’s ability to track its development through sequential (mundane) time.” With this interpretation of the relation between primordial temporality and vulgar temporality, one can say that Dasein has a kind of intention to manage his/her daily life organization of time, namely in the framework of vulgar temporality, and at the same time he/she has the ability to possess primordial temporality.

I guess that the meaning of the authentic mode of being in the world starts to appear in the light of these explanations about two notions of time. As vulgar time covers up primordial temporality, inauthentic mode of Dasein covers the true character of authentic mode of being. Now, while I am accounting for the authentic being of Dasein, I will explicitly go deep into the issue of Dasein as being ahead of oneself and this will hopefully enable us to realize the relationship between Dasein’s fundamentally incomplete being and its death.

The authentic existence of Dasein comes with the recognition of the fact that we are beings towards the death, and  Dasein’s being ahead of itself is related to care. Here we are pointing the core of the relation between Dasein and its death. First of all, the recognition of Dasein about himself as being towards death and moreover as a being always already in death gets him into a tight corner where Dasein is in a terrible anxiety. Your disappearance does not merely causes a fear of death, it is called as anxiety because in the case of anxiety we do not have a direct object on the contrary to fear.

But there is an important question: How does Dasein recognize its own death? Before trying to answer this question there are more things to say about the very reality of Dasein’s death and they will probably make harder to answer this question. First of all, the death of Dasein is not a situation Dasein will be, on the contrary Dasein reveals itself in a clear, actual and complete form while not-being there. This nothingness is very unfamiliar to us, since we have a tendency to think nothingness as a space without objects. But this is not Heideggerian nothingness, furthermore how could it be nothingness in the way we understand while it is meaning a kind of nothingness in which being understands the being itself.

Secondly, when Dasein comes to its end, it is not a thing which is not yet anymore. Dasein might be conceived as a thing that reaches completeness. There is a funny sketch from website Being&Tim, there is a big pink ‘Being’ as the main character in drawings. One of these sketches we see that Heidegger is at the door and he knocks it. There is Tim, who is a child and friend of pink ‘Being’, in the house and says that “Hey Heidegger is at the door” and  big pink thing says “Tell him I’m Being-Not-At-home”. However, metaphorically when death knocks the door Dasein is no longer there to say that “I’m Being-Not-Here”.

Furthermore, these words of Heidegger from Being and Time point out another important thing about Dasein as a being toward death:

“However if Da-sein “exists” in such a way that there is absolutely nothing more outstanding for it, it has also already thus become no-longer-being-there. Eliminating what is outstanding in its being is equivalent to annihilating its being. As long as Da-sein is as a being, it has never attained its “wholeness”. But if it does, this gain becomes the absolute loss of being-in-the-world. It is then never again to be experienced as a being.”

Thus, since the wholeness of the Dasein depends on the eliminating of the outstanding possibilities and this also means its complete annihilation, the claim here we have encountered is such a radical one to grasp. It is very hard to contemplate about the relationship between being complete and becoming absolute loss of being in the world, I would make this more explicit with the help of a thought experiment.

Let’s imagine that there is a book in the process of writing. When you put the last dot at the last page, book will be complete, but at that very time it will disappear but the only way to make the book as complete you have to put the dot otherwise it is not a perfect book. Let’s say you are struggling with that idea about completing your book and losing it, so you want to record it. Now everything is ready, your hand is getting closer to the page where you will mark your dot, camera is on and it is ready to record that important moment for you. You make a move and put your dot and the book disappears immediately as you have expected. You are curious about the record whether you caught the moment or you didn’t. What I think here is you record the moment but the moment is not the one you would have expected. There is a moment when you put the dot but this very same moment is the one that your book has gone. So according to me it is not possible to remark that moment where it becomes complete and disappear at the same time. Actually, there is no way to specify these two moments separately, because they are the same not as actions but as meaning, they both mean completeness.

The death is our all most being. It is one and the only thing that is real which you cannot escape from and you are truly aware of this, since it is how and who we are. In the being of Dasein, death defines the ways of being. It is constitutive of human existence as a possibility in Dasein’s existence which eventually turns into actuality. Even though, Dasein’s death is not merely an event and Dasein will no longer be there when it becomes a complete being in its own death, it is considered as a kind of constitutive force in our being necessarily situated in. But still is it not clear how Dasein recognizes its death in these circumstances. One can claim that within the situation of being in the world and being in relation with others, Dasein can recognize its death via others’. However, a bigger problem shows up by adopting this claim as an answer, because we come up against the unbearable unrepresentability of death. The death is unbearably unrepresentable by itself, ipso facto other’s death cannot represent our’s. Even we cannot represent our own death. Since there is no Dasein to represent his/her own death, Dasein is impossible in his own death. So it can be said that it is fate, it is the end you cannot change whatever you do. But it is not the fate as the end of the road. It is not only the last sentence of the story, also it cannot be projected towards future in order to be accomplished. Because it can happen anytime. Maybe it is the only ubiquitous possibility to unity and connect all the possibilities you project.

To sum up, Dasein’s recognition of its very own death is actually a kind of existential encounter, it is a face-off. By saying recognition it has not been referred to a kind of reasoning or understanding based on a cognition. The recognition of the authenticity of Dasein is closely connected to its essential which is defined in death.

From now on, I would like to continue with the more specific features of the meaning of being of Dasein and its death. As I have mentioned Dasein’s recognition of being-towards-death, it is clear that there is a relation between Dasein’s incomplete being and the revealing of its death as an essential thing to make it a whole being, and also this causes an extreme anxiety in Dasein. Here, because of the reasons listed above, the death of Dasein maintains a kind of mystery in itself even when it reveals itself. In other words, what death hides in itself becomes a given when the being of Dasein has been completed, but still it is not wrong to say that Sein is associated with a kind of mystery. It can be said that generally within human capacity of grasping, being is not something we go and possess, and even though we can say something about Sein, when it comes to features and description, it fails. The novelty of Sein comes from nothingness of its reality but grasping the being as nothingness is one of the crucial parts of understanding Heidegger’s philosophy. On the other hand, Sein is not exactly being, being can only be found among beings. Sein is not the totality of beings, however it is not a being or an entity and it cannot be found outside of beings. We are already in/ with sein. we found ourselves in the world. It is “Dasein”, i.e. being out there in the world. It is a totally empty concept and it is not possible to grasp the essence of being. However, nothingness is different from a lack of beings. This means that nothingness is not a kind of negation of being, but rather it is what brings to view the Being of beings. All of these explanations have brought us in a kind of position to claim that people have a kind of openness without any ground or a kind of directedness like a capacity.  According to Heidegger, being does not represent anything and it does not say anything about object because it does not have any metaphysical and foundational ground.

But how a being cannot be its own ground? According to Heidegger, since Dasein is an entity lives in possibilities, makes up his mind, projects itself to one possibility, one does so as being always already in the world, and since being is thrown into those possibilities, Heidegger claims that one cannot be one’s own ground because one cannot produce these possibilities. In my view based on this opinion of Heidegger, Dasein recognizes that his being is not its own ground and the only reality which he can define itself is its own death. The possibilities in one’s horizon are not authentic ones. The way that you face one possibility, no one can evade namely death, enables you to step out of horizon.

After this elaboration, I think that the meaning of the death and the being of Dasein have been articulated enough in order to support my answer to the fundamental question of my investigation which is that: What makes Dasein’s death so unique to be still able to reveal itself as a poiesis? Through the end of the paper, you will be presented how modern technology has been evaluated by Heidegger in terms of its modern essence preventing things to bring themselves forth to reveal their truth and how Dasein is situated as an orderer who encounters only himself but nothing else in the world of the modern technology.

First of all we have to state that in order to understand the Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, we should go back the source of the traditional understanding of technology such as a way of aletheia and modes of causality. Especially with the terms of the times before modern technology, when one is active and one works upon something then one cannot avoid the four types of causes. Four causes have a crucial role in the revealing of the thing, because the being, the existence or presence of the object owes four different causes. The artist on the other hand just considers carefully and gathers all other three ways together. The causation we are talking here is a more fundamental thing rather than a mere effecting force. It has something to do with the bringing-forth of the things to presence. It is  of the truth by bringing something from non existence to the existence, which can also be called as aletheia. Aletheia in Greek is a revealing and it is also related to the truth, however in modern technology there is a difference between poiesis and the instrumentality as we take technology today like the difference between truth and correctness. There is a truth in the revealing, but the only thing we have based on the correctness in the modern technology cannot give us a free relation with technology, because taking technology into account as instrumental we are covering the possibility of relation to the truth.

For Heidegger, an organ/tool which is used by human in order to produce does not capture what we have in modern technology today. In this epoch modes of experience we relate to objects we posit are labeled as enframing. Essence of something can only come out at a development as long as you investigate processes, theories and moreover you unfortunately assume that they are related to each other. However, there is nothing as essence coming at present rather here we have a covering up. Enframing does cover up the revealing itself. According to Heidegger, human only encounters himself since revealing has been covered up and it is not as  bringing forth, thus human misses his own essence. There is also another difference in the experience of the people of modern era and it is that we do not relate to entities, actually we do not experience their true essence. There is strict separation between the epochs about the becoming of entities and if the becoming of entities was a kind of letting be in pre modern era, it is completely a subject of investigation which is depending on the capacity of mind in modern world.

What is our relation with technology? According to Heidegger technology is a revealing, but not as a bringing-forth. The world reveals itself in terms of technological settings upon. The river example can be applied to everything. Technology also enframes us as a kind of setting upon. We are the commanders and controllers usually in this new revealing of technology which is an ordering. What happens here? When revealing occurs in the mode of enframing, the destining becomes an unfree one. Destining is no more concealed, no more mysterious, no more free and no more the one which reveals itself as poesis. Heidegger says that “Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing.” And he says that the danger is the main issue in destining of revealing in modern technology, since the technology we have has its essence in enframing. So, when objects are not free anymore to reveal themselves in terms of destining and there is nothing concealed in their revealing, since technology cannot be thought separately from enframing, then we have the danger of destining of revealing. River is not a river in the sense that freely destining its revealing as poesis, and since it is ordered, and it has become a standing reserve, there is nothing concealed about it and it fails to reveal itself as bringing-forth. As long as the world is treated as a standing reserve, Dasein will only see himself but nothing more wherever he encounters an object.

I would like to state my own views which are concluded from this kind of relationship between us and modern technology. When enframing is in the essence of modern technology, and there is no freedom for things for destining as poiesis, what is seen now and when we form our horizon is only Dasein himself even when he looks at the world and the things in it. Here, I would like to mention that the relationships between Dasein and others, or between Dasein and objects are also included in this situation. In other words, not only the physical objects, but also the events and relationships cannot reveal themselves in a way other than a challenging forth into ordering.

The death is and has to be the only thing can destine itself freely and apart from enframing essence of modern technology, and hence it can maintain its mystery and concealment. Because it is not a thing to be set upon, or to be ordered. Even if it is a possibility in every moment of our lives, the unbearable unrepresentability of death saves it from the danger of modern technology. In the light of my argument, I dare to take my claim a step forward and say that the death of Dasein is the only thing which can reveal itself freely as a poiesis in our world which is intermingled with the modern technology.

REFERENCES

 

Blattner, W. D. (1989) “Existential Temporality in Being and Time” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (ed.), HEIDEGGER: A Critical Reader, Massachusetts, USA: Blackwell Publishers.

Critchley, S. (2009) “Heidegger’s Being and Time, part 8: Temporality” Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/27/heidegger-being-time-philosophy

Heidegger, M. (1966) “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking”, Discourse on Thinking, New York: Harper and Row Publishers.

Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and Time, New York: State University of New York Press.

Heidegger, M. (1982) “The Question Concerning Technology”, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper and Row Publishers.

Mulhall, S. (2007) “Human Mortality: Heidegger on How to Portray the Impossible Possibility of Dasein” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (ed.), A Companion to Heidegger, Blackwell Publishing.