Bearers of Transience: Simmel and Heidegger on Death and Immortality

In the Phenomenology, the death in which Spirit maintains itself is described as pure contingency: “Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality[…]” (see Hegel 1976: 19).

Simmel (1999: 232; 2010: 16): “Just as life’s transcendence, within the plane of life itself, of its current delimited form constitutes more-life (although it is nevertheless the immediate, inescapable essence of life itself), so also its transcendence into the level of objective content, of logically autonomous and no longer vital meaning, constitutes more-than-life, which is inseparable from it and is the essence of spiritual life itself”.

Others (Krell, Jalbert) have noted that the thematic overlap of Being and Time and The View of Life arguably includes a whole set of interlocking philosophical concerns—from the effort to reinterpret the dynamic structure of life in a pretheoretical manner, and to recast the concept of time in terms of lived temporality, to the overarching concern to ground historical science in a novel understanding of historicity. In these and other ways, many have contended that Simmel and Heidegger remain closer than the latter was willing to admit (see Jalbert 2003: 259–283; Krell 1992: 93f.; Gawoll 1993: 193–151).

On Heidegger’s critical stance toward the German historicist tradition, see Charles R. Bambach (1995).

On the use of this term, see for instance Martin Heidegger (1995: 100).

This is not to say that death is a latecomer in the early Heidegger. Though it goes unmentioned in the first Marburg seminar of 1923–1924, the analysis of uncanniness that punctuates these sessions paved the way for the emergence, months later, of Heidegger’s highly influential characterization of death as a way for human Dasein ‘to be’ (see 1994; 2005: 213f.).

On Simmel’s use of the term ‘vital,’ see Daniel Silver, Monica Lee, and Robert Moore (2007: 262–290, esp. 269f.).

This question becomes particularly pressing if we were to consider the genealogical sources feeding into Being-towards-death. According to Heidegger himself, the effort to stipulate Being-towards-death as how Dasein exists resulted from a critical re-interpretation of Aristotle’s ethical works, one which was informed by Heidegger’s reading of Christian sources. Subsequent to the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger indicated that the form of subjective certitude advanced in Division Two of Being and Time, of which Being-towards-death is a major component, is supposed to clarify Kant’s notion of the moral personality.

Here the Kantian index is once again indispensable. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant defines anthropomorphism as the act of transforming subjective principles of cognition into objective determinations (see for example 2000: 227; AK 5: 353). He argues that we anthropomorphize when we mistake how we think about something for what that thing really is. On his reckoning symbols provide important information regarding how we depict objects, but they tell us very little, if anything at all, about the objects they presumably envisage. The error of anthropomorphism is most readily apparent when it comes to cognizing God. For Kant, all cognition of God, freedom, and immortality is symbolic. In order to think these three objects, the proper objects of metaphysics, we must analogize from the sensible or natural order. To use such analogies as though they reveal anything at all about these three objects, rather than our relation to them, is to extend our cognition unlawfully.

Paul Ricoeur (2004: 350): “For Heidegger, death affects the self in its untransferable and incommunicable solitude: to assume this destiny is to bestow the seal of authenticity on the totality of experience thus placed in the shadow of death”; (2004: 356): “have not the resources of the openness of the potentiality-for-being been closed off by the insistence on the theme of death? Is not the tension between opening and closing attenuated by the dominion exercised, in fine, by being-toward-death treated as being toward a possibility?”

It is absent, however, from the treatment of salvation Simmel develops elsewhere, in which salvation is distinguished from immortality as such (see [1903] 1997: 29–35).

On this topic see Mari J. Molsee (1987: 357–366).

This is the sense in which Heidegger speaks of death as the shrine of the nothing.

Or Da-sein.

On this point, see Matthew Lipman (1959: 128f.).

On this topic see Ryan Coyne (2015).