Written by Caleb Knight

In 1976, 49 years after the publication of Being and Time,¹ Martin Heidegger came to his own demise in the hills of the Black Forest. In the same year on the opposite side of the globe Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released the Apple I, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to build Microsoft, and the 5.25 inch floppy disk was invented. While these calendrical parallels have no apparent connection to Martin Heidegger, perhaps the death of this intellectual giant might mark the end of some kind of world; as the sun set on this Dasein in the Black Forest, a new horizon brought forth a new world in Silicon Valley. In the following pages I will reflect on Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as Being-towards-Death thrown into a world, fallen into and alongside the ramblings of an idly talking “They-self”, met with an anxiety that leaves this Being-minded-being at odds with her own finitude. In doing so it is my project to extrapolate these themes through a lens exposed by the digital world that has arisen for us today. It will be my claim that while the world in which Heidegger penned his revolutionary text on Being is quite distinct from the world in which I type these words, his thinking on Being is even more important for us today. In order to accomplish this task I must first offer an incommensurate attempt at approachably organizing Heidegger’s conceptions of Dasein, a being for whom its Being is always an issue for it, as: 1. existing in a world alongside others, 2. temporally conditioned by and concerned with its own finitude and ‘possibility of impossibility,’ and 3. a being capable of living ‘resolutely’ and ‘authentically’ through its existential death. After articulating a rough sketch of these tumultuous and interconnected ideas I will turn to the digital-Dasein, an entity whose Being is, at least in part, constituted by what might be called a kind of Being-in-the-metaverse or Being-online. In resurrecting these Heideggerian themes in reference to our world of digital innovation I hope to add something of a software update for how we might think about Dasein’s death today.

The medium² of investigation in Being and Time (henceforth BT) is the entity Heidegger names Dasein (being-there). In the opening paragraphs of the first chapter of BT Heidegger writes that Dasein is “that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue”.³ Rephrased, Dasein is a being (entity) ultimately concerned with its own Being. But this language of da-sein brings forth the question of where this being is; where is there (da)? Mark Wrathall writes, “Dasein is most fundamentally a ‘being-in-the-world’…there cannot be Dasein without a world.”⁴ As any hero needs some origin story Heidegger writes that Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is “a Being which has been thrown and submitted to the ‘world’”⁵ This thrownness speaks to a contextualizing positioning of Dasein. In birth, Dasein is brought into a world that has been unfolding long before her existence implying that her existence is “with-one-another”⁶ or alongside other entities previously and subsequently following her existence. That Dasein is brought into existence alongside others requires a distinction for Heidegger. It cannot be accepted a priori that these others are also Daseins as the phenomenological structure of Dasein is wrapped up in mineness⁷. Heidegger calls these others “the They” (das Man). This positioning next to or alongside the ‘They’ contextualizes the interpretive possibilities of Dasein. In Being-with-one-another Dasein operates with a linguistic discourse that Heidegger calls “idle talk” (Gerede)⁸. While idle talk is not necessarily deemed negative as such, it positions Dasein as “fallen away (abgefallen) from itself…and has fallen into the world. Fallenness into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far that the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.”⁹ This fallenness is the natural state of thrown Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-seins). Heidegger writes, “Being-in is Being-with Others (das In-Sein ist Mitsein mit Anderen)”¹⁰ Dasein’s place in the world is constituted by this Being-with (Mitsein) Other entities. However he is clear to state that “by ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me…They are rather those from whom, for the most part one does not distinguish oneself––those among whom one is too.”¹¹ This means as Dasein is thrown into the world taking up the position of being amongst Others includes the entity of Dasein itself as a member of those Others. But while everyday Dasein can be considered to be a part of the Others in virtue of its nature of Being-with, Dasein is still concerned with the differences between itself and the other-Others (by which I mean the non-Dasein Others). While Dasein constitutes the They it remains distinct in that by Being-with, this “with-ness” affects how Dasein can appear and show up in the world.¹² Having situated Dasein alongside and with Others, I will now turn to the existential situation of Dasein’s finitude.

Finitude, the second theme of consideration for our investigation is the horizonal limitation of Dasein’s existence: in a word, death, or specifically Being-towards-death, is a forward-facing condition of Dasein’s Being-here and finds it fulfillment and wholeness in death. However, Heidegger does not seem to be speaking of our traditional, common sense ideas of death whenever he uses the term. This can be evidenced through language like “[f]actically, Dasein is dying as long as it exists,”¹³  “[d]eath is a way to be,”¹⁴  and “let the term ‘dying’ stand for that way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death.”¹⁵  So what does Heidegger mean by ‘death’ and how does it constitute Dasein if it is not a mere mortal end?

In the Cambridge Companion to Being and Time Iain Thompson, pointing to thinkers like William Blattner, John Haugeland, and Carol White, says a small sect of “cutting edge Heidegger scholars think that what Being and Time means by ‘death’ has almost nothing to do with the ordinary sense of the word.”¹⁶  Thompson is quick to note that in order to clarify what Heidegger seeks to do in Being and Time the text’s distinction between demise (what can be understood by our common usage of “death”, or more specifically Dasein’s own conscious awareness of death coming upon us at the End) and Heideggerian “death” are not “radically heterogenous phenomena,”¹⁷  the two are deeply interwoven. This distinction however is an attempt for Heidegger to understand how Dasein might understand itself as a whole, a term Heidegger demarcates as “Being-a-whole” (§46-7). So what is death, if not the demise of our end? If demise can be understood as the conscious experience of one’s mortality and perishing as merely the physical end (full stop), then what of ‘death’? Here I will use the term existential death to refer to what Heidegger seems to mean when using the word ‘death.’ In this existential death, we mean the collapse of all organization and previously meaningful possibilities for Dasein. In this death Dasein is forced to confront its fallenness and look its own potentiality-for-Being straight in the eye.¹⁸  Thompson writes that in the experience of [existential] death “the self—temporarily cut off from the world in terms of which it usually understands itself—finds itself radically alone with itself, and so can lucidly comprehend itself in its entirety for the first time.”¹⁹  In death Dasein’s Being-with and Being-in-the-world are stripped away, but in that stripping away what is left is something that cannot be outstripped, something inescapable––Dasein alone with a whole view of itself, unobstructed by anything. This stripping away is not a mere loss, rather in the experience of existential death Dasein is no longer able to “project itself into the worldly projects” it has typically used to ground its sense of identity;²⁰ the possibility of Being-in-such-a-way is made impossible. This self-view imparts on Dasein a state-of-mind called anxiety. “But to bring itself face to face with itself, is precisely what Dasein does not do when it thus flees. It turns away from itself in accordance with its ownmost inertia [Zug] of falling.”²¹  That is, in Being-in-the-world-alongside-Others Dasein is fallen away from itself into the They. In this fall Dasein’s attitudes, experiences, and possibilities are limited by the interpretations and values of the They, not by her own full-view of self. The They attempts to reduce existential death to something far off and eventual. Instead of confronting Their own existential death, the They recomposes any consideration of death as demise, covering death up with the promise of “tranquilized everydayness”²²  and reshaping Dasein’s “anxiety into fear in the face of an oncoming event.”²³  The oncoming and eventual qualities of demise allow for the They to a) objectify death as an event one has; and b) “death” (or in this case demise) becomes something that the They can fear, and not experience anxiety in relation to. This fear is easily tamed, according to Heidegger, because fear is a “jumping ahead” and a forgetting.²⁴  The process of promising Dasein with this temptation of tranquilization “alienates Dasein from its ownmost non-relational potentiality-for-Being.”²⁵  This concealing evasion is a movement in which Dasein turns away from itself in inauthentic fallenness. In considering this inauthentic falling and turning from anxiety two questions must be asked: 1. why is anxiety the response to existential death? and 2. how does one respond to this temptation for fallen inauthenticity? In order to answer the second question, which is our third necessary point in defining the contextualized position of Dasein, we must first articulate anxiety and what it means for us existentially. Upon a proper articulation we might be better able to understand Digital-Dasein’s relation to a cyber-world.

Heidegger notes that fear and anxiety are “kindred phenomena.”²⁶  But what relation do these themes, especially anxiety, have in relation to time? It would appear clear and easily understood that fear is a looking-forward in time; one does not fear something in the past, rather fear is a looking-ahead towards some objectified thing approaching or coming towards us that we do not like.²⁷  He continues on saying that “[a]nxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being…Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for”²⁸. The inclusion of “for” is a forward-minded sentiment. Anxiety opens Dasein to the possibilities ahead of it; anxiety is objectless for Heidegger; fear objectifies, anxiety seems to lay claim to Dasein. In existential death Dasein is exposed to the collapse of all around it, something reflected in its eventual demise. Rather, in existential death coming face to face with anxiety means after all around us has been stripped away, the unknown of our own future possibilities is presented to us.

This anxiety is not a mere mood, rather it is, as I have said previously, an existential experience that lays claim to us as we take a whole view of ourselves.²⁹ So, if not a mood, what is to be done in light of this anxiety? For Heidegger it is not a mere mental state or mood of the conscious mind, rather anxiety (Angst) is a revelation of something inherent to Dasein’s ontological possibilities of Being-in-the-world; anxiety is exposing the temporally forward direction of Being-towards-death and the openness of projecting onwards. The response to anxiety for Heidegger is one of Dasein’s ownership of resolute authenticity, not rationalization or coping.

For the sake of brevity, I will not spend too long attempting to crack the code of what is meant by this extremely charged term of ‘authenticity,’ rather I will use an efficient negation of the themes of the They listed above, as this seems helpful for the task at hand. When the They attempts to turn from anxiety in the face of death, pulling the covers over its head by reducing death to some eventual reality coming-one-day-but-not-yet,³⁰ authentic Dasein kicks off the security of the covers, exposes itself to the monsters under the bed, and confronts the paralysis of the unknown coming towards it. In facing the anxiety of this kind of existential death authentically Dasein, left alone, divorced from the collapsed world around it with a whole view of its ownmost possibilities, is able to press on in the world after its world-collapse.

For a poetic exemplification of this theme of resolute authenticity, consider for a moment book six of Virgil’s Aeneid. As Aeneas ventures towards the underworld he must cross the river Acheron to continue on towards the culmination of his journey, on the banks of the river Aeneas meets Charon, a psychopomp³¹ ferryman who takes Aeneas across the river for three dark nights. Virgil writes that Charon had “eyes like hollow furnaces on fire,”³² an image with connotations of the destruction and collapse Heidegger references in his conception of death. That death is a divorce from and loss of what constitutes our world; fire as purifying and deconstructive allows these hollow, optical furnaces to poetically represent a confrontation with our existential death. Here we can see Aeneas’ maintains a resoluteness in his willingness to confront death’s ferryman, giving him a golden branch from the forest nearby, convincing Charon to lead him forward in his journey into the unknown, through three consecutive, dark nights across the river, past much unknown, even Cerberus, the three-headed dog––a journey most living souls would inauthentically refuse.

But what does this mean for us today? If Heidegger means to say that death is something Dasein experiences in life, not only at our End (our ‘demise’), then where is the ferryman standing in front of us guiding us on our trip into the unknown? It seems most, the They (of which we often belong), are too busy to notice him waiting in front of us––we are too busy with a more complex distraction than Heidegger could never have dreamed: a distraction born in the Valley at the sundown of his demise in the mountains.

Information Technology (IT) is the current, modern day resistance and refusal to face death. When our projects and worlds collapse, we turn to participate in and create new virtual worlds with endless possibilities. Technology seeks to delimit our possible ways of being as well as offer an unlimited selection of worlds in which we can be. Information Technology sells an illusion of control to Dasein but offers only a distraction from Dasein’s eventual collapse. This distraction is often subtle: momentary connection via text messages and the subsequently instantaneous ‘presence’ of another, distracting Dasein from her solitude in existential death³³ ; an unlimited library of ideas, discussions, and posts³⁴ ; and attempts to present ourselves to the Others in a certain way, thereby leaving the real behind as we log on. In logging on to the cyber-world we simply fool ourselves, failing to exist in the real world the way Dasein is, instead comporting ourselves towards the techno-They for the sake of affecting how our throwness into the fallen-world is viewed by others and ourselves.

Heidegger writes to this idea that “the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social inconvenience…against which the public is to be guarded,” making a note that Tolstoy gives a tremendously poignant example of Pyotr Ivanovich and others struggle to handle Ivan Ilyich’s death in a proper way.³⁵ While not always a social manifestation of the They’s inauthenticity, the rise of information and bio-technology has been used in purely physical ways to alleviate and even resist our own natural perishing. That the United States spent $365 Billion on end-of-life care in 2018 is a radically shocking number. In 2019 Greg Eastwood, professor of bioethics and medicine at Upstate Medical University, said in an interview with NPR-associated WVRO that:

“we did not [previously] have the ability to intubate people and put them on a ventilator, give them potent drugs to stimulate their heart and keep blood pressure going, and so on. And what happens now, is people come to the hospital and receive the ‘gadgetry’ and then they get in to almost an irreversible position of being very sick, usually no longer able to conduct their own affairs, to make decisions for themselves, so someone else has to.”³⁶

The They, through technological development of the cyber-world and what Eastwood calls ‘gadgetry,’ seem to have pushed any thinking about death to another day, even for those who are perishing and demising at their End. By elongating the process of the physical death of one, the Others can “keep talking the ‘dying person’ into the belief that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillized everydayness of the world of his concern.”³⁷ This elongation is a physical reflection of the goal and aims of how digital technology seeks to function for people today.

Unquestionably, technology has seemingly always served the development of humanity (first the wheel, then medicine, now the iPhone). However, the ways in which we view human development appears to have valued the quality and longevity of life, in the attempt to escape the inevitability of our demise. Technology gave us modern medicine for infections,³⁸ end-of-life-support, and accessibility to a higher quality of life, now today we have digital archives being stockpiled and saved even beyond the very End—all of which seems driven by the circular desire to stay alive and full of life as long as possible. This circularity is not a generalized critique of all technology, rather the way we have viewed humanity and used technology, especially information technology, to accomplish those goals. Media companies make money promoting ads using information they take from users with algorithms so advanced a pregnancy can be predicted by ad companies, promoting users buy an IKEA crib even before a pregnancy test.³⁹ Humans have been reduced to stockpiled resources for exploitation, but we participate in this willingly and with full knowledge of the systems at play. Humans exploit each other on social media for attention and distraction, inauthentic temptations from engaging with the whole view of the self; in exploiting each other we play a quid-pro-quo game allowing others to do the same. We engage in the cyber-Monday sales⁴⁰ knowing we are submitting ourselves to a(n) (e)mailing list we can never seem to unsubscribe from. The more we are plugged in, the longer we want to remain so. Medical technology does the same thing. Its value scheme seems to be “keeping people alive,” but this would make sense given a system where dead people cannot pay their medical bills. The advent of food science gave us hyper-processed food, making the dentist and orthodontist leap for joy. In our society today, we find ourselves trapped in a hyper-technologized, always connected and plugged in world. A world that seeks to keep us around as long as possible because a) death is not fun to think about, so here are some kitten videos; and b) we need you to keep paying for our services––can’t do that if you’re dead.

It is undeniable that most would say technology is good. Technological advancement gives us knowledge about life-threatening problems (e.g. putting water under a microscope and seeing a murderous bacteria), but how far is too far? Of course this information should be shared if it can save the life of a child across the world (and we owe it to humanity to share it as soon as possible!). But have we abused this instantaneous connection to relay too much? Have we merely changed how we use the ever expanding possible capabilities of technology, or is the attempt to unlock previously impossible capabilities itself the problem? It would seem the latter is not inherently the case. Innovation is not morally charged, even Heidegger is critical of the view of technology based solely on its potential uses in An Essay Concerning Technology. Instead, for Heidegger the value of technology lies in how something is used for Dasein. While most consider Heidegger to be anti-technology, in 2022 Heidegger scholar Richard Polt presented Heidegger’s own typewriter at the annual Heidegger Circle Conference. This presentation was accompanied by an in-depth analysis into the dialectic between Heidegger’s later views on technology and his assistant’s apparent use of technology under his own name⁴¹ .

It is clear however that technology cannot be seen as essentially corrupt, especially for a Heidegger whose transcripts may only have been legible given his assistant’s use of a machine. It is undeniable, especially in a post-COVID-19-world, that the ability to save the lives of a millions across the world by a viral sequence being analyzed with scientific technology and shared instantly across the globe via the internet is a good one. Rather the value of technology emanates, not from how it may be used, but instead from how we use it. It is not hard to imagine that an infection-healed-2022-Heidegger would likely have a landline and even, perhaps, a flip phone in his skiing hut in the Black Forest, but very easily it can be imagined that he would say the value is derived from how a particular Dasein allows technology to position themselves in the world.

The Heideggerian critique of technology found in An Essay Concerning Technology as well as lectures given in Rome (see Polt 2015) today seems strongest in that we exist outside of our world, no longer Being-in-the-world, instead Being-online. Given the world is presented before Dasein, not existentially but physically in front of us, in our hands, via a screen, the internet has allowed us to present ourselves to others without having them there-with-us. The most extreme examples of this Digital-Dasein curation can be witnessed in what is commonly referred to as “catfishing”, or the formation of a digital profile of someone that is not yourself and subsequently living that life on the internet. Most would say they would never do this explicitly, but it appears in all online engagement something distinct from and less than Dasein is disclosed to others virtually. For the new generation of beings in the modern world (Generation Z—the generation of the End), ones who have never known a world before computers sat in almost every home, technology has become a gateway to a life disjoined from their own. Phrases like “twitter community” and “tinder match” have replaced embodied community as well as the lived “meet-cute”. Today, life is live based on what is in front of us (in our hands), as we ignore what is ahead of us, the existential possibilities of our Being. Yesterday, what we deemed real happened around us and to us in virtue of our being-there to witness it and play a part in it; today we curate real for each other and ourselves digitally. Technology brought the horror of 9/11/2001 to every TV in every home across the nation, phones notify us of any interaction with our publicly uploaded selves, and what is important—the reality of our demise, and thus the collapse of all possibility of Being, death-itself, is lost to us in a deeper world of inauthentic distraction within the distractions around us, some of which may still be traumatic and concerning, but not essentially belonging to our own Dasein. To put this another way, previously Dasein participated in they-self by engaging with the world in an expected way, a way that denied the unfolding of our limited possibility; but today we have created a virtual world in which there is limitless possibility (no impossibility), as long as the power stays on. When previously our mortality presented itself to us in life it evoked anxiety, today it would take an apocalyptic power outage to bring us back to ourselves with no options but introspection into Being-here. This going-offline becomes our technological-death, a death we must opt into like an email subscription with the chance to cancel anytime, allowing us to control and choose how we feel at all moments; today death is avoidable whenever we can re-connect any time things become “too much.” When Youtube cannot teach one how to fix their car, Google cannot provide mathematical instruction for our calculus homework, and Instagram fails to connect a highly curated and digitized version of our perceived (inauthentic) selves to others, all that is left is my being in an unfamiliar and alienating world; without information technology we lose our distracting tranquilization and are once again reminded of our position as thrown into an unfolding (real) world. In this real-world we are open to the possibility of experiencing existential death, something Information Technology excels⁴² at subverting any possibility of. Cyber technology seeks to hide this alienation from us, a tactic of the They, under the illusion of inclusion, information, connection, and community; technology gives us unlimited options of worlds to belong in and an unlimited ways of showing up in those worlds.

But what of death as the End? Surely technology cannot stop this. But in fact a growing number of proponents have gathered in the corner of the ring behind their star fighter: Transhumanism. The Transhumanists continue to push for the use of technology to either achieve non-perishing bodies and minds; mobilize the cognizing parts of ourselves into new, immortal bodies—often conceptualized with a digital form; or, in the most rudimentary manifestations simply extend the limits of our possibilities for showing up in the world (implanting chips, altering our sensory reality, manipulating memory, etc). While most of these believers were likely bullied in middle school for being “too into” science fiction and comic books, technology has allowed them to take for themselves the illusion of control, hoping to play god, and giving themselves the superpowers they once dreamed of to escape their harassment. As I mentioned above, the use of this technology is not inherently bad, in fact the attempt to utilize technology to enact something impossible may very well be an authentic move for a particular Dasein. But according to one’s imagination of what Heidegger might say about technology today, if any escaping existential death—or having a whole view of one’s self, becomes the project, digital technology must be seen to be inauthentic. And I fear this may always be the essential direction of digital, cyber technology.

However, even in cyber-being, death still threatens us. The headset I wear to engage in my virtual world might irreversibly shock me, the battery in my laptop might start a fire on a plane, or even as simple as mass production and stream-lining of information and propaganda through radio, TV, and social media might mislead thousands and millions into atrocious ideological stances—don’t believe me? Ask Heidegger, the Nazi.⁴³

Again, I will say that it cannot be claimed that information and digital technology are inherently bad. No one is interested in an Unabomber 2.0 and typing this paper on a computer was much easier than writing, erasing, and re-writing, but the questions must be asked: is there any chance for a rethinking of technological uses and how technology’s promise of an infinite possibility of possibilities, even the hope to escape our possibility of all impossibility of Being, or are we too late? If authenticity can be had technologically in a digital world, is there any hope for decrypting a method of authenticity without completely unplugging forever or are we condemned to experience anxiety only when our phones reach 1% with no charger in sight?

To conclude, I have laid out a rudimentary and incomplete rendering of Heidegger’s thought concerning Dasein as an entity thrown into the world amongst others, propelled towards death, and overcome with anxiety, given the chance to face it authentically. We have sought some understanding of how Being can be seen to exist in a world that Heidegger may never have been able to conceive of, a digital world in which the lines between reality and fiction are blurred. While I claim to have made no exhaustive critique of technology’s role in the digitally-positioned Dasein (Being-online), I hope something done here has exposed system-wide vulnerabilities in the lack of serious literature regarding the often unquestioned, ubiquitous adoption of new technological means of distracting ourselves from our existential death.⁴⁴ It is without question that Heidegger would have much to say regarding our current condition; however, given that Heidegger’s corpus is dense enough to spend a lifetime attempting to discern, that we are only left with conjecture as to what he might actually have said and felt today, and that binge-watching Netflix would be tremendously more pleasurable, I fear the birth of modern ‘gadgetry’ injected a virus into the existential possibilities of Heidegger’s authentic Dasein today; today, we find ourselves at the mercy of a concerning zero-day exploit in need of an update to fix.

---

Endnotes

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
2. Dasein is the medium, not the subject of investigation in that Being is Heidegger’s interest, the phenomenological analysis of Dasein is the means through which Being can be revealed to us in Being and Time.
3. BT §9 H.42
4. Mark Wrathall, “Dasein and authenticity”, How to Read Heidegger, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006). 16.
5. BT §34 H.161
6. BT §37 H.175
7. I am Dasein because I am concerned with my own Being. My thinking of other being’s Being does not make them Dasein necessarily, merely entities whom I find myself alongside.
8. BT §35 H.167
9. BT §38 H.175
10. BT §26 H.118
11. BT §26 H.118, emphasis original
12. BT §27 H.126
13. BT §50 H.251]
14. BT §48 H.245
15. BT §49 H.247, emphasis original
16. Thompson, Iain, “Death and Demise in Being and Time” in Cambridge Companion to Being and Time, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 263.
17. Ibid., 263-4.
18. BT §50-1, H.251-3
19. Thompson, “Death and Demise”, pp. 266.
20. Ibid.
21. BT §40, H.184
22. BT §51, H.253-4
23. BT §51, H.253-4
24. BT §68.b H344. This understanding of fear as a “jumping ahead” and “forgetting” is the constitutive nature of the inauthenticity of fear; it disables Dasein from being able to engage meaningfully with that which ought concern them anxiously. Fear can be tamed because fear forgets who is concerned with the feared object.
25. BT §51, H.253-4
26. BT §40, H.185
27. Like my father’s greatest fear of being chased and mauled by a bear, we fear what could (futurally) happen, not what has happened. Even in examples of fear related to some past trauma, the substance of that fear is motivated towards an effect from the cause of the traumatic event.
28. BT §40 H.188, emphasis original
29. While anxiety, for Heidegger, is not an objectified mood one has, Thompson theorizes that, while likely not being the best interpretation, the move of Heidegger for death as a stripping away (collapse) of all possible worlds could be a “generalizing from his depressive nature.” But this would not follow, at least to the author of this paper, given their particular mental health diagnosis, in that depression seems to be a reflection of reversed temporality; put another way, depression is a looking-back-on––anxiety is always a looking-ahead-towards (see footnote 25).
30. BT §51 H.253
31. An interesting note on psychopomps: they are never tasked with judgement, only guiding and escorting of souls to and from the unknown of the afterlife. If we were to see Charon as a judge, the image of resoluteness would fall through and a source of meaning and expectation would exist outside of Dasein and thus would reduce any possibility of death being Dasein’s own.
32. Virgil, The Aeneid: Book VI, trans. John Dryden, (MIT Internet Classics Archive, 2000). Virgil’s inclusion of the word ‘hollow’ can imply that the furnace has been filled, what was housed there once was burned away, and it now awaits another project to reduce to ashes; another soul to purify.
33. We never have to be alone—through technology we can always be-with (mitsein) another.
34. The unlimited and ever-growing amount of what has been named “content” has reduced information, wisdom, and understanding, the philosophical pursuit, a way of distracting ourselves and inauthentically dealing with our Being. Content has become, in the most Heideggerian terms, the new “idle talk of the They”. As a means of placating any awareness of Dasein’s own possibility of all Being becoming impossible, negative and isolating feelings can with a few taps be instantly dispelled and taken away from us. I am thankful for a conversation about this theme with Dr. James Bahoh at the University of Memphis who challenged my attempt to globalize all content as idle talk, responding that the development of the meme and other intentioned content may very well have self-reflexive consequences for a Dasein. While I may look to social media to alleviate my Angst, unknown to me before-hand I could open an app to see content that is, in a humorous fashion, intended to force me to face some inevitable reality of my Being-towards-death.
35. BT §51 H.254
36. Greg Eastwood, interviewed by Ellen Abbott, WVRO Public Media—NPR, WVRO, September 30, 2019.
37. BT §51 H.253; This phenomenon is evidenced in Tolstoy’s story as the narrator tells the reader that “what [Ivan] wanted was for someone to take pity on him as if he were a sick child” (Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories” Penguin Classics, 2008, pp.200). This desire is paralleled with what Heidegger calls “Fürsorge”, translated solicitous care, and stands opposed to the inauthentic They’s tendency to distract away from the “social inconvenience” of the dying Other (BT §51 H.254). This distraction from death’s inconvenience, while technology has opened the possibility to delay its final actualization, is also manifested in the desire to continue on memorializing one after their End via social media. This delays the reality of accepting one’s no-longer-being-with-us.
38. Perhaps Heidegger might still be with us today with the right pharmaceutical technology during his life-ending infection.
39. Kevin W Breuninger, “Ikea Ad Doubles as an at-Home Pregnancy Test-and Works the Same Way (Think Yellow),” CNBC (CNBC, January 10, 2018), https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/new-ikea-ad-for-crib-is-a-working-pregnancy-test.html.
40. I confess, I bought some cool shoes this year.
41. Richard Polt, “Heidegger’s Typewriter” (presentation, Annual Heidegger Circle Conference, Memphis, TN, May 26, 2022). Polt explained his method of verification was possible only because of a signature under the paper loading mechanism of the machine, an interesting location in that his own name physically grounded the pages his assistant would have typed his handwritten notes on. This signing was in response to a previous theft from Heidegger’s office recorded and almost forgotten in Freiburg University’s incident reports. Additionally, the serial number on the machine matched the timing of when a replacement would have been bought, causing Polt to speculate that the addition of the signature was to produce an assurance of traceability given another instance of theft. I am quite proud to have had the opportunity to type the word “Dasein” on Heidegger’s own typewriter after Polt’s presentation.
42. This pun is unquestionably intended.
43. While Heidegger was a party member, this remark is not purely ironic, nor is it a claim that he had a robust ideological stance in his political position. His Nazism appears to me to be a period of inauthentic engagement with the They-self of the Third Reich. Swayed in by propaganda, Heidegger’s lack of serious political philosophy around Nazism leads me to feel this was a position of his by virtue of a desire for cultural and community cohesion—not authentic engagement with the world, or from a place of genuine care (Sörge).
44. This is not to say that there is no literature on Heidegger’s Dasein and technology. In fact, Richard Polt’s recent essay about this theme is very much worth giving up an evening of Netflix and chilling. Richard Polt, “A Heideggerian Critique of Cyberbeing”, Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology, Contributions to Philosophy vol 74, ed. Hans Pedersen & Megan Altman (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 179-197.

Bibliography

1. Eastwood, Greg, interviewed by Ellen Abbott, WVRO Public Media—NPR, WVRO, September 30, 2019.
2. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
3. Polt, Richard, “Heidegger’s Typewriter” (presentation, Annual Heidegger Circle Conference, Memphis, TN, May 26, 2022).
4. Polt, Richard, “A Heideggerian Critique of Cyberbeing”, Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology, Contributions to Philosophy vol 74, ed. Hans Pedersen & Megan Altman (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 179-197.
5. Thompson, Iain, “Death and Demise in Being and Time” in Cambridge Companion to Being and Time, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
6. Tolstoy, Leo, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, (NewYork: Penguin Classics, 2008).
7. Virgil, The Aeneid: Book VI, trans. John Dryden, (MIT Internet Classics Archive, 2000).
8. Wrathall, Mark, “Dasein and authenticity”, How to Read Heidegger, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).