“Death is the Road to Awe” Life and Death in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus
I wrote this for my Heidegger class last semester and am thinking of reworking and submitting it for publication. If you have any criticisms of it, please share. Full PDF is here.
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“Death is the Road to Awe”
Life and Death in Heidegger’s Being and Time
and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus
Death and its ending of life play important roles in both Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Written and published within the same decade, both works examine the place that death has within their philosophical explorations. In particular, both philosophers are interested in the notion of death as an end. Writing in the introduction of the second division, “Dasein and Temporality,” Heidegger writes that as “long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding” to which “the ‘end’ itself belongs. The ‘end’ of Being-in-the-world is death” (234). [1] Similarly, Wittgenstein writes near the end of the Tractatus that “at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end” (6.431).[2] For both philosophers, death acts as not only as an end to life and as an end of one’s own world they as they try to philosophically describe it, but death also plays a vital role in how we both understand and live our lives.
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