Are We Destitute?
Pain, Death, and Love in Heidegger
Heidegger writes:
“The time is destitute because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death, and love.”
One could reject Heidegger’s premise that our time is destitute. But one way that Heidegger might counter is that he’s simply defining destitution operationally as living in an age in which one doesn’t appreciate the nature of pain, death, and love.
Is Heidegger’s statement simply oracular—or is a resistance to it a symptom of destitution? Bold, and often apocalyptic statements like Heidegger’s require a decision on the part of the reader: “Will I go along with this and see how it makes sense, or will I reject it out of hand as overblown nonsense and deny myself the possibility of gaining any insight from it”?
I take Heidegger to be saying that our relationship to pain, death, and love is dysfunctional in some way; that our culture enshrines the wrong definitions of these, and promotes the wrong relationship to them. Philosophy’s task isn’t simply to offer correct definitions, but to “un-conceal,” that is, make accessible, a new relationship to them.
The part about death is the easiest to decipher because Heidegger devotes most of Being and Time to it. Death is the basis for meaning, yet we run away from it. To know death as the ground of meaning and accept it would heighten our ability to live more meaningfully.
Regarding love, Heidegger writes that to love something is to let it be what it is. There is a paradox at work in love, as it involves participating in something without getting in its way, a form of assistance that requires the right amount of presence and receptivity.
Pain, I take it, is more than physiological discomfort; it’s psychosomatic. For Heidegger, the medicalization of all or most physical problems is a missed opportunity to investigate what other thinkers call “the mind-body connection.” Pain is not just physiological, but an expression of and response to a sense of self. But treating ourselves and others as objects whose pain needs to be taken away or diminished leads to a situation in which, by optimizing for the absence of pain, we end up numbing ourselves and treating ourselves as machines.
While Heidegger’s comment is gnomic—and comes without a call to action—it seems to ask us what it might mean to live with a deeper appreciation for love, pain, and death, and to build relationships and institutions that are attentive to it. What do these look like? What examples can you identify? Does resisting “destitution” require one to live radically? Or can one still be a normie and work to “unconceal” pain, death, and love?
What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.
You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.