What Is The Significance Of Hu Essay — страница 6

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never escape this thing that inhibits us from the possibility of seeing our lives as having been completed or fulfilled, then what chance do we have of attaching any real meaning to our existence? It would seem that at the end of our lives, we needn t have existed at all. This existential notion of contingency is explored in great detail in Sartre s 1943 essay on phenomenological ontology, Being and Nothingness . Sartre places human consciousness, or no-thingness, in direct opposition to thingness. Consciousness is not a material entity (is not-matter) and by this token escapes all determinism. The message, along with all of the implications, is a hopeful one; yet the incessant reminder that human endeavour is and remains useless lends an air of tragedy to the book as well.

Concerning Heidegger s existentialism, the necessity of an entity/possibility that will end all of our possibilities (i.e. our choices) and will not allow our lives to possess any form of completeness shows us that all of our choices/possibilities will have been contingent. Thus, if Dasein is, as Heidegger claims, possibilities then it is also contingency. If we are to have an authentic outlook upon death, then we must consider it existentially. In doing so, we must accept that death plays an integral role in our being in such a way that we have a being-towards-death. Our being-towards-death is a matter of Dasein making it s every projection upon an existentiell possibility, in the light of an awareness of itself as mortal. If we are to confront death, then we must confront it as

the possibility which is not to be outstripped thereby accepting, as Mulhall states, that one s existence is ultimately to be given up or annihilated, and so is utterly contingent, and in no way necessary . It could be said that this being-towards-death is, in its essence anxiety because of the contingency of our existence combined with the facticity of our thrownness and the ever-present possibility of the end of all possibilities. One cannot imagine that it would be easy for the average person to dwell upon the contingency of existence presuming that she is leading the typically inauthentic lifestyle. Authenticity on the other hand requires a kind of optimistic stoicism in which death is embraced as a possibility and man faces the nothing . This is in accordance with Heidegger

s analysis of the structure of our being; an analysis that reveals an affective existence i.e., through such existential attitudes and feelings as care, anxiety and so on. Having investigated the convoluted methodology behind Heidegger s ontological analysis of death we may now consider the actual significance of the role of Human mortality in his philosophy. Anxiety functions to disclose (dis-close) authentic being, freedom, as a potentiality. It manifests the freedom of man to choose himself and to take hold of himself. The relevance of time, or more specifically, the finiteness of human existence is then experienced as a, perhaps unnerving, freedom to meet his own death, a preparedness for and continuous relatedness or, being-toward, his own death. In anxiety, all other

entities disappear into a nothing and nowhere , man hovers in himself as ex-isting, being nowhere at home. In facing this no-thing-ness all obvious everydayness disintegrates and so he faces the potentiality for authenticity. Thus, anxiety, care and the implied confrontation with death are for Heidegger primarily of methodological importance: through these fundamental parts, elements are revealed such as potentialities for being joyfully active, knowing joy [die wissende Heiterkeit] is a door to the eternal . Anxiety is the existential instrument which opens man up to Being and, according to Heidegger, to think Being is to arrive at one s (true) home . Unsurprisingly, the overall theme of Being and Time is not too dissimilar to Sartre s later masterpiece. The implications of

contingency leave one with a similar air of tragedy . However, if we can gather the strength to adopt an authentic way of being, if we can see that we have a self to find and overcome the repression for selfhood, we can at the very least be freed from the mistaken view of death and thus, be freed from the irrational fear that normally accompanies it. The role of mortality in Heidegger s philosophy may be methodological and catalytic, but the import of mortality to Human Being, whether authentic or inauthentic is and always has been significant in conjunction with our cultural overlays and traditions. Heidegger s phenomenological view of death as a way-of-being is significant to us because it provides a workable alternative to the common dogmatic views of death and it can help to