Intimations of Mortality

Heideggers thinking has an underlying unity, this book argues, and has cogency for seemingly diverse domains of modern culture: philosophy and religion, aesthetics and literary criticism, intellectual history and social theory. The theme of mortalityfinite human existencepervades Heideggers thought, in the authors words, before, during, and after his magnum opus, Being and Times, published in 1927. This theme is manifested in Heideggers work not as funereal melodramatics or as despair and destructive nihilism but rather as a thinking within anxiety. Four major subthemes in Heideggers thinking are explored in the books four parts: the fundamental ontology developed in Being and Time; the lighting and clearing of Being, understood as unconcealment; the history of philosophywith emphasis on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Nietzscheinterpreted as the destiny of Being; and the poetics of Being, explicated as the fundamental experience of mortality. Neither an introduction nor a survey, this book is a close reading of a wide range of Heideggers books, lectures, and articlesincluding extensive material not yet translated into Englishinformed by the authors conversations with Heidegger in 197476. Each of the four subthemes is treated critically. The aim of the book is to push its interrogations of Heideggers thought as far as possible, in order to help the reader toward an independent assessment of his work and to encourage novel, radically conceived approaches to traditional philosophical problems.