Tommi Juhani Hanhijarvi Dialectical Thinking Zeno Socrates Kant and Marx

The Enigma of Being-Toward-Death
Author(s): Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2015), pp. 547-576
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.29.4.0547
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jsp
The Enigma of Being-Toward-Death
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
university of oregon
abstract: This article considers the relationship of Heidegger’s metaphysics of Being-

toward-death to what Heidegger describes as “the enigma of motion,” that is, to Dasein’s
“historicality.” In doing so, the article confronts a series of questions concerning fundamen-
tal realities of animate life, realities centering on angst in the face of death, but including
curiosity and fear, for example, all such realities being what Heidegger terms “states-of-
mind” or “moods.” Thus, the article basically questions Heidegger’s elision of a Leibkörper,
not only in terms of feelings but in terms of an exaltation of language, an insular notion of
Dasein’s historicality, and a narrow and deficient depiction of animals in his “philosophical
biology.” Through a critical examination of the phenomenological disclosure that Heidegger
seeks in his metaphysics of Being-toward-death, the article shows that death and the very
concept of death hinges on being a body, a temporally finite animate body. Thus, however
metaphysical its exposition, Being-toward-death is existentially anchored in being a body.
keywords: “enigma of motion,” concept of death, poetry, being “poor in world,” being
poor in body, states-of-mind, feelings
How is it that in anxiety Dasein gets brought before itself through

its own Being, so that we can define phenomenologically the
character of the entity disclosed in anxiety, and define it as such in
its Being, or make adequate preparations for doing so?
—martin heidegger, Being and Time
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 29, no. 4, 2015

Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
548 maxine sheets-johnstone
This “bodily nature” [of Dasein] hides a whole problematic of its

own, though we shall not treat it here.
—martin heidegger, Being and Time
Is the phenomenological disclosure that Heidegger seeks with respect

to anxiety possible short of a disclosure of the felt body, the affective/
tactile-kinesthetic body? Is the being that Heidegger describes as Being-
toward-death actually poor in body in a way analogous to the way in which
he describes animals being “poor in world”? Can there be angst short of a
body? Indeed, can there be death short of being a body?
To answer to these questions and thus begin to clarify the enigma of
Being-toward-death, it is relevant to consider the likeness of the enigma
of Being-toward-death to what Heidegger terms “the enigma” of “motion”
(1962, 444), for the two enigmas are ontologically, even metaphysically,
related precisely in the sense that Heidegger specifies when he writes of
Dasein’s historicizing and historicality as “the enigma” of “movement” or
“motion” (1962, 441, 444).1 As Heidegger in fact affirms, “The ontological
problem of history [is] an existential one. The Being of Dasein has been
defined as care. Care [the call of conscience] is grounded in temporality”
(1962, 434). In non-Heideggerian words, and as Aristotle finely analyzed
and documented in detail centuries earlier (Physics 250b10–252b7), time
and motion go hand in hand, in a close but not identical relationship. It
is thus understandable that, as Heidegger points out in distinguishing his
concept of movement from the common, everyday, and indeed dictionary
definition of movement, “the movement of historicizing . . . is not to be
grasped in terms of motion as change of location” (1962, 441). On the con-
trary and as indicated by the above quote, the “ontological enigma of the
movement of historizing” has to do with temporality, with time, not space:
“Authentic Being-towards-death—that is to say, the finitude of temporality—is
the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality” (Heidegger 1962, 438).
Given this ontologically anchored temporal foundation, the enigma
of motion may be understood in both the Heraclitean sense of existen-
tial change, that is, of a river—or being—that is never the same from one
moment to the next—hence a being-toward—and in the Aristotelian sense
of the intimate and complex metaphysical conjunction of time and motion
(Physics 250b10–252b7). In both Heraclitean and Aristotelian senses, move-
ment and time both flow; both are dynamic; both reach for a future as
they trail a past; in both, the present is always in process. In effect, neither
the enigma of being-toward-death 549
ovement nor time is still. The flow inherent in each is indeed not to be
m
stilled—except in death or, as we will see, in Heidegger’s ontological elabora-
tion of poetry. In what follows, a number of passages in Heidegger’s writings
on poetry will be cited that pertain to the ontological significance of stillness,
movement, and time. On this basis, it will be possible to lay the groundwork
necessary to clarifying the enigma of Being-toward-death, showing in par-
ticular that being a body is ontologically foundational to Being-toward-death.
1. Poetry and the Exaltation of Language
To begin with, Heidegger elevates stillness and extends its common

meaning. Indeed, stillness moves, according to Heidegger: it “peals” (1975,
207ff.). Heidegger bases this metaphysical claim in language, specifically
language in the art of poetry. “Stillness” is in fact of singular moment in
Heidegger’s notion of the intimacy of world and thing in poetry. His meta-
physical evocation of movement in poetic stillness might recall lines in
T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton” that similarly single out stillness, move-
ment, and time, perhaps most particularly the line “At the still point of
the turning world.” For Heidegger, however, stillness is something more
than a temporal existentiell; it is a fundamental ontological poetic reality that
describes the manner in which “language speaks” (Heidegger 1975, 190ff.).
In exacting descriptive terms he states, “Language speaks as the peal of still-
ness” (1975, 207). In earlier lectures on the origin of the work of art, that
is, prior to his ontologically detailed exposition of how language speaks,
Heidegger directs our attention to language and poetry, urging us to realize
that “the right concept of language is needed” in order to see that poetry
“has a privileged position in the domain of the arts” (1977, 185). Moreover,
in these earlier lectures, he affirms that language and Being are of a piece:
“Language alone brings beings as beings into the open for the first time. . . .
Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word
and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their Being from
out of their Being” (1977, 185). Presumably, Heidegger would affirm that
the very word Dasein does precisely this.
Heidegger’s claims about language are provocative. Is it naming alone
that by seemingly purposeful tautology, that is, by “nominating,” makes
beings apparent and even brings them to an immediately present reality? Is
stillness solely an ontological poetic reality, or is stillness, via Heidegger’s
unelucidated claim that “as the stilling of stillness, rest, conceived strictly,
is always more in motion than all motion” (1975, 206–7), an inherent
ontological reality of time, an inherent ontological reality on par with the
enigma of motion? Heidegger’s conception of profound boredom (of which
more later) answers positively to just such a relationship. By extension, all
animate movement speaks in the peal of stillness, bringing beings to an
immediately present reality, as when a nonhuman animal or a human
infant reaches for and grasps something, whether by hand, beak, or jaws.
Not only this, but sign language unfolds in stillness; it unequivocally
“brings beings to word and to appearance.”
In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” one might find initial hints of
an answer to the first question, that is, a beginning aesthetic account of
how naming ontologizes, and this by way of Heidegger’s claims that “the
essence of art is poetry” and that art is “the distinctive way in which truth
comes into being” (1977, 186–87). In his later lectures and essay titled
“Language,”2 one finds a more elaborate aesthetic accounting of naming
and with it, Heidegger’s elaborate explication of stillness. In particular,
through the “intimacy” of thing and world in poetry, language speaks, but
in stillness. Heidegger describes this intimacy as dif-ference. By the neol-
ogism dif-ference, he means neither “distinction nor relation” but a com-
ing together of thing and world in a unity that preserves their individual
presence, their togetherness in separateness (1975, 202–3). It is through
their poetic intimacy that a mutual “bidding” occurs: a poem both “bids
the things to come which, thinging, bear world” and “bids world to come
which, worlding, grants things” (Heidegger 1975, 203). By extension, Hei-
degger’s claim is not only that naming nominates “beings to their Being
from out of their Being” but that the truth of Being comes to Being from out
of Being in the distinct and extraordinary stillness that language speaks.
This ultimate ontological truth is the truth of finitude, the existential core of
Dasein (Heidegger 1962, e.g., 269): “‘There is’ truth only in so far as Dasein is
and so long as Dasein is.” Dasein is, of course, that Being for whom its Being
“is an issue for it” (Heidegger 1962, 32).
Heidegger’s metaphysics of language is an exalting of language,3 a
near-religious “pealing” phenomenon in that it is not a matter of sound, and
indeed not matter at all, whether in its utterance or in its hearing. In and
through poetic intimacy, stillness moves both in and through language:
“Stillness stills by the carrying out, the bearing and enduring, of world and
things in their presence. The carrying out of world and thing in the manner
of stilling is the appropriative taking place of the dif-ference. Language, the

peal of stillness, is, inasmuch as the dif-ference takes place” (Heidegger
1975, 207). By way of explanation, Heidegger immediately avers, “The peal
of stillness is not anything human.” On the contrary, “language, the peal of
stillness,” brings human being “into its own”: “The very nature, the presenc-
ing, of language needs and uses the speaking of mortals in order to sound as
the peal of stillness for the hearing of mortals. Only as men belong within
the peal of stillness are mortals able to speak in their own way in sounds”
(Heidegger 1975, 208). Thus, Heidegger proposes that everyday language
is subsidiary to “poetry proper”: “The speech of mortals rests in its relation
to the speaking of language” (1975, 208).
Heidegger’s exalting of language is ontologically secured by the
singling out of Man—humans—mortals who “belong” to language. His
beginning remarks in his essay “Language” detail the givenness of lan-
guage in everyday terms but at the same time emphasize the defining
singularity of man. Heidegger in fact begins his essay by stating, “Man
speaks,” and immediately enlarges on this statement as follows:
We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams. We are

always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but
merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly listen-
ing or speaking but are attending to some work or taking a rest. . . .
It is held that man, in distinction from plant and animal, is the living
being capable of speech. This statement does not mean only that,
along with other faculties, man also possesses the faculty of speech.
It means to say that only speech enables man to be the living being
he is as man. It is as one who speaks that man is—man. (1975, 189)
A few pages later, Heidegger compares this everyday givenness with

what is spoken in poetry, affirming to begin with, “No one would dare to
declare incorrect, let alone reject as useless, the identification of language as
audible utterance of inner emotions, as human activity, as a representation
by image and by concept. The view of language thus put forth is correct, for
it conforms to what an investigation of linguistic phenomena can make out
in them at any time.” He cautions, however, that such “correct ideas about
language . . . ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language,” and
cautions further, “Thus despite their antiquity and despite their compre-
hensibility, they never bring us to language as language” (1975, 193).
What Heidegger is at pains to affirm is that what brings humans to

language as language is what is “spoken purely”: “What is spoken purely is
the poem” (1975, 194). The realization Heidegger draws from language as
the peal of stillness in the art of poetry is that “mortals speak by respond-
ing to language in a twofold way, receiving and replying.” In particular,
Heidegger claims that “mortal speech must first of all have listened to the
command, in the form of which the stillness of the dif-ference calls world
and things into the rift of its onefold simplicity. . . . Mortals speak insofar
as they listen. They heed the bidding call to the stillness of the dif-ference
even when they do not know that call. Their listening draws from the com-
mand of the dif-ference what it brings out as sounding word. This speaking
that listens and accepts is responding” (1975, 209). In effect, “man speaks
in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing. It hears
because it listens to the command of stillness” (Heidegger 1975, 210).
Now however much Heidegger is at pains to explain and elucidate the
preeminence of language, he nonetheless realizes that a lacuna exists in a
genetic phenomenology sense. He states, “At the proper time it becomes
unavoidable to think of how mortal speech and its utterance take place in
the speaking of language as the peal of the stillness of the dif-ference. Any
uttering, whether in speech or writing, breaks the stillness. On what does
the peal of stillness break? How does the broken stillness come to sound in
words? How does the broken stillness shape the mortal speech that sounds
in verses and sentences?” (1975, 208). He goes on simply to assume “that
thinking will succeed one day in answering these questions,” though in the
meantime, “it must be careful not to regard utterance, let alone expression,
as the decisive element of human speech” (1975, 208–9).
2. Dasein’s Developmental Historicality and the Enigma of Motion
Heidegger’s question, “How does the broken stillness come to sound in

words?” is indeed provocative. Like all other forms of animate life, humans
are animate: they come into the world moving. Yet, while movement is a
ready-made range of abilities for many if not most animate forms of life,
providing an immediate or near-immediate kinetic subject-world relation-
ship, for humans that relationship is a developmental process, a distinc-
tively temporally extended phenomenon. Indeed, for humans (and notably
Pongidae primates), the process of learning their bodies and learning
to move themselves effectively and efficiently in the world spans a good

portion of their initial histories as animate beings. Their historicality—
the temporality that constitutes “the enigma of motion”—thus necessar-
ily encompasses real-time, real-life tactile-kinesthetic/kinetic subject-world
relationships and learnings. Recognition of this natural, inborn, panhu-
man temporal-developmental history poses a radical internal problem with
respect to Heidegger’s foundational elevation of language and its exalta-
tion as the peal of stillness. In brief, infancy is ontologically if not logi-
cally incompatible with what Heidegger essentially describes as “Dasein’s
language-embedded historicality,” and this because infants are precisely
“without language.” They are thus ontologically and logically antithetical
to Heidegger’s metaphysics of Dasein and immune to his metaphysics of
language. That they are without language is not of course a matter of propo-
sitional knowledge attained by way of discoveries in the “positive sciences”
(Heidegger 1962, 31). That they are without language is a foundational
historical reality of human Being. Accordingly, if language alone brings
beings and Being into the open—if “naming nominates beings to their
Being from out of their Being”—is it any wonder that there is a lacuna to be
filled in phenomenological understandings of the ontological character of
Dasein, a lacuna demanding precisely a genetic phenomenology providing
authentic elucidations regarding the constitution of “Self”—the “who” of
Dasein in its everydayness (Heidegger 1962, 149–50)—and in fact, authen-
tic elucidations of the very moment of historical birth of Dasein, not to
mention authentic elucidations of “Authentic” Dasein, that is, Dasein’s
“Being-towards-death—that is to say, the finitude of temporality,” a finitude
that constitutes “the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality” (Heidegger 1962,
438)? Resolution of the enigma of motion is epistemologically as well as
ontologically central to the closure of this lacuna.
The interconnected lacuna and enigma are clearly evident in the
existential reality of infants, who not only are without language but have
no notion of finitude. They have just been born. In effect, in the beginning,
everyday Dasein—if “Dasein” at all—is not caught up exclusively in the
world, in “things,” in the idle talk of the “they” (Heidegger 1962, 211–14)—
or for that matter, in Heidegger’s idea of curiosity as “a kind of knowing,
but just in order to have known,” or in ambiguity as an impossibility of
“genuine understanding” (1962, 217). It is caught up in its primal anima-
tion, learning its body and learning to move itself. It is thus caught up
in inchoate reachings and graspings; in stretching and in turning over; in
movement toward and away; in sound-making as in crying, babbling, and

cooing; in excited or agitated kickings; and so on. In the context of its pri-
mal animation, it may be caught up in the light reflected through a window
or in the ordered bars of its crib; it may be caught up in the movement of
a mobile above its head; it may be caught up in the face of its mother, in
the tactilely felt pressure of the arms that hold it and in the rippling sounds
it hears. In simply being awake, it may be caught up in an array of pos-
sible sensory awarenesses. In all such learnings and engagements, it is
caught up in an ongoing wonder and exploration of itself and its surround-
ing world. In view of its primal animation and animated learning experi-
ences and relationships, we might truthfully say that Dasein’s historicality,
in precisely an ontological sense, is born in movement. Thus, language as
the peal of stillness does not break nothingness, as might incidentally be
thought in relation to Heidegger’s (1961, 1) well-known question of why
there is something rather than nothing. On the contrary, given the develop-
mental historicality of Dasein, language in a literal sense breaks movement:
it breaks into the nonlinguistic dynamic world of infants, a predominantly
tactile-kinesthetic world in which infants progressively form nonlinguistic
concepts, corporeal concepts such as open and close, near and far, large
and small, strong and weak, abrupt and sustained, smooth and sharp, fast
and slow, sudden and attenuated, and so on. In short, language breaks into
a nonlinguistic world of movement and of burgeoning nonlinguistic corpo-
real concepts (Sheets-Johnstone 1990, chap. 6). Thinking in movement is
indeed primordial (Sheets-Johnstone [1981] 2011, [1999] 2011, 2009). With
respect specifically to “the finitude of temporality,” that is, Dasein’s “Being-
toward-death,” language as the peal of stillness breaks on the nonlinguis-
tic corporeal concept of death, a concept born in third-person experiences of
inert, unmoving bodies, a concept that in fact arose far back in our human
history and indeed in our evolutionary past (Sheets-Johnstone 1986b).
Given this developmental perspective, one can easily see the foundational
relevance of the question not why there is something rather than nothing
but why there is movement rather than stillness.4
To be clear, the concept of death is not language-dependent (Sheets-
Johnstone 1986b). It is Other-dependent, Other-dependent in that some-
thing heretofore experienced as animated is now inanimate. Indeed, what
was formerly an ever-changing visual form, a form that was gesturing, run-
ning, carrying things about, opening its mouth, and so on, is now utterly
still. The other whom one once knew is now no more. A quite distinct Other
other is present. As described elsewhere, “what is apparent in death is a

stillness, a radical behavioral change, a sleeplike demeanor from which the
Other is unrouseable. What is present, in other words, is an Other I can no
longer know, an Other whose being escapes me” (Sheets-Johnstone 1986b,
51; 1990, 223; 2009, 110). It is from just such experiences that the concept
of death was first born and ultimately with it, the knowledge that I too lead a
punctuated existence. As pointed out elsewhere, “precisely because the expe-
rience of death is never mine originally, and in turn, because the concept of
death is rooted in a reverse analogical apperception, the apperception is an
analogical apperception manqué” (Sheets-Johnstone 1986b, 54; 1990, 226;
2009, 113). In finer terms, “the concept of death is born when the sense of
I too and the sense of distinctive contrast are heightened in equal measure.
With the sense of I too, I ultimately grasp my punctuated existence; with the
sense of distinctive contrast, I grasp the inevitability of my death. . . . The felt
similarities and felt differences reverberate with the existential dissonance
of life and death. . . . This temporal stretch of being that I am . . . is not a
never-ending expanse of being but a punctuated one” (Sheets-Johnstone
1986b, 57; 1990, 229; 2009). In this moment of an analogical apperception
manqué, I grasp both the reality of my living temporality, my moving, felt
presence, and the inevitability of my ultimate end.
Sartre’s words are timely to recall in this context: “If the Other did not
exist,” Sartre writes, but without concrete elaboration, “[death] could not
be revealed to us, nor could it be constituted as the metamorphosis of our
being into a destiny”; death “transforms us into the outside” (1956, 545).
Moreover Voltaire’s observation is equally of moment: “The human race
is the only one that knows it must die, and it knows this only through its
experience. A child brought up alone and transported to a desert island
would have no more idea of death than a cat or a plant” (1901, 174; see also
Enright 1983, ix).
Given the fact that our concept of death is rooted in an analogical apper-
ception manqué, that is, in a nonlinguistic third-person anchored corporeal
concept of death, it becomes clear why, precisely in an ontological sense,
the peal of stillness that language speaks breaks foundationally on being a
body, in particular, on the temporality of being the animate and animated
form one is, hence ultimately, on the finitude inherent in being “an animate
organism” (Husserl 1970, e.g., 97–98, 110–11; 1973, e.g., 106–8, 217–18;
1980, e.g., 4–6, 103–4; 1989, e.g., 185, 266–67). As pointed out above,
one’s awareness of finitude—of Being-toward-death—does not depend on
the ability to speak, hear, listen, or “hearken” (Heidegger 1962, 207); it

rests on the ontological reality of being an animate form of life among
other animate forms of life.
Ontological and epistemological concerns regarding the interconnected
lacuna and enigma nevertheless remain. If “only speech enables man to
be the living being he is as man,” if “it is as one who speaks that man
is—man” (Heidegger 1975, 189), then infants are not human. Language
would presumably be the path by which infants become human. Yet surely
direct and immediate observations and experiences prompt us to question
Heidegger’s claim and ask, for instance: Do infants not hear and respond?
Clearly, they do not hear and respond, much less hearken to the call of
conscience, to Care. They hear and respond in the form of expectations, for
example, as when they hear the sound of a certain voice and in turn expect
a certain someone to be near or to be coming to them, and this on the
basis of if/then relationships (Husserl 1970, e.g., 161–62; 1989, e.g., 63),
what infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel Stern terms “con-
sequential relationships” (1985, 80–81) and infant child psychologist Lois
Bloom recognizes as “relational concepts” (1993, 50). Moreover, contrary to
Heidegger’s general claims about what is “first,” that is, what is “existen-
tially primary” in Being-in-the-world, infants do indeed “first” hear “noises
or complexes of sounds”; they do not “first” hear identifiable and duly iden-
tified objects such as “the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle,” or “the wood-
pecker tapping, the fire crackling” (Heidegger 1962, 207). In short, it is
simply untrue that an infant—in the manner of Dasein—“already dwells
alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world” (Heidegger 1962, 207).
Further still, were Heidegger’s claims true that Dasein “certainly does not
dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape
to the swirl of sensations to provide the springboard from which the sub-
ject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world,’” then infants would be clearly
“[ontologically distinct] from Dasein, and in fact ineligible Beings-in-the-
world” (1962, 207). An infant is indeed far from being “essentially under-
standing” and thus “proximally alongside what is understood” (Heidegger
1962, 207). In effect, epistemological as well as ontological issues testify to
the need for a genetic phenomenology of the historicality of human being.
Not only does the enigma of motion otherwise remain an enigma, but the
enigma of Being-toward-death necessarily does also.
The idea that the peal of stillness—language—breaks foundationally
on being a body, an animate being, may be elaborated further by way of an
ontological analogy. Just as world and thing come intimately together in the
peal of stillness in Heidegger’s metaphysics, so lived and physical bodies
come intimately together in movement, in what might in fact be described
as “the peal” of movement, given the unfolding qualitative dynamics that
constitute any movement.5 The intimacy of physical and lived bodies is as
apparent in reaching for and grasping a glass of water as it is in running to
catch a ball, as apparent in making love as it is in moving in concert with
others in the orchestral rendition of a Beethoven symphony. As elsewhere
shown, an existential fit obtains between lived and physical bodies (Sheets-
Johnstone 1986a). In death, that integral and intimate fit of lived and physi-
cal bodies is sundered. A physical body is still there, but it is lifeless. It is
no longer moving, nor is it capable of movement. Being-toward-death is
being-toward a once living but now non-moving body, a body that can no
longer go for a walk, put an arm in a sleeve, look up at the stars; a body that
can no longer feel moved to move, whether by curiosity, joy, or anger; a
body that can no longer feel doubtful, confident, or concerned; a body that
can no longer feel too tired or too hesitant to drive; a body that can no lon-
ger sit quietly and ponder yesterday’s accident, make plans for tomorrow,
put a puzzle together, solve a building or math problem, or expect rain or
snow. This once living but now non-moving body epitomizes the finitude
of temporality, the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality. The enigma of
motion might in fact be viewed not only from the metaphysical perspective
of Dasein’s historicality but as the enigma of time itself: while life has a
beginning and an end, time has neither. Time indeed outstrips individual
life. At the end of his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger poi-
gnantly summons Nietzsche to transpose this cosmological-existential fact,
specifically, transpose “the perilousness of being seized by terror” into “the
bliss of astonishment” (Heidegger 1995, 366). The poem he summons by
Nietzsche, a poem, Heidegger states, that Nietzsche called “the intoxicated
song,” confronts woe with joy that is “deeper than heart’s agony.” It ends
with an intense, soul-stirring near plea: “But all joy wants eternity, / Wants
deep, profound eternity!” (Heidegger 1995, 366).6
The ontological analogy of thing/world and physical/lived body
documents further the fact that we are not born with a concept of death
and that knowledge of death does not spring to life with our learning to
speak, that is, our learning to name things. Death is indeed not language-
dependent (Sheets-Johnstone 1990). It is not a thing to be named but a
reality that, while from one perspective is an ontological reality, is from
a different but integrally related perspective a chronological reality that

coincides with what Aristotle describes as change, movement, and growth.
Aristotle’s basic observation is unequivocal: “Nature is a principle of
motion and change. . . . We must therefore see that we understand what
motion is; for if it were unknown, nature too would be unknown” (Physics
200b12–14). From this chronological-ontological perspective, what is out-
stripped by death is not simply Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being but
what might be termed a conditional of that ownmost potentiality-for-Being,
namely, Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-movement. Indeed, movement
is no more. The concept of death is anchored in that motionless reality.
The closure or finality of life that death and the concept of death signify is
a chronologically natural ontological closure and ending, a natural stillness,
for the breath of life is no more: it has run out. A foundational subject-world
relation is thus ended. The absolute impossibility of movement holds sway.
Life and death are indeed a matter of animation and its contrary: some-
thing that was moving is now permanently still. Stillness and death are of a
piece. Clearly then, one’s awareness of a punctuated existence as ontologi-
cal reality is not language-dependent but movement-dependent. How we
come to a knowledge of Being-toward-death is answerable only in terms of a
concept of death rooted in the no-moreness of movement, the no-moreness
of being an animate organism, and in turn, the no-moreness of life. The no-
moreness of being a moving body is thus of singular significance. Being a
moving body to begin with, that is, a body that comes into the world mov-
ing, a body that is precisely not stillborn, is integral to an ontological delin-
eation of Being-toward-death. To be emphasized too is that the concept of
death is not learned in the manner of everyday concepts such as house,
dog, friend, and so on. It is a hand-me-down human concept passed from
adult to child, though children may certainly wonder and inquire on the
basis of their own experience, whether of a dead ant or spider or of a dying
or dead pet, what has happened. Whether aided by wonder and inquiry or
not, the hand-me-down human concept always comes from the experience
of Others. Though one may experience one’s own dying days or moments,
one never experiences one’s own death: to be dead is to be beyond experi-
ence. Heidegger’s emphasis upon and elucidation of the “they” is thus of
substantive moment beyond his delineation of them in terms of idle talk
and such. Precisely because one may experience dying but never self-death,
the “they,” however busily engaged in chatter, are nonetheless integral to
the very concept of death.
3. Correspondences Between Being Poor-in-World and Being

Poor-in-Body
To arrive at finer understandings of the lacuna through deeper

phenomenological understandings of the ontological character of Dasein,
both its Being-in-the-world and its Being-toward-death, we may turn atten-
tion not only to infancy but to nonhuman forms of animate life. Though
Heidegger wrote nothing of the former, he wrote at some length of the
latter (1995). In these writings his essential claim is that without a name—
knowing something as something—there is no recognition of being—
or Being. What animals miss or lack and are therefore “poor in world”
is the “as”: knowing something as something. But what is it that “man”
knows “as” death, and how does he come to know it “as” death? As indi-
cated above, man knows death as death by way of Others who are inert,
who no longer move, who in this sense are now “poor in body.” When
Heidegger writes of animals being poor in world, not knowing something
as something, he gives as example a detailed account of bee “behavior”
(1995, 241-46). Precisely because there are fundamental correspondences
on behalf of an “adequately clarified metaphysics” (Heidegger 1995, 240)
between being “poor in world” and being “poor in body,” it is instructive to
examine Heidegger’s rendition of bee “behavior.”
Early on in his account, Heidegger asks, “Is there any evidence that
the bee recognizes the presence, or the absence, of honey?” (1995, 241).
He answers, “Clearly there is,” but he goes on to question, “But does this
really prove that the bee recognized the honey as present?” His answer: “Not
at all, especially if we can and indeed must interpret the bee’s activity as a
driven performing and as drivenness, as behavior—as behavior rather than
comportment on the part of the bee toward the honey which is present or
no longer present” (1995, 241). Several pages earlier, he has declared a dif-
ference between behavior and comportment: “The behavior of the animal
is not a doing and acting, as in human comportment, but a driven perform-
ing. In saying this we mean to suggest that an instinctual drivenness, as it
were, characterizes all such animal performance” (1995, 237). Heidegger
(1995, 237) thus specifies in an authoritative manner that “comportment”
is distinctively human; “behavior” is distinctively animal.
Prior to his detailed account of bee behavior, Heidegger spells out the
essential character of animal behavior, stating that an animal is absorbed in
itself. He identifies that absorption as “captivation,” the “inner possibility
of behaviour as such” (1995, 239). At the end of his subsection titled “The
Animal’s Absorption in Itself as Captivation,” he cautions, “We cannot
claim in any way to be offering a complete and thoroughly developed deter-
mination of the essence of animality.” He in fact goes on to temper his
account further by emphasizing that his account of animality “remains
utterly rooted in the problematic of metaphysics which must be adequately
clarified” (1995, 240).
Even given his tempering, a surprising oversight remains, specifi-
cally with respect to his detailed but puzzlingly deficient account of bee
“behavior.” Prior to von Uexküll’s Theoretische Biologie published in 1928, a
text that Heidegger takes as his main biological source, were at least three
books on bees by Karl von Frisch: Über den Geruchssinn der Bienen und seine
blütenbiologische Bedeutung (1919), Über die Sprache der Bienen. Eine tier-
psychologische Untersuchung (1923), and Aus dem Leben der Bienen (1927).
Von Frisch not only wrote extensively about the perceptual and navigational
abilities of bees but documented their Tanzspraches, the dances by which
a dancing bee communicates information about a honey source to other
bees in the hive; the distance of the source, the direction in which it lies
in relation to the hive, and the richness of the source are communicated
to other bees. Clearly, given the communicative function of the dances
and the kinetically symbolic means by which information is communicated, the
essential character of a dancing bee can hardly be called “behavior” or be
described as an absorption in itself. Moreover its kinetically symbolic dance
could hardly be labeled a form of “noise,” in keeping with Heidegger’s affir-
mation that the “utterances” of animals “are merely . . . noises . . . that lack
something, namely meaning” (1995, 307). While Heidegger (1995, 239)
claims that the relation of animals to their environment is absolutely distinct
from the relation of humans to their world, his neglect of the Tanzsprache
is telling as well as puzzlingly deficient. The main thesis dominating his
account, the thesis that he wants to document and emphasize, is that a bee
is simply captivated by the sun. Indeed, he states specifically,
If we say that the bee notices the position of the sun, the angles, the
distance traversed in flight and so on, we should bear in mind that
explicitly noticing something . . . always involves noticing some-
thing with regard to some end . . . here with intent to finding the
way back to a hive located at a particular place. But the bee knows
precisely nothing of all this. For on the contrary, it flies back in a
re-established direction over a pre-established distance without

p
regard to the position of the hive. . . . [I]t is absorbed by a direction, is
driven to produce this direction out of itself—without regard to the
destination. The bee does not at all comport itself toward particular
things, like the hive, the feeding place and so on. (1995, 246)
Heidegger concludes his account of a bee in relation to the sun by

s tating categorically, “The bee is simply given over to the sun and to the
period of its flight without being able to grasp either of these as such, without
being able to reflect upon them as something thus grasped” (1995, 247).
Bees are thus without a world because they fail to apprehend something as
something. Being related to something is for the bee
not an apprehending of these things as feeding place, as sun or

hatever, but rather, one is tempted to say, as something else. No,
w
it is not an apprehending of something as something, as something
present at hand. There is no apprehending, but only a behaving
here, a driven activity which we must grasp in this way because the
possibility of apprehending something as something is withheld from
the animal. . . . [T]his possibility is taken away from the animal, and
that is why the animal is not simply unrelated to anything else but
rather is taken, taken and captivated by things. (Heidegger 1995, 247)
Heidegger thus writes of animals as being encircled by a ring, and this

on the basis of their “instinctual behaviour”: “While it is certain that all
instinctual behaviour is a relating to . . . it is just as surely the case that in
all its behavior the animal is incapable of ever properly attending to something
as such. The animal is encircled by this ring constituted by the reciprocal
drivenness of its drives” (1995, 249). Heidegger insists that this judgment
not be taken negatively but, rather, simply as recognition of what is funda-
mentally an eliminative behavior that “can show itself as destruction—as
devouring—or as avoidance of . . .” (1995, 250).
The metaphysical distinction that Heidegger is at pains to show is that,
in contrast to “world-forming” man, animals are “poor in world” (1995,
274ff.). Though he gives a brief account of how “variation” among animals
is central to their “adaptation” and “survival” (1995, 277), and though he
seemingly at one point acknowledges evolution, that is, “descent with mod-
ification,” where he writes that “forms of comportment displayed by the
higher animals . . . seem to correspond so closely to our own comportment”

(1995, 240–41)—an observation that, we might note, contradicts his author-
itative behavior/comportment distinction—Heidegger bypasses Darwin’s
writings in favor of “Darwinism.” He in turn seems oblivious of the fact
that Darwin wrote explicitly and meticulously of “the relational structure
between the animal and its environment” (Heidegger 1995, 263; see Darwin
[1859] 1968), appropriating this basic evolutionary field of inquiry as his
own, that is, a field of inquiry in the service of fundamentally differentiat-
ing “Man” from animals, in particular, “environment” from “world.” Hei-
degger in fact disparages his brief pro forma “survival of the fittest” account
of evolution, declaring that its conclusion—“Thus it is that the rich abun-
dance of higher animal species has developed out of the primeval slime”—
is contradicted by “the essence of animality,” namely, captivation and the
encircling ring (1995, 277). His emphatic disconnect between Man and
animals is a metaphysical necessity. The “musts” in his account of animals
and animality are a telling indication of this necessity—for example, “. . .
especially if we can and indeed must interpret the bee’s activity as a driven
performing . . . ,” “we must merely see that insofar as satiation inhibits this
drive . . . ,” “we must content ourselves here with a brief account of how the
bee redirects its instinctual sucking into an instinctual impulse to return to
the hive, how the bee finds its way” (1995, 241–43). In short, the intricate
interconnections among animate forms of life and the intricate relation-
ships of animate forms of life to an environment that Darwin so meticu-
lously described are nowhere acknowledged, nor are the “mental” powers
of animals that he detailed and documented.7 Heidegger mentions only his
own seemingly personal observation of how encircling rings may intersect,
specifically, those of “the woodworm,” “the woodpecker,” and “the squirrel”
(1995, 277).8
Though, as indicated above, Heidegger at one point acknowledges
“higher animal” “comportments,” his peculiar rendition of Darwin and
miserly rendition of animate life along with his puzzling omission of the
Tanzsprache of honey bees are in the service of an absolute division of man
and animals. They support his claim that “man exists in a peculiar way in
the midst of beings” (Heidegger 1995, 278). Indeed, “Man” is seemingly a
deus ex machina creation who beholds beings—mountains, animals, other
humans, houses, and so on—as present at hand, hence in a totally differ-
ent way from the “encircling animal rings [that] mesh with one another” as
a result of “the encircling struggle of the animals themselves.” Heidegger
indeed explicitly states that an animal’s “fundamental manner of being . . . is

different from any kind of merely being present at hand” (1995, 278).
An alternative perspective on nonhuman animals is not only possible
but instructive, a perspective that highlights a different way of being an
animate body and in turn provides insight into the relationship between
Being-toward-death and being a physical body. This different way of being
an animate body hinges on the fact that nonhuman animals make no ana-
lytical distinction between Leib and Körper, between what in traditional phe-
nomenological terms (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1962; Sartre 1956) are called the
physical and lived bodies. As described and documented elsewhere,
nonhuman animals experience themselves and their fellow creatures

dynamically and physiognomically—as animate forms, not as objects
made up of arms, heads, legs, feet, eyes, tongues, and so on. Kanzi,
a male bonobo who mastered language on his own, does not apply
himself to learning words for parts of his own body, “even though
these words are words that have been on his keyboard for some time”
(Savage-Rumbaugh 1993). He experiences himself not as having a
physical body as such but as a dynamically engaged body immersed
in some activity and affectively and cognitively caught up in it. What
one nonhuman animal experiences in experiencing another is simi-
larly not a physical body as such but a portentous physiognomy of
some kind: threatening, caring, playful, fearful, curious, and so on.
In short, in the nonhuman animal world, what is experienced or what
appears is not a material body abstractively separated or analytically
separable from the animate and animated body that the individual
is. In consequence, nonhuman animals have no fear of their bodies,
of what their bodies might do, of what they might become. Hence
there is no future fate that awaits them in view of their being material
bodies. (Sheets-Johnstone [2002] 2008, 38–39)
A significant correspondence exists between nonhuman animals’ not

having a physical body as such, and a consequent obliviousness of finitude,
and Heidegger’s metaphysical Being-toward-death, a Being that not sim-
ply is short of a physical body but is nowhere recognized as a body to begin
with. As we will progressively see in greater detail, “Being-toward-death”
is outside any physical anchorage; it is metaphysical through and through;
it traverses an ontological path through life at an abstract level, with no
r elation to being a body. Indeed, Being-toward-death is bodiless—even

though such a Being, however authentic, is logically as well as existentially
firmly anchored in being a body, in particular being a physical body that
changes in diverse ways in the process of both growing up in childhood
and growing down in aging. That physical body may furthermore con-
tract illnesses in the course of growing up and down, illnesses that change
one’s abilities, one’s “I move, I do, and I cans” (Husserl 1989, 273, see also
271; Landgrebe 1977, 107–8; 1981, chaps. 1–2), changed abilities that in
turn change one’s habitual ways of being a lived body, including perhaps
one’s mode of livelihood, one’s family life, one’s future possibilities, and
so on. Ultimately, that physical body not only ceases to function in normal
organic ways but ceases to move. One is pronounced dead. The integral
intimacy of lived body and physical body, their existential fit, is irrevocably
severed.
In short, Being-toward-death and being a body, in particular being a
physical body, are ontologically, existentially, and conceptually of a piece.
Whichever the perspective from which they are viewed, they go temporally
hand in hand. The developmental historicity of humans—their learning
their bodies and learning to move themselves—attests to their being a cor-
poreal temporal entity from the start. Being this temporal entity is thus a
question not just of finitude but of changing dynamic potentialities and
of possible infirming debilities throughout life. In effect, being a body is
not just a question of ultimate death—“being-toward-the-end” (Heidegger
1962, e.g., 289, 293, 298)—but a question of life itself, a question of the
very Being that anchors Heidegger’s metaphysics.9
Moreover there is a peculiar correspondence between Heidegger’s
description of captivation being the essence of nonhuman animals and
Heidegger’s description of what might rightly be identified as Dasein’s
captivation, namely, Dasein’s being caught up in the “they”: “The Self of
everyday Dasein is the they-self” (Heidegger 1962, 167), a self that is “fas-
cinated with its world . . . thus absorbed in the world.” This Self “com-
ports itself towards that world with one predominant kind of Being,” an
inauthentic Being that considers death as a “mishap which is constantly
occurring,” that encounters death “as a well-known event occurring within-
the-world” (Heidegger 1962, 296–97). This Self is precisely distinguished
from “the authentic Self” (Heidegger 1962, 296–97). Everyday Dasein’s
inauthentic Being—its fascination with and absorption in the world—is
a form of captivation, distinct from yet on a par with animal captivation
as described by Heidegger.10 In each instance what obtains may be termed

“real-life, real-time” captivation, a captivation that, whether world-poor or
world-absorbed, elides recognition of one’s having a physical body as such.
It thereby elides not only Being-toward-death in a living sense as described
above; it elides the impending and inevitable no-moreness of death, finitude
itself. In short, captivation solidifies further the import of an absent physical
body, whether a matter of nonhuman animal “behavior” or of the “they-
self” of everyday Dasein.
The absence of a physical body and the obliviousness of finitude are in
essence an absence and obliviousness of time, not simply in an abstractive
metaphysical sense but in the experienced real-time realities of life itself,
the realities of movement, growth, and change, all of which are anchored
in being a body. As the second epigraph clearly shows, Heidegger appears
to recognize the extraordinary lacuna he creates in dismissing the body
and perhaps even its import when he states—actually in parentheses in
the course of specifying the spatiality of Dasein in the world—“This ‘bodily
nature’ [of Dasein] hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall
not treat it here” (1962, 143). In truth, the “problematic” of Dasein’s bodily
nature calls Heidegger’s metaphysics into question if not compromises its
integrity. Being-toward-death is anchored in being a body, in particular, in
being a physical body. What was once an intimacy, an existential fit of lived
and physical bodies, is precisely sundered in death; a physical body has lit-
erally disintegrated to the point of being no more than an inert and indeed
decaying physical mass. In sum, one finds that in complete accord with
what would be a phenomenologically enriched metaphysics of Being and
Time is not merely a factical realization and conclusion but an ontological,
existential, and conceptual realization and conclusion: the no-moreness of
death has its roots in the non–staying power of the physical body. Dasein—
“Being-there”—is no longer a possibility.
4. The Ineluctable Modality of Feeling
Heidegger declares unequivocally, “Death is the possibility of the absolute

impossibility of Dasein” (1962, 294). With the aim of grounding his
ontological metaphysics not in what he specifies as a “pre-logical being
open for beings”—a “pre-logical manifestness of beings” (1995, 344, 351)—
but in the dynamically unfolding realities of life itself, realities that duly
r ecognize the centrality of Leibkörper to life, we might critically paraphrase

Heidegger: “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of an
everlasting physical body.” Being-toward-death engenders an awareness of
this possibility, the possibility of “the absolute impossibility of existence”
(Heidegger 1962, 299). It does so because however metaphysical Dasein
may be, Dasein is not ontologically bodiless. We see its bodilyness in all
three forms of boredom that Heidegger so finely describes: in being bored
by and being bored with—two everyday forms of boredom—and “being
held in limbo” (1995, 108–10, 131, 140ff ). In the former two instances, we
find explicit references to being a body in the course of “passing time”:
“We walk up and down [the local road]”; “[we] draw all kinds of figures
in the sand” (Heidegger 1995, 93); “we . . . remember a repeated, though
suppressed yawning (Heidegger 1995, 110); we find that being “in other
people’s company . . . it was inappropriate to drum our fingers on the table-
top, as we were tempted to do” (Heidegger 1995, 111). In contrast to the
former two instances, in the latter instance, there is no “passing the time”
(Heidegger 1995, 134–35). Heidegger describes this profound form of bore-
dom, this being held in limbo, as “it is boring for one.” What is experienced
in “it is boring for one” is a distinct form of boredom, a profound emptiness
in which, Heidegger states, “passing the time is factically entirely absent”
(1995, 136). All the same, in this form of boredom too, Dasein is not onto-
logically bodiless: Dasein is “left entirely in the lurch . . . suspended among
beings and their telling refusal of themselves as a whole” (Heidegger 1995,
139–40). Apparently Dasein has no solid ground under foot but is swaying
while hanging from something above—“in the lurch,” “suspended among
beings.” Dasein is furthermore not devoid of feeling, of which more below.
Suffice to note here that although Heidegger restrains himself, he admits
to the temptation of feeling. With respect to being held in limbo, he writes
that one is “almost tempted to say that in this ‘it is boring for one’ one
feels timeless, one feels removed from the flow of time” (1995, 141). In
short, in all forms of boredom, a body is livingly present, affectively and
kinesthetically reverberating at the core of Being.
Feelings, however, have no place within Heidegger’s metaphysics.
Feelings are factical entities and as such are metaphysically replaced by
“states-of-mind,” “states” defined as “moods,” and “attunements.” In effect,
feelings such as fear, terror, timidity, shyness, and so on are in Heidegger’s
text possible “states-of-mind,” possible “existential structures in which the
Being of the ‘there’ maintains itself” (1962, 182–83). In fact with respect to
possibilities, Heidegger describes Dasein “in every case . . . as essentially

having a state-of-mind” (1962, 183). In other words, just as “the existen-
tial Interpretation of death takes precedence over any biology and ontol-
ogy of life” (Heidegger 1962, 291), so also states-of-mind take precedence
over any bodily presence; hence they are removed from their realities as
highly specific, real-life, real-time qualitative affects that move through us
in distinctive ways and that move us to move in distinctive ways (Sheets-
Johnstone 2006). Heidegger indeed distances himself from anything fac-
tical, anything that in this instance might be “related to the psychical” or
to “an inner condition” (1962, 176). Yet, however metaphysically replaced,
feelings nevertheless inform the qualitatively patterned ways of our Being-
in-the-world; they anchor our receptivity and responsivity toward the world;
they anchor our emotional attitude in face of Being-toward-death.
To be a Being-toward-death is to be a body, and to experience Being-
toward-death is to be affectively aware of being a temporally finite body, a
body that will ultimately cease to function, whose breath of life will be no
more. Angst in the face of death is thus not properly speaking a “state of
mind,” as Heidegger terms it, and is in fact not a “state” at all but a particu-
lar affective dynamic that is felt in a full bodily sense (1962, e.g., 295-96).
That particular affective dynamic courses through the body in ways quali-
tatively distinct from sadness, fear, joy, disgust, and so on. It reverberates
with certain tensions and constrictions peculiar to angst and recognizable as
angst. While angst might be claimed a metaphysical phenomenon, even the
underlying existential reality of being a body, specifically a temporally finite
living body whose span is limited by its physicality, the reverse is true: the
foundational ground of the metaphysical claim is being a body, a temporally
finite entity. To test this claim is to ask the question, “Can one authentically
experience angst short of a felt living body?” Surely it is relevant to go back
“to the things themselves,” as Husserl urged (1983, 35), in order to discover
their essential character, the foundational ground of their reality.11 This is
not to deny a metaphysics of Being-toward-death and Heidegger’s claim
that “throwness into death reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and
impressive manner in that state-of-mind which we have called ‘anxiety’”
than in “any explicit or even any theoretical knowledge of the fact that it has
been delivered over to its death” (1962, 295). It is to affirm only that if “that
in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world itself” (Heidegger
1962, 295), then the real-life, real-time dynamic realities of Being-in-the-
world itself warrant fine-grained examination. In short, anxiety in the face
of death is indeed not a matter of explicit or theoretical knowledge but a

matter of the experiential realities of being an animate organism: Being-
in-the-world, like Being-toward-death, is impossible short of being a body.
In effect, feelings, however factically sidelined and even discredited, if not
seemingly maligned,12 cannot be thrown overboard.
To make the point more emphatic, we may indeed ask not only how
there can be anxiety without being a body but how, as indicated above, there
can be death without being a body. Authentic Being, that is, full ontologi-
cal disclosures of Being-toward-death, would seem necessarily to engender
being a body. Full ontological disclosures, that is, full understandings,
would thus require what may be termed a bottom-up ontology, an ontology
that lays out in exacting phenomenological analyses the vulnerabilities not
of having a body but of being a body, a body that by its very nature encom-
passes the vulnerabilities of being alive—in the words of D. H. Lawrence, of
being “alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos” ([1932]
1980, 200). Being alive is precisely the defining existential condition of Das-
ein’s historicality, the existential condition that brinks on “the finitude of
temporality” (Heidegger 1962, 438)—on death. Inauthentic Being engen-
ders precisely a nonrecognition of the vulnerabilities of being a body, an
impediment or obstacle to an awareness of Being-toward-death. Indeed, to
elaborate Heidegger’s rendition of the “they,” it is clear that “they” are not
only caught up in idle talk, in a warped curiosity, and in ambiguity; “they”
are oblivious of being a body.
As is evident, Heidegger assiduously elides any recognition of feelings
in his disquisition on states-of-mind and everyday Dasein, invoking
“moods” in their place. Yet “elation,” “curiosity,” and “fear” (Heidegger
1962, 173, 214–17, 179–82), for example, are feelings that, as noted ear-
lier, course through the body and move us to move in distinctive ways. In
short, moods are engulfed in feelings, and feelings are dynamic. Heidegger
eschews these aspects of “the spiritual” that constitute Dasein (1962, 419),
comprehending them generally as simply a “psychical condition” (1962,
e.g., 175, 318), not only when he directly affirms, “Having a mood is not
related to the psychical . . . and is not itself an inner condition” (1962, 176),
but when he specifically states that when the “they-self is appealed to . . .
[and] gets called to the Self,” it is not to “that Self which inertly dissects
its ‘inner life’ with fussy curiosity”; it is “to that Self which . . . is in no
other way than Being-in-the-world” (1962, 318). He furthermore adamantly
affirms that “Dasein is ‘spiritual,’ and only because of this, it can be spatial
in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal

Thing” (1962, 419). Yet tactile-kinesthetic/affective feelings—feeling hesi-
tant, feeling determined, feeling bewildered, feeling elation, feeling curi-
ous, feeling joy—are foundational dimensions of Being-in-the-world: they
epitomize a Being that, however ontologically gifted and described, is and
remains foundationally an animate organism, a Leibkörper. Being fearful,
being shy, and being indifferent are not in each instance a state-of-mind
any more than they are in each instance a state of body. On the contrary, par-
ticularly from a phenomenological perspective, they are in each instance a
distinctive dynamic through and through, a qualitatively inflected dynamic
that is bodily experienced as such.
In straightforward elision if not opposition to such bodily dynamics,
Heidegger states that his metaphysics treats the “unsensuous characteris-
tics of the being of beings,” the “unsensuous” being “something . . . which
is not accessible through the senses” (1995, 44–45). He affirms his meta-
physical perspective not just admittedly and purposefully but uncompro-
misingly. His metaphysics winnows out anything corporeal; it is indeed a
disembodied state-of-mind that holds sway. It is hardly surprising, then,
that the integral intimacy and foundational unity of physical and lived body
and the qualitatively patterned and dynamically charged affective and tac-
tile-kinesthetic modes of that foundational unity are ignored. Yet surely we
may pointedly ask whether there can be an animate being that is unsensu-
ous. Unsensuous dimensions such as intentions and transcendental sub-
jectivity, for example, might be invoked in answer. All the same, we may
ask whether these dimensions of being can be short of an animate form of
life. Furthermore, and in turn, we may ask whether there can be moods,
states-of-mind, or attunements short of animate forms of life. If the answer
in each instance is no, then animate forms of life in their full sensuous
presence cannot be avoided, passed over, or ignored. In short, being a body
is part and parcel of Being-in-the-world and Being-toward-Death.
Anxiety, then, is not simply a metaphysical reality as Heidegger
describes it; it is a metaphysical reality prompted by a livingly present and
affectively resonant body—a Leibkörper—in face of the possibility of the abso-
lute impossibility of existence. Such a bodily resonant metaphysical reality
cannot be conveniently packaged by way of today’s practice of “embodying.”
In the same way that Heidegger, whether inadvertently or not, describes
boredom not as a pure state-of-mind but in real-life, real-time bodily ways,
so it is possible to describe anxiety in real-life, real-time bodily ways, and
this despite Heidegger’s claims about the rarity of “real,” that is, factical,
anxiety and about the even further rarity of an interpretation of its “existen-
tial-ontological Constitution and function” (1962, 234–35). To be clutched
in thoughts of an impending end, temporally gripped and stilled, is to be
bodily clutched, gripped, and stilled; to be agitated, disquieted, rattled, even
churning inside, all the while being held captive by the thought of nonexis-
tence, is obviously to be a body, “alive and in the flesh,” and indeed to be far
from being an embodied mind. In short, while Heidegger asks, “How is it
that in anxiety Dasein gets brought before itself through its own Being, so
that we can define phenomenologically the character of the entity disclosed
in anxiety, and define it as such in its Being, or make adequate prepara-
tions for doing so?” (1962, 228), we may in turn ask, “Is this phenomeno-
logical disclosure possible short of a disclosure of a felt body, an affective/
tactile-kinesthetic body?” Moreover we may surely answer that the integral
intimacy of physical and lived bodies, their existential fit, is precisely alive
and well in “anxiety in the face of death” (Heidegger 1962, 298). We may
even point out that it is precisely this integral intimacy that is lacking in
the “they.” As Heidegger himself observes, “The ‘they’ does not permit us the
courage for anxiety in the face of death” (1962, 298).
In sum, the physical body is the source of Dasein’s ownmost
historicality, which is nonrelational and cannot be outstripped. Change and
growth as well as movement are temporal dimensions of being a body that
reverberate metaphysically as well as physically, metaphysically in that “I
too” am being-toward-the-end, “I too” am Being-toward-death. A metaphys-
ics may be after physics, but it is not beyond physics, that is, outside the
realm of matter, of physicality, thus of a tactile-kinesthetic/affective body.
On the contrary, metaphysics is grounded in the realities of what is, and
what is, is physical or physically realized in some way, and it is further-
more, by nature, changing. What is, is thus temporal not only in the meta-
physical sense of being toward, for example, but in the real-life animate
sense of being developmentally dynamic, both indirectly, that is, accidentally
mutable, and directly, volitionally mutable. In brief, we do not live in a
static world, and we ourselves, like all animate beings, are hardly static:
not only is the world not the same from one moment to the next, but we
ourselves are not the same. In effect, a sound metaphysical ontology must
account for dynamics—and by extension, for an impermanence that is
foundationally definitive of all animate beings. Thus, whatever its particu-
lar worldly form—plant, animal, or “Man”—being is not simply a noun, a
fixed reality, so to speak; it is a verb, precisely as in Being-toward-death,

Being-in-the-world, “being open for beings,” and precisely furthermore as in
being rapt in thought, caught off guard, deep in conversation, delighted by
the news, disturbed at the meeting, curious about what is inside, and so on.
In short, a veritable dynamics obtains with respect to Being-in-the-world.
Once one’s investigations and perspective shift from a static metaphysics
to an existential dynamic, not only do the dynamic realities of life come to
the fore, but the enigma of motion is resolved. It is not “states-of-mind” but
change that is the very nature of life, change that not simply engenders but
articulates historicality.
A final point merits attention in this temporal context. Heidegger
defines “states-of mind” as moods and affirms, “Dasein always has some
mood” (1962, 173). Yet, while he indicates a set condition of some kind
in singling out and identifying states-of-mind, he implicitly recognizes the
actual changing conditions and nature of life when he writes of “indifferent
or fleeting” moods, of the fact that “we slip over” from “equanimity,” for
example, into another “good mood,” “or slip off into bad moods” (1962, 173,
see also 390). In short, Heidegger is far from affirming an invariable condi-
tion or mode of being. All the same, in his very recognition of historicality,
and in his concern with the enigma of motion, he is obviously perplexed
regarding a temporal dynamics and the dynamics of time itself. Either this,
or his consistent elision of any talk of the body prevents him from a rec-
ognition of the relationship between time and motion, motion in the onto-
logical sense of Being, and motion in the metaphysical sense of time itself;
hence, his puzzlement over “the enigma of motion.” The enigma remains
unresolved absent an animate organism, an animate organism grounding
Being-in-the-world and Being-toward-death, an animate organism whose
very movement, change, and growth embody a temporal dynamic.
notes
1. It is of considerable interest to point out Husserl’s (1997, 414) marginal
notes in Being and Time where Heidegger writes of “the enigma of motion” (1962,
444) and where, earlier, Heidegger states that “being-in-movement” (Bewegtheit)
“cannot be understood in terms of motion as change of place” (Husserl 1997,
413; see alternate translation in Heidegger 1962, 441). In both places, Husserl
writes in the margin “enigma of motion” (1997, 413, 414). Moreover, alongside
Heidegger’s first mention of “being-in-movement,” Husserl writes in the
margin “being-in-movement” (1997, 413). Perhaps most striking too is the fact
that Husserl himself writes of “the problem of movement” (2001, 585). As is
likely apparent, Heidegger’s concern with the enigma of motion is a matter of
historicality; Husserl’s concern with the problem of movement resides in the
fundamental nature of animate organisms. Husserl’s concern is evident not only
in his marginal notes to Sein und Zeit but in his own affirmation of the problem
of movement in Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. He writes,
“One’s own lived-body . . . is constituted phenomenologically in a fundamentally
different way than other things. The question in all of this is how ‘it gets on as it
does.’ Many new problems radiate out from here: like the problems of change and
above all the problem of movement whose possibility belongs to the fundamental
nature of a bodily thing” (2001, 585). We might parenthetically note that Husserl’s
specification of “the problems of change” along with “above all the problem of
movement” recalls Aristotle’s clear-sighted realization: “Nature is a principle of
motion and change. . . . We must therefore see that we understand what motion
is; for if it were unknown, nature too would be unknown” (Physics 200b12–14).
For further discussion of “the enigma of motion” and “the problem of movement,”
see Sheets-Johnstone 2014.
2. In 1950 and 1951 and in 1959, respectively (in Heidegger 1975).
3. The exalting is evident in earlier writings, notably in Being and Time: “Man
shows himself as the entity which talks.” Heidegger is careful here to caution that
this showing of himself “does not signify that the possibility of vocal utterance
is peculiar to him, but rather that he is the entity which is such as to discover
the world and Dasein itself” (1962, 208–9). To ensure the ontological nature of
that showing, Heidegger declares, “The doctrine of signification is rooted in the
ontology of Dasein” (1962, 209). His statement “Discourse . . . belongs to the
essential state of Dasein’s Being” attests further to his enthronement of language.
4. We might indeed ask why the question “Why is there something rather than
nothing?” is not complemented by, if not logically preceded by, the question “Why
is there movement rather than stillness?” “Why is there something rather than
nothing?” puts matter in the form of objects at the helm. The less familiar but
equally provocative if not more penetrating question—Why is there movement
rather than stillness?—puts dynamics at the helm. In this respect it is of
substantive import to note that naming talk—what we might call Heideggerian
“idle chatter”—is an adult practice, not the practice of infants and young children,
whose experiential knowledge of the world is nonlinguistically constituted and
whose basically tactile-kinesthetic constitution of the world lays the foundation for
its later linguistic constitution (Sheets-Johnstone [1999] 2011). Infants and young
children, after all, have yet to be indoctrinated into the epistemological name game
by which what is unfamiliar is made putatively familiar by naming. Learning the
world originally, regardless of one’s ancestry or religious environment, means
making one’s way not by dint of language but in the flesh, exploring it. In doing so,
infants and young children take what is initially strange directly into their world,
familiarizing themselves with it in the process.
5. For a detailed phenomenological analysis of these qualitative dynamics, see
Sheets-Johnstone (1966) 2011, (1999) 2011.
6. In this context of “want[ing] eternity,” one might readily ask whether
Heidegger would not find himself in accord with Derrida, i.e., that “there is
nothing outside of the text”—“il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (Derrida 1976, 158).
Heidegger’s prominencing of language would seem to incline one toward that
claim and its primordial valuation of language. The “text,” after all, saves one from
complete dissolution. While being is no more, le texte lives on—not just any text
but one’s own text, one’s own words, one’s own writings. In short, in addition to
its being adultist with respect to bypassing infancy, Heidegger’s prominencing of
language is actually idealist: it secures everlasting presence. For more on Derrida
and Heidegger in relation to death and immortality ideologies, see Sheets-
Johnstone 1986b.
7. On intricate interconnection and intricate relationship, see Darwin (1859)
1968, sections in chap. 3; on mental powers, see Darwin (1871) 1981, pt. 1.
8. A further indication of what might be termed Heidegger’s idiosyncratic
philosophical biology is his listing of “inheritance of acquired characteristics”
among the biological “capacit[ies]” of an animal (1995, 234). Heidegger seems
to have read Lamarck but missed biologists’ repudiation of Lamarck’s claim
regarding the inheritance of acquired characteristics. (For a discussion of
Lamarck’s Philosophical Zoology, see Sheets-Johnstone 1982.)
9. This dynamic is captured by Montaigne in his keen-witted observations
concerning being. After concluding that “there is no permanent existence either
in our being or in that of objects” and that “we ourselves, our faculty of judgement
and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly,” he goes on to state: “If
you should determine to try and grasp what Man’s being is, it would be exactly like
trying to hold a fistful of water: the more tightly you squeeze anything the nature
of which is always to flow, the more you will lose what you try to retain in your
grasp” (de Montaigne 2003, 680).
10. And this though Heidegger would obliquely deny any such correspondence,
insisting that his view of animals is from the metaphysical perspective of “Man,”
the “encircling ring” of animals and Man being “not remotely comparable”
(1995, 278).
11. It is of interest in this context to point out Heidegger’s claim about the
irrelevance of experience to dying and to death. He claims that “when Dasein
dies—and even when it dies authentically—it does not have to do so with an
Experience of its factical demising, or in such an Experience” (1962, 291). He
substantiates this claim simply by saying that “an existential analytic and a
corresponding conception of death” is required for understanding comportments
toward death (1962, 291–92).
12. Heidegger commonly puts references to feelings in quotation marks, as

when he states, “Here the issue is one of existential modes, not of degrees of
‘feeling tones’” (1962, 181), and when he states, “Any cognitive determining has
its existential-ontological constitution in the state-of-mind of Being-in-the-world;
but pointing this out is not to be confused with attempting to surrender science
ontically to ‘feeling’” (1962, 177).
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Tommi Juhani Hanhijarvi Dialectical Thinking Zeno Socrates Kant and Marx

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The Enigma of Being-Toward-Death

Author(s): Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

abstract: This article considers the relationship of Heidegger’s metaphysics of Being-

How is it that in anxiety Dasein gets brought before itself through

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 29, no. 4, 2015

This “bodily nature” [of Dasein] hides a whole problematic of its

Is the phenomenological disclosure that Heidegger seeks with respect

1. Poetry and the Exaltation of Language

To begin with, Heidegger elevates stillness and extends its common

of stilling is the appropriative taking place of the dif-ference. Language, the

We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams. We are

A few pages later, Heidegger compares this everyday givenness with

What Heidegger is at pains to affirm is that what brings humans to

2. Dasein’s Developmental Historicality and the Enigma of Motion

Heidegger’s question, “How does the broken stillness come to sound in

to move themselves effectively and efficiently in the world spans a good

movement toward and away; in sound-making as in crying, babbling, and

other is present. As described elsewhere, “what is apparent in death is a

the ability to speak, hear, listen, or “hearken” (Heidegger 1962, 207); it

a different but integrally related perspective a chronological reality that

3. Correspondences Between Being Poor-in-World and Being

To arrive at finer understandings of the lacuna through deeper

­ re-­established direction over a pre-established distance without

Heidegger concludes his account of a bee in relation to the sun by

not an apprehending of these things as feeding place, as sun or

Heidegger thus writes of animals as being encircled by a ring, and this

higher animals . . . seem to correspond so closely to our own ­comportment”

indeed explicitly states that an animal’s “fundamental manner of being . . . is

nonhuman animals experience themselves and their fellow creatures

A significant correspondence exists between nonhuman animals’ not

r­ elation to being a body. Indeed, Being-toward-death is bodiless—even

as described by Heidegger.10 In each instance what obtains may be termed

4. The Ineluctable Modality of Feeling

Heidegger declares unequivocally, “Death is the possibility of the ­absolute

r­ ecognize the centrality of Leibkörper to life, we might critically paraphrase

possibilities, Heidegger describes Dasein “in every case . . . as essentially

of death is indeed not a matter of explicit or theoretical knowledge but a

in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal

fixed reality, so to speak; it is a verb, precisely as in Being-toward-death,

12. Heidegger commonly puts references to feelings in quotation marks, as

Husserl, Edmund. 1983 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. (1999) 2011. The Primacy of Movement. Expanded 2nd

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re-established direction over a pre-established distance without

higher animals . . . seem to correspond so closely to our own comportment”

r elation to being a body. Indeed, Being-toward-death is bodiless—even

Heidegger declares unequivocally, “Death is the possibility of the absolute

r ecognize the centrality of Leibkörper to life, we might critically paraphrase