Death is the Road to Awe

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Loyd Ericson

Rel 435 Heidegger‟s

Being and Time

Professor Ingolf DalferthMay 3, 2010

“Death is the Road to Awe”

Life and Death in Heidegger‟s

Being and Time

and

Wittgenstein‟s

Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus

Death and its ending of life play important roles in both

Martin Heidegger‟s

Being and

Time and Ludwig Wittgenstein‟s

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Written and published withinthe same decade, both works examine the place that death has within their philosophicalexplorations. In particular, both philosophers are interested in the notion of death as an end.Writing in the introduction of

the second division, “Dasein and Temporality,”

Heidegger writesthat

as “long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding” to which “the „end‟itself belongs. The „end‟ of Being

-in-the-

world is death” (234).

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Similarly, Wittgenstein writesnear the end of the

Tractatus

that “at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end”

(6.431).

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For both philosophers, death acts as not only as an end to life and as an end of one‟s

own world they as they try to philosophically describe it, but death also plays a vital role in howwe both understand and live our lives.As an aid

to the discussion, I will use Darren Aronofsky‟s science

-fiction film,

TheFountain

, to illustrate the shared and different ways in which Heidegger and Wittgensteinexamine death in these philosophical works.

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This film consists of three separate storylinespresented simultaneously. The first is the story of a 16

th

century Spanish explorer, Thomas, who

is on a quest in the Americas (or “New Spain”) to find the rumored tree of life which would save

his Queen and love, Isabella, from the murderous Inquisitor. Upon finding the tree, his over-zealousness for immortality prevents him from returning to be with the Queen. The second

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storyline involves a present-day scientist, Tommy, searching desperately for a cure for cancer tosave his wife, Izzi, who is dying from a brain tumor. Because of his persistent work in trying to

find a cure, Tommy ignores his wife‟s pleas for companionship, resulting in his missing out o

nsharing the final days of her life. Finally, the storyline taking place half of a millennium in thefuture tells of the same scientist Tommy on quest through space to reach a dying star. He hasmanaged to avoid death with the medicine derived from the sap of a tree that he discovered whilesearching for a c

ure to his wife‟s cancer.

He is in a race against time, hoping that the energyreleased from the exploding star will save his dying tree

—

which has been the source of hislongevity. Because of his desire to continue living forever, he takes too much from the tree,eventually killing the tree moments before reaching his destination.The format of the examination of the

Tractatus

and

Being and Time

will be as follows: acomparison of the relationships between life and the world (part 1); experiencing death; anddeath as the end of the world (part 2); and the role of death in understanding life (part 3). ¶ 1.

A Comparison of the Relationships Between Life and the World

For both Wittgenstein and Heidegger the world and the life are inseparably related;however the interrelation between the two comes from two very different approaches.Wittgenstein, being influenced in what was becoming the analytic tradition by philosophers suchas Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, was primarily interested in describing the logicalstructure of the entire world and all of the entities which compose it. Because we are only able todescribe the logic of the world using language, the logical world is dependent upon the languageand life of the subject which gives sense to that language. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein is

able to say that “The world and life are one” (5.621).

On the other hand, Heidegger was largely

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influenced by Edmund Husserl and the emerging phenomenological approach and was interestedin discovering, not the structure of the world and its entities, but rather the structure of our ownbeing in relation to, or in, the world. Whereas Wittgenstein argued that logic drew the limits of

what could be said of the world, concluding that it could only describe the “how” and not the“that” of its existence; Heidegger was instead looking at the “that” of existence, or what it means

to be a Being that exists.In his own preface to the

Tractatus

, Wittgenstein writes

: “The whole sense of the book

might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what

we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence” (preface).

In a letter to a prospectivepublisher of the

Tractatus

, Wittgenstein further elaborates on this idea:

“My work consists of

two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have

not

written. And it is precisely this secondpart that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, by

my book.”

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It is this second part

—

that which is both most important and must be passed over insilence

—

which Wittgenstein begins to explore (but cannot state) in the closing pages of hiswork. However, in order to get to that point Wittgenstein believes that he must first draw out the

limits of what can be said: “Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—

not

to thought, but to the expression of thoughts.” Once the structure

and the logic of the world canbe shown (what can be logically described), we would then be able to see all that there is thatcannot be shown through logic (i.e. ethics, aesthetics, etc.)

It is then that we can see “how little is

achieved when the proble

ms [of the logical structure of the world] are solved” (preface).

Wittgenstein begins his structure of the world by declaring that

“The world is all that isthe case” (1). He further clarifies this by adding: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”

(1.1). Rather than trying to understand the world as the sum total of empirical items (things),