How is this title supposed to make any sense? How could death be a place?
Death is, if it is at all, utter negativity, the utter opposite of life and of positivity, not some place we could even begin to imagine.
Death is, says Hegel, “most terrifying“ (Vorrede, 26). If death were a place, then it would be a most terrifying place. To remain with Hegel, death is most terrifying for what? For the understanding, i.e. for Vorstellung, because what is dead cannot be held firmly and manifestly before oneself.
Hegel continues: “But not the life that shies away from death and safeguards against devastation pure and simple, but the life that bears it and preserves itself in death, is the life of spirit.“ (26; my emphasis) I have emphasized in death, in ihm, because it suggests a certain locality of death present in Hegel. I do not want to conflate Hegel with Heidegger and claim that death in Heidegger is a marker for negativity as it is for Hegel. However, thinking death as a place is necessary even for Hegel, it seems. Life, sheer immediate positivity, needs to stride through death, utter negativity, in order for life to include mediacy in its immediacy. Spirit is to “dwell“ with negativity. “This dwelling is the magic power which turns the negative into being.“ (26) We are all too familiar with the terminology of dwelling, as readers of Heidegger. Death as negativity to Hegel appears to be a place in which Spirit needs to dwell in order for being to assume its proper and full potential.
Hegel does not explicitly address and articulate the apparent spatial sense he attributes to death. With Heidegger things are reversed. Death is explicitly articulated as a place. And not just any place. Death is determined as the Gebirg des Seins, literally the mountain range of being. In Contributions Heidegger points out that death comes in many gestalts. The Gebirg is thus one of those gestalts of death, which man knows of. The Gebirg is one of the ways in which death manifests itself for man’s destiny.
Heidegger publicly speaks of death as Gebirg for the first time in the Bremer Vorträge of 1949. There Heidegger writes: “As the shrine of the nought, death is the Gebirg of being … The mortals are who they are as mortals by assenting in the Gebirg of being. They are the abiding, wesende, relationship to being as being.“ (GA79: 18) In a footnote added in the same year to the introduction of What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger writes: “Letting death come towards oneself, holding oneself in the arrival of death as the Gebirg of being (crossed out)“ Being crossed out indicates that being is here at the centre of the fourfold, holding together the relationality of the four poles. Mortals are to take a self-relational stance in regards to their mortality. The footnote is added to the following sentence: “We have to think standing-in in the openness of being, carrying out the standing-in (care) and persisting in the uttermost (being towards death) all together as the full essence of existence.“
In a poem to Hannah Arendt dated from 1950, a poem Heidegger dedicates to Arendt’s friend Hilde Fränkel, who was terminally ill at the time of writing, Heidegger also speaks of death as Gebirg. I have taken the liberty to translate the poem here myself:
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