While the existentialists made radical strides on the topic of death as a personal possession of every human’s, the phenomenology of death need not only dwell on one’s own end. Most of the time, one stumbles on dwelling the topic of “death” in general after hearing about the death of a loved one or variable levels of acquaintance with someone who had passed. While philosophy from the Greeks to the existentialists prepare for death, what remains hushed is those who used to possess the verb to be. The phenomenological method that Husserl revolutionized allowed for a more ‘scientific’ understanding of the categories of our intention- the ‘logic’ of our consciousness. One may confuse this logic with the logic of Descartes, Kant, Hegel. But phenomenology is supposed to return us to the things themselves. When we engage in perceiving the object, consciousness intends the object, tries to grasp it. But in our natural attitude, in the hum bum of everydayness, our perception maintains the wholeness of an object despite only seeing one of them. The part is intended, the unity is what consciousness is intending.
But what of intending the departed? Whatever euphemism we use, language can only try to describe the phenomena, the kind one would know when one actually engages in phenomenology. And so this investigation will attempt to do just that. But this will not solely follow the Husserlian telos, other variations of the modern dogma will manifest themselves in thought as it helps the process. For philosophers, even if their backgrounds were in mathematics, theology, anthropology, etc. all studies are just studies of humans situated and narrowed into a subject of interest about the human. And so we must inquire whether or not intending the dead is akin to intending an ideal structure such as mathematics. For what characterizes human beings is that they are always unfulfilled, always a potentiality until death. Heidegger calls this notion being-towards-death. To begin to try answering this, one must ask what does one think of when one intends the phenomenon of a loved one and is that different from intending the dead in general? Phenomenology is always a first person investigation, and so others dwelling on this should think of this themselves. For when I intend the dead in general, all I’m dealing with the facticity that they used to be, always thought of in one tense– the past. And so I find it strange when other people say something along the lines of “she would have wanted it like this” or “she doesn’t like it to be this way”, turning whoever into a mouthpiece for one’s own interpretation. And these people aren’t mystical prophets or completely self centered manipulator, at least that’s not how I intend them ;). Jokes aside, any tense a person uses referring to the departed other than past is inaccurate but not entirely false. Language is just a tool for us to aim our intentions at what we’re intending.
With a specific person in mind, when we intend them, our act of intention puts them in our consciousness. Is the act of intention a fulfilled intention? For our interests, the logic behind consciousness, where supposed transcended ideas arise from, is that where our intended loved one resides? Mathematics is a fulfilled intention as it does not require us to rediscover 1+1=2 over and over again. But death doesn’t appear to us as a fulfilled idea, at least not intuitively. In our everydayness, thinking about a dead loved one is normally associated with emotions, which trigger memories that grasp the past intentions. And the constant grasping by consciousness for a person who at the time before her death was being with possibilities, provided us with an insight into the structure of our intentions. Most people are on the fence on whether death is a certainty. But phenomenology takes the things themselves, and the very notion of death gained from seeing the corpse itself or reading about it in the obituaries affects the structure of the life world of the phenomenologist. Regardless of the source, the notion of death of an other remains a factually true statement but also an ontologically debatable discourse. For to describe death itself, one may turn to the Kantian cop out and claim one cannot know the thing in itself but that only promotes skepticism.
Death is first person for me but always third person for any one else. And so Phenomenology’s first person technique grasps for the kind of being that used to be continuous beings that are always a “yet to be” but always is. And so even the most sophisticated and considered of phenomenological analysis has to deal with this intending in time. “Being is time” Heidegger ironically answers about the relationship of being and time in his large magnum opus.
One thing that can’t be denied as mentioned previously is the fact that one cannot help think of one’s own death when dealing with the thought of a dead person. Death is a looming certainty in our being. And so arguably in trying to grasp or intend the death o ta loved one, the ego is also trying to grasp the fulfilled intention of one’s own death. For all of this activity of intending is going on within consciousness. Noth the consciousness of the subject and the pure consciousness for which all consciousness operates under.
The notion of death when dealt with and put in the forefront of one’s life world, can lead towards either authenticity or inauthenticity. Authenticity occurs only when one is dealing with one’s own death. Projecting it unto another and denying one’s own certain, impending death leads to inauthentic behavior, one may tend to go with the “crowd”, “herd”, “they”, “one”, etc.
Underlying all this activity in the forefront is the background being-in-the-world, our everydayness still dominates even if one falls into lapses of coping with the idea of death. And so when speaking/intending of a loved one , it appears that the phenomena will try to grasp the person who has deparrted and realize that he/she is actually intending one’s own death. Either way, the investigation remains a looming uncertainty, like an unsolved mathematical problem. And from one’s own attitude towards death (inauthentic or authentic behavior) leads to the fundamental underlying ethics that stems into our everyday ethics. So this kind of pre-ethics, appears to be fundamentally irrational for grasping something that is unfulfilled does not leave comfort into certainty. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why ethics ends up with relativism. Because each person’s death is their own. no one can take hold of it. But death isn’t unique in that sense, each person’s own unique experience with death itself is unique. But also everyone’s own experience with the phenomena. There’s no way one can experience the same as another, only a notion that some things remain certain while other aspects of a thing remains a practical endeavor.
This analysis is leaning towards the Sartrean notion of nothingness, and will likely end up in that train of thought as the notion of the nothing, when truly considered is a complex endeavor and may arguably the same as mathematics.
Nonetheless, thinking of a dead person, especially one that I know makes me think about myself because that death is his/her’s. My death is mine. We may be caught in existential crises and melodramatics death as if it were unnatural but death is really an integral part of a person’s life. The choice to anguish over our death is authentic behavior but not practical. Because alongside our being-toward-death are the goals we set to ourselves as we engage within the world, necessarily as part of the world. To disclose being through activities such as ontological phenomenology, history and even science. The problem of death is the problem of life so long as we make a part of us a problem.
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