Being and aliveness

Abstract

Who are we? Of what essence are we the bearers, and whence is this essence determined? Do we still have an essence, or have we become the provisional figure for which all essence is in a state of decay? Do we remain as much as ever, or almost as much, as we say, the rational animal? But are animality or rationality, body, soul or mind, adequate to our being? In other words, has not the metaphysical interpretation of man as a rational animal reached its limit in that absolutization of human subjectivity which demarcates the end of philosophy by opening onto the truth of Being? Is it not through constraint on Being itself that our essence is originarily constituted? And how might we attain to this Being, how might we properly be that which we have to be without destroying the history of that long error about ourselves -the history of ontology? But to destroy is not merely to return to the things themselves, it is also to take account of a tradition by starting out from what made the tradition possible. It is thus just as necessary to define the essence of man as Dasein by ceasing to understand it against the horizon of subjectivity as it is to endorse, albeit in a restricted way, the concept of the rational animal. Since man's rationality is the distinctive mark of his animality, the specific trait of his life, we cannot take the name of Dasein and assume the tasks which this name imposes upon us without first examining if and how our life, life as it manifests itself in us, can obtain an existential meaning. Let us return to the context in which this problem first emerges. Having established that a fundamental ontology must follow the path of an analytic of Dasein, and having sketched out its guiding lines and set in place its cardinal concepts, Heidegger secures the originality of such an analytic with regard to all those disciplines with which it might be confused. In section 10 of Being and Time, in order to distinguish his phenomenology of existence from a philosophy of life or a general biology which would include the fields of anthropology and psychology, he affirms that "life, in its own right, is a kind of Being; but essentially it is accessible only in Dasein. The ontology of life is accomplished by way of a privative interpretation; it determines what must be the case if there can be anything like mere-aliveness (Nurnoch-leben). Life is not a mere Being-present-at-hand (Vorhandensein), nor is it Dasein". 1 This thesis is taken up again in section 41, which Heidegger devotes to the determination of the Being of Dasein, and in Which he shows that care cannot be brought back to elementary drives which, on the contrary, are ontologically rooted in it. He goes on to point out that "this does not prevent willing and wishing from being ontologically constitutive even for entities that merely 'live'" and that "the basic ontological state of 'living' is a problem in its own right and can be tackled only reductively and privatively in terms of the ontology of Dasein". 2 The same stance reappears finally in section 49, which aims at rejecting any medical characterization of death. If Heidegger acknowledges that "death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life" and that "life must be understood as a kind of Being to which there belongs a Being-in-the-world", it is only to add right away that "we can fix its character ontologically only if this kind of Being is oriented in a privative way to Dasein", whilst biology and physiology can always make Dasein their theme by considering it as pure life on the same basis as animals and plants. While admitting that Dasein is also a living being since life is accessible in it, and conceding that Dasein can have a physiological death "co-determined by its primordial mode of Being", 3 Heidegger nonetheless argues for the priority of the existential concept of death over any science or ontology of life. These brief references dealing with the Being of life bring up a number of difficulties. These concern Dasein