We Thrown: Unto Death
In last week’s post, we looked at Martin Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” and its implications for us as persons living within history.
Before continuing on this theme, regular readers might remember my spurt of writing around the issue of pornography, both here on this blog and also in other outlets both written (in Humanum Review) and in audio (for CPX, Living Fullness, and the Naked Gospel)
In those pieces, I spoke about the key to understanding pornography’s grip on our culture lay in its embodying a metaphysics of possibilism, where “what could be” becomes more important to our reality than “what actually is”.
While I may not have said this explicitly in those pieces, I did indicate that this metaphysics of possibilism was also underwriting a culture of death, as what is actual becomes sacrificed on the altar of what could be. The example given were actual bodies being made to die as so much medical waste under the scalpels of plastic surgeons, just so that they could altered to become the “what might be” ideals of airbrushed images.
However, there is more to this link between possibilism and death than meets the eye, and this became more apparent to me after watching a video which was a helpful introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy of being in the world, in particular his concept of “Being unto Death”.
Put simply, thrownness means that in order to live, decisions need to be made, and with those decisions comes the need to commit to them. Part of embodying a metaphysics of pure possibility is that, in order to keep possibilities alive, one must refrain from making a committment to any one of those possibilities. In other words, it was necessary to refrain from deciding, so as to “keep one’s options open”.
However, as we become too aware as we get older, keeping one’s options perpetually open often leads to lives barely lived. Things (and people) become engaged only on a surface level, and we find ourselves not really coming to a full appreciation of any one those things.
By contrast, life requires one to make decisions and, as the Latin origins of “to decide” (Decidere) suggests, deciding requires a form of cutting oneself off from an array of other possible decisions.
Against this backdrop, Heidegger’s concept of “being unto death” makes sense. It is not simply that we can only live if we have death as the horizon of existence (which will need to be looked at another time). Our being in this contingent world - Heidegger calls this our “thrownness” - and our ability to live in light of this contingency and thrownness requires that certain possibilities have to die, so that we might be able to commit to that one decision that defines our life.
There is thus a level of poignancy that comes with truly living defined as “being unto death”, for all of us, in the course of our growing up and adulting in this world, our being where we are now, we would have had to see to the death of a whole host of other possibilities both great and small, cutting them off from the tapestry of life. To keep all those possibilities alive would mean that we ourselves would not have meaningfully lived.
Viewed philosophically, this poignancy can easily give way to melancholy, as we see the many great and little deaths we would have had to go through in order to truly live. However, viewed theologically, we can see a hopeful horizon to all of these deaths, if only we joined them to the saving death of Jesus Christ, who is also “the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25).
Joined to Christ’s death, we can look forward not only to the good future redemption of our deaths. Indeed, when joined to the redemptive work of Christ’s death, all these deaths we have gone through can work right now for the redemption of others. Our “being unto death” can be, even if quietly, become the embodiment of that Pauline line in Galatians “it is not I that live, but Christ that lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
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