Being towards death
Being towards death
Hanan Cohen intertwines the mortality of blogs with our own mortality:
We think that we will live forever. We think that the files we have stored on machines powered by electricity will also live forever. Our files have no other purpose than to be online. We think that if our files are not available to the web, they are dead.
In a way, thinking about the death of our files is like thinking about our own death.
Meanwhile, over at Ereignis, the English-language Heidegger site, there’s a link to Christopher Ellis’ article that argues that Heidegger’s ideas about death are inadequate because they are oddly a-historic. Ellis touches on Heidegger’s failure to incorporate the ways in which we are animals in addition to being “ecstatic Dasein.” He recommends that Heidegger swallow a big dose of Hegel and re-think the historical particularities of, say, the Holocaust.
This article is aimed at the Heideggerian in-crowd, but I think its critique is trenchant. “No one can die my death for me,” wrote Heidegger. Ellis shows that this view of death-as-individuating is rooted in history, not in the inescapable basis of human existence. Besides, no one can take my shower for me either. Heidegger’s disinterest in us as embodied creatures has always seemed to me to be a weird and obvious flaw in his thinking. (And yet, Heidegger remains for me the person who got most of It right. And I mean the big big It.)
