Abstract
Heidegger’s analysis of the meaning of death in Being and Time has been widely claimed as his most important contribution to philosophy. Critics have suggested that his investigation incorporates traces from the thought of Rainer Maria Rilke and Karl Jaspers.1 In the death analytic, however, Heidegger himself mentions neither the poet nor the philosopher but references only Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich,2 significantly, the only prose fiction work mentioned in Being and Time. Clearly Tolstoy’s novella made a lasting impression on Heidegger because in it he could find dramatically illustrated most of the characteristic behaviors and evasive attitudes uncovered in his own phenomenology of death. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, then, is an illuminating supplement — specific, personal and emotional — to what Heidegger universalized in his philosophy.
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Notes
For a fuller discussion of the origins of Heidegger’s thoughts on death see Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961) and Roger Waterhouse, A Heidegger Critique (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981 ).
Heidegger writes that in this work Tolstoy “presented the phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having ‘someone die’ ’ ” (Being and Time 298 n. xii.). Being and Time will throughout this article be abbreviated as BT. My quotations are from the translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson using their pagination (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
Leo Tolstoy, “Memoirs of a Lunatic,” The Existential Imagination (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1962 ), pp. 75–87.
According to Roland Blythe, Tolstoy was moved by the death of a provincial judge, Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, whose death was described to him in some detail by the dead man’s brother. (See Blythe’s introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich [New York: Bantam Books, 1981[).
By adopting a “public” mode of being “chrwww(133) proximally and for the most part Dasein covers up its ownmost Being-towards-death, fleeing in the face of it. Factically Dasein is dying as long as it exists, but proximally and for the most part, it does so by way of falling” (BT 295).
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (From now on abbreviated as DI), trans. Lynn Solotaroff ( New York: Bantam Books, 1981 ), p. 103.
Foremost among the elements constituting the structure of human existence is the fact that our Being is integrally bound to non-Being, a fact which not only determines actions in the present but also colors the interpretation of the past. “Death is something that stands before us, something which is impending” (BT 294). Heidegger’s rather unassuming pronouncement, typical of Being and Time as a whole, summarizes how the phenomenon of death is for human beings. Only by “resolutely” facing death as the most absolute and extreme possibility, will one be liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. (BT 308)
Heidegger uses the term “deceased” to distinguish a human corpse from any other kind of lifeless material thing ‘just-present-at-hand-and-no-more.“ This distinction is necessary because for those who remain behind, the deceased is an object of concern more significant than merely ”the useful“ of other ”beings-in-the-world“ (BT 282).
This is necessary, Heidegger notes, because “the ‘they’ does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death” (BT 298).
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Pratt, A. (1992). A Note on Heidegger’s Death Analytic: The Tolstoyian Correlative. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Dialectic of Light and Darkness. Analecta Husserliana, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3296-3_18
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