Abstract
This presentation will contrast differing time-death relations by examining closely a few passages from these four exemplary expressions in the Western and Eastern traditions: 1.) Division Two of Heidegger’s Being and Time; 2.) “Absolute Knowing” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; 3.) The Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death on the Cross and its meaning for New Testament Christianity; and 4.) death as genesis in the Vedic heritage of the East Indian Upanishads.
The paper will argue for the incomparable uniqueness of Heidegger’s thought when contrasted with these three other civilization-shaping forms. Heidegger’s work is the only example to challenge commonplace notions of physical death and demise as well religious notions of the afterlife while boldly attempting to derive our common intuition of endless, linear time (with origins and ends) and being ‘within-time’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 456) from a more ‘primordial, ecstatic, finite, authentic, unified temporalizing of temporality’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 380). This finite, authentic temporalizing is likened to a complex event of ‘equiprimordiality’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 378) that defies interrelated registers of the three normal, spatialized tenses of time, namely past, present, and future; this includes interrelated tenses of the three in various historiographical models of historical time, or various configurations of historical time in different epochs- namely circular, linear, and rectilinear (Blumenberg, 1966). Furthemore, the time-death relation in Heidegger’s Being and Time to the ‘enigma of motion’ remains undisclosed (Heidegger, 1962, p. 444).
Heidegger’s philosophy holds the unfulfilled promise of conceiving time as four-dimensional grounded in an ontological-ecstatic possibility of finite freedom, a claim that cannot be fully established in those three other forms, namely Hegelian thought, Christianity, and Hinduism. For the latter three, overcoming death and negation is the goal, albeit in radically different ways. Heideggers’ early project is about the possibility of fundamental ontology and reposing the ‘question the meaning of Being anew’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 19); it is not the speculative-metaphysical grounding of logic as ‘science’ in Hegel (Hegel, 2010, p. 9), or either the theological or philosophical-registers of Western Christianity or Eastern Hinduism as world religions. Let us state from the outset, we do not begin or end with the human subject in relation to any transcendental entity, be it Being or God. Modestly, our task in this presentation is to differentiate Heidegger’s thought from the three other forms of thinking.