Abstract
The main topic of this paper is the connection between facing death and a special kind of solitariness. Heidegger talks about the kind of anxiety, the feeling of uncanniness, of Unheimlichkeit (not-at-homeness), that must attend coming to grips with mortality. At one point Heidegger refers to this feeling as “existential solipsism,” which is evidently an allusion to a special kind of solitariness. When Heidegger uses this expression, he puts “solipsism” in scare quotes. He implies that there is a distinctive kind of uncanny solitariness that attends the facing of death, but he does not suggest that facing death implicates literal solipsism, that is, the denial or doubt that there is a reality external to consciousness. One claim in the present paper is that the notion of existential solipsism can be associated with a phenomenon that can be called a “shift to subjectivity,” in which one’s focus is on one’s representations rather than on what is represented. But can there actually be a connection between literal solipsism and facing death? Two philosophers who credit such a connection are Thomas Nagel and J. J. Valberg. The present paper also attempts to explain the views of these philosophers.