Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with melanoma. While Western medical science, which is based on Aristotelian thinking, sees the human body as a material thing that can be understood by examining it and breaking it down to its constituent parts like any other piece of matter, Heidegger’s ontology puts human experience at the centre of our understanding of the world. According to Heidegger, this awareness of our own inevitable demise makes us, unlike the rocks and trees, hunger to make our life worthwhile, to give it meaning, purpose and value. Heidegger’s philosophy remains attractive to many today who see how science struggles to explain the experience of being a moral, caring person aware that his precious, mysterious, beautiful life will, one day, come to an end. He coined the term Dasein because he believed that we had become immune to words such as ‘person’, ‘human’ and ‘human being’, losing our sense of wonder about our own consciousness. He called it Dasein, which loosely translates as ‘being there’. He invented a special word for this Being that asks, looks and cares. Heidegger pointed out that we who are asking questions about Being are qualitatively different to the rest of existence: the rocks, oceans, trees, birds and insects that we are asking about. Whereas Aristotle saw all of existence, including human beings, as things we could classify and analyse to increase our understanding of the world, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argued that, before we start classifying Being, we should first ask the question: ‘Who or what is doing all this questioning?’ Heidegger believed that Aristotle’s notion of Being – which had run as a thread through Western thinking for more than 2,000 years, and been instrumental in the development of scientific thinking – was flawed at a most fundamental level. But Heidegger actually struggled to live up to his own ideals in 1933, he joined the Nazi Party, hoping it would advance his career.ĭespite his shortcomings as a man, Heidegger’s ideas would go on to influence a wide range of philosophers, artists, theologians and other thinkers. Heidegger lamented that too many people wasted their lives running with the ‘herd’ rather than being true to themselves. The relationship between death-awareness and leading a fulfilling life was a central concern of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose work inspired Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist thinkers.
In fact, like most humans, I value staying alive above pretty much everything else. If I get struck down with cancer, heart disease or any of the myriad life-threatening ailments I learnt about in medicine, I want all the futile and expensive treatments I can get my hands on. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.ĭon’t get me wrong.
We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this in the West. Jason’s oft-repeated observation reminded me that death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It’s no wonder medical students become hypochondriacal, attributing sinister causes to any lump, bump or rash they find on their own person. We diligently worked our way through a textbook called Pathologic Basis of Disease that described, in detail, every single ailment that could befall a human being. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memorising everything that could go wrong with the human body. Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s.
‘Despite all our medical advances,’ my friend Jason used to quip, ‘the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person.’
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