The Absolute Master

Abstract

Saul Kripke, in Naming and Necessity, explicates identity in terms of originarity, a being’s being from origin or birth.¹ Heidegger, in Being and Time, explicates the identity of each human being in terms of terminality, its being towards its death. Terminality is the principle of jemeinig individuality, what separates me from the impersonal undifferentiated one (das Man). It separates me in my autobiographical existence, it is tempting to say, not from the viewpoint of an observer recording events in the story of my life, the viewpoint from which Kripke’s criterion is applied. It separates me out in my lived existence, it might be said, were it not for the antipathy to speaking of human as distinguished from animal life which we have discerned already in Heidegger’s references to biology in Being and Time, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, in his treatment of Rilke, and elsewhere. Being toward my death is being on the way toward myself, hence, via the manifold meanings of eigen, on the way to the possibility of authentic being. Although Heidegger insists that being in the world is being with others and that it is not only with its own mortality that each Dasein is concerned, my concern for the mortality of others is, according to the account given in Being and Time, inscribed within the circle of the project whose origin is the each-for-himself jemeinig I, the projectile, if not subjectile, je.

its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute master.

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Death is not this master. Always future and unknown it gives rise to fear and flight from responsibilities. … Death, source of all myths, is present only in the Other, and only in him does it summon me urgently to my final essence, to my responsibility.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity