Viewing Death as source of being:Jug Suraiya:The Times Of India: The Speaking Tree

Recently I chanced upon a quote, attributed to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, which intrigued me: “Every man is born as many men, and dies as a single man.”A disciple of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl who sought to interpret the in-built ‘intentionality’ of human consciousness which makes us invest meaning in the world – an artist will see a mountain as a painting, a tourist as a selfie opportunity, an entrepreneur as a location for a profitable ski resort – Heidegger broke from his mentor to pursue his goal to reconstruct Western philosophy by replacing the abstract foundation laid by Descartes (I think, therefore I am) with the bedrock of ontology, the investigation of Being, what does it mean for something to exist as opposed to not-exist.

In his seminal work Sein and Zeit, Being and Time, Heidegger took human being-in-the-world, which he called dasein, as his starting point to arrive at an understanding of Being. While he had a profound influence on later existential thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger remains one of the most controversial figures in the realm of philosophy. Even as his advocates cite him as the greatest philosopher of the 20th-century, his critics decry him as a fraud, a con man carried away with his own polysyllabic pomposity which makes his abstruse prose impenetrable to even the most devoted of readers.

Heidegger distinguished between what he called ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ existence, between life illuminated with the laser-light intensity of Being and life spent in the busy-ness of social conformity and the give-and-take of everyday transactions. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”, as Wordsworth put it.

So, short of renouncing everything and becoming a hermit in the Himalaya, how does one escape inauthencity and experience Being? How does one, as Heidegger wrote, experience “that wonder of all wonders – that things exist”.

Viewing human existence as a journey bounded by the horizon of Time, an odyssey of even-unfolding possibility culminating in the ultimate possibility of death, Heidegger defined ‘authenticity’ as a perpetual awareness of personal extinction.

To constantly be brooding on my demise sounds a proposition which is not just glum but calculated to drive me into terminal depression.

Not so, asserts Heidegger, in language more suitable to mysticism than to philosophy. Far from being a sure-fire formula for the pits of pessimism Heidegger claims that the steadfast contemplation of death liberates the individual from the distraction of daily triviality to ascend to a higher plane of consciousness and experience what Nietzsche called “dancing on the edge of the abyss”.

The seeming paradox Heidegger poses – that Being can be realised fully only through the inevitability of non-Being – is as difficult to assimilate as his obscure, jargon-laden language, which distinguishes between several stages, or levels, of Existence, including one in his later work in which the word is used with a line running through it.

Heidegger is certainly a hard nut to crack. But the kernel of his thinking might be found in the aphoristic quote that all men are born as many, but each man dies as one.

Life begins with an undifferentiated Everyman, who through traversing the manifold pathways of possibilities open to consciousness creates a singular and unique destiny with the termination of that existence, which sums up and gives meaning to the journey in between.

Some call this existentialism. Others might call it dharma.