Neighbors in Death

Abstract

Werner Marx's teaching career spanned two continents and two cultures; his German-Jewish experience spanned the divide between two irreconcilable historical worlds; and his academic mission combined the roles of thinker and witness.1 It is not surprising, then, that his philosophizing is characterized throughout by a certain set of doublings. There is, first, a appreciation for the inescapability of Heidegger's challenge to thought, combined with equally suspicion of Heidegger's apparent blind spots. Marx's early book, Heidegger and the Tradition, set the agenda by refusing to think truth as infected by untruth; thereafter his calling-and his call to us-would be to think with Heidegger beyond (or even against) Heidegger order that post-metaphysical thinking might find purchase domains, such as ethics, where Heidegger was either unwilling (or perhaps unable) to extend it.2 A second doubling, or doubling back, facilitated this extension. Werner Marx never forgot that the Lehrstuhl of the Philosophisches Seminar I was not the Heidegger Chair alone, but equally the Husserl-Rickert-Riehl Chair; Marx's postwar thought could thus retrieve the impulses of German Idealism preserved the neo-Kantian tradition, together with the moral imperative informing the craft of phenomenological reflection. Eschewing Heidegger's andenkendes Denken to return to a phenomenology that brings the respective matter into view order to clarify the structural features and relations of meaning that lie within it,3 Marx's later essays attain a supple concreteness pursuit of what he identified as the most pressing demand facing philosophy today, viz., the phenomenological clarification of the measure of our Measure is experienced as a claim-not as a claim that we make (in asserting something, for example, or insisting on a legal title), but rather as something that claims us, something whose authority we acknowledge, thus serving as the basis for a our being. Though such a phenomenon tends to be rendered invisible by modern thought and its hypostatic, metaphysical, conception of rationally autonomous subjectivity,4 the nexus of claim and measure silently informs all genuine aesthetic, religious, and reflective experience and constitutes-as Werner Marx began to show-an indispensable touchstone for rendering the Lifeworld a humane world. Thinking beyond Heidegger by doubling back through a phenomenology of claim, then, Marx sought to uncover the ground for a nonmetaphysical ethics, an experience that could clear the way for a transformation which one would be willing to allow measures of a nonmetaphysical ethics . . . to become effective within oneself.5 aspect of this project I propose to explore-briefly and phenomenologically-is the revisioning of death. Here Marx locates the path to a postmodern ethical intersubjectivity, experience of our humanity which impulses toward traditional virtues such as kindness, honesty, and justice can be discerned even where the traditional measures of metaphysical teleology, faith, or enlightened reason no longer claim us absolutely. For Marx, we become neighbors death. And what most needs to be clarified phenomenologically-thinking with Marx and perhaps to some extent beyond him-is why neighbor (and not, say, friend, lover, comrade, or brother/sister) should come to designate the genuinely human form of the social bond, the ethical face of intersubjectivity itself.6 To set the stage let us recall Tolstoy's story, The Death of Ivan Ilych. Because the early Heidegger sought a formal-existential insight this story-viz., that death radically individualizes and opens out onto the of resolve-he overlooked the content of Ivan's own moment of vision (Augenblick).7 Marx does not overlook it. Late the story Ivan, in a state of stupefied misery, senses himself being stuffed into a deep black sack. Shocked from his reverie, he weeps-like a child-on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, the absence of God. …