The ‘Who’ Question, Time, and Death in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and Death before Birth and the Origin of the “I” in Hinduism’s Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (7th-6th Century BCE)

This paper will render a close reading of the question of ‘who’ Dasein is in Chapter IV of Division One (1962, p. 149) as we continue to probe the mysteries of death in Chapter I (1962, p. 279) and ‘ecstatic, primordial, finite, unified, authentic temporalizing of temporality’ in Chapter III (1962, p. 380) in Division Two of Heidegger’s Being and Time. We will set up this exegesis as a backdrop to juxtapose Heidegger’s original thought in the Western tradition with one of Hinduism’s most ancient wisdom texts, the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (circa 7th-6th Century BCE). In that ancient work specifically, we will isolate two passages in Chapter I that mark ‘death’ in relation to both the origin of the world (Olivelle, 1996, p. 7) and the origin of the notion of ‘I’ (Olivelle, 1996, p. 13) that attaches to both human subjects and the gods. Death and nothingness share a complex relation that defies dialectical oppositions and overcomings/syntheses of presence and absence. Their relation is shrouded in mystery as the Sanskrit term - Brhadaranyaka - means “great wilderness or forest” (Retrieved from: https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/brihadaranyakopanishad). Not to intentionally obfuscate the hermeneutics underpinning this investigation, but we are not concerned with the philosophical, religious, historical, or linguistic ‘birth or origin’ of death so to speak as a concept or belief. Rather, just the inverse holds; we want to contrast Heidegger’s philosophy and the Hindu Upanishads on how death as possibility is inscribed in the ‘origin’ of any factical entity, thereby reversing our normal understanding of time as linear beginning with an birth and ending with death, i.e. mortal entities like humans and animals.

Without reducing the Judeo-Christian roots of Heidegger’s Western philosophical context or conflating it with a non-Abrahamic Eastern tradition, such as ancient Hinduism, we will explore - through different kinds of phenomenological methods - an incomparable difference between the two towering efforts of Western and Eastern thought. The question of the meaning of the being of this difference remains open. The difference institutes a space or gap that allows us to mutually illuminate one text by utilizing the resources of the other and vice-versa; but this requires we suspend any intuition or sense intimating that the two traditions have any relation at all, both historically and philosophically. In fact, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other; this is not even the nothingness between them that they may share in any meaningful sense of a ‘contrast.’ We must draw out the ontological and ethical consequences of these two different traditions - Western and Eastern - in reciprocal-appropriative dialogue when it comes to the 21st century’s ideas about ‘global’ or ‘world’ philosophy.