Iain D. Thomson, "Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Dozman. We are coming up on the centenary of Heidegger's Being and Time, a text that radically reshaped the intellectual landscape. One of its most central themes, death, remains one of its most difficult to understand, puzzling readers and scholars with language that at times can feel obscure and ethereal. This has generated a plethora of opinions on the topic, although without much of a consensus. It's

Stepping in to try and clarify the topic is Ian Thompson in his new book, Rethinking Death in and After Heidegger. Unpacking dense passages, he shows the place death plays in Heidegger's thinking, as well as the impact it would have on his later intellectual trajectory.

After laying this all out, he turns to other readers of Heidegger and gives us a philosophical odyssey of various others who've thought along similar lines, but often developed his thinking in new directions. In showing how others have often tried to think with Heidegger, Thompson is able to tease out the subtlety of Heidegger's own positions and what they might have to offer contemporary readers today.

Ian Thompson is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is also the author of Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education and Heidegger: Art in Postmodernity. He is also the co-editor of the Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945 to 2015. Ian Thompson, welcome to the NewBooks Network. Thanks for having me, Stephen.

Yeah, I always like to have guests introduce themselves at the beginning of episodes. So for listeners who maybe don't know who you are, could you just give us a quick intro to who you are and what your work and research tends to focus on?

Sure. I'm a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I've been here for 25 years. I got my PhD with Hubert Dreyfus, was co-chair. I also studied with Jacques Derrida. I mainly specialize on Heidegger, but in general, existential phenomenology, including hermeneutics.

I have quite a few PhD students running around out there in the world, changing the world, I hope, but glad to be here today.

Yeah, so to start things off, Heidegger's ideas around death play a really pivotal role in his thinking. But you note at the beginning of this book you've written that whenever this theme has been discussed in secondary literature, it's often been difficult to arrive at or develop a consensus about what he was trying to say about death. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to this difficulty and what you were hoping to achieve by writing this book.

Sure, I'll do my best. Yeah, I think the main problem I've realized out of, I've been reading this book since about 1987, so almost 40 years now, and it took me a long time to realize myself the problem that I think most people still haven't realized, which is that when Heidegger's talking about death, he's not talking about what we ordinarily mean by the word death.

He's not talking about croaking or kicking the bucket or buying the farm. He's talking about a different phenomenon, not a different phenomenon entirely. This is sort of, I suggest that the scholarly literature is divided into two groups, a giant group that assumes that by death he must mean what we ordinarily mean by death, and a much smaller group that assumes

thinks that by death he means something like the collapse of a scientific paradigm, that's Hoagland, or the end of a historical world, that's Carol White, or a world collapse as typified by a depressive episode, that's Blatner. And my views are probably closest to Blatner, but what I've tried to suggest is that there is a profound connection between

what we normally mean by death or the experience of our own croaking and what Heidegger's calling death. So I'm trying in a way to sublate the dichotomy that divides the field by saying that, yes, it's true that he doesn't mean what we mean by death, but it's not that he's merely using the word in a metaphorical sense either.

Yeah, so before confronting death directly, it might be helpful to step back and set the stage a bit. So death in Heidegger's thinking, as you read it, is a sort of interruption or break in his very unique conception of what we are as human beings and what it means for us to live and navigate the world. Could you give us kind of a preliminary understanding of what it might mean for me to be at all in Heidegger's sense?

Yeah, nice question. And that's exactly right. So he defines death as the end of our Dasein or being in the world. So we have to know what it means to be Dasein or to be a being in the world in order to be able to figure out what it would mean for that to be at an end. So, um,

To be Dasein is to exist. Existence is Heidegger's technical term from the Latin existere or outstanding. So we stand out into a temporally structured, intelligible world, or in more normal language, we participate in the world disclosure that we are. So

Death is something like a end of our standing out into the intelligible world that we are. Now, it's a little tricky because it's not a complete end. We don't

cease to think. We don't find ourselves in a kind of a vacuum where nothing makes any sense at all. Rather, it turns out that death is the collapse of our being in the world, which for Heidegger is primarily and primordially practical. That is, it's

we make sense of our being in the world in terms of what he calls the ready to hand or zuhan tonight which is our skillful hands-on use of things so in my ordinary world i'm usually an ordinarily understanding myself as a teacher or a father or a husband and those life projects that i project myself into organize and make sense of the intelligibility of my world

Heidegger's word for that making sense of is significance. So they provide my world with a kind of textural significance that organizes and makes sense of it. That's what comes to an end when a project in terms of which I make sense of myself stops working. So death for him is something like the complete collapse of all the projects in terms of which I ordinarily make sense of myself.

Yeah, elaborating on a rather dense passage in Being and Time, you note that a major stumbling block for a lot of Heidegger's readers is that he uses death to describe a very different phenomena than most people intend when they use the term. So as you were saying, instead, death for Heidegger needs to be distinguished from what you call perishing or demising, which are closer to the everyday meaning.

Could you unpack these distinctions a bit and how they allow Heidegger to try and go elsewhere with his own terminology? Sure, yeah, and I'll try not to go on too long on this one because, as you know, it's a complicated topic.

idea, but it's on page 247 of Sein und Zeit or 291 of the English translation by Macquarie and Robinson. That's, for me, a very crucial passage. I come back to it a lot in the book where he distinguishes between perishing, de

demising, ableben and dying, sterben. Those are sort of three words, perishing, demising and dying that in English I think we would tend to use interchangeably.

So it's very important as he finally, about 10 pages into his analysis of death, starts distinguishing his ontological conception of death from ordinary conception of death, that we understand this threefold distinction. So perishing or ferendin is perishing.

The end of anything living. It's what he calls the merely physiological sense of death. So it's something like every living thing has its perishing. A pear tree...

lives and dies on a mountain without anyone ever seeing it perishes. Dasein, that's us, his word for us, has its perishing too. We are a living organism and our strictly physiological systems can perish. I can have a blood clot that forms in my

in my heart and blocks it and but i don't experience my blood clotting exactly as he says i only experiencing my i only experience my perishing as it's um the word is uh mit durst let's say is that right

Anyway, it's the, I only experience perishing as it gets taken up and made sense of in terms of the existential world that I am. So I might experience this blood clot as a impending heart attack. And I might rightly recognize that as portending the end of my life. Now that experience of the end of my life,

is what he calls demise. And that's what most of us mean by death, the experience of our lives coming to a kind of seemingly permanent end. And that's not what he means by that. So he says demise is the intermediary term between perishing and death. And that means that demise heads toward the experience of being at an end.

But it's a very funny experience in which I can experience my demise as it approaches me, but I can't experience it once it's arrived. So I can't experience what it's like to be demised, at least initially.

Heidegger's doing phenomenology. So he's trying to pay attention to how we experience things here in this world. So it's possible that you wake up in some other world or something, but we have no phenomenological evidence of that. So restricting ourselves to what phenomenology gives us evidence of, I have no experience of what it's like to be demised. It's like an asymptotic limit, right? I can experience...

as it comes toward me, but not once it's arrived. So it's the intermediary concept because it's how we experience the perishing of our physiological systems. If we're awake and aware and we know what's happening, we'll experience the perishing of our physiological systems as perishing

portending the final end of our lives. But we never get to experience that final end of our lives. So that's death. Death is something like being at an end. It's what it means for Dasein's distinctive way of being to actually be at an end. So demising promises us, if you want to put it that way, an encounter with the end of our being that it can't itself deliver.

Death is what delivers what demise promises, but can't deliver. So I can get into why he's distinguishing that, but it has to do with the structure of being in time and...

The question of whether Division One has fully understood Dasein, it turns out it hasn't. Division One understands it in terms of these three existential structures and Division Two shows that there's these three temporal structures underlying those three existential structures. But the bridge from Division One to Division Two is death. And he shows that as long as we understand death the way we normally do, as demise, as the croaking or kicking the bucket,

We can never get our Dasein as a whole into our hermeneutic conception. It's only if there is an experience of fully being ended that we can get all of our Dasein into what he calls our hermeneutic forehaving or completely grasp our

are being here. Yeah, developing this further, a major element of what Heidegger is trying to do here is essentially develop a sort of secularized understanding of a religious conversion experience. And to that end, you draw connections to figures such as the Apostle Paul,

the mystical thinker Jacob Bohm, as well as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, particularly in his book, The Sickness Onto Death, written about a century earlier. So what is Heidegger getting out of this series of religious references? And what is he trying to do in bringing them through into his own philosophical project?

Yeah, nice. So I think The Sickness Unto Death is the single most influential book for Heidegger's way of thinking about death. Heidegger is almost literally appropriating Kierkegaard's view, but he's secularizing it. He's secularizing it because he's phenomenologizing it. Phenomenology, as I mentioned earlier, has to stick to what we can actually experience here in this world.

So it can't make any claims about what might happen in some other world. Um, so in the sickness unto death, Kierkegaard describes an experience in which, um, I, myself is in, it's in what he calls despair, where I'm embody a series of contradictions that I can never reconcile. Like I'm finite and infinite free and determined, et cetera. And, um,

I've got these two parts: an embodied self that's in the world and a disembodied abstract thinking self that's not. And the trick is to come to identify with my abstract self, what Kierkegaard calls my naked self before God, the infinite self. And then on the basis of the insight gained by that identification of this infinite self before God,

find a way to own the finite self that I am, to become my own individuality, to seize my individuality as a task, as he puts it. So Heidegger takes this idea, and Kierkegaard's formula for the escape from despair is to repose transparently in the power that created me. And it looks like for him, that's God. So in the ordinary way of reading this,

Faith in a God for whom all things are possible is what makes it possible to reconcile contradictions like being finite and infinite.

But for Heidegger, it's illegitimate for a phenomenologist to make an appeal to a god who isn't bound by the same rules that apply to us if we can't experience that god. So what he does, what Heidegger does, is he famously articulates a concept of authenticity, Eigentlichkeit or ownedness. And death is sort of the first half of authenticity. Authenticity requires a kind of death-like

to the self that I was, and then a rebirth back to the world. So it too goes through this death and rebirth. And the death part is very similar to what Kierkegaard's describing, except that for Heidegger, rather than coming out of these built-in contradictions in the self, for Heidegger, it comes out of our anxiety, our angst. So Heidegger thinks that...

The self is essentially uncanny, unheimlich. It's not at home in the world, by which he means that there's nothing about the ontological structure of the self that can tell you what to do with your life, whether to become a teacher or a lawyer or a stockbroker or a gossip columnist. Can't tell you whether or not to get married. So there's no right answers, in the sense of a correct answer, a

soulmate or calling that's just the single right answer for us. Instead, we are haunted by the fact that we can be more than one possible thing. We're haunted by our freedom and our uncanniness

is the reason that we feel anxious. We're kind of permanently unsettled because we can never have a one right answer or we just fit into the world like a round peg into a round hole. We always overflow the holes in terms of the projects in terms of which we understand ourselves. We're always more than we can explain. So

Death is this moment in which we experience, the normal way to think about this is, or the easiest way to think about it is, being in time is telling a kind of Bildungsroman story where it's about growing up. And ordinarily, we just sort of go with the flow and do what one does. That's what Heidegger calls das Mann. And

You know, like I was told, oh, you love to argue. And of course, you want to make money. That's what someone in our society does to be successful. You should be a lawyer. And I thought, OK, that's that sounds good. I'll be a lawyer. And then I actually took a class in law school and retired.

then realized I didn't want to be a lawyer. I had no desire to be a lawyer. So when you realize that the project you've been projecting into with a kind of blithe self-assurance, it's the right thing to do is not right for you. You can experience the profound death of that project and the world that it was organizing falls away. And then you're in the situation of having to decide what to do. You're still here, like in existential death and you don't go away. You're sort of a desperate world hungry striving

in which you want to reconnect to the world, but no longer have the past answer that was doing it for you. And so have to, in Heidegger's words, entschlossen or resolve. It sounds like you're sticking to your guns obstinately, but it means...

unclose yourself open yourself to one of the selves in your future that you could be and it's those two moments death and rebirth that is what he's describing as authenticity and that's often been recognized as a kind of secularized conversion narrative much like Saul becoming Paul or Jakob Buma is a really interesting case because his just last point is that um

And my suspicion is that Christian mysticism is halfway to phenomenology because Jakob Buma says in the Mysterium Tremendum that the greatest mystery of the Christian faith is that the death of Christ is a death within life that brings you back to life. So it's not like what we in this literal mythology where you die and are reborn in another world or something. It's rather a transformation of this world here where the...

The hunter of Christians, Saul, becomes Paul, the apostle of the faith. So the scales fall from his eyes and he's in what's literally the same world, but for him it's a fundamentally transformed world. He's become a new person. And those kinds of deaths and rebirths in Heidegger aren't just once and for all time. You don't just become authentic. It's more that you can only be anything by repeatedly becoming it.

So life is a series of transformative identity realizations where you keep dying to the self that you were in order to become the self that you're becoming.

in his picture of authenticity.

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Yeah, to develop this a little more. So as you've been saying, death is part of this kind of larger multi-layered or multi-step journey that being in time outlines. One that kind of starts with being lost in the everydayness, going through death, but then kind of finding your way back via what he calls anticipation and then ending in authenticity, at least temporarily.

I'm wondering if you could just give us an outline of this path and more specifically, the crucial role death plays in kind of helping get us along that journey. Yeah, well, that's what I was just sketching a moment ago. So it's, you know, in my little canned example there from my own life of realizing I didn't want to be a lawyer, you know, it's so that.

The self for Heidegger has these three main existential structures. He calls them existentials. The understanding. The understanding is like the life projects I project into. So I can understand myself as a lawyer while I'm an undergrad thinking about going to law school. That just means I project into the project. And that's my world is organized and made intelligible by that projecting into that project.

when I decide or experience the collapse of that project, I realize I no longer want to do that, or I can no longer do that or for whatever reason. Um,

I still am this intelligible world, but I'm now no longer organized by that connectedness to becoming a lawyer. So I have to take the self that I am and find a way to reorganize it, right? To find a way to connect to different worldly projects in terms of which I'll be able to understand myself. In my case, that was...

become a teacher, become a philosophy professor.

So, you know, it's a death is a kind of existing without projects. It's a projectless projecting. So for Heidegger, it's a complete collapse of all the projects that you are. I mean, in my case, when my lawyer project breaks down, I still have my, you know, I'm somebody's boyfriend and I'm somebody's son and I'm a pet owner and all this. I have lots of other projects organizing my life. But in Heidegger's vision of existential death, it's a complete collapse of all the projects that I am because I'm

he's got this Kierkegaardian view that purity of the heart is to will one thing. Kierkegaard thought he could only, he had to choose between being a philosopher and being a husband.

And interestingly, late in life, I was told by a friend of mine who's a Kierkegaardian, Kierkegaard said that if he would have had more faith, he would have married Regina. He would have been a philosopher and a husband, meaning he would have trusted in God to resolve the contradiction that you can't 100% dedicate your life to two different things. But Heidegger's word for that in Being and Time, and one of my teachers, Bernard Williams, had a similar view that he called integrity. Yeah.

is that we have an ultimate for the sake of which. It's something like the project that all our other projects are for. So Dreyfus's way of putting it, I always liked. It's like if an all-powerful being came to you and said, I'm going to take away all your projects but one, which one are you going to keep? That's your ultimate for the sake of which. So if my ultimate for the sake of which is being a teacher,

And that means everything else that I do, being a husband, being a father, all of that I understand as being a teacher, really. And it either serves being a teacher or I make sense of it in terms of being a teacher. And if one day I can no longer teach, something happens to me and I stop being able to project into that project.

then all my projects collapse like a house of cards. And that experience in which I cannot connect to any of my projects, that's what I call projectless projecting or existential death. And in that situation...

I experience, it's not like the world disappears and I'm in some sort of Cartesian vacuum where nothing makes any sense at all. It's that nothing has any significance. Like I still see the bed and the coffee machine and the kitchen. It's just none of it matters to me. There's no projects in terms of which I would open its significance as significant.

to, you know, the coffee machine is no longer the thing I use to make coffee to bring with me to teach my classes. And the bed is no longer the place where I sleep to be rested for tomorrow's class. So it's all still there in a present hand or thematic way. I can make sense of it as objects of properties, but it's gone as a ready to hand equipmental world. I can't connect to it. It has no significance in being in times language. And that experience of, um,

- Recognizing that I survived the shipwreck of all my life projects. Like even when all my projects collapse, I'm still here, this projecting without any projects to project into. That's what Heidegger calls the , our own most ability to be. That's his definition of death that he uses probably the most frequently in "Being in Time." Our own most ability to be, just a projecting or existing.

without any projects to project into or exist in terms of. And that's what can't go away.

I could say more about that self and its connection to some of the other parts of the book. It's the moment where futurity comes in. It's the moment where nothingness comes in. So it's a very crucial insight in being in time, even though the role that it was supposed to play in being in time, which was to help us get to fundamental ontology, fails. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll get to that in a moment. I'd just like to develop this a little more because I know there's been a lot of work done kind of at the intersection of Heideggerian thinking and thinking about psychology and emotions. And it seems like what he's doing here and what you're kind of picking out, if you can get past kind of some of the very difficult esoteric language, he's giving a sort of philosophical analysis to the underlying structure of

a sort of depressive state or an existential crisis where you can kind of still be living your life and going through the motions, but it doesn't have any sort of existential significance. Do you see like him kind of outlining when he talks about this, or I know in some other lectures around the same time, he talks about boredom or themes like that. Is that kind of what he's getting at here?

Yeah, that's very helpful. So boredom is different. I can talk about that if you want, but what Hayek's talking about is anxiety. One of the arguments I make in the book is that Emmanuel Levinas, who was one of the first and best readers of Being in Time, he transforms anxiety.

In Heidegger, death is the possibility of an impossibility. That's a projecting into not being able to project into any projects. Possibilities for Heidegger are always existential. They're not logical. They're not future things that might happen. They're ways of being. He says possibility is the most positive way Dasein's defined and understood.

And same with being toward. So when he says I'm being toward death, people think that's some sort of attitude you might have toward your eventual demise. But being toward is a project. It's a possibility. So you embody it. Being toward death is the embodiment of death. A lot that confuses a lot of people.

But there's a big difference, I think, between Levinas' understanding and Heidegger's. So Heidegger says death's the possibility of an impossibility, projectless projecting. And Levinas will say it's the impossibility of possibility,

I know you're going to ask me about that later, but I think Levinas is talking about depression and Heidegger is talking about anxiety. So for me, the best example of what Heidegger is talking about is like an identity crisis or profound anxiety attack in which you are kind of overcome affectively by an attunement that's trying, trying, can an attunement try? It's an attunement that's telling you that what you're doing with your life isn't working.

And is unsustainable. And I think that experience in which you what you have been, you can't be anymore. So you can't just kind of go through the motions anymore. You can't do it. You know, I mean, you can kind you can like.

The analogy I use in the book, one of the analogies is like your pet dies and you find yourself like absentmindedly filling the bowl, the food bowl. So you can project into a project that's not there. But once you notice what you're doing, it doesn't make any sense. You just got to put the food back in the container.

container or throw it away or something. So it's not like you can keep doing it. Depression. So anxiety is like this desperate desire to connect to a world you can't connect to. I think that's what Heidi was talking about. His autobiographical, autobiographical example was he was becoming a Jesuit priest and the night before he was supposed to take his vows as a novitiate, he had a kind of psychosomatic heart attack where he, it was his

affective way of experiencing the fact that he didn't want to be a priest. He didn't want to dedicate the rest of his life to defending the church, which he didn't have that much intellectual respect for and give up all his erotic drives, etc. So he couldn't consciously admit it yet, but it was he lived through the collapse of the project that all his other projects were organized by. Levinas, I think, is describing something much more like depression,

where you can't even get out of bed. You're not even... You can't even project into... You're not even projecting almost. It's something more profound in a certain way and I think has a slightly different phenomenology. But yeah, boredom is interesting because that's from 29 and I argue that there is a profound transformation between early and later Heidegger that's been obscured by recent...

People didn't used to recognize that now Tom Sheehan is arguing that it doesn't exist. And, but there's for me, and I think in Heidegger, a profound transformation between his early and later views is,

And the big transformation there is the death of metaphysics, the death and fundamental ontology, which was the goal of being in time is metaphysics. It's the ontological side of ontotheology. So boredom is like a moment where you don't want to do anything. I don't like the kids still experience boredom. I think it must be really profound in the technological age. If you experience boredom, you have so many options and none of them appeal to you. That's close to depression, right?

But in boredom, you can't connect to anything. And that's what he calls profound boredom. And in that profound boredom, you're completely disconnected from everything. You see the entire world spread out before you as a whole.

And that perspective on the whole of all things is part of what metaphysics gives us. So it's like he's suggesting that boredom is the affective attunement that helps us take up the perspective from which metaphysics is possible. That's 29. By 37, I'd say he's given up on metaphysics completely and come to see it as a problem, not as the solution. So that's...

That's fascinating, like middle. There's sort of three Heideggers, early and middle and late, but middle is really just like the wishy-washy sliding back and forth between early and later. So it's kind of an incoherent decade. Yeah.

Yeah, developing this bit a bit more. So much, you say, has been made about Heidegger's turn post being in time towards some very different ideas in ways of trying to think them through.

You argued that this turn emerged in the wake of being in time largely because Heidegger felt it was a project that failed to do what it had set out to achieve. And more specifically, you argue that Heidegger's thinking on death and its disclosive power was a crucial part of that discovery. Could you unpack this turn and how the thinking on death really impacted it?

Yeah, it's complicated, but I'll give you this sort of simplified version to that deep question. So it's...

I think it was in 1907 when Heidegger's in this Catholic boarding school, the headmaster of the boarding school, this guy, Conrad Ingruber, who was a philosophy major, I think. He says to Heidegger, you're the smartest kid around. Let me give you the book that I couldn't crack. Maybe you can crack it. And it's Franz Brentano's On the Manifold Senses of Being in Aristotle. So since like 1907, Heidegger's been on this path

of trying to understand what all the different meanings of being have in common. That's fundamental ontology. He defines fundamental ontology and being in time as a singular understanding of the meaning of being in general.

It's like we use being in a million different ways. What do they all have in common? The answer to that question, what's it mean for anything at all to be, that's fundamental ontology. So that's what from later Heidegger's perspective when Heidegger becomes profoundly critical of metaphysics and dedicates his life to thinking, that is to getting beyond metaphysics as ontotheology. He says, and I quote him, that being in time is caught up in metaphysics, still trying to do ontology and doesn't recognize what it's doing.

So fundamental ontology or an attempt to understand the meaning of being in general is the onto of onto theology. So what happens is –

He publishes Being in Time. It's the first third of the book as it's outlined in the outline within the book. He does the history lectures, which are another third, but he never does the philosophical third, which was going to explain fundamental ontology. So 29 is kind of the peak of that project, especially Comte and the problem of metaphysics. And there what he tries to show is that the temporal horizons, which he describes

discovered beneath the existential structures, his belief was that these temporal structures constitutively conditioned all ontology. So if we can understand the fundamental structures of temporality, we'll be able to say something contentful about any possible ontology. So the only

bit of that he works out, I think in 29 is it's never not now. Like we're always in an experience of in presenting and that sense that it's, we're always in the now is what makes us believe that there must be some

that stays the same beneath all change. That's substance. So substance ontology is constitutively conditioned by temporality. But he doesn't work it out and he kind of gives it up. And by 33, that's the rectoral address, he's given up trying to insert his own fundamental ontology as the meaning of being in general, despite the fact that he's still relying on the project. The project of...

explaining what it means to be anything at all, that would, if he could pull that off, he would have been able to reunify the university because all the different sciences, all the different Wissenschaften or fields of knowledge are exploring different regions of being. Psychology is exploring conscious entities and biology is exploring living entities.

entities and histories exploring historical entities, but they don't know what historical entities and conscious entities and living entities all have in common. If you could explain that, that's fundamental ontology. You could reunify the university and behind it, Germany. That's the project. He's been accused of putting the university in the service of Nazism, but it's actually the opposite. He's trying to say that it's only the university and the

The reunification of the university around the idea of fundamental ontology that can give Germany its true destiny by explaining what it means to be. If you can explain what it means to be, then you can explain what it means to be German. So in 33, when he does it, he ends up looking to Nietzsche and thinking about, I talked about this in my first book, Heidegger on Ontoic Theology, and how he thinks Nietzsche's ontology is going to, he sort of sticks that into the gap where

fundamental ontology was supposed to be. But he later in life says, you know, Nietzsche ruined me. Nietzsche hat mich kaputz gemacht. He crashed my car. He broke my engine or something. And that's because he had this kind of temporary belief that the Nazis were tapped into this Nietzschean thing. And even as he's critiquing it in his

Nietzsche lectures, he's still trying to, we can talk about politics if you want, but he's still trying to transform the mainstream understanding of what it means to be a Nazi into something much more like his own philosophy. He's basically, as Carl Jaspers said, Heidegger wants to be the Fuhrer of the Fuhrer.

He wants to be the leader of the leader. He wants to be like the grand vizier, Steve Bannon, providing Bush with the... Bush. Providing Trump with the actual content for this empty demagogue. I don't know that Hitler was quite as empty a demagogue as Trump, but that was the vision. So...

The entire project of delivering a fundamental ontology has to die. And that's not just an intellectual abstract thing. It's like the main project that's been organizing Heidegger's life for decades, which I think explains how and he's put all his eggs in that basket, right? That's how he's going to unify the university. That's how he's going to become this political leader.

So there's the stakes of that are immense. And his inability to do it, it's hard for him to face up to. And it takes him about a decade to really acknowledge that it's impossible, that there is no contentful understanding of the meaning of being in general.

that can serve the role of fundamental ontology. There's still Heideggerians out there who want to say, oh no, he delivered a fundamental ontology. It's temporality. But that's not right, as I show in chapter two. That's what he wanted from fundamental ontology is not delivered by temporality. Temporality was supposed to be like

a halfway house to fundamental ontology. The window through which we get to fundamental ontology, not the fundamental ontology itself. So he has to die to philosophy. He has to die to what philosophy's been since Plato. In fact, since, I argue, since Thales and Anaximander, it's been this attempt to grasp the totality of all things from the inside out and the outside in at the same time. And, um,

Once we see that that attempt to give a completely comprehensive understanding of all things is impossible,

And it's impossible, I think, it's not like he doesn't have an incompleteness argument. It's impossible because he tried it and he couldn't do it. And if it turns out, you know, Sir Francis Crick, I tell the story that he used to sit next to me in a class in grad school and he still believed that the micro and the macro would be unified by science and we'd come up with a complete understanding of anything. If that was true, then Heidegger would be wrong.

metaphysics would be possible if we really could find the innermost core and the outermost perspective and unify you know the quantum with like the Big Bang or whatever we're gonna do it then I'd be wrong so his probably the later project his entire mission is dedicated to helping us think beyond metaphysics and specifically the metaphysics that underlie the technological age which he saw as first instanced by the Nazis and the vision that

this eugenic vision of what it means to be human that he, even his critics acknowledge he was very critical of from, you know, 33, 34 on. Yeah. We'll come back to technology in a little bit, but before that, so in the second half of half of the book, you look at how some other thinkers have developed Heidegger's thinking on death often productively, but also in your view, often at the expense of staying true to Heidegger's own insights and,

So you start here with Carol White, who argues that Heidegger's thinking doesn't contain distinct periods as it is often claimed, but instead that there is a fundamental unity running through it. What do you see White getting at here and what does it end up missing in Heidegger's intellectual development?

Yeah. So Carol White was a PhD student of Dreyfus's when I was an undergrad. I see them talking and she was a fascinating person, quadriplegic. She was in a wheelchair that she controlled with a lever in her mouth. She typed that book that I'm talking about in that chapter with a wooden spoon handle in her mouth.

So she's this incredible person and, you know, really pretty amazing. But yeah,

And I think one of the people who understood that death is not demise, it's not croaking, that's what he's talking about. But she's basically doing the thing that what I call orthodox Heideggerians do. So orthodox Heideggerians are the people who read Heidegger the way Heidegger wants to be read. And it's a kind of midrashic Talmudic reading where instead of acknowledging that the text contradicts itself, that, you know, it says...

Man and woman, he created them, then the animals in one part, and then man, and then the animals, and then woman. You just try and tell a story where that apparent contradiction is in fact a clue to a deeper and more profound understanding of the text. So Heidegger, he's a good instance of what we now call toxic masculinity in certain regards. And a central aspect of that is the inability to ever admit when you're wrong.

and apologize and take it back. And he could, he only occasionally, you know, makes notes about it and they're very important, but

For the most part, his main published writings, he never says, oh, I was wrong in being in time. I was doing metaphysics. The passage I quote where he says that is from the Black Notebooks, from the notebooks that he only wanted to be published after everything else, all the stuff intended for publication was published. So he doesn't admit, for the most part, that he was wrong and has changed his mind. Instead, he tries to reinterpret what he said earlier to make it consistent with what he's now saying later.

So there's famous examples of this that I go through and they're funny. But the, you know, the introduction to metaphysics, half of it's from 35 and half from 53. So it's this divided text where it's a terrible text to teach undergrads because it's later Heidegger arguing with early Heidegger and reinterpreting early Heidegger to make him consistent with later Heidegger. So just one brief example. And being a time, he says behind the being of entities, there is essentially nothing.

So the being of entities, that's what metaphysics tries to secure in these comprehensive systems. It tries to tell us what it means to be a thing, what an entity is as an entity. That's the being of entities. Later, Heidegger believes there is a further horizon behind the being of entities. That's what he first calls the nothing, then the earth.

then being as such, then the fourfold. So he's got this idea that there is something beyond the being of entities that makes possible all the different metaphysical ways of understanding the being of entities.

And yet is not exhausted by any of them. Overflows them all. They all get part of it, but none of them gets it all. That's metaphysics can never completely capture being. It can capture parts, but not all. It's not, again, he's not, he's not levy-ness. He's not saying it's ineffable. It's alterity. He's saying it's inexhaustible. It overflows being. So remind me what we're, where we're going with that.

What does White miss when she kind of tries to force this unity? From what I remember, you seem to, what I got out of it was that there's kind of an inability to hold him accountable for mistakes, philosophical or political, when you try and kind of read this unity through him. Would that be correct? Yeah.

Yeah, I go through in the white chapter, I go through this passage from the origin of the work of art where he says two kind of crazy things. One is that he who knows what is knows what to do in the midst of what is. And a very funny thing for someone who's just been shown quite publicly not to know what to do in the midst of what is the implication is he didn't know what is.

So Heidegger wants to say that if you understand being, you'll know what to do. And that's a kind of masterful prophetic gesture that, you know, isn't true. If you understand being, you'll understand that there's more than one thing that's right for you. You could get married or not. You could, you know, there's a lot of different ways you could have a meaningful life and it's up to you, which one you do. And that free, uh,

that margin of freedom is what makes you responsible for what you do as being in time argues. So it's, you know, he says in, um, I forget where exactly, but they put this over the Heidegger path in Germany. He who thinks greatly airs greatly. And, you know, that's a way of saying something like, um,

When I became a Nazi, I was just going with the history of being. It's like I was caught up in the zeitgeist and I was caught within the very historical understanding of being that I later turned against. And because the only way out is through,

I was actually serving being self-overcoming by being caught up in it. And, you know, there's a deep truth to that, that I try and do justice to. But on the other hand, as a particular individual, I think you have to acknowledge that there's always this margin of freedom in what you do. As Heraclitus says, the God whose oracle is at Delphi neither commands nor withdraws, but merely hints.

Being only hints. And it's up to us how we take those hints to some degree. So we're responsible for the creative disclosures by which we respond to what is and make them intelligible and meaningful for ourselves. And Heidegger kind of dodges that. So just to connect it to bigger issues, I mean, white is one of the most –

and interesting and deep versions of this, but the old view that there's just one Heidegger, he never changed his mind. That's a, that Orthodox Heideggerian reading is what Father Richardson started the, the,

started the turn against by saying no in fact there's Heidegger one Heidegger two early Heidegger later Heidegger and Heidegger in his note to Richardson said oh but it's not change of mind being you know it's a deeper understanding of being but to this day I mean you get Tom Sheehan this who was a student of Father Richardson's who is kind of trying to undo the very central

contribution of Father Richardson, which was to recognize a difference between early and later Heidegger and say they're just two different ways of talking about the same thing. And that view is normally the old way it was done, including by Derrida and White.

is to read later Heidegger into early Heidegger and say, like in that passage I mentioned from Being of Time where he says, behind the being of entities, there's essentially nothing. In Being of Time, that means there's no further horizon behind the being of entities. Being is always the being of entities, he says. For later Heidegger, that means there is a further horizon behind the being of entities. That's the essential nothing, the not yet a thing as it glimmers to be understood.

That is what later Heidegger believes, but early Heidegger didn't recognize that yet. So there's this, you know, there's these differences. And one way to try and wash them away is to read later Heidegger into early. I just, you know, was did a reading group on Pippin's book on the culmination Heidegger and Hegel. And he follows she and it ends up reading early Heidegger into later Heidegger, where the forgetting of being ends up meaning like the forgetting that equipment is the basic mode through which we make sense of things.

Which is not what Heidegger means. Once you have the understanding of the history of being, you can ask the question, where does the ontology of being and time fit into the history of being? And it turns out it doesn't look that good. It looks like the idea that beings fully show themselves when humans or Dasein use them is a kind of penultimate stage toward the nihilism of technological unframing.

Because what things are is just how we use them. As he says, like the forest is a forest of timber and the quarry, the quarry of rock. You know, that's like thinking that the rock is nothing but what we use it for and the trees are nothing but what we make out of them. That's close to later Heidegger saying in our Nietzschean technological age, everything is nothing but meaningless stuff to be optimized, ordered and enhanced as efficiently as possible.

I spend a lot of time arguing against various strategies to try and downplay the very profound differences between early and later Heidegger. And for me, it's a profound existential death that he had to go through in his own thought to die to his own metaphysical ambitions and then give birth to this project of thinking as a creative way of trying to move beyond metaphysics. Yeah.

Yeah, so moving along, you look at Emmanuel Levinas and his thinking on Heidegger in death, which runs parallel but distinguishes itself by its encounter with otherness as a crucial step for getting back to the world.

And you do find parts of this approach suggestive and interesting, but you also find yourself not totally convinced of what you consider kind of a hasty conflation of ethical life and the encounter with the other. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to what you see going on here. Yeah, great. So as I mentioned earlier, I think Levinas was one of the great readers of Heidegger early on. He understands what Heidegger is claiming and contests it.

So he's doing an imminent critique of Heidegger. He's, you know, phenomenology is not a spectator sport. Heidegger actually wants us, if we want to evaluate his phenomenology of existential death, we have to experience it for ourselves. We have to go through this complete world collapse and see if we experience it the way Heidegger did or not. And as he says,

Telling that to your students is a tsumutong, a fantastically unreasonable demand. It's like God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham's 80. Isaac is his only kid. God's told him his children will be as many as the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky, nearly infinite. And now he's going to kill the only person through whom those descendants could come.

That doesn't make any sense. It's irrational. It's unreasonable. It's a sumutum. So to say to your students, if you want to evaluate my existential phenomenology of death, you've got to experience it for yourself and see if my way of describing it matches yours. And if not, why not? How's it different? Well, that's what Heidegger's first readers did. You know, Sartre, I think to some degree, Beauvoir and Levinas, among others, and even Agamben in a certain way. And, um,

What Levinas argues is that when we actually experience the complete collapse of our world, we are not able to just pick ourselves up and go on. We can't pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and just say, for Heidegger, it's a kind of gestalt switch where instead of being paralyzed by not being able to decide if I want to be a teacher or a writer, I see that as freedom. It's that moment of paralyzing, which I realize neither of those is the correct answer, but

So I could be either. I just have to let one go as I embrace the other. And that sort of gestalt switch in which I realize that there's more than one right answer about what to do with my life is what sets me free and allows me to reconnect to the world. For Levinas, that's too glib, I think, and too optimistic. And in his experience, when your world breaks down and you can't figure out how to go on, you need an other. That's where the other comes in.

So the other is primarily, I mean, there's the other, that's something like his secularized God. And then there's other people. But for Levinas, the other only shows up through other people. They're not, you know, there's no other apart from other people, you

showing me something I haven't seen before. So othering or alterity shows up when another person says something I haven't thought before, does something I haven't thought before, and they bring something new into my world. And in that sense, they're made in the image of the creator God. They bring something new into the world.

world. That's the face. The face is not a physical thing. That's a common misunderstanding. He's not talking about like looking a homeless person in the face as like seeing their humanity or something. He's talking about how every person is an other world for me. And when they, when I encounter them in a real way, I encounter something that isn't already in my world. So in death, when I can't figure out how to go on, that's where I need an other to come and help me.

to like show me a way back to the world for levinas and for levinas that's primarily the teacher or the master he uses those words interchangeably and i think it's master shoshani this this talmudic scholar who helped him but i give the example of this myth of um prince siddhartha who's you know lying on the on the banks of the of the river under the bow tree in misery because he's he's had the hedonistic lifestyle of getting everything ever wanted and then he's

snuck out discovered death and suffering and sickness and he's tormented by pain and misery in life and he he's asking you know what do I do and he's become a kind of ascetic where he's starved himself and he's and he's miserable and then he hears the music teacher going by in a boat who says you know if the strings are too tight they'll break if they're too loose it won't play and he hears those words but he doesn't hear him as being about music only he hears them as being like a wisdom of the middle way and

And he has a kind of profound realization where this other person's words allow him to find his way back to the world, to reconnect to the world in a way that allows it to be meaningful. So for Heidegger, where you sort of discover your own existential strength and resiliency, you're stronger than death. As Heidegger says, you don't go down with the shipwreck of yourself. Something survives this projectless projecting that can then reconnect to the world.

For Levinas, that's all too individualistic. Even for him, it's proto-fascistic. He thinks it's too involved in this like fantasies of potency and individual power. Instead, what we should discover in that moment is our vulnerability and our constitutive openness to the other. So that's where the other comes in as this profound moment. I think a lot of Levinasians don't yet fully understand that. So that's one thing I'm trying to show there.

But then it plays out into this, you know, there's the kind of rhetoric of Levinas who gets increasingly pissed off at Heidegger, quite understandably. But it's not, it doesn't always have the best hermeneutic effects in terms of what he says about Heidegger. His readings kind of get a little increasingly distorted as I show. And, um,

He wants to suggest that he's got something like the sole ethical perspective that we need to get out of this proto-fascist ontology and into an ethics of the other. And I go through that and suggest that, well, that's

quite suggestive if what you think the central things humans need to resist is genocides of humans. But if you look at other things like environmental crisis, the wiping out of animal species, factory farming, which is a kind of, as Derrida says, like a forced survival rather than a wiping out, you start seeing some of the limits of Levinas' view. Levinas didn't think animals...

had a face he's kind of cagey about it but it looks pretty clear he didn't think animals had a face that meant they couldn't be other and stuff

Yeah, turning from there, you look at French existentialism, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, both of whom you see incorporating some of Heidegger's thoughts into their own thinking, particularly around the idea of selfhood and our ability to project ourselves out into projects or flee from such a life and retreat into a sort of existentially infantile state. What do you see these two pulling from Heidegger?

Yeah. So, you know, Sartre in Being and Nothingness does talk about death and there he does tend to conflate it with demise in the common way. But there is this very famous analysis of the phenomenology of the look. And I think that's his version of existential death. So in the look, it's this famous case where I'm peeking through a keyhole in a hallway and

And somebody comes up behind me and sees me doing this. And I'm caught in the shameful voyeuristic act. And I can't defend myself. I can't say, oh, I was just blah, blah, blah. I'm nothing but what that other takes me to be. And I have no access to how they're understanding me. I'm like a bug on a pin. Yeah.

And in that moment, I'm stripped of the living possibilities that ordinarily I am. Sartre's taken over lots of Heidegger. He's just, he re-Cartesianizes it. Heidegger's fundamental move in Division I is to try and argue that Cartesian dualism, the split between subjects and objects, is a disaster because it fails to capture the

way we normally are when we're using things and inextricably part of them. Like when I'm riding my bike, it's not an object my subjectivity is ever against. It's part of the world that I am. So Sartre has a lot of that, but it sits uncomfortably with his splitting of the world into the for-itself and the in-itself or consciousness and the physical. So in this moment of

The gaze, I'm turned into sort of an object for the subjectivity of another, and that's a kind of existential death. He then goes on to develop that in terms of the logic for others and this sort of proto-sado-masochistic sexuality view where I'm always either objectifying others or being objectified by them and objectifying.

One of the great things about Beauvoir is that she sees the reductiveness of that analysis and developed a much richer and more interesting understanding of intersubjectivity where it's not always this proto-sado-masochistic master-slave dynamic. So in Ethics of Ambiguity, which is the main text I focus on, she articulates this understanding of what she calls the crisis of adolescence.

And the crisis of adolescence is something like what being at times describing, where we go from thinking there's kind of a right answer about what to do with our lives, which is the child's view of the grownup world. So for the child, grownups all know what to do with their lives. They all have, they figured it all out. And it's only, you know, when you grow, to grow up is to realize there's no such thing as grownups in that sense. It's just sort of

of grow out of the child's view of a grownup as someone who has all the answers. That's a very, you know, that's a toxic understanding of what it means to be a grownup. But it's difficult because to realize that you don't have all the answers and neither does anybody else is profoundly anxiety provoking.

And a lot of people don't seem to be able to handle the anxiety that comes from there not being right answers about what to do in life. And we see this politically, right, where we get what I think in the 70s they called future shock.

where history moves fast. And a lot of people say, you know, oh my God, I was raised to think gay people were weird. And now you're letting them get married. And now there's trans people. I don't, God, what's all this? Everyone's coloring outside the lines. We need a strong father figure to come in and make them all get, you know, play by the rules and get back in line and obey the law. And that reactionary period is like a reassertion of the child's vision of the grownup.

up. And if you go along with that, this is the temptations of fascism, you can be a kind of permanent adolescent, I would say not infant, but adolescent where you get the freedom of living in the imagination and just doing what you want to do and having capitalist fantasies or whatever it is, video game worlds, whatever.

while other people handle the serious issues of international politics, et cetera. And I think Beauvoir gives us a very nice Heideggerian or post-Heideggerian critique of those temptations of fascism and how they're rooted in this inability to confront what Heidegger in Being and Time calls the nothingness, all the possibilities that we could be. That's scary. And, you know, we'll get into that, but...

There's something crucial about learning to embrace rather than flee our own anxiety that I think is part of the deep existential lesson Heidegger is trying to impart by going through it himself.

Yeah, another thinker who has taken up death as a major theme in his thinking is Giorgio Agamben and his notion of bare life. So while his thinking has taken what you describe as a sort of frustrating turn during the COVID pandemic, you also see him offering up an interesting direction for thinking along Heideggerian lines to rethink death and its social and political implications. What do you see going on with Agamben for good and ill?

Yeah, yeah. So for me, Agamben is tricky because...

You know, I think when I wrote that we were living through COVID and he, he was in Italy when COVID hit and it hit Italy really hard. And he has a dark view as I show in the politics chapter. Um, he and Foucault both have these very dark views of our contemporary situation where it's kind of hopeless. The idea of a, of a profound transformation is, is off the table. It seems like. And, um,

He saw the lockdown of Italy as biopower, you know, the transformation Foucault from

Sovereign power to bio power is from the sovereign makes you die or lets you live. Bio power makes you live or lets you die. So in Italy, where they wouldn't let you risk your life, you weren't allowed to go outside. You know, you could walk. People were like borrowing the neighbor's dogs. They could go outside, was making people live. He saw it as this super repressive authoritarian thing. I was viewing it more from the public health angle of I want to get through this thing.

pandemic. And if people don't, you know, act in such a way as to minimize the transfer of the disease, we're going to be in this for a long time, which is what ended up happening. And luckily, it wasn't as bad as it looked in the early days in terms of death. It was quite serious.

so the particular book of his that I focus on is probably my favorite of his it's um Remnants of Auschwitz and I think it's it's incredibly deep and moving and profound book and but from earlier in his development Agamben was like Levinas a student of Heidegger's though from 50 years later from his late lectures and um

What Agamben argues in there is that Heidegger, he sort of shows it more than argues it, is that Heidegger never really fully took the measure of the Holocaust. He didn't really think through the profound significance of this Nazi eugenic mass murder. And he shows what it would mean to do so. So his argument is that in the death camps, he's building on his countryman Primo Levi's

recollections of the death camps. In the death camps, people were systematically starved and worked to death until they could be, they would fail the so-called selection and then be burned to ash and reduced to whatever usable resources could be salvaged from their body, their fillings and their leather soles and their hair and that kind of stuff. Very

This gets into the critique of technology where everything's nothing but a meaningless resource to be optimized. It's like the extreme version. And his argument is that in this situation where human beings are reduced to what the camp denizens called musulman –

The Muslim, the submerged, they're submerged into bare life. Like they've, they're, they're like existing in projectless projecting, just desperately trying to get something to eat to make it one more day. They're just, they're reduced to sort of animal life. And this bare life situation for him, what I think is profound is that

It suggests what it is that we all have in common. So it helps us start thinking about what it would mean to have an ethical, political perspective founded not on Cartesian subjectivity, rational agency, and just the dignity of the thinking self, but a political organization founded around every

who's capable of projectless projecting, that is of existing, standing out into an intelligible world, which I think isn't only humans. So it gives us a kind of post-anthropocentric perspective

political foundation for a post-metaphysical liberalism, which is what I'm drawing from it, as well as showing us what Heidegger should have said about the Holocaust, but failed to say for interesting and kind of obvious reasons. His own shame got in the way of his ability to think deeply and creatively there. But Agamben does. Yeah.

Yeah, a final thinker you touch on is Derrida, who you argue reads death in its more everyday meaning, conflating it with demise, and pushes through that to develop death as a sort of paradoxical non-being that we can nonetheless live through. What does he get out of this paradox, and what does it miss about Heidegger's own insights?

Nice. Yeah. So Derrida was one of my teachers and really amazing thinker. I'm not one of those philosophers who dismisses him. I think he's very difficult and he presupposes a ton of knowledge about the text he's talking about. So if you just try and read his work on

say Nietzsche, without also knowing all of Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche, it's not going to make a lot of sense. So I think as a result, people have been quite dismissive. But he's there in Aporias, for example, he reduces death to demise. But what he's fascinated by, and he misunderstands perishing, and I show some problems with this view, but

But to reduce death to demise is to say that when Heidegger's talking about death as our own most ability to be, he means the experience of ceasing to live.

So demise is paradoxical. There's what I call the Epicurean paradox that where I am, death is not, and where death is, I am not. We should say where I am, demise is not, and where demise is, I am not. So demise and I never perfectly coincide. I can only experience it as it comes toward me, not once it's arrived. But for Derrida, if I'm awake, conscious, and know what's happening when I demise, I'm going to experience it.

the ending of my experience how can i experience the end of experience you know if death is the absence of experience how can i experience the absence of experience so i'm going to experience my a very paradoxical situation right i'm gonna this is a it's necessary that i undergo something but i can't fully undergo it so it's a necessary impossibility that's an aporia an aporia is a

a necessary impossibility, something I have to undergo, but I can't undergo. So the thinking he, he, he treats Heidegger's understanding of death as an instance of the aporia and then looks at lots of other aporias. But in general, Derridian deconstruction is a little different than Heideggerian deconstruction, which is its model. But for Heidegger, Heidegger's deconstructing the history of metaphysics to get at these deeper experiences that motivate it.

Derrida is deconstructing all metaphysical dichotomies anytime you try and distinguish between two camps and draw a bright red line between them. So, for example, perishing on the one hand and demising and dying on the other. So the sheer perishing of my physiological systems for Heidegger is not something I can ever experience.

And yet, I think Derrida's suggesting there's ways in which you can understand being in time as the work of a young man. He was 35. Is that right? 38. And he's 38, so he hasn't really started to experience aging yet.

You know, maybe just barely sort of midlife. And aging is one of the many ways in which we actually do seem to be able to experience our perishing, albeit we experience it in the intelligible world. So we are so it doesn't violate Heidegger's.

stricter on it, but the attempt to kind of really distinguish the two is sort of overdrawn in the search for philosophical clarity, arguably, in being a time. And there's more ways in which demise shows up than just you realizing that you're now about to cease to live forever. Instead, you can experience something like the slow motion demise of your life in aging, memory loss, loss of balance, loss of coordination, all these things

all these phenomena that everybody who lives long enough will experience. And yeah, so I'm also very interested in the there's I try and show there's a there's a in Dyrdok's very last lectures,

which he gave um while he knew he was dying of cancer um but he didn't tell students and it's he gives these lectures there's a beast in the sovereign too and it's about robinson caruso shipwrecked on this island and this image of shipwreck that's projectless projecting all my projects of shipwrecked and i'm still here um so he uses he sort of reads being in time and and and

in the margins of Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, and vice versa. Reads the two through each other and it's having fun and it's very deep and he deconstructs the decision between

burial and cremation he treats them both as like insurance apparatuses whereby the living try to ensure that the dead stay dead as an attempt to partition the two worlds of life and death the ultimate dichotomy that can't actually be dichotomized so his way of undermining the life death dichotomy is to articulate this notion of survivance or surviving or something which is like

For him, what it means to be a self is to be like a system of differences. This gets into Derridian stuff about his axiomatic Caesarian commitments are that the meaning is not, you don't get the meaning of the word cat from it. Your extra linguistic denotation of a living cat out in the real world. Instead, cat, the meaning of cat comes from

the holistic system of everything connected to a cat, but different from a cat. So a cat is a not rat, bat, hat, dog, fog. So it's this, everything sort of interconnected to everything else. And each one of us is this idiosyncratic system of differences. And we,

We write those systems, we mark them in the world, we leave them on each other. You see someone, you're impacted by the system of differences that they are. So he's got this notion of what it means to survive demise.

And it's fascinating. And I get into that a little bit too. And it is also fascinating to me that both Levinas and Derrida used their very final lectures to try and have it out with Heidegger on death a final time. It's very clearly the sort of most profound example

part of Heidegger that's motivating them. And I think one of the great things Derrida does is help us reread Levinas' very uncharitable, understandably, but very uncharitable final readings of Heidegger in a way that makes them interesting and not just kind of polemical.

Yeah, you end the book with a couple chapters trying to tease out some Heideggerian wisdom on the meaningfulness of our unique condition. One thing you develop is the value of acknowledging and embracing our finitude against a cultural problem he saw of us trying to use technology to reject or overcome that finitude. What do we miss out when we lean into technology in this way?

Yeah, so there's several chapters there to kind of try and bring together there. But the think about how best to do it. If you think about in general, what motivates metaphysics? So metaphysics is this attempt to give a completely systematic idea.

final account of all things by grasping them from their innermost core, sort of final component element they're made out of, whether it's subatomic particles or superstrings, all the way out to the biggest possible perspectives. Step outside all reality and take this God's eye view on the totality. That's the theological perspective.

And if metaphysics was right and early Heidegger being time was right, and there was an understanding of the meaning of being in general, a single right answer about what it means to be, then we'd be done. You know, if Sir Francis Crick's dream of science having this final form of getting it all figured out was done, then humans would be done. So the finitude, the fact that our perspectives are always partial in the double sense of

limited and reflecting our own prejudices and partialities and commitments such that we can never grasp the whole once and for all. It's tragic if you've been drinking the Kool-Aid of the metaphysical dream of having this one complete system of all things and think we just need this little minor tinkering here and there and we're progressing toward it, etc.,

When you give that up, what you can realize is it's the impossibility of that complete view that's what makes it possible for us to always see new things. So futurity is what emerges from the failure of totality, right? It's that we see in our finitude, which initially looks tragic, it's our finitude that gives us a future, gives us things yet to see and discover.

And I then connect this in the final chapter, not the conclusion, but the final chapter about arguing with Fisher and various people have tried to argue that immortality could be good. And I argue that immortality would necessarily be bad. And, you know, Fisher got like $5 million from the Christian Templeton Foundation to argue that immortality could be good. And that's understandable because they want to think of heaven as a kind of immortality and they don't want it turning into hell.

If heaven is like an eternal life in the sense, not a frozen into one permanent experience of God or something, but like an endless life, how does that stop getting boring? And I give a lot of reasons for thinking it won't. So there's something about demise that seems to play a role in there always being more for us to discover and disclose and so encounter meaningful lives.

And I mean, it's a complicated argument, but it's basically that if you could live forever,

What makes your life meaningful is having these projects you project yourself into. And in the infinitude of time, those projects are either going to succeed, in which case you'll need a new project, or they'll fail, leaving you bereft and hopeless. And if you think of what it would be like to live infinitely, like an infinite stretch of time, it starts becoming unclear how you could keep coming up with projects that

that would make your life meaningful, especially when you think about some basic facts about the universe, those get real problematic. But even just imagining as Fisher likes to do that, you can have great dinners and great sex and listen to great music and read great books and stuff.

But, you know, he's got this view that somehow living for an infinite amount of time would not be different in kind from living for a very long time. Whereas I think it's a very easy argument to say, of course, we'd like to live for a few hundred more years or a thousand more years under the right circumstances. We're not trapped in an aging body or something.

forever getting worse and worse. But that doesn't mean we would want to live for an infinite amount of time. And if you live for an infinite amount of time, certain nightmare scenarios seem to become inevitable.

And I make the case for that in a way that I think, I call it tongue in cheek, the pro-choice rather than the pro-life position on immortality. Because I think it's crucial to be able to demise. But immortality literally means not being affected by mort, death. So immortal can't die. An immortal that can die is a paradox. So to truly be immortal would mean to be incapable of death. It's like immortality.

If somebody said to you, would you like to be immortal? It means you'll live forever, but you can never die. Should you do it? That's the central question of that chapter. And I argue that the answer is no. Morris Fisher tries to argue that's yes. He calls my position the immortality curmudgeon position.

the curmudgeons who are kind of grouchy about immortality. But yeah, I think his is kind of a blithe naivete about infinite time. Whereas, you know, I do think there's an alternative vision of this where you give up your identity and, you know, constantly transform it into new things or something. And then that's very different. This gets into different issues. Like I think it's a noble project for life to live forever.

I'm not saying it will, but I'm not against the immortality of life.

I'm not sure how it would happen in a universe that seems doomed to heat death, but it's worth working toward. But my individual life, that seems to be a kind of terror of anxiety and the unknown, the terror of nevermore, as Poe put it, being so afraid of nevermore that you would just embrace forevermore, I think is a mistake. Yeah.

Yeah, that brings us through the whole book and all my questions on it. So as a final question, I always like to ask, what, if anything, are you working on now? Do you have any new or upcoming projects that we can be excited about? Yeah, thanks, Stephen. So I appreciate the interview. I have the next book coming out. It's called Heidegger on Technology's Danger and Promise in the Age of AI. And it's one of these Heidegger elements. They're these little...

Little small books coming out from Cambridge University Press on various topics. And I'm doing the Heidegger and technology one there. So looking at AI and kind of continuing some of the critiques of my teacher, Bert Dreyfus, who was a very famous critic of early technology.

AI and then updating them to look at some of the self-driving cars and chat GPT and genetic engineering and some of the stuff that I think Heidegger is actually thinking about in a really deep way, despite the fact that he's looking at very early analogs of some of this. He saw it coming. That's part of the reason we still read this crazy old Nazi is that his thoughts are extremely prescient. He seemed to predict things.

the way history would unfold in a way that's proven to be largely correct and revealing. And since I'm looking at some of his positive solutions as well and what his advice is about how best to think about and deal with some of the problems we're facing. Yeah, so that brings us to the end of this. So Ian Thompson, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you, Stephen. Appreciate it. It's been fun.