Abstract
This article analyzes various phenomenological approaches to death and articulates how these approaches affect their respective conceptions of subjectivity. Since death interrupts the correlation between the subject and the object, it puts into question the fundamental premises of the phenomenological method. If a phenomenon can only appear for a subject, then how can phenomenology deal with a phenomenon that ends subjectivity? By going through classical positions, I seek to demonstrate that one can only gain a full picture of human mortality by a thorough account of intersubjectivity. Since death is not only one isolated experience at the end of our lives, I will argue that it is death that structures the ways in which we engage with others and our lifeworld.
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- 1.
Husserl 2006, 154ff.
- 2.
Heidegger 1977, § 7.
- 3.
Patočka 1996, 7.
- 4.
Lévinas 2000, 50.
- 5.
Ricoeur 1967, 4.
- 6.
Husserl 1982, § 24, 44.
- 7.
See Scherer 1985, Chapter 1.
- 8.
In fact, one could argue that all medical explanations are ways to render visible death for our human experience. Here again, the “causes” of death do not define death’s nature or essence – if there is any. For a discussion of this issue, see Schumacher 2011, Chapter 1.
- 9.
Husserl 2008, 591.
- 10.
Husserl 2006, 154ff.
- 11.
One of the earliest critiques was put forth by Dolf Sternberger who in 1931 wrote his dissertation Der verstandene Tod under Paul Tillich solely on §47 in which the question of the death of the other becomes virulent. See Sternberger 1981.
- 12.
Heidegger 2001, 282.
- 13.
Husserl 2014, 3.
- 14.
Lévinas 2000, 43.
- 15.
Scheler 1957, 26.
- 16.
Scheler 1957, 26.
- 17.
Heidegger 2001, 296.
- 18.
Fink 1969, 110f.
- 19.
Some commentators, as for example Bernard N. Schumacher, argued that this lazy use of the term “death” creates a semantic confusion which has to be cleared up terminologically. He proposes to differentiate between “dying”, “mortality”, “passing away” and “death as a state”. See Schumacher (2011), Chapter 1.1. However reasonable this demand of terminological clarity might seem, I would argue that one loses the complexity of the problem in respect to what – phenomenologically considered – is precisely given. I would hold that we do not experience “dying” in dying, “mortality” in mortality, etc. but we do in fact experience death in its many facets. Hence, the seeming clarity in terminology obscures the complex hermeneutic matrix in which death is given.
- 20.
Sartre 1971, 545.
- 21.
Sartre 1943, 590.
- 22.
Husserl 2014, 18.
- 23.
Husserl 1993, 321-338, 332.
- 24.
Derrida 2007.
- 25.
Scheler 1957, 47.
- 26.
Cf. Fink 1969, 9.
- 27.
Derrida 1993, 70.
- 28.
Sartre 1971, 539.
- 29.
Freud 1975, 193-212.
- 30.
Derrida 2001, 146.
- 31.
Derrida 2007, 26.
- 32.
Derrida 2004, 3-19, 7.
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Sternad, C. (2020). On the Verge of Subjectivity: Phenomenologies of Death. In: Apostolescu, I. (eds) The Subject(s) of Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_13
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