“Held Out into the Nothingness of Being”: Heidegger and the Grim Reaper

Abstract

The paper presents a reading of Being and Time that challenges the widely accepted image of Heidegger as a philosopher of conservative, moralist, and existentialist overtones. The core concept at stake is the concept of death. While almost every reader agrees that it is an ambiguous concept that should be understood as a fundamental existential disposition of Dasein, the majority of readers nevertheless reduce it to a tragic question of facing personal, individual mortality. To counter this, a radical ontological reading is attempted, one that implies, to an extent, also a reading of the Heidegger of the fundamental ontology against the Heidegger of a type of “existentialist theology”. The author consistently pursues the idea of reading the key concepts of angst, end, death, and time by analysing them as concepts that enable us to see the nothingness, the void at the core of existence. The conclusion of the paper underscores this formal ontological orientation of the book with the help of two little known concepts developed by Franz Brentano in the course of his studies of the continuum.