The Mortal Self: Toward a Transcendental-Pragmatic Anthropology

Abstract

Human well-being and the good life are, obviously, regarded as vitally important topics of research within the humanities and the social sciences in general, as well as philosophy in particular. Philosophical explorations of ‘human nature’ — that is, philosophical anthropology, as it has been traditionally understood — may also be expected to make fundamental contributions to our understanding of these and related issues. Those contributions presumably differ from those of the special sciences, because philosophical anthropology investigates not only factual ques-tions of human nature — what human beings are actually like — but also normative ones concerning the ways in which human lives ought to be led. However, clearly, the good life cannot be understood at all if we fail to pay attention to the ‘darker’ sides of human existence, including our experiences of evil, pain, suffering, guilt, and death. Philosophical anthropology, in short, is seriously incomplete without investigations of death and mortality.1 As Martin Heidegger famously maintained, our existence is deeply characterized by ‘being-toward-death’, Sein-zum-Tode, which is inseparable from our ‘being-in-the-world’ generally, our in-der-Welt-Sein.2