Care,

Anxiety and Death

Phenomenology
Lecture 10
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 Dasein exists.

Dasein dwells in the world with

others.
Recap Dasein is thrown into the world,
and projects into possibilities.
Dasein cares about itself, the
world and others.
Care
“Dasein exists factically…Because Dasein essentially has a state-of-mind
belonging to it, Dasein has a kind of Being in which it is brought before
itself and becomes disclosed to itself in its thrownness. But
thrownness, as a kind of Being, belongs to an entity which in each case
is its possibilities and in terms of them, projecting upon them. Being
alongside the ready-to-hand, belongs just as primordially to Being-in-
the-world as does Being-with Others; and Being-in-the-world is always
fallen. Accordingly Dasein’s “average everydayness” can be defined as
“Being-in-the-world which is falling and disclosed, thrown and
projecting, and for which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is an issue,
both in its Being alongside the ‘world’ and in its Being-with Others.”
Pre-ontological attestation of Care
“Once when ‘Care’ was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a
piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she made, Jupiter came by.
‘Care’ asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her
name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name
instead. While ‘Care’ and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own
name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They
asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just
one: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and
since you, earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped
this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute
among you as to its name, let it be called ‘homo’, for it is made out of humus (earth).”
Anxiety vs Fear
• Anxiety plays a methodological role – we grasp our
mode of being as a whole through anxiety.
• Anxiety contrasts with fear: fear arises relative to my
world, or, in terms of Dasein’s concerns:
“That which fear fears about is that very entity which is
afraid—Dasein. Only an entity for which in its Being this
very Being is an issue, can be afraid…Proximally and for
the most part, Dasein is in terms of what it is concerned
with. When this is endangered, Being-alongside is
threatened. Fear discloses Dasein predominantly in a
privative way. It bewilders us and makes us ‘lose our
heads’.”
Anxiety itself
“That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such. What
is the difference phenomenally between that in the face of which anxiety is
anxious and that in the face of which fear is afraid? That in the face of which
one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world. Thus it is essentially
incapable of having an involvement. This threatening does not have the
character of a definite detrimentality which reaches what is threatened, and
which reaches it with definite regard to a special factical potentiality-for-
Being. That in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite. Not
only does this indefiniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-
the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities within-the world
are not ‘relevant’ at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand
within-the-world, is, as such, of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the
world has the character of completely lacking significance.”
Anxiety continued

• The feeling of anxiety is of something “so close

that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and
yet it is nowhere.”
• This is because “The utter insignificance which
makes itself known in the “nothing and
nowhere”, does not signify that the world is
absent, but tells us that entities within-the-world
are of so little importance in themselves that on
the basis of this insignificance of what is within-
the-world, the world in its worldhood is all that
still obtrudes itself.”
 • Discloses our Being-in-the-world as such.
• “Explains” our “uncanninnes” (our
fallenness, our not being ourselves):
“When in falling we flee into the “at-home” of
The publicness, we flee in the face of the “not-at-
home”; that is, we flee in the face of the
significance uncanniness which lies in Dasein—in Dasein
as thrown Being-in-the-world, which has been
of anxiety delievered over to itself in its Being. This
uncanniness pursues Dasein constantly, and is
a threat to its everyday lostness in the
“they”…”
 • Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility.
• It is non-relational
Death • It is certain
• It is not to be outstripped
Death as the “end”
”Ripening is the specific Being of the fruit. It is also a kind of Being of the “not-
yet” (of unripeness); and, as such a kind of Being, it is formally analogous to
Dasein, in that the latter, like the former, is in every case already its “not yet”
in a sense still to be defined. But even then, this does not signify that ripeness
as an ‘end’ and death as an ‘end’ coincide with regard to their ontological
structure as ends. With ripeness, the fruit fulfils itself. But is the death at
which Dasein arrives, a fulfilment in this sense? With its death, Dasein has
indeed ‘fulfilled its course’. But in doing so, has it necessarily exhausted its
specific possibilities? Rather, are not these precisely what gets taken away
from Dasein? Even ‘unfulfilled’ Dasein ends. On the other hand, so little is it
the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with death, that Dasein may
well have passed its ripeness before the end. For the most part, Dasein ends in
unfulfillment, or else by having disintegrated and been used up.”
Death as the
“end”
“The rain stops. It is no longer present-at-
hand. The road stops. Such an ending does
not make the road disappear, but such a
stopping is determinative for the road as
this one, which is present-at-hand. […] On
the contrary, just as Dasein is its “not-yet”,
and is its “not-yet” constantly as long as it
is, it is already its end too. The “ending”
which we have in view when we speak of
death, does not signify Dasein’s Being-at-
an-end, but a Being-towards-the-end of this
entity. Death is a way to be, which Dasein
takes over as soon as it is. “As soon as man
comes to life, he is at once old enough to
die.””
Evading or
fleeing Death
“The analysis of the phrase ‘one dies’ reveals
unambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to
everyday Being-towards-death. In such a way of
talking death is understood as an indefinite
something which is proximally not yet present-at-
hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat. […] This
evasive concealment in the face of death dominates
everydayness so stubbornly that, in Being with one
another, the ‘neighbors’ often still keep talking the
‘dying person’ into the belief that he will escape
death and soon return to the tranquilized
everydayness of the world of his concern.”
Resolutely Being-towards-death
“[M]aking Dasein aware of itself as the kind of being for whom its own Being is an issue:
the fact that death is perceived as threatening shows that Dasein’s existence matters to it.
Second, it forces Dasein to acknowledge that what matters to it about its existence is not
just the specific moments that make it up, but the totality of those particular moments; in
acknowledging death as a threat not just to some particular possibility of its Being but to
its Being as such, Dasein acknowledges that what is an issue for it is not just any given
moment of its life but its life as a whole. It thereby comes to see that its life is something
for which it is responsible, that its life is its own to live. This, however, leads to the third
consequence, since it is also forced to admit that typically its life is in the hands of others,
lived out in the terms established by the ‘they’ rather than those which are closest to its
own individuality,” (Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time)
 “Acknowledging death thus shatters any
misplaced sense of the necessities of life,
dispelling any impression that its present
state, the array of possibilities that we regard
Resolutely as open to us, is wholly fixed by forces greater
than or external to ourselves. It reveals us as
Being- unfree, existing in self-imposed servitude to
towards- the ‘they.’ For in reality, we alone are
responsible for allowing ourselves to be lost in
death the range of possibilities that our
circumstances have thrust upon us, and we
alone are capable of, and responsible for,
altering that state of affairs,” (Mulhall,
Heidegger and Being and Time).