Abstract
Pattison deploys his encyclopaedic grasp of Heidegger’s corpus to stage a wide-ranging explication Heidegger’s use of the idea of death. His stated aim is to respond to modern questions about hope in the face of death. The task of theology today, he suggests, is to enrich thinking in other disciplines, displaying, rather than simply touting, its queenly status in the university.
The treatment orbits around Being and Time, in which Heidegger deploys the idea of death as a lever by which the agent’s will is moved toward ownership of their given lives. Heidegger’s precise indebtedness and divergences from German Idealism are set out, the core divergence being Heidegger’s insistence that the aim of subjective knowledge must be ontological comprehensiveness. In Kierkegaard’s account of death, however, we can begin to see why a theological viewpoint reveals the philosophical inadequacy of this aim to emerge, namely, the futility of any quest to know our lives as a whole. A Christian doctrine of God and creation thus presses the question of whether Heidegger is too sanguine about the possibility of living the overcoming of the individual’s death that his philosophy seeks.
Dostoyevsky’s novels (which Heidegger read) insist that we cannot depict or even imagine our passage through death, further illustrating a conceptual limit faced by Heidegger’s account of resoluteness in the face of death (limits that are also illustrated with Heidegger’s interlocutors, Kierkegaard and Luther). Heidegger’s ontology of death would only make philosophical sense if it gave a greater role to the role of interpersonal relationships in the formation of the self, which alone can foster hope in the face of death. Thus the existential and epistemological value of thinking about death is more accurately understood when conceived as drawing us more deeply into engaged relationships with others. On similar grounds the death of others can help us to glimpse the contours of our own lives more powerfully than the reflection on our own deaths, which is the narrow and insistent focus of Heidegger’s analysis. Ultimately this relational criticism of Heidegger rests on the theological idea that a ‘what’ can never call us into a more existentially engaged life, only a ‘Who’. We may not always or often hear God speaking, but God is the proper horizon of all the talk of listening that lies at the core of Heidegger’s philosophy.