Phenomenology of Love

#107 A PHENOMENOLOGY OF LOVE by TASYO February 22, 2005

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF LOVE by Manuel B. Dy, Jr. What is love? The question has been asked since the time of Plato, not only by professional philosophers but by people from all walks of life. Much has already been written on this subject, answers to the question have been given and many more questions posed; and yet the reality of love has not been exhausted. The very fact that this question of what love is, is still being asked seems to show that love is part and parcel of man's life, and a philosophy of man is incomplete without a philosophy, of man as loving. Many of us have the tendency to equate love with romance. The world "love" rings a sweet melody to the ears, brings to the imagination the image of two lovers whispering sweet nothings to each other in the park or on the telephone, unmindful of the rest of the world as if only they matter and exist at all. "Love is a many splendored thing," so the song goes. On the other hand, love is pictured many times as an act of possessing, of being possessed by another person. People fight and struggle in the name of love. "I love you" has come to mean, "You are mine" and "I want you to do the things I want, I want you to be what I want you to be." Or else, it has come to mean, "I am yours, and you can do whatever you want to me." For many young people, love has become synonymous with sex. To love another means to be passionately attracted to her and bring her to bed with me. This equation of love with sex has led to the idea that friendship is not love, that when two lovers break up, they may settle down for friendship as if friendship were inferior to love. People say, "Love is blind and lovers don't see". This has come to mean that to love is to attracted to the good qualities of the other. Sometimes this is earned to the extreme of attributing attractive qualities to the other even if they are not there. Love has come to be equated with admiration. Erich Fromm in his famous book "The Art of Loving" mentions the fact that the popular notion of love at present is "falling in love". People have the misconception that there is nothing to learn about love that love hits a man like lightning. Either the arrow of Cupid strikes you or you are not. He attributes this popular notion of love to three reasons: 1) The emphasis of "being loved" rather than on "loving". This is evident in the many books written and sold on "how to win friends and influence people," "how to be attractive," "how to have sex appeal," etc. 2) The emphasis on the object loved rather than on the faculty of loving. People talk of the "ideal girl," "the ideal boy," "the ideal husband," "the ideal wife." And it seems the right object to love follows the same trend as the fad in the market. 3) The confusion between the initial state of falling in love and the permanent standing - in love. People mistake the initial feeling of infatuation as love. Two people finding themselves strangers in a country and feeling lonely easily fall for each other. If they simply based their love on this feeling of loneliness their love will not last.

Our phenomenology of love must first set aside all above preconceptions of love. Now, let us go back to the original experience of love. Loneliness and Love The experience of love begins from the experience of loneliness. The experience of loneliness is basically a human experience. Because man as man is gifted with self- consciousness, there comes a point in the stage of man's life that he becomes aware that he is different from others, that he is not what others (like his parents) think him to be. As a child, people were mere extensions of his ego, mere satisfactions of his desires. But as he grows up to become an adolescent, his gaze is gradually turned inwards; he questions the things that were taught to him by his parents and teachers; he searches for his own identity. "Who am I?" becomes more important than the toys and candies that once were the objects of his desires. Too old to be identified with the child and too young to be considered an adult, he feels misunderstood, unwanted, alone. His natural tendency is to seek out his fellow adolescent for understanding and acceptance. Together they invent their own language, their own music. It is in the barkada that he finds equality. But then what has equality come to mean? It has come to mean uniformity, sameness in actuality. The adolescent groups himself with his barkada because they happen to have the same likes and dislikes as he. Very often, he has a different barkada for sports, a different barkada for movies, another barkada for work and study. Very seldom does he find himself in a group who will take him for all that he is, different from the group. Until this equality will mean oneness in difference, the person will remain lonely amidst a crowd. Loneliness is possible even if one is immersed in the crowd. In an attempt to comfort to the group and hide ones individuality his loneliness eventually expresses itself as an experience of boredom To overcome this boredom and loneliness, the person many time resorts to drinks the drugs of any form of heightened sensation. The effect of this artificially created sensation is to involve ones total being in some kind of a trance reminiscent of the primitive man's ritual and dance provides to the lonely and bored person in a temporary escape from reality, temporary because the trance, the "happening" is transitory and periodical. Another resort to overcome the experience of loneliness is to keep oneself busy with creative activity. Keeping oneself occupied with all sorts of activity diverts ones attention from one's self- but only for some time. One eventually will tire himself out. Moreover, it is not any activity that can be fulfilling one's emptiness- the activity has to creative something that the person himself has started, developed and finished to the end. This kind of activity is rare nowadays. And even If one discovers himself in this creative activity, in the end he is still has to come to face with the anguish o being alone. The answer to the problem of loneliness is the reaching out to the other person as another. Love is the answer to the problem of loneliness because it is only in love that I find at-onement and still remain myself. Love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality love is an active power in man, a power which breaks though the walls which separate men from this fellowmen, which unites him with others, love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet, it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. (Fromm, p.21) The Loving Encounter

Loneliness ends when one finds or is found by another in what we will call a loving encounter. The loving encounter is a meeting of persons. The meeting of persons is not simply bumping into each other, nor is it simply an exchange of pleasant remarks, though these could be embodiments of a deeper meeting. The deeper meeting here in love happens when two persons or more who are free to be themselves choose to share themselves. It presupposes an I- thou communication of selves. (This is possible even in groups of common commitments although the meeting of persons may be harder due to the expectation of roles.) First of all, the loving encounter necessitates an appeal of the other addressing my subjectivity. The appeal may be embodied in word, a gesture or a glance- all these can be signs of invitation for me to transcend myself, to break away from my preoccupation with myself. Very often in the daily run of life, I ignore these signs. I am to absorbed or too conscious of the roles I am accustomed to play in daily life as a teacher, a student, an employer, a priest, that I fail to see the appeal of the other. To be able to see the appeal of the other, I need more than eyes; more than mind- I need an attitude, a heart that has broken away from self- preoccupation. What is the appeal of the other? The appeal of the other is not his corporeal or spiritual attractive qualities. I can conceptualize the other into a list of beautiful qualities (which I myself may lack) but they can only at best give rise to enamored ness, a desire to be with the other. But once the qualities cease to be attractive, love also ceases. Love is more than mere infatuation, more than mere liking such and such qualities of the other. The other person is more than his qualities, more than what I can conceptualize of him. And love is the experience of this depth and mystery of the other and the firm will to be for him. Nor is the appeal of the other an explicit request coming from the other. The explicit request of the other may just be a sign of a deeper appeal, yet if I base my reaching out to the other simply on this need, it may well be because of a certain pity, and not really out of love. Or, it may be possible that I can satisfy his request because I just want to get over with it and not be bothered anymore. In such a case, even if I have satisfied the request of the other, he may go away dissatisfied because my heart was not in it. The other appeal of the other is himself. The other in his otherness is himself the request. The appeal of the other is the call to participate in his subjectivity, to be with and for him. While it is true that I need an attitude that has broken away from self- preoccupation to see the appeal of the other, the converse also holds: the appeal of the other which is himself enables me to liberate myself from my narrow self. It reveals to me an entirely new dimension of my existence, that perhaps my selfrealization may be a destiny- for- you. Because of you, I understand the meaninglessness of my egoism. Perhaps, I am not meant to be alone, perhaps I can only be truly myself with you. If the appeal of the other is himself, what then is my reply? Since the appeal of the other is not his quality or an explicit request, it follows that my response cannot be an outpouring of my qualities to the other or the satisfaction of his request. Compatibility is not necessarily love. Neither is the submission necessarily love. Sometimes, refusing the request of the other may be the only way of loving the person in a situation, if satisfying it would bring harm to the person. If the appeal of the other is himself, then the appropriate response to that appeal is Myself. As a subjectivity, the other person is free to give meaning to his life. His appeal then to me means an invitation to will subjectively, to consent, accept, support and share his freedom. Love means willing the

other's free self- realization, his destiny, his happiness. At times, it may seem refusing whatever could impede or destroy the other's possibility for self- realization. When I love the other I am saying, "I want you to become what you want to be. I want you to realize your happiness freely." Love, however, is not only saying it, it is doing it. Love is effective, it takes actions. ("Actions speak louder than words.") Since the other person is not disembodied subjectively, to love him therefore implies that I will his bodily being, and consequently his world. Love is inseparable from care, from labor. To love is to labor for that love, to care for his body, his world, his total well-being. Willing the happiness of the other, however, also implies that I have awareness, though implicit and at time vague, of the other's destiny. I have a searching for and a partial finding of his way in the world. And whatever opinion I have of the happiness of the other will influence and give direction to my affection for him. It will open certain worldly roads for him and also close others, those that would not bring him closer to his destiny. Love then necessitates a certain personal knowledge of the other. Of course, the possibility exists that I could be mistaken as to what will make the other happy. The temptation is also very great that I may impose my own concept of happiness on the other. I can go on laboring for the happiness of the other, where in reality I am simply fulfilling my own needs. The other has become an extension of myself and has become absorbed by my own person. If love is not to become domination, it must be balanced by a certain respect, respect for the uniqueness and otherness of the other. Respect does not mean idolizing a person; it simply means accepting the person, as he is different from myself. Accepting the other as other, as he is, is not to be taken in a static sense. The other is also himself in his potentialities, in his becoming. But his becoming may have a different rhythm from my own. His pace of growing may be faster or slower than my own. In such a case, respect also means being patient. Patient is harmonizing my rhythm with his. Like a melody or an orchestra, my music of life must follow his own tempo. Patience requires a lot of waiting and catching-up, a waiting that is active, ever-ready to answer to the needs of the other, and a catching up that is spontaneous and natural. Reciprocity of Love From our description above of the loving encounter, it seems that love is wholly concerned with the other. What happens to myself? Am I not concerned with myself in love? Am I not all interested in being loved in return? Here we touch upon two important questions on love: First, what is the relationship of love of the other and love of myself? Secondly, what happens with the unreciprocated love? In the loving encounter, my response to the appeal of the other which is his subjectivity is myself. I will the other's free self-realization. In other words, I offer myself to him by placing a limitless trust in the other. This opening of myself to the other is a defenselessness. It becomes a call upon the love of the beloved, an appeal to him to accept the offer of myself. This appeal of the lover to the beloved is not eh will to draw advantage from the affection for the other (upang magkakaroon siya ng utang na loob). It is not compelling, dominating or possessing the other. Love wants the other's freedom: that the other himself choose this safe way and avoid that dangerous path. There is indeed an element of sacrifice in loving the other which is often understood be many as a loss of self. In love, I renounce the motive of promoting myself. I have to break the provisional structure I have given to my own life, and this is painful. Entering into a friendship is acceding to my friend's wishes which not be the same as mine. The pain lies in abandoning my egotism, my self-centeredness. But this does not mean the loss of myself. On the contrary, in loving the other I need to love myself, and in loving the other I come to fulfill and love myself.

In loving the other, I have to be concerned with myself if my love is to be authentic. Since in the loving encounter I am offering myself to the other, the gift of myself must first of all be valuable to myself. If I despise myself and give myself to the other, my giving is a throwing away of myself. I have made the other a garbage can of my despicable myself. In the development of man, this love of self takes the form of being-loved. I am first loved by my parents, teachers and friends before I learn to give back that love to others. The joy I first experience in life is the joy of being loved. And yet this value of myself remains unconfirmed, the joy of being myself a hidden joy. I need to go out to others, to accept and value them as they are to discover the value of myself. In giving myself to the other, I discover my available self. In willing the happiness of the other, I experience the joy of giving. In giving, I also receive. Just as the teacher is taught by his students and the actor is stimulated be the appreciation of his audience, so in loving the other I cannot help by also be fulfilled. In love, giving is also receiving, and receiving is giving. Consequently, there exist in loving the other the desire to be loved in return. I cannot love the other if I am one hundred percent sure my offer will not be accepted. One does not give something he knows the other will not receive. The desire is essential but should never become the motive for loving, otherwise I am "loving" the other not for what he is be for what I can get in return for myself. The primary motive for loving the other is thus the other himself, the "You". The "you" is not a "he" or "she" I talk about. The "you" is not just another self (just a rose among other roses, a fox among other foxes), but the you-for-whom-I-care. The "you" in love is discovered by the lover himself. It is not the lover is blind to the objective qualities of the other but that he is clear that the other is over and above his qualities. The motive of love is the "you" that is seen not only be the eyes or the mind but more by the heart. "I love you because you are beautiful and lovable, and you are beautiful and lovable because you are you." Since the "you" is another subjectivity, he is free to accept or reject my offer. This is the risk of loving, that the other may reject or betray the self I have offered to him. What happens to unreciprocated love? One cannot of course erase the possibility that the rejection of the beloved could be a test of the authenticity of love. If the other rejects my offer and I persist in loving the other in spite of the pain, then perhaps my love is truly selfless, unmotivated by the desire to be loved in return. But granted that the rejection is final, what can one say of the experience? No doubt the experience is painful, and it will take time for the love to recover himself from the experience. Nevertheless, the experience can provide him with an opportunity to examine himself. It can be an opportunity to examine himself. It can be an opportunity fro self-reparation. The experience of being rejected can be an emptying of oneself which would allow room in oneself for development. In this sense, an unreciprocated love can still be an enriching experience. Indeed, the risk and reality of love being unreciprocated proves that there is not shop in the world that sells love. Creativity of Love When love is reciprocated, love becomes fruitful, love becomes creative. Granted that knowing the other person as he is necessitates loving him, still there is a distinction between knowing the other as other and loving him as he is. In knowing, I actively let reality be by opening myself to I, but this letting be of reality demands a certain respect and acceptance of reality which is somewhat passive. Loving the other, however, is willing the other's free self-realization, and willing demands a "making" of the other. In fact, in every encounter, there is making of each other: the teacher makes the student a student; the student makes the teacher a teacher. In the loving encounter, we also make each other be. What then is created in love?

To understand more clearly the creativity of love, let us try a brief phenomenological sketch of the experience of being-loved: what does the other make of me when he loves me? When I am loved, I experience a feeling of joy coupled with a sense of security. The feeling of joy is the sense of being valuable, of being accepted and consented to. I no longer feel the fear of being myself and the anxiety of trying to be someone else. I experience an exhilarating sense of freedom. At the same time I feel secure, secure because the lover participates in my subjectivity such that I no longer walk alone in the world but that I walk together with him. The other by his love has made me fully myself, not just by being what I am but also by being what I can become when I am with him. What is thus created in love is a being-togetherness, a "we". I can no longer say, "I did this or he did that" but "We did this and that." Concomitant with the creation of the "we" is the creation of a new world – our world. No longer do we live in two different worlds, but our worlds have become one. Such a feeling's coming over me There is wonder in everything I see... Everything I want the world to be Is now coming true especially for me... And the reason is clear It's because you are here I'm on the top of the world looking Down on creation and the only explanation I can find Is the love that's found ever since you've been around? You almost put me at the top of the world. 'My life is very monotonous,' he said. 'I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike and all men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...' Union of Love The "we" that is created in love is the union of persons and their worlds. The union of persons is not an objective union: when two things are united what results is a composition or assimilation: the two elements are no longer distinguishable from each other--they have each lost their identities. The union in love, however, does not involve the loss of identities. The "I" does not assimilate the "you" or vice versa. On the contrary, the "I" becomes more an "I", the "you" an other. We become more of ourselves by loving each other. This is the paradox in love, the many in one, one in many. Says the poet E.E. Cummings, "One's not half two. It's two that are halves of one." The Gift of Self It is not our intent here to explain this paradox of love, the paradox of one in many and many in one. That would call for metaphysics of love. What we can do on a phenomenological level is attempt to clarify and deepen this paradox by means of a description of love as essentially a gift of self. What is the nature of a gift? A gift is causing another to possess something which hitherto you possess yourself but which the other has no strict right to own. If the other has paid for that which I have give him,

this is not gift-giving but an exchange or selling. It is of the very essence of gift-giving that it be disinterested, that is to say, I give not in order to get something in return. Love is essentially a disinterested giving of myself to the other as other. The giving in love is not a giving up: I am not being deprived of something when I give in love because the self is not a thing that when given no longer belongs to the giver but to the given. Nor is the giving in love the giving of the marketing character because as we have said, in love I do not give in order to get something in return. Furthermore, the giving in love is not of the virtuous character: I do not give in order to feel good. I do not give with reporter and photographer surrounding me. Why then do I give myself in love? The answer can be seen in what is essentially given in love and to whom it is given-the Self. To give myself in love is not so much to give of what I have as of what I am and can become. And this self that I am and can become is given to the other as other, not so much of what you have but of what you are and can become. I can of course express this giving of self in the giving of what I have, in the giving of sex or material things, but when I do so the thing has become unique since it has become a concrete but limited embodiment of myself. When I pick up a rose from a garden of a hundred roses, the rose I pick ceases to be a rose among hundreds of roses-it has become unique, a symbol of myself. But what does it mean to give myself? It means to give my will, my ideas, my feelings, my experiences to the other-in short all that is alive in me. Love is sharing myself to the other. And why do I share myself to the other? Because I experience a certain bounty, a certain richness in me, and this richness cannot help but overflow to the other. The giving in love comes from a productive character. But why this particular other? Why did I choose you and some other? Because you are lovable, and you are lovable because you are you. I see a certain value in you, and I want to enhance and be part of that value. The value of the other is the value of his being a unique self. In a sense then, everyone is valuable and consequently lovable because everyone is unique, original, irreducible and one of its kind. Thus, if I am capable of loving- this particular person for what he is, I am capable too of loving the others for what they are. Love is Historical The gift of self is offered to another self. Love is thus essentially interpersonal (between persons). But human persons are not disembodied souls. They beings-in-the-world, living in time and history. If love is a disinterested giving of myself to the other as other, then it follows that love is historical. Love is historical because the other who is the point at issue in love is a concrete particular person. Love is not love if it is simply love of humanity in the abstract. Indeed It is easy to love mankind in general but so difficult to love unique individual persons. As one cartoon of Peanuts ironically puts it, "I love mankind, its people I cannot stand!" It is so easy to shout in the streets "for the masses" but the "masses" is an abstraction. The farmer in the fields, the beggar in the streets, and the laborer in the factory are "parts" of that humanity. If I really love the poor masses, then I must have shared their poverty, have lived with them, have labored in the fields with them to be able to work for the enlistment of their impoverished condition, and not simply shout and preach. Fyodor Dostoevsky put in the mouth of the doctor, a character of his novel The Brothers Karamazov, the inverse relationship between the inauthentic love for humanity and the authentic love for persons: I love humanity, but I can't help being surprised at myself: the more I love humanity in general, the less I love men in particular, I mean, separately, as separate individuals...I become an enemy of the people the moment they come close to me. But, on the other hand, it invariably happened that the more I hated men individually, the more ardent became my love for humanity at large.

The concrete other is not an ideal person but a unique being with all his strength and weaknesses. If we examine the friends we have, they are far from being ideal persons. Christ did not choose perfect people to be His friends-they were fishermen and tax collectors. Such being the case, to love the other does not mean improving him, although in the course of the relationship it does happen that the other becomes more his authentic self. Many parental loves are based on the motivation of realizing their own frustrated dreams in their children or in making their children copies of themselves. "I love you because I want to improve you" is making an object out of the other person. To love is to love the other historically. To love the other as other, as an individual unique being, I have to use places, times, singular events. It is not strange that we associate songs and places and happenings with people we love or once loved. Friends remember exactly the time, place and circumstances of their first meeting. In the Gospel of St. John, the old St. John recounts his first meeting with Christ and ends that account with the words "It was about four o'clock in the afternoon (John 1, 39). And when friendship is breaking down, and one wants to reconcile, one begs to remember things they have done together. Friendship remembered involved events. 'You are beautiful, but you are empty, ' he went on. 'One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passer-by would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important that all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.' Love thus involves no abstraction. Everything in love is concrete. In contrast, loneliness, the absence of love, lives among shadows, involves that nothing is real. Equality in Love If love is essentially between persons, then it follows that love can only thrive and grow in freedom. In loving, I do not surrender my liberty and become a slave to the beloved. Love is not a bondage but a liberation. In the case of parental and filial loves, at the beginning of the affection may be natural and not personally willed, but later on I have to make this love personal: the father or mother is not just an authority-figure but a friend. In the case of the wife being submissive to her husband, this submissiveness is done in freedom and recognition of the husband's position in the family. There exist therefore an equality of persons in love, the equality in what they are, as subjects, as freedom, and not in what they have. Cicero says, "The great thing in friendship is being equal to an inferior." The bridges of love can be built between persons of different age, race, sex, status, nature. (Of course, for a man and wife to live together for life, they have to be compatible. But compatibility is not yet necessarily love.) The union of unique persons results in a community. Unlike in a society where the bond comes from the common purpose to be achieved and thus necessitates an organization, the bond in a community springs from the persons themselves and an organization is not necessary. Nevertheless, the friends in a community can have a common project to express and substantiate their unity. And likewise, the members of a society in the course of their doing their individual functions can get to know each other as persons and not just as functions. Love is Total, Eternal and Sacred Man as a person is not a bundle of qualities and functions. As a person, he is indivisible and persists through time and space. As a person, he is unique and irreplaceable.

As such, love as a gift of self to the other as self cannot but be total. In love, I cannot say to you, "you are my friend only insofar as you are my classmate." The "you" in love is indivisible and thus love is an undivided commitment to the other. It is offered from the totality of my being to the totality of the other's being. Love is eternal. The gift of myself to the other is not given only for a limited period of time, otherwise it becomes a loan and not a gift. When I make friends with you, I do not say to you, 'let us be friends only for two years, for as long as we are in the same class.' True, friendships can be broken, yet people do not become friends on the understanding that they will be friends only for a limited time. Love implies immortality. In love, we catch a glimpse of eternity. In the marriage vows, I say to you, "I shall commit myself to you, in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer till death do us part." And yet love even conquers death. As Gabriel Marcel would say, "I love you" means "you shall not die." Love is sacred. The persons involved in love are unique, irreplaceable beings and as such are valuable in themselves. A person has a dignity no money or material wealth can buy. And since love is the gift of a person of his own self to another person, their relationship is also sacred. Thus friends and lovers share secrets and intimacies not for public consumption. They have a common world that may include others but can never be made vulgar. The greatest tragedy that can happen to a lover is when this trust is betrayed, when the self that is entrusted in confidence to the other is disclosed and thrown to the public. "When a confidence is betrayed, something fine and beautiful dies." Like a broken glass, it becomes almost impossible to patch it up again. After having written so many pages on love, I feel I have really said nothing of the experience of love. Love is to be practiced rather than talked about. What can love do to one's life? The answer is better left to be experienced rather than enumerated. Try it anyway and see if without love, you can be anything at all. "Without love, you are nothing at all."

#108 MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEATH by TASYO February 21, 2005

MARTIN HEIDEGGER'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEATH By Manuel B. Dy, Jr. According to Heidegger, the being of man is a being-in-the-world. Man is primordially directed towards the world and has the power-to-be in the world. His being in the world consists in being alongside with things, the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, that Heidegger calls "There-being". "There-being with others, "solicitude". The being of man is Dasein, "There-being is the There of Being among beings-it lets beings be (manifest), thereby rendering all encounter with them possible." By being in the world, by being involved all encounter in it, Dasein has the power to be. Once thrown into the world, Dasein realizes its own possibilities, it constantly actualizes its potentialities of existence. As such, man is always ahead of himself; in his being he is always ahead of himself, ahead of what he actually is; Being thrown into the world, he discovers himself there absorbed in things and people, and constantly realizing his own possibilities for being. This is what Heidegger calls Care', the fundamental structure of Dasein. The primary item in care, therefore, is the ahead-of-itself of Dasein. Dasein as project always comports itself towards its potentiality for being. There is always something still 'outstanding' in man. As long as man exists in the world, his potentiality for being is never exhausted. According to Heidegger, there is always something to be settled yet in man. Man, as long as he IS, has never reached his "wholeness". Man always has an unfinished character. Man reaches his wholeness in death. In death, man loses his potentiality for being, he losses his 'there'. There is no more outstanding in man, everything is finished, settled for him, He is no longer being there. What is death for Heidegger? How is death related to the being of man, and what is man's attitude towards death? Since death is the transition of man from Dasein to no-longer-Dasein, there is therefore the impossibility of experiencing this transition. No one has ever come out alive from death to tell us about death. How then are we going to describe death? What is Heidegger's phenomenology of death? Our first experience of death is the death of others. We can see, hear, people die, If man is a being with others, will the death of others then give us the objective knowledge about death? But the death of another person, Heidegger argues, makes him no longer a person but a thing, a corpse, although he may be the object of concern for those who remain behind. However, we have no way of knowing the loss of being that the dying man "suffers". We never experience the death of another as he himself has experienced it. Even if, granted that it is possible for us to analyze the dying of others, we can substitute and represent the dying of any Dasein for another, will our representation be valid and justified? True, representation is one of the possibilities of man as a being with others, but representation is always a representation in something, with something. But in death, the totality of man is involved; it is Dasein coming to an end. Dasein's dying is therefore not representable. "No one can take the other's dying away from him". Death is always mine. It is a peculiar possibility of my being in which my own being is an issue. Mineness and existence are constitutive of death. Death is therefore the possibility of man, a 'not-yet' which will be. And what is peculiar in this possibility is that it has the character of no-longer-Dasein, of no-longer-being-there, and belongs to the particular man, his very own, non-representable. We have said that as long as man exists, he lacks a totality, a wholeness; and this lack comes to its end with death. This lack of totality of man is not the lack of togetherness of a thing which can be completed

by piecing together entities or parts. This totality and wholeness of man is a 'not-yet' of man which has to be. This 'not-yet' of man, moreover, is something that is already accessible to him. Dasein, as long as it is, is already its 'not-yet'. This 'not-yet' of Dasein is like the 'not-yet' of unripeness of the fruit. The ripeness of the fruit is the end of its lack-of –ripeness, the end of the 'not-yet' of the fruit. As long as the fruit is not ripe, it is already it is already its 'not-ripe'. There is, however a difference between the ripeness of the fruit and the death of man. With the fruit, the ripeness is the fulfillment of its being. In the case of man, on the other hand, in death, man may or may not arrive at his fulfillment. And here Heidegger throws a striking remark: What is unfortunate is that " so little is it the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with death, that Dasein may will have passed its ripeness before the end. For the most part, Dasein ends in unfulfilment..." Dasein therefore, as long as it exists, is already, its end. The end of Dasein is not to be understood as being-at-an-end but as being-towards-the-end. Heidegger's phenomenology of death therefore is not a description of death of an after-life, but of man as a being-towards-his-end, a being-towards-death. If man is a being-towards-death, and his being in the world has the fundamental structure of care, then the end of man must be clarified in terms of care, his basic state. Being-towards-death and Care Heiddeger defines care as "ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in (the world) as Being-alongside entities which we encounter (within-the-world)." Care, in other words, has the following characteristics of Dasein's being: existence, in the 'ahead –of-itself'; facticity, in the 'Being-already-in'; and falling, in the 'Being-alongside'. Being-towards-death must be understood in these terms. Man, in being ahead of himself, as project, comes to the diclosure of his extreme possibility, the possibility that he will no longer be 'there'. Death is the uttermost 'not-yet' of man, something towards which he comports himself. Death is not just something that happens to man; it is something impending. The impending is not that of the coming of the storm, or the arrival of a friend, or a journey one is going to undertake. The impending of death is distinctive, because it is the possibility which is ownmost; death is mine, something that I have to take over myself. In death, I stand before myself in my ownmost potentiality for being, because the issue in death is no other than my being in the world. Death is the possibility of my no-longer-possible, of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there; the possibility that must be, something that I cannot outstrip. My being ahead of myself in my project towards the world with all its possibilities reveals to me my uttermost possibility, distinctively, impending, because this possibility is my ownmost which cuts me off from others (non-relational) and which I cannot outstrip. This possibility of my absolute impossibility is not just obtained in my rare moments. As soon as I am born into the world, I am already thrown into this possibility. I of death. This possibility is revealed only in the basic mood of man, anxiety, in the experience of dread wherein man comes face to face with his potentiality for being. Anxiety is not fear, because fear is concerned with something determinate which threatens my immediate involvement of things. Anxiety is of something indeterminate; what I dread is not an entity, but the world itself, my being-in-the-world. Many are indeed ignorant of death as the possibility which is ownmost, non-relational and cannot be outstripped. They are engrossed in immediate concern with things, thus covering up their ownmost beingtowards-death, fleeing in the face of it. But the fact remains that they are being-towards-death, that man is dying even in his 'fallenness', in his being absorbed in the everyday world of concern. Let us describe further this fallenness of man in being-towards-death. Everyday Being-towards-death-Inauthenticity In the publicness of everyday concern, death is known as a mishap that frequently occurs. The self of the public, the impersonal 'they' talks of death as 'a case of death,' an event that happens constantly. The 'they' hides death by saying, "People die...one of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it

has nothing to do with us." The 'they' realizes that death is something indefinite that must arrive ultimately, but for the moment, the 'they' says, it has nothing to do with us. It is something not yet present-at-hand, and therefore offers no threat. The 'they' says, "one dies", but the one is nobody, no one will claim that it is I. In this way, the 'they' levels off death, makes it ambiguous, and hides the true aspects of this possibility, the mineness, non-relational, and that which cannot be outstripped. This is the inauthentic mode of man of being-towards-death. He loses himself in the 'they' and forgets his distinctive potentiality for being. The 'they' has a very nice way of hiding the true nature of man's beingtowards-the-end. When a person is dying, the 'they' talks to him into the belief that he will not die, that he will recover his normal state or traquilized everydayness. By traquilizing death, the neighbors console the dying person and of course themselves. The normal carefreeness of everyday concern must not be disturbed. To start thinking about death is considered by the 'they' as a sign of cowardice, of fear, of insecurity. The "'they' does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death". Instead the anxiety in the face of death is taken as a sign of weakness. According to the 'they', the attitude to the fact that one dies is that of indifferent tranquility. For Heidegger, this indifferent tranquility of course-means the alienation of man from his ownmost non-relational potentiality for being-towards-death. Everyday being-towards-death is therefore a "falling", a constant fleeing in the face of death. The everyday man is constantly evading death, hiding it and giving new explanations for it. Actually, the everyday man even in his falling, attests to the fact that he is a being-towards-death, although he assures himself in the inauthentic, impersonal 'they' that he is still living. Even in the mode of tranquilized indifference towards his uttermost possibility of existence, man still has his ownmost potentiality for being an issue. The impersonal 'they' is also certain of death. The 'they' says, "Death certainly comes, but not right away". The 'but...is at the same time a denial of certainty. This is the ambiguous attitude of the 'they' with regards to the certainty of death. However, this certainty of the 'they' seems to be only an empirical certainty derived from several cases of other people's death. As long as man remains on this level of certainty, death can never really become certain for him. But, though man may seem, to talk only of this empirical certainty of death in the public, he is really at bottom aware of another higher certainty than that of the empirical, and this is the certainty of one's own death. The inauthentic man, however, evades this higher certainty in carefreeness, in an air of superior indifference. He stops worrying about death and busies himself in the urgency of concern, deferring death as "sometime later." Thus, he covers up also the fact that death is possible at any moment, the indefiniteness of death which goes with its certainty. The inauthentic man confers a kind of definiteness upon this indefiniteness of death by intervening it with urgent matters of the everyday. However, inasmuch as he flees from death, the everyday man actually derives his certainty of death from the fact that being thrown into the world is being-towards-death. Death is ever present in the very being of man. What, on the other hand, is the authentic being-towards-death? Authentic Being-towards-death The authentic response of man in his awareness of being-towards-death is not of evasion, of covering up death's true implications, nor of giving new possibility in which his very existence is an issue. Facing this possibility is not actualizing it, that is, bringing it to happen. That would be suicide, and suicide demolishes all the potentialities of man instead of bringing them into a whole totality. Nor does it mean that man must brood over death, calculating it; for death is not something one can have at one's disposal. The authentic being-towards-death, man realizes that death is his ownmost possibility, and thus the awareness comes to him of his potentiality for being, for fulfilling himself, his own being. He must therefore wrench himself away from the impersonal 'they' and make himself an individual, alone.

Death individualizes man, because death does not belong to everybody, but to one's own self. This individualizing by death reveals the 'there' of man, his being –alongside-things (concern) and his beingwith-others (solicitude). It reveals to man that his concern and solitude is nothing when his ownmost potentiality for being is itself an issue in death. Authentic being-towards-death does not mean, however, cutting oneself off from all relationships; rather it means projecting oneself upon his ownmost potentiality for being rather that upon the possibility of the' they' self. Death is known to the authentic man as nonrelational, and with this awareness, he as it were understands and chooses his possibilities of relational, and with this awareness, he as it were understands and chooses his possibilities of relations in the light of the extreme possibility of death as non-relational. The authentic man does not outstrip death. His anticipation does not evade death; rather it accepts this possibility. In accepting death as the possibility, man frees himself. This is to mean that man, by anticipation is free for his own death; he is delivered from becoming lost in possibilities. While before, in the 'they-self', he was secure in the impersonal but dictated by it, now in anticipation, in accepting death as his extreme possibility, man for the first time can understand and choose among the possibilities in the ambiguous 'they' and he is now free to be himself, the person he himself wants to be. His possibilities are now open before him, determined by his end and understood, thus, as finite. In anticipation of death as non-relational, man gains an understanding of his potentiality-for-being of others. Since anticipation of this possibility which is not to be outstripped opens to man all the possibilities for making himself, man now comes to grip of his wholeness in advance. He is now open to the possibility of existing a whole potentiality- for-being. The certainty of death does not have the character of certainty, which is objective, of the present-at-hand. The certainty of death corresponds to the certainty of being-in-the-world. Thus, when the authentic man holds death for true, what is demanded form him is not just one definite kind of behavior, but the full authenticity. In anticipation, man makes certain first his ownmost being in its totality. The indefiniteness which goes with the certainty of death calls for authentic Dasein to open itself to the constant threat arising out from its being 'there', a being in the world. The state of mind that is open to this constant threat is anxiety. In anxiety, man comes face to face with the 'nothing' of possible impossibility of his existence. What he is anxious about is no other than his potentiality for being. Anxiety individualizes man, and in individualizing him, makes him become certain of the totality of his potentiality for being. Thus, authentic being-towards-death is essentially anxiety. Heidegger summarizes this authentic being-towards-death in the following words: Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARDS DEATH- a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the 'they', and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious. Karl Rahner's Notion of Death Heidegger's freedom towards death seems to reach a theological development in Karl Rahner. For Rahner, death is not merely something that occurs to man, an event that overtakes him, nor is it an evil that befalls him unexpectedly. Death, for Rahner, is an act of man, an act of self-affirmation in regards to his acceptance or refusal to be his authentic self, a self that is open to transcendence. Death, thus, constitutes the highest act of freedom of man, the freedom to say yes or no to his openness to God. If death constitutes the highest act of freedom of man, it is because death involves the whole man. At death, there is no longer any concupiscence on the part off man. By concupiscence Rahner means the evil that lessens the power of man to choose between good and evil; it is the power that prevents man from making a total commitment either to the good or the evil. Because of concupiscence, man never makes a total final commitment to the good or to the evil in the course of his life. It is only at death, that

his commitment reaches a climax. Death brings a kind of finality, a definity to the life-long decision of man with regards to his destiny; Death should not be taken as an isolated point in the life of man. Rather, it is to be taken as the culminating point of his life, the point where he finally reaches a fulfillment, a totality. Death, in other words, is not to be isolated from the other free acts of man; it is understood and it becomes significant only if it is considered against the background of the totality of man's life, because in death, the very issue is no other than man's total being, his total commitment. As such, death should therefore be present in every free act of man. Every free act of man should carry an awareness of his fulfillment to a commitment, a realization that this one free act helps to build a total decision of his whole being to the good (or to the bad). The very presence of death is in the very being of man. The anticipation of death brings man face to face with the possibility of being itself in an impassioned freedom towards death, with the possibility of making an active consummation from within of the totality of his own being.