Taylor Coles

4/10/15
Everywhere trying out, underway; untried, with no way out
he comes to Nothing.
A single onslaught, death, he was unable
ever to resist by any flight,
even if in the face of dire illness
deft escape should be granted him.
For someone in the class:
This passage should, for Heidegger, be read as a shift in the poem from what might be
loosely called Daseins essential accomplishments towards a sense of Daseins essential
frustrations. The previous sections of the poem illustrate the way Dasein contributes to the
unconcealing of Being, i.e. the way that Daseins essence is to be the site for the violent polemos
that holds open entities as a whole into meaningful presence. In this passage, Heidegger finds the
resources to describe how these features of Dasein run into difficulty, especially with regard to
its own being as an entity. While the previous passages described Dasein as making paths
amongst and mastering entities other than itself, the poem here suggests that Dasein can become
trapped in the routes that it makes for itself, realizing itself as a sense-making entity that has
nothing but its own sense to turn to.
This is troubling because it allows it to become enmeshed in seeming, caught up in its
own fascinations, skills, and activities rather than the genuine appearance of Being, but also for a
deeper reason (EM 175). Dasein has made a world of entities sensible, but it cannot make
complete sense of itself as an entity in this world. Here, Heidegger uses the poem to highlight a
tension between the way the meaning of things seems so dependent on us humans and the way
that there are parts of our existence that are necessarily foreign to us. In particular, no amount of
meaning-making violence can bring Daseins death within the limits of intelligibility. The second
half of the stanza clarifies this notion by making it clear that death is an existential condition that
is continuously present to Dasein, as an element of what it is to be Dasein, rather than a temporal
event in the lifecycle of a person. Daseins mortality is an aspect of the self-concealing of being.
Thus, no matter how skillfully human beings might avoid particular causes of death, the basic
impenetrability of Daseins essence as an entity remains a persistent limit on its ability to hold
entities in meaning.
This passage helps emphasize why Dasein is uncanny for Heidegger. Uncanniness is
understood by reference to unheimlich and is understood as the sort of self-alienated strangeness
that accompanies the tension between being the site of Being and confronting the possibility of
Death or Not-Being. Dasein is not at home in its own sense-making, because its own essence is
necessarily concealed. In short, we cant make sense of ourselves as the sense-makers we are
because our efforts are frustrated by Death. Dasein cannot, as it were, get outside of its efforts
at meaning making. Thus, while Heidegger suggests that this fact is part of what makes Dasein
shut itself out from the way of meditation on the seeming within which it drifts around, a
condition that seems like it can be escaped once modern Dasein remembers Being, there are
elements of our essence that necessarily escape our understanding (EM 176). In other words, we

are defined by our uncanniness, an aspect of Dasein that Heidegger believes the Greeks had
latched on to already in the inception (EM 168).