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Experiences of Mortality
Phenomenology and Anthropology

Abstract

Martin Heidegger radically separated my experience of my mortality—an anticipation of 
being cast from existence to nothingness—from my experience of the mortality of others
—a perception of their being reduced from ex­istence to utter presence.  I argue that 
anxiety is not really an anticipation of what can be identified as nothingness.  I argue that 
the perception of the corpse another has become is not, as Heidegger says, the 
tranquilizing experience of someone now utterly present.  I argue that my experience of 
becoming a corpse, in suffering, makes my sense of my own mortality not essentially 
different from my sense of the mortality of others.  
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Experiences of Mortality
Phenomenology and Anthropology

Martin Heidegger set out to elucidate our experience of being mortal, beneath the
interpretations that he would take as metaphysical. He dismissed the dying that Socrates
had taken to be liberation, a transfiguration, a passage to a higher kind of existence. Yet
Socrates had argued that this liberation is an experience, anticipated in the asceticism of
the body that is the very practice of philosophy.

Anxiety and Nothingness

Heidegger finds my experience of my mortality in anxiety, which, he says,

anticipates my experience of dying. He interprets anxiety to reveal that my dying is
passage from existence to nothingness, annihilation, and annihilation, for me, of the
world about me. Heidegger confronts humans with their mortality in the most radical
sense, forcing us each to see that our death is pure nothingness, that we are destined to be
nothing. Humans are, through and through and in their most essential definition, “the
mortals.”
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Anxiety can be fled or covered over. But when acknowledged, accepted, it

converts, Heidegger says, into resoluteness. Feeling myself adrift in the void, nothing
supporting me, nothing to hold on to, I am thrown back upon the powers that still subsist
in me, the powers that are my own. No longer counting on the support of the world or of
others, taking up the powers that are my own, I now resolutely act on my own, exist on
my own. Thus Heidegger sees the most negative experience, the experience of
nothingness itself, converting into the most positive experience, the experience that posits
my existence on its own.
But does anxiety really identify death to be nothingness? What is distinctive of
anxiety, as contrasted with fear, is that anxiety has no identifiable object. It is a
foreboding concerning what is indeterminate. What I am anxious about is the unknown
—not something that I know to be nothingness.
We could compare the situation that arouses anxiety with our edginess in the
night. What makes the night disquieting is not a perception of something dangerous, but
the fact that possible dangers are not localizable in things. We no longer perceive things;
their contours are dissolved by the night. But this no-thingness is not nothingness; there
is left the darkness of night, which fills space, and invades, is within as much as without.
The dissolution of contours and boundaries makes whatever dangers the night harbors be
possibly anywhere, everywhere.
The deep uneasiness before the unknown that afflicts me does not turn into a
recognition that I exist on my own and can, must, act on my own. I would instead
overcome, or at least endure, anxiety by seeking support in what is known, even though it
is now out of reach.
The fact that death is not evidently nothingness, that anxiety is not experienced as
manifestly a sinking into nothingness but rather as a foreboding regarding what is
unknown, ungraspable, motivates the efforts, in so many cultures, to know what the state
of death is.
Anxiety, Heidegger observes, can be fled or covered over, and it is so concealed
in everyday preoccupations. But when we see that death is unmistakably imminent, our
existence would be nothing but the dull pounding of anxiety, driving the resolute plunge
into nothingness. Yet anthropological research in many cultures, and in our own, has
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shown that many people sink calmly and peaceably into death, and many cultures have
elaborated practices that help people to die without anxiety. The Tibetan Book of the
Dead is an example.
We have had a premonition of this calm. When we go to the forests and the
meadows, to mountains and glaciers, when we descend into the coral reefs of the oceans,
when we contemplate the movements of the clouds, we find ourselves, not in the
Heideggerian “world” of implements and objectives, pathways and obstacles, but in
nature. A nature that we are not surveying with a circumspection governed by our
interests; our gaze drifts among beings seeing them as they are, as they exist on their
own. There is a dissolution of any governing and integrating force in our consciousness,
and the systole and diastole of our consciousness disconnect and exist as pulses of
luminous energy picking up the random and ephemeral scintillations of light, patches of
shadow, restless leaves, bird calls, fluttering butterflies, spangles of light in the water. We
lie back in the meadow or in the depth of the coral seas, our postural axis fades out, we
give over the support of our trunk and limbs to the ground or to the water, and our bodies
become volumes where small surges of blood and nutrients and biles go on, in synch with
the drafts of breeze, the pulse of sunbeams, the rhythms of the sea. We no longer stand
upright to exist and act on our own; we lose our will to make our organisms into self-
moving, self-motivating, self-programmed agents, we sink into nature.
This experience is a premonition of dying. Of dying in nature, into nature. A
dying that seems to us to be the natural destination of our organisms. This destination no
longer appears to us to be an inexorable fearful iron Fate or a supreme duty we owe to
authenticity or to our own freedom, but the calm movement with which nature flows
through time.
We have spent days or weeks or months in other cultures sharing with them their
experience of going to nature. We have accompanied on camel the Tuareg of the Sahara
whose Heideggerian instrumental complex is reduced to a tent and a few utensils packed
in a bag , and spent days in rhythmic movement over ever-drifting sand dunes seeing the
footprints of the camels already being erased by the winds. We have spent days on small
boats with Moken people, the sea gypsies of the Andaman Sea, our bodies and our
consciousness filled with nothing but the waves of the sea. We have spent long evenings
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with the never-Christianized Lacandón of the Chiapas rain forest, watching the embers of
the fire glow and listening to the baso continuo of frogs and night insects. We have
understood how dying for them would not be fraught with Heideggerian anxiety or
resoluteness.

See the Corpse

Heidegger separates radically my experience of my mortality, the anxiety that

reveals my dying as annihilation, from my observation of the death of others. For me the
death of others that I observe (and my death that they observe) is transition from active
ex-istence to the state of a corpse, utterly present in a world as full as before. Thus
holding wakes, going to wakes, is tranquilizing—an insight Heidegger finds in the
opening pages of Leo Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”
Anthropologists have instead reported in so many communities the outbreak of
wild grieving and outrage, not only of the loved ones but also of the whole community, in
the presence of a corpse. Even in societies subsisting in harsh environments, the Kalahari
Desert, the Amazon, the Artic tundra, the swamps of West Papua, where death is
common, a corpse of a fallen warrior or of a child is excruciating for the community.
Heidegger defines the corpse as an existence that has turned into utterly and
simply present being, an intramundane being now simply on hand (Vorhanden). But a
corpse is a locus of violence. It is an organism where violence has struck, from without
or from within, and where violence continues, bacteria, viruses, or tumors having
assaulted the homeostasis of the body, releasing toxins that will break out of the organs
and cells, contaminating the ground with blood, biles, infectious seepage, and excrement,
polluting the air with foul gases. Max Weber argued that the sense of the strange powers
at work in a corpse, a fear of the corpse manifested, he says, even by other species of
animals, is at the origin of the most ancient practices of burying or burning corpses, and
also of the later practices of mummifying corpses, providing them with a tolerable
existence, giving them offerings of food and drink, preventing them from becoming
envious of the possessions enjoyed by the living.i
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A corpse arouses horror in us, but we are also drawn to it. The first effect of
bloodshed is hatred and the compulsion to shed blood in turn. The sight of the victory of
violence in the corpse provokes the will to take on that violence, to wield it as one’s own
power. Anthropologists find many societies where every death in one’s community
produces an active initiative to kill someone practicing sorcery in a hostile community, or
just to kill someone, anyone, in that community. Today, without belief in sorcery, the
sight of a corpse continues to provoke the violence that requires another corpse—see
crimes of passion, gang battles, wars, torture, capital punishment.

Suffering. The Corpse I am Becoming

Heidegger separates radically my experience of my mortality from my experience

of the death of others. One can object that the very word “death” used in either case
indicates that the death of others does give me a premonition of my own dying.
Aging, the growing inertia that weighs on my initiatives, wounds, scars,
infections, debilitating diseases give me a sense of my mortality. A corpse befouls and
pollutes. The intense experience of shed blood, in wounds but also in menstruation, as
well as body effluvia, vaginal fluids, semen, mucus discharges, and excrement show me
my becoming a corpse.
It is striking that Heidegger only attended to the opening scene in Tolstoy’s story
—the corpse cleaned, dressed in fine clothing, appearing, at the wake, to have achieved
perfect rest, which gives the visitors an increased sense of their own buoyant vitality. But
the body of the story is all about the small bruise that Ivan Ilych suffers when he is back
at home and that does not heal, and the growing pain that finally fills all of his days and
nights and that gives him first an inkling, then the appalled recognition of death
inexorably coming, already at work in him.
Suffering is the inner experience of debilitation, the growing inability to launch
initiatives, to turn from oneself to the outside environment; one finds oneself unable to
leave oneself or to back up behind one’s corporeal materiality, one finds oneself mired in
oneself. It is the experience of an internal violence at work. Suffering contains a
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premonition of our death in the guise of the last limit of prostration, materialization,
becoming a corpse.
There is insight in suffering. What we had heard talk of, what we had conceived,
imagined, feared, we now understand. Until we suffered, we did not really know what
suffering is. And in suffering I first realize what the suffering of others is; I find myself
suffering as all that lives suffers. In suffering the increasing reduction of my active
powers to passivity, I find I am dying as anyone, everyone dies, as everything that lives
has to die.

The Voices of the Dead

Burial of the dead, which archaeology now dates back at least 80,000 years, and
mummification, which, among the Chinchorro peoples of present-day Chile, began 7000
years ago, do not by themselves prove that societies that did these things with the dead
did not regard the dead as Vorhanden to be gotten rid of, or momentos of what no longer
exists. But when the dead are found to have been buried or mummified along with
utensils, weapons, and foodstuffs, anthropologists recognize these as evidence that for
those peoples some of the life forces and powers of those now dead persist in some sort
of existence. Ancestors endure in some form and effect the living beneficently.
Widespread also is the sense that the dead are resentful of the living and pains must be
taken to protect the living from them, to drive them out of the habitat of the living.
Heidegger, however, affirms that the death of others that we witness is their
transformation to the state of a being utterly present, on hand, Vorhanden, from which
their lucid, or oblivious, future and possibility-ordered ex-istence has utterly vanished.
Today theories of communication induce us to depict the others about us as
agencies with which we exchange information. But when we actually communicate with
people about us, the exchange of information is the least part of our conversation; most of
the time we utter words of welcome and comraderie, give and receive clues and
watchwords as how to behave among them and among others, gossip, talk to amuse one
another. The other is evidently there, a person, for us not as an agency that issues
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meaningful propositions, information, but as an agency that orders us and appeals to us.
Another is like me in that he or she says things that I understand, but other than me in that
he or she appeals to me and puts demands on me.
This fundamental presence and reality of the other as an agency that appeals to me
and orders me can be quite separated from the perceptible presence of him or her. A
voice uttered at a distance can penetrate to the core of our identity and appeal to us and
put demands on us. A child may be ordered by the voice of a parent when that parent is
no longer there; an adult may hear that voice when the parent is no longer alive, may hear
too the parents of that parent. What in an earlier, evolutionist anthropology was dubbed
“animism” recognizes that voices addressing us and ordering us may be the voices of
other species, and voices of the absent and the dead. Indeed, is there any society where
the voice of ancestors is utterly silenced?
For us the voices of the dead order us and appeal to us often more forcefully than
the voices of the living about us. The voice of our father or our grandfather invalidate the
lecherous suggestions of our gang, our cronies, and the opportunist maxims of our boss.
The voice of our grandfather makes us listen still to the cries of the peregrine, the
drumming of the ruffed grouse, the voices of the pines and of the aspens in the evening
breeze. The voice of Socrates and Hume strip the authority from the sententious
affirmations of our teacher. The voices of the Founding Fathers are more important for
us than those of any set of politicians campaigning today. The dead also torment us.
When our mother or our child dies, we are tormented by all the things that we failed to
say. The voice of a parent who in words or without words said to us from childhood “I
do not love you” curses us still today, twenty years after he or she died.

Phenomenology and Ethnocentrism

Death is the line of confrontation between our will, our desire, our wish, and fate.
Heidegger dismisses the understanding, so widespread across our history and so many
cultures, that in dying I participate in a common destiny, that of others I see die, that of
other species that are born and that die, the efforts of so many cultures to know what the
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state of death is, and the sense that the dead persist in some kind of existence and order,
and appeal to, and curse the living. These would be metaphysical interpretations driven
by desire and not experience, wish fulfillment, Freud would say. But does not
Heidegger’s interpretation belong to the culture of his land and his time?
The authenticity Heidegger promulgates is made of lucidity and power. For us to
be is, he says, at each moment to have-to-be. He, like Kirilov in Dostoievski’s The
Possessed, seeks to make dying, the having-to-be-nothingness the supreme feat
accomplished by our constitutive freedom.
Heidegger declares that we, or he, sees in the death of others their reduction to the
state of intramundane beings utterly present in a world as full as before, from which their
lucid or oblivious, future and possibility-ordered ex-istence has utterly vanished. Is this
an evidence, or it is the interpretation of a will to silence the voices of the dead?
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Notes
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 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 6.