Questioning Discrepancies in Heidegger’s Philosophy

English translation

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2020-12-10

This is material published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices describe circumstances at the time of its original publication.

Questioning Discrepancies in Heidegger's Philosophy

Recognizing death Each Day to Affirm Dasein

Seishu Hamano

War or a robber can kill us and erase our existence whether we wish it or not. People who want to preserve their living bodies therefore avoid going to war or venturing onto dangerous roads at night, if they can.

Yet when someone who was lively and cheerful yesterday rises dejectedly from bed today, do they writhe in torment, grieving and suffering because the self that existed yesterday has been utterly erased? 'All who live must perish' is, after all, an act of violent destruction wrought by 'time.'

Cruel Today　　by Seishu Hamano

Dear Today, you have killed Yesterday
Without any love or mercy.
Say Sorry for the corrupting past days!
Without shedding tears, this killer, an arrogant murderer
Has come down from the innocent, vacant-headed sky,
Down deep into the obscure, shady, conscious widow, asking
How many yesterdays did I kill for you in this way?

Even when the 'today' that has vanished with the passage of time becomes the past and ends as the uncertain fiction called 'yesterday,' people think there is no problem, because their existence preserves yesterday's self into today. Yet those who talked together and found themselves in agreement yesterday—including oneself—have become images that can never be recovered. We set them aside under the label 'yesterday' and busily respond to the day called 'today.' While doing so, 'today,' too, becomes 'yesterday,' and the 'yesterday' previously set aside becomes 'the day before yesterday,' a still more unreal, imagined existence. It becomes so remote as to be beyond reach, receding even from memory, until no effort can draw it back. Without our having asked God for any such thing, is our existence not caught in the unfathomable cloud called 'time,' turned into an image, while what once existed is inexorably rendered nonexistent?

How many ancestors challenged you in the past time cave?
Swords decayed, broken and left in the mud of repentance cried out
Let it come down into my dream,
Let it cry over the spilt milk!
Memory, a bundle of dismay and hopeless inquiry,
Dried, shrank, rotten, with half-attained aspiration
Waiting in line for their coming into Today, but in vain,
Tomorrow, come with me, you the grand children of the victims.

Heidegger holds that 'the they' (das Man), having lost its agency and 'fallen' into an inauthentic existence from day to day, escapes its anxious condition by immersing itself in everyday affairs. In such a state, it can never attain its own existence. It must therefore place in the foreground the awareness expressed by the words Man is mortal. and exercise 'anticipatory resoluteness towards death.' Put another way, it is necessary to recognize human alienation and awaken oneself in order to attain Dasein. Yet alongside this stands another monster: the fact that one is prey to the inescapable, a priori monster of space and time. By remaining indifferent to it, 'the they' is swept still farther towards the loss of agency.

Heidegger says that, even before the body is exhausted and reaches 'death,' people are depersonalized and in a state of 'fallenness,' and must become aware of themselves as beings towards death. He is an optimist who believes that one can grasp oneself as an individual and secure Dasein. The debates over existence since Kierkegaard have split into complex and diverse strands because of the absurdity of his own birth and the chaos of the subsequent twists of his life. In addition, we cannot neglect the disappearance of actual existence through the passage of time. Yet Heidegger does neglect it. I would therefore like to call this Heidegger’s discrepancy. Heidegger's theory has not gone beyond logic resembling a linear equation and does not consider the multiple factors encompassing this real world. Is this not thought that falls short not only of the absurdity considered by his contemporary Camus, but even of Kierkegaard's absurdity almost a century earlier?