1. CONCEPTS OF DEATH
1. MARTIN HEIDEGGER
There is a very brief way of framing how Heidegger approaches an understanding of death: since
death is not something we can experience (live through), there is really nothing at all to say about
"death itself." In this sense, death is not -- it does not exist for an individual to experience. But since
"death," in the sense of the termination of all possible experience (at least a we presently know it) is
inevitable, a given fact of human existence, we can say a great deal about the attitudes we do have,
as well as the attitudes we ought to have, about this quintessential aspect of human existence. We
can say that what is important is not "death itself," but dying, the manner in which the human
being lives as it aims toward death. "Death," as our being toward it, is the focus of Heidegger's
analysis. The old saying that as soon as we are born we are old enough to die, Heidegger notes, is
not something we can ignore -- for how we live in light of this fact makes all the difference (BT, p.
158).
Given this above frame, however, we must be careful not to confuse Heidegger's analysis with
ordinary "sayings" or formulations of everyday speech. Heidegger develops a special language in
the analysis of Dasein. In what follows, it will be necessary to assume some familiarity with
Heidegger's special terms. Otherwise, we will be faced with the problem of building Heidegger's
system from the ground up. As an example, let us apply Heidegger's language to the problem frame
we just described. The "attitudes" we have toward death need to be understood in Heidegger's
language as "understanding attunements." These are types of future-oriented awareness that also
contain a heedfulness or emotional investment. The type of understanding attunements we can
have, that derive directly from the primordial structure of Dasein are "existential possibilities." But
these possibilities can take on an abstract or "theoretical" aspect because the given facts of our
existence limit our possibilities. The understanding attunements that we can actually live through
are "existentiell possibilities." Those existentiell modes of life which adequately express and reveal
the true structure and possibilities of human existence are "authentic," while those modes which
cover these over are "inauthentic." Hence, Heidegger's problem is to investigate Dasein
primordially, yielding an existential analysis that will in turn establish existentiell possibilities of
our being toward death. In the next section, we will follow Heidegger's thought in pursuing this
project as he develops it in the central chapter on death in BT.
2. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Traditional European Christian philosophy, particularly in the eighteenth century, was filled with
images of and sermons on the fear of the judgment that would come upon the time of death.
Characterized by Plato as the need to free the soul from the "hateful" company of the body, death
was seen as the entrance into another world. By contrast, the efforts of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century existentialists were to humanize and individualize death as the last stage of life rather than
the entrance into that which is beyond life. This shift historically helped to make death conceptually

2. a part of life, and therefore could be understood as a human phenomenon rather than speculation
as to the nature of a spiritual life.
If death is the last stage of life, then one philosophical question is, What is the nature of the
experience? It is to this question that the phenomenological analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre
contributed significant insight. It can be said that when a child dies, the child becomes frozen in
time. Always a child, the potential of that child is never realized and the experience of the life of
that child ends. Sartre explains in his analysis of time that the past is fixed in the experiential
history of the person. Whatever the person did, or even did not do, is simply the way it is. If a
person was a coward when he or she died, then the image of that person as a coward is how the
individual is remembered.
In his book Being and Nothingness (1956) Sartre established his early phenomenological method,
exploring the nature of the human experience. Since Socrates, Western philosophers have suggested
that essence or those basic aspects that make up the person are divinely preordained or predesigned
prior to birth. Sartre, on the other hand, understood that the person must first exist before that
which makes up the person can be identified, as human beings are not objective objects but rather
subjective in their dynamic ability to change. Thus for Sartre, existence precedes essence. If
analysis starts with the first human experience and ends with the last, then one's past is the past
that was experienced by the individual, the present is the current reality, and the future reflects his
or her potential. For Sartre, at the point of death the person does not have a past, as he or she is
now dead and cannot continue to write in the log of the present. Rather, a person then becomes his
or her past. Like the child who has died, in death the person is frozen in the minds of those persons
who remember him or her.
Sartre used the concept of a wall to explain the transition from life to death. This concept is best
understood by persons in a hospice who find that their comrades in death often understand them
better than their families or those who do not understand their own finite nature. As he often did,
Sartre offered his existentialist philosophy in a more academic volume and then explained it in his
plays and novels. In his story The Wall (1964) Sartre writes about Pablo, a Spanish loyalist in his
cell with two other republicans waiting execution by Generalissimo Franco's soldiers. He reflects as
follows: "For twenty-four hours I have lived at Tom's side, I had heard him, I had talked to him,
and I knew that we had nothing in common. And now we resemble each other like twins, only
because we shall die together" (Stern 1967, p. 174). Persons faced with their own finitude often see
the meaning of both their experiences and their lives from a larger perspective.
3. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
Was greatly influenced by Husserl, and in his own work he attempted to refute the tendencies in
Western philosophy of empiricism and what he called intellectualism, or what is commonly
referred to as idealism. He challenged the thinking of dualisms, of subject and object, self and
world, through the lived experience of the existential body, as revealed in his (The Phenomenology
of Perception). He argued that the 'body subject' was frequently underestimated in philosophy,
which tends to view the body as something to be transcended by the power of the mind. For this

3. reason, he was interested in the 'primacy of perception', as a place of embodied inherence in the
world, while admitting that perception itself is primarily cognitive. His opposition to the knowledge
of scientific and analytic methods was based on their derivative relation to knowledge as compared
to the practical thinking of an embodied relation to the world.
He confirmed the primacy of lived experience by pronouncing, "the perceiving mind is an incarnate
mind." He saw the body as in continuity with the world, arguing that even considering the body as
external and in the world is inconsistent with a concept of the primacy of lived experience. This is a
difficult mode of thinking, where the consideration of perception in the world itself delivers the
subject into the state of perception. Therefore, there is no perception in general, there is only
perception in the world. For Merleau-Ponty, the 'lived' perception is fundamental to
phenomenology, it is what makes it possible and necessary. As the perceiving subject changes,
hence the relation of the subject to the world also changes, beginning things anew. Consciousness
for Merleau-Ponty is also perceptual, in a state of flux, and is never autonomous from what it
perceives of the world. Certainty of idea is based on the certainty of perception, which, contrary to
the cogito of Descartes, always remains to be established by phenomenological investigation -there
is no universal or ideal certainty at the level of ideas. One cannot say that 'I perceive' is equivalent
to 'I think', nor is the concept of being strictly a universalism. The incarnate situation of the
perceiving subject opens the way to a phenomenological description of the living present -the
perceived thing is equivalent to what is said about it.
Merleau-Ponty was also fond of language-based concepts as those of linguistic and structuralist
philosophies, and he cited such ideas in his critiques of Sartre and his contemporaries for playing
down the importance of language in relation to thought. Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss and
Ferdinand De Saussure were all key figures for Merleau-Ponty. Claude Levi-Strauss, a structuralist
anthropologist, dedicated his major work The Savage Mind to the memory of Merleau-Ponty, and
Ferdinand De Saussure, a linguist who demonstrated the importance differences play in language,
was introduced to Merleau-Ponty, into his reflections and teachings on language, in the late 1940s
and early 1950s. The dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Saussure would form the core of
structuralist thought, particularly on theories of language and semiotics. In his unfinished work,
The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty writes, 'Saussure shows admirably that … it cannot be the
history of the word or language which determines its present meaning.' Structural linguistics is a
theory that seems to emphasize the subject's lived relation to the world. Meaning in language is
attributed to the interplay, a diacritical relationship, between signs. As Merleau-Ponty has observed
of Saussure, the notion of the primacy of the synchronic dimension of language for understanding
the nature of language itself "liberates history from historicism and makes a new conception of
reason possible." Language is enacted and evolving, it is the "living present" in speech. Therefore,
language can no more be reduced to a history of linguistics than history can be reduced to historical
discourse.

4. CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM
1. MARTIN HEIDEGGER
The concept of freedom plays an important role in Being and Time and takes on an increasingly
important place in Heidegger's essays and lectures of the post-Being and Time 1920s and early
1930s. In his lecture course of 1928/29, Introduction to Philosophy, he speaks of freedom as the
“innermost essence of [human] existence” (GA 27: 103). An entire lecture course devoted to the
concept of freedom in 1930 (The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy)
begins with the claim that the question of the essence of human freedom “lays the whole of
philosophy before us.” The essays written during this period make even stronger claims for
freedom. According to “On the Essence of Ground,” written in 1928 immediately after the
publication of Being and Time, “Freedom alone can let a world prevail and let it world for Dasein”
(Wegm 162/Pathm 126). And in “On the Essence of Truth,” written in 1930 and revised over the
years, the discussion of “the essence of truth” is introduced by way of a section entitled “The
Essence of Freedom” (Wegm 185–189/Pathm 143–147). It is here that we find the nearly inscrutable
statement that the essence of truth is freedom.The concept of freedom is also central to Being and
Time. In some cases, when Heidegger talks about freedom, we seem to be on familiar ground.
2. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Sartre believed that as human beings we are free to make our own decisions and choices (free will).
This belief rejects the argument that states that life is pre-determined because of past events
(determinism). In other words our everyday actions are the result of other causes.
Being and Consciousness
Sartre rationalises this notion of human freedom by explaining his thoughts on consciousness
(phenomology). Firstly, Sartre described two different types of beings' in the world.Being-for-itself
(etre-pour-soi): Sartre's term for any being capable of self-consciousness.Being-in-itself (etre-en-
soi): Sartre's term for anything that lacks self-consciousness.
Another characteristic of the being-for-itself (humans) is the ability to project themselves in the
future or to reassess their past. Also, being-for-itself have the ability to recognise when something is
absent.
For example if you arranged to meet a friend at a caf but he does not arrive then his absence is felt.
You could list all the people you know who weren't in the caf, but it will only be your friend who
you would genuinely miss. Sartre describes this absence or lack of something as nothingness'. This
knack to see things which are missing is linked to Sartre's idea of freedom. This is because we can
picture things which have not happened and things yet to be done, and subsequently this reveals a
world full of possibilities where anything can happen (freedom).

5. 3. MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY
It is not surprising that Merleau-Ponty concludes Phenomenology of Perception with a chapter on
freedom. His concept of freedom relates to the embodied subjectivity that finds itself within the
structures of the phenomenal field, and only free subjects can be obligated by imperatives. All the
phenomenologists are critical of Kant’s notion of autonomy, as it is an inward turn away from the
world (i.e., from the phenomenal field in Merleau-Ponty’s terms), whereas the phenomenologists
argue for the exteriority of imperatives in things and other people. But how does Merleau-Ponty’s
view of freedom compare with Kant’s? Merleau-Ponty’s first reference to Kant’s conception of
freedom points out a problem of Kant’s autonomy and idealism in the experience of freedom in
concrete actions. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty refers to Max Scheler, who alleges that Kant conflates
ethical intentions and real actions in "… the Kantian idea of an intention which is tantamount to
the act, which Scheler countered with the argument that the cripple who would like to be able to
save a drowning man and the good swimmer who actually saves him do not have the same
experience of autonomy."75 It would be more correct, however, for Scheler and Merleau-Ponty to
speak of good will and duty rather than good intentions in Kant’s ethics. In the Grounding, Kant
shows that he is well aware of the limitations in the archetype of good intentions, the "Golden
Rule." For Kant, as with all ethical intentions, the Golden Rule is conditional, because it is based on
empirical outcomes. Its heteronomy cannot be an autonomous grounding principle, and it does not
account for strict notion of duty.76 Still, Scheler’s contention of the limits of good intentions can be
aptly applied to the good will and duty. The experience of autonomy in wanting to save the
drowning person would not be the same in someone who cannot swim as in someone who can. In
agreeing with Scheler’s assertion, Merleau-Ponty points out that Kant’s indeterminate freedom
would undo all determinate ethical actions with its successive indeterminacy. Without the
determinations of concrete action, freedom is everywhere and nowhere. For Scheler and Merleau-
Ponty, the intention of the good will is not tantamount to its act. Merleau-Ponty insists on a
commitment of freedom to action and events, which forms the basis of a lived ethics of free, but
concrete, choices. These actions are not merely the good will’s intentions followed by their effects.
Ethical intentions must be committed to action or else they will remain indeterminate. Contrasting
the indeterminacy of Kant’s autonomy with the determinacy of action, Merleau-Ponty argues that:
A freedom which has no need to be exercised because it is already acquired could not commit itself
it knows that the following instant will find it, come what may, just as free and indeterminate. The
very notion of freedom demands that our decision should plunge into the future, that something
should have to be done by it, that subsequent instant should benefit from its predecessor and,
though not necessitated, should at least be required by it. If freedom is doing, it is necessary that
what it does should not immediately be undone by a new freedom…. Unless there are cycles of
behavior, open situations requiring a certain completion and capable of constituting a background
to either a confirmatory or transformatory decision, we never experience freedom.

6. VIRGEN MILAGROSA UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION
MARTIN P. POSADAS AVE., SAN CARLOS CITY PANGASINAN
CONCEPTS OF
FREEDOM
AND
DEATH
PREPARED BY: LOREVILLE S. CRUZ
PREPARED TO: MR. CHRISTOPHER PAGDANGANAN