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Martin Heidegger's Interpretation Of Death Essay

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Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings about our personal deaths and how we are to relate to our personal deaths as individuals has interested me. Heidegger would say that dasein (for those who don't understand, click here) can only authentically deal with death in a deeply 'own' and individual manner (because of the "Jemeinigkeit" of death). What strikes me about at least some of their remarks in their writings is how obvious they seem to me and yet how far removed they are from common notions regarding death and mortality, especially in the case of Heidegger. In fact, Heidegger himself observes that common notions regarding death are usually abstractions and derivatives of the immediacy of our own mortality, to explain how far removed his remarks are. He says that we are continuously dying, in the sense that we are always mortal and that the possibility of our death is always immediate; but yet we seem to distance ourselves from this immediate possibility by speaking either in general or in abstract terms about death. Death is commonly seen as something that can happen to anyone, but that is not deeply personal and immediate in the Heideggerian sense. Thus we are fleeing from the possibility of our death, from our mortality, by making it abstract and general. Indeed, we …show more content…

I accept Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's claim that my death is not something for me to live through, nor a moment or event in my life, but I do not see how my death would be immediate in the way Heidegger seems to think it is. If anything, their claim that our personal death is not an event in our life seems to imply that our own personal death is never an issue for us, so that we should find nothing but apathy in ourselves when contemplating our own death. It seems unnatural to me to take death as seriously as Heidegger does, but yet many existentialists agree with Heidegger on this

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