1.

The Need for an Ontology of Death

The philosophical study of death must face the difficulty that death, as a problem, cannot be
reduced to a given phenomenon. On the contrary, if the epicurean thesis about the nothingness of
death is sound, the first obstacle that philosophy in general must get over is how to access the
phenomenon itself. For phenomenology this is especially complicated. As Levinas says, “[d]eath is
the reversal of appearing [lapparaitre]. Contrary to what appears, death is like a return of being in
itself, where that which beckoned turns back into itself, and can no longer respond. It is a movement
opposed to phenomenology.”1 Hence, if philosophy pretends to talk about death, the analytical
thinking needs to take a detour in order to get access to the phenomenon itself, even if it is sneakily.
For example, Levinas has stated in this regard that, “phenomenology seems to make possible the
thinking of nothingness thanks to the idea of intentionality as an access to something other than
oneself, and an access that can be had in a non-theoretical manner.”2 However, if death is the
opposite of the appearance of being, if all of it is what withdraws back into itself, what
understanding can we have of it? What question can we ask about death? What thought is that
which goes towards death? And even what does this going consist of?
In a recent article dated January 19th, 2014, it is argued that the ontological state of patients
declared in a permanent vegetative state (PermVS) is at least ambiguous. Especially interested in
the ethical implications that a clear determination of such status could have in their treatment, the
authors ask, “What, then, is the situation of a patient in PermVS: alive, dead, or some other state?”;
and they conclude that, “it is neither directly alive nor simply dead.”3 What is interesting about the
article is not so much its conclusion, as it rather seems not to reach any, but the methodology
followed which, in itself, shows a turn in its focus: before questioning the meaning behind the states
of living or dead, the authors try to discern the feelings, emotions and beliefs that the relatives of
these patients held. This opens the possibility of interpreting death, not as a determining episode in
the historical existence of an isolated subject, but as a necessarily intersubjective phenomenon and
whose nature, perhaps, we can only access from this intersubjectivity. However, in this respect the
words of Celia Kitzinger and Jenny Kitzinger resonate with even greater importance in stating that:

“Studying the ontological state of patients in PermVS is useful when thinking about the
philosophical implications of possible treatments. However, in another sense, such an approach to
the problem has few uses for family members who daily face the obligation to have a loved one in
such a condition - trying to make sense of both their own experiences and feelings, such as the
confrontations with the present laws and practices that take place while patients are moved through
different diagnostic categories.” 4

Thus, the philosophical study of death not only has to deal with the limitations that the
problem itself imposes on its practice, but also with the urgencies prompted by the new advances in
medical achievements that require in themselves a solution, even if approximate. The article below

1 Levinas, Emmanuel (1993), God, Death, and Time, Princeton University Press, p. 50.
2 Ibíd., p. 68.
3 Holland, S., Kitzinger, C., & Kitzinger, J. (2014). Death, treatment decisions and the permanent vegetative state:
evidence from families and experts. Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 17(3), 413–423. doi:10.1007/
s11019-013-9540-y
4 Kitzinger, Celia and Kitzinger, Jenny, This In-between: How Families Talk about Death in Relation to Severe Brain
Injury and Disorders of Consciousness (“The Social Construction of Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”, Eds. Lee
Van Brussel and Nico Carpentier), Palgrave Macmillan, 243.]
is set within this problem. Beginning with a reconstruction of the phenomenon as stated in the
thought of Kierkegaard, Scheler and Heidegger, we seek to develop the concept of death as an
“ontological infidelity” introduced by Paul Louis Landsberg in 1937. In what sense should we
understand this infidelity, and how can this understanding shed light onto the ontological states of
patients in PermVS is the objective of the following pages.

2. Towards an Ontology of Death

Landsberg refers to death as an "ontological infidelity" for the first and only time through
the following words:

“There is in this decisive experience of the death of a friend something like a sense of tragic
infidelity in his departure, just as there is an experience of death in our own rejection to infidelity.’I
am dead to you, he is dead to me’, is not a figure of speech, it is the abyss.”5

This quote must be analyzed in parts. To begin with, Landsberg compares what, in principle,
we can determine as two different states of being: on the one hand, we are faced with the death of a
friend by which we experience (or “Experience” [Erfahrung], if the movement from the ontic to the
ontological is allowed) a "tragic infidelity." On the other, our rejection to infidelity harbors in itself
an experience of death. However, although in both cases the term "infidelity" seem to be equivalent,
they do not share the same meaning, nor stand for the same function. The same applies to the
concept of death that Landsberg uses in the phrase. To some extent, death reveals a sensation of
"tragic infidelity", and yet, to another, it is death itself what is discovered in our own rejection to
infidelity. That is, in the death of a friend, death seems to be held in a non-thematic way, thus
providing the possibility of accessing something other than itself: the feeling of infidelity. But still,
it is in our rejection to infidelity that we are opened to an experience of death.
Now, in the death of a friend, and by extension of any loved one, it is worth asking who the
unfaithful is, if there is one, and if not, where does this state come from. Therefore, it is necessary to
determine to what extent one experiences an infidelity if the dead person, we suppose, is not guilty
of having died. Moreover, it should be noted that in this first case, death is what is immediately
given and what discovers something that is ontologically prior, while in the second case, the
relationship is exactly the opposite. It is this second type of infidelity what receives closer attention.
Landsberg says that the expression, “I am dead to you, he is dead to me” is not a mere saying, but
that ti is the abyss. But then, how or what is this abyss? Let’s suppose that the origin of this
infidelity lies on the other, then why does Landsberg make it explicit that death is at both ends of
the relationship? What exactly is that which is dead? The relationship, perhaps? Not likely. On the
contrary, the relationship feels more alive than ever in the form of resentment. Nor can we count the
parties as dead either since, properly speaking, they are the agents of the relationship. However, is
that abyss, which is a decisive experience, the same as in essence, Landsberg has seen, underlies the
loss of a loved one? A peculiar relationship prevails in this analysis then: death which reveals an
infidelity, and an infidelity that reveals death. Yet, neither of the terms can be reduced to one
another. We may ask, then, if the source of the experience lies, not so much in the feeling of
infidelity itself, but in that towards which it rises in respond.
It is by precisely understanding death as an answer, what leads Landsberg to strongly
criticize the characterization of human existence as essentially directed toward death [Sein zum

5 Landsberg, Paul Louis (2009), The Experience of Death, United Kingdom, Living Time Digital, p. 18.
Tod]. His criticism will focus mainly on the thanatology of Scheler and Heidegger, whom, of the
first Landsberg will reject the possibility of an intuitive knowledge of death from the experience of
aging; and of the second, that anxiety [Angst] is an original state of being that would reveal an
essential going towards the end. Landsberg emphatically affirms that, “[d]eath considered as a
finality […] is only the reflection of a despairing unbelief, a negation of the person by the person.”6
Nevertheless, both critics appear to be poorly founded. This, however does not undermine the
novelty of Landsberg’s proposal. But the lack of a detailed theoretical development, added to, we
understand, a critical theory that suffers from certain precariousness, makes of the concept
somewhat vague. But, since Landsberg’s theory builds upon his critics of Scheler and Heidegger,
we consider that it is through these authors from where to start any attempt of reconstruction of the
concept.
In the following sections we will present both conceptions of death, Scheler's and
Heidegger's respectively, and the reasons why we believe Landsberg is mistaken in his criticism.
However, prior to this, we consider adequate to make a stop at the analysis that Søren Kierkegaard
has developed of it. We understand that the idea of despair as hopelessness, that is, as the
experience of dying death without death itself ever arriving, together with Scheler’s, Heidegger’s
and even Landsberg’s view of the phenomenon, will gives us the right tools to approach the
question of death as an ontological infidelity.

2.1. The Starting Point — Kierkegaard and Hope-less-ness

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard says that the mere “possibility of this sickness
[despair] is man's superiority over the animal, and this superiority distinguishes him in quite another
way than does his erect walk, for it indicates infinite erectness or sublimity, that he is spirit.”7 For
Kierkegaard, despair opens man to a unique experience, that is, the act of dying death without
death, being the spirit eternal, could arrive effectively.8 As such, human existence is in fact revealed
in a continuous state of tension. On the one hand, his spirit, eternal, is faced up to an experience of
death that perpetuates in time infinitely. On the other, the actual mortal of subjectivity, which is
moving towards death, is revealed in the spirit that experiences it. Between the two extremes there
is a synthetic relationship that remains un-finished: the infinity that inexhaustibly experiences
finitude, and the finitude that is endlessly announced in the infinite. Within this tension, which is a
gerund, remains the possibility of the sickness unto death, this is, despair. Thus, it seems that
Kierkegaard's subjectivity is made up of three elements, the finite, the infinite and the eternal. Now,
what is the eternal in Kierkegaard? The author says that the spirit, the self. But in what sense is the
spirit eternal? Is it in time? No, because time is the relationship in which the synthesis, — the self
— is ”a relation that relates itself to itself.”9 The eternal is eternally on a return-to-itself. Here lies
an existencial dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; Infinity, finitude, the self. The tension in the
thesis-antithesis couple, —infinite-finite—, is the relationship, —time—, that the self, —synthesis
—, is properly by way of relating. The eternal is a constant re-affirmation of the tension which is
the relationship tensing.

6 Landsberg, Ibíd., p. 26.

7 Kierkegaard, Soren (1980), The Sickness not Death, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, p. 15.
8 “If a person were to die of despair as one dies of a sickness, then the eternal in him, the self, must be able to die in the
same sense as the body dies of sickness. But this is impossible.” Cfr., Ibíd., p. 18.
9 Ibíd., p. 13.
 Now stick to that relationship, what is it? We said, "time." But in what sense? In the
relationship we presuppose the self that acts and suffers. But the relationship is not the self. The self
is the eternal that is eternally. The relationship is the way in which the finite-infinite couple, which
is not opposite to each other, meet, and of which the self is agent and patient. Is the relationship, in
the words of Levinas, an ipseity, a self that does not carry its identity as an themed entity for
consciousness, but which is the possibility of a "me" [moi], that is, "an identity of oneself that
would come about by way of the impossibility of letting oneself be replaced”10? The relationship is
the eternal un-finished, this is, it is that which is only eternally, which is only being eternal. At all
times, the infinite watches over the finite, while the finite happens infinitely. That is why the self is
not the relationship but the relating to itself, when the relationship is time. Time is what announces
the finite in the infinite, and vice versa, what reveals and is revealed through a self that cannot be-
abandoned. Or, as Heidegger would say, time is temporary.
Now, Kierkegaard locates the origin of the sickness unto death, which he has defined as
hopelessness, in the relationship11 , which we have understood as time. But he has not identified
hopelessness with time. Kierkegaard asks, “Where, then, does the despair come from? From the
relation in which the synthesis relates itself to itself”12. For Kierkegaard, despair is an alienated
relationship, an unbalanced tension, in which the synthesis, the self, has been faced up against the
reality of its own death in the form of an experience that does not end, and that declares its synthetic
action as responsibility. It is a recrudescence of hope that yearns to wait no more. Consequently, the
self goes from a constantly return-to-itself to a perpetually escape-from-itself. Death is no longer
the worst, for there is an even greater badness for which death has properly become hope. Thus,
despair consumes the firming action of the self, leaving it as pure passivity. It goes from an original
"having to be" to a timely "having no time”. In despair, time does not tempor but counts, it shows
itself gross and naked, violent. The finite and the infinite loses their harmonic tension and are
discovered in contradiction: the self as a burden, and time as a countdown. In his escape, the self
denies death because it first denies itself. An attitude that Max Scheler understands the modern man
has adopted as natural13.

2.2. The flee - Scheler and the Intuition of Death

From the very beginning, Scheler states that, "we have to reject with the greatest energy this
idea that makes of the idea of death a generic, purely empirical concept.”14 Death is not the mere
cessation of vital functions, nor the impassable wall against which, eventually, every living thing
crash. Death is not a dark force that reaches existence from a strange and alien sphere, so as in
Landsberg, but it is "already in every ‘phase of life’, however small, and in the very structure of
how we experience it.”15 We have seen through Kierkegaard that despair (hope-less-ness) opened to
an experience of death, without this experience defining what death properly was. We defended the

10 Levinas, Ibid. p. 20.

11 ”When death is the greatest danger, we hope for life; but when we learn to know the even greater danger, we hope for
death. When the danger is so great that death becomes the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able
to die”. Kierkegaard, Ibíd., p. 18.
12 Ibíd., p. 16.
13 Scheler, Max (2001), Muerte y supervivencia, Madrid, Ediciones Encuentro, S.L., p. 16.
14“Tenemos que rechazar con la mayor energía esta idea que hace del concepto de la muerte un concepto genérico,
puramente empírico”; Ibíd., p. 17. (This, and all the quotes from this book, are my own translation).
15 Ibíd., p. 17.
idea that Kierkegaard’s relationship should be recognized as time; a relationship between the finite-
infinite couple synthesized by a self-ethical action constitutive of the self. Hence, making of the ego
temporary in as much a relational synthesis of time; or, by using a Heideggerian formula, the way in
which time was given its there. Scheler, on the other hand, will go one step further. For Scheler,
time is death, and death is in continuum me. Death would be the affirmation as much as it gives
closure to the self, and this its articulation as much as it goes towards it.
Now, how are we to understand this "going towards death" referred to by Scheler? Even
more, in what original sense is death revealed to the individual if through its obvious event as the
end of existence? The first question refers to the special relationship between time and death. Being
able to respond this question is the answer to the latter.
"Going towards death" has nothing to do with a lineal succession on the subject’ state of
being that would lead him to the end of its existence, framed in an objective plane, which would be,
one, illustration, and two, measure unit of said movement. But neither does it refer to any kind of
revolt of the person’s vital impulse. On the contrary, it is that impulse. By "going towards death"
Scheler understands that the subject’s death is already given in his existence at all times, and that
existing is nothing more than the realization of that death. In this sense, of the subject, is not death,
both, the substrate and the opposite of change? To understand it, we have to reverse the Aristotelian
order of generation. Death is not the step of being determined to its indeterminate being, but the
potency that pushes existence forward to its own concretion in opposition. But the achievement of
the opposite is rather the absolute determination of the self-being. The artificiality of modern men,
that Scheler refers, is that this man does not "die for himself, but for others, and that himself will
eventually die just as an 'other' for others.”16 This way, Scheler places death in the ontological
framework of the subject. Yet not as a “frame casually added to the picture of each of the psychic or
physiological processes, but a frame that belongs to the picture itself, and without which it would
not be the picture of a life.”17
However, Scheler indicates that only on the condition of a natural rejection to death (vital
impulse) one's own existence can be thrown into daily tasks. In this contingency there is a friction
between opposites, death-life, whose synthesis reveals the identity of the self, existence, which
Scheler understands is spirit. Hence he affirms that the subject must die his own death for himself.
But did we not say that death constituted precisely this vital impulse? Yes. Death affirms denying,
or closes constituting. For Scheler, meaning is a preterite, it is always a "has been”. The expression
“is”, which colloquially affirms as it identifies (“is a doctor”, “is a teacher”, etc.), ontologically,
refers to the tension between affirmation and negation, in which the former pushes the closure
forward, while the latter resists all determination. The natural rejection that Scheler claims identifies
modern men comes by precisely inverting these values. But when the negation is negated as the
resistance of all determination, the subject turns to that in which no tension resonates and whose
content already reveals a certain meaning: things. That is why Scheler says that, "what the modern
man sees and thinks, and how he sees and thinks it, will be the consequence of the way in which
this man manipulates things.”18 Any relation with others passes through this prism in which "work
and profit become their own impulses, and henceforth infinite.” Hence the criticism that Bernard N.
Schumacher makes to Scheler is inadequate. Schumacher affirms that Scheler has dismissed the
other’s presence as an essential element to achieve any authentic experience and knowledge of

16 Ibíd., p. 41.
17 Ibíd., p. 27.
18 Ibíd-, p. 37.
death.19 But the relationship with the other is already discovered alienated as a first and original
alienation of the self with its own death prevails; death, which due to its ontological significance,
Scheler understands, is condition for all experience.
Now, how does man manage to achieve knowledge of his own mortality if not through
experiencing the other? Where can man deduces the certainty of his own death from if not from
empirical observation? And hence, what access can knowledge have to its intrinsic ontological
structure if any attempt to do so presupposes an essential impossibility?According to Scheler, that
man is spirit entails that he has a special relationship with the background if the universe. Scheler
calls this metaphysics.20 Scheler understands philosophy as an “loving act of participation between
the core of human being with the essence of all things”.21 Philosophy is not a love that lacks [eros],
but one that opens world in harmonious communion with the essential. It is an openness that pushes
the subject out of himself, to absolute value, to infinity, and, above all, that is not motivated by
domination and manipulation. In this sense, philosophical action is rather an act of surrender that
lets things speak themselves as they are.
This act of renunciation reveals life as a "closed totality, on whose background all the
experiences and special destinies appear”22 The parallelism that Scheler refers when thinking about
the universe and thinking about life is pertinent23 . In as much as communion is participation in the
whole, there is a revealing lack that comes forward, not from the whole, but from within. To use a
Levinas quote: “It the totality there is nothing to think”. Nothingness shows itself as an intuition to
the subject that goes side by side with the affirmation of the self. Thinking being is inseparable from
thinking non-being. Because, the thought that goes towards itself and objectifies this selfness, even
aware of the cardinality of its object in time and space, apprehends it whole but not in its entirety.
Scheler deduces from this the "going towards death" that essentially constitutes existence, and for
which aging is only an empirical and second-order manifestation.
Paul Louis Landsberg has misunderstood the access to death Scheler grants to the subject.
He accuses him for having confused it with the experience of aging. That's why, Landsberg claims
expressly, “the human experience of the necessity of death reaches beyond biology, just as it
reaches beyond the data provided by the feeling of growing old.”24 Schumacher, in the same wake
as Landsberg, also senses that the access to death goes through an analysis of the aging process that
reveals the reality of death as an existence’s a priori.25 In both cases, the critic loses the kind of
understanding philosophy truly is for Scheler, and what it can provides. The modern man, who has
denied death, has first and foremost denied himself. He carries a guilt that pursues him. Man, who
has objectified time on the clock, lives mired in the immediacy of life's most elementary impulses.
Time is not the frame of possibility, but pressure and coercion. From the bottom of the analysis, it

19 Schumacher rejects “the possibility that a consciousness that is defined as a monad, closed to others, could know
with absolute certainty that it is mortal"” [In: Schumacher, Bernard N. (2018), Muerte y mortalidad en la filosofía
contemporánea, Barcelona, Alianza Editorial, S.L., p. 113 “la posibilidad de que una conciencia que se define como una
mónada sin ventanas, cerrada a los otros, pudiera conocer con absoluta certeza que es mortal”. Translation is mine.
20 Scheler, Max, Man’s place in the Cosmos.
21 Scheler, Max (1980), La esencia de la filosofía y la condición moral del conocer filosófico, Buenos Aires, Nova, p.
14. “[la] filosofía es la posibilidad del hombre de “participar en lo esencial de todas las cosas
posibles”(Translation is mine)
22 Scheler, Muerte y supervivencia, p. 28.
23 Ibíd
24 Landsberg, Paul Louis (2009), The Experience of Death, United Kingdom, Living Time Digital
25 Schumacher, Ibíd., p. 107.
pushes up to the surface the idea of an authentic death, which will ultimately be nothing more than a
true way of being.

2.3. De-subjectivization - Heidegger and the authenticity of death

In the first pages of Being and time, Heidegger already warns us that, “[e]very idea of a
‘subject’ still posits the subjectum ontologically along with it. [Therefore] the point of departure
from an initially given ego and subject totally fails to see the phenomena content of Dasein.”26
Heidegger understands that the history of philosophy, in relation to its questioning about being, is
marked by the attempt to either objectify the subject in being, or to subjectivate being into the
subject. He understands that the question about being cannot start from the security provided by the
ego because it, as it is, is also included in the interrogation.27 However, Heidegger attends that
being, in its being given, it’s shown [Anwesen] thrown [Geworfenheit] "in the world" [in der Welt],
there [Da]. The way in which being is revealed is through a question that does not float in a
vacuum, but that is rooted, taking care of circumstances, a question whose mere enunciation is
already a first answer. But then, who asks? What subject is Dasein? And if Heidegger say none28,
this must be understood in the double sense of the anonymity of an existence governed by the
impersonal One [das Man], and as a particular moment in the history of Being [Seyn]. This is why
Levinas would state that, “Dasein’s privilege resides in the fact that it exists ontologically. All that is
man, all his modalities, are adverbs: not properties but manners of being.”29 But if Dasein is no
subject, who is this that can die? And even more, in what sense are we to understand death as
Dasein's "most proper possibility", the "possibility of all impossibility"30, if Dasein does not attend
to any given identity? Why is death the "possibility of all impossibility" and not, as Sartre would
say, the "impossibility of all possibility”31 ?
To understand this possibility of absolute impossibility, first we need to understand what all
possibility consists of. First, Heidegger prefigures being-thrown [Da-sein] in a state of original
impropriety. But this may lead us to ask whether there is a possible state of property metaphysically
antecedent to the impropriety of being-thrown, or on the possibility of arriving at the property of the
"self" from the mere recognition of one’s own impropriety. This idea lies behind Mauricio
Gonzales’ affirmation that, “the drama of our daily coexistence consists on how to ‘take distance’ to
become properly ‘myself’; how to ‘singularize one self’.32 But none of these options seems correct.
Being-thrown is already and can only be improperly. That is, there is no being-thrown
metaphysically prior to the ontological impropriety of "being there" [Dasein]; and there is no being-
thrown that can overcome the improperly of the gerund through the reaffirmation of “self” “me”
"in the world”. That is why Heidegger says that, “[t]he One is an existential and belongs as a

26 Heidegger, Martin (1996), Being and Time, USA, State University of New York Press, p. 43.
27 Heidegger, Martin (2016), What is Metaphysics?, Jovian Press, p.
28 Being and Time, §25, p. 108-1110.
29 Levinas, Ibíd., p. 58.
30 Being and Time, p. 232.
31 Sartre, Jean Paul (1978), Being and Nothingness, a Phenomenological Essay on ontology, Colorado, Pocket Books,
p. 537.
32 Gonzales, Mauricio (2005), Fuera de casa o de la existencia impropia - Hacia otra lectura de Ser y tiempo, Bogotá,
Universidad de los Andes, p. 223. “el drama de nuestra coexistencia cotidiana consiste en cómo “tomar distancia” para
llegar a ser propiamente “yo mismo”; cómo singularizarse.” [Translation is mine].
primordial phenomenon to the positive constitution of Da-sein.”33 Or in other words, in the
impropriety of being-thrown, being is properly "being there”.
In this sense being is always "away from home" [als Un-zuhause], but existence is as in the
familiarity [Vertrautheit] of the house. His house is everyone’s, There, being “one self" is the act of
being like everyone else; and rejection always has within sight what it rejects, because its sense of
distancing comes from a sharp re-affirmation of what it flees from [die Flucht]. Hence Heidegger
says that,

“The they [das Man] maintains itself factically in the averageness of what is proper, what is
allowed, and what is not. Of what is granted success and what is not. This averageness, which
prescribes what can and may be ventured, watches over every expectation which thrusts itself to the
fore. Every priority is noiselessly squashed. overnight, everything primordial is flattened down as
something long since known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes something to be
manipulated. Every mystery loses its power. The care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential
tendency of Da-sein, which we call the leveling down of all possibilities of being.” 34

Two ideas seem clear from this quote. First, every possibility is referential, that is, every
possibility of being [Seinsmöglichkeit] references the averageness of existence
[Durchschnittlichkeit] and is referred to it. Yet this statement does not fall into any kind of ethical or
moral judgment. Here, the ontology of throwness [Geworfenheit] is prior to all value, and reaffirms
the publicness of existence as its factual [faktum] facticity [Faktizität]. Second, one must avoid any
idea that substantiates Dasein into an idea of subject. Dasein is the revelation of being as fallen
[Verfallenheit], that is, being-thrown. This throwness responds to a determined structure that
Heidegger calls "care" [Sorge], and that reveals an inexhaustible and original fault; a lack that is, at
the same time, the very being of possibility.35
Now, having analyzed the idea of possibility against the background of existence’s
averageness allows us to understand that that Heidegger characterizes death as the possibility of all
impossibility, and even more, as the “ownmost, nonreferential and unable to bypass potentiality of
being”36 is indeed loaded with a certain value. The possibility of absolute impossibility is the real
possibility, a possibility that does not come from the publicness of existence, nor it refers to it, and
neither can be overcome by it, in this double movement of affirmation and rejection in which the
self tried to distance itself from Them [das Man]. But nonreferential does not mean a-referential;
however, its reference is not to the averageness of existence, but to the event [Erignis] of being as
Enowning37 , that is, as a beginning and as an achievement, but at the same time as its ownmost true
self conclusion. If Heidegger's notion of death is seen on the horizon of his entire work, a strong
messianic sense seems to prevail, one that heralds a new beginning, a new coming. The

33 Being and Time, p. 121.

34 Ibíd., p. 119.
35 Ibíd., p. 219.
36 Ibíd., p. 232.
37 “Ereignis in German usually means ‘event’, but, as in many other instances, Heidegger likes to play with a wider
semantic field that opens up once we hear the word more literally by breaking it up into its two semantic components
er- and -eignis. The prefix er- carries the sense of a beginning motion or of an achievement, whereas -eignis refers to
the word eigen, which in German usually means ‘own’, but which is also at play in a word that is familiar to us from
Heidegger’s Being and Time, namely eigentlich, in English ‘proper’ or ‘authentic’. This has led scholars to translate
Ereignis not only as “event” but also with the neologism ‘enowning’, or as ‘appropriation’, or as 'the event of
appropriation’. “Erignis: The Even of Appropriation”, en: Heidegger, Martin (2010), Key Concepts, Ed. Bret W. Davis,
United Kingdom, Acumen, pp. 140-141.
nonreferentiality of death is heroic because, as Levinas points out, it is installed within the epic of
being38 . Heidegger depersonalizes death by placing it in the history of being, but singularizes it out
by giving it this redeeming and creative character. Sartre, who tries to disregard any essence prior to
existence, fails to free himself from the idea of an already constituted ego. The throwness that
constitutes his understanding of being in the world still maintains a deep subjective sense. And the
nothingness of death is an absolute nullity that differs completely from the existential nadifying
action of a for-itself essentially detached from the world. For Heidegger, on the other hand,
authentic death is not a simple nullity, just as existence is not recognized in the action of a nadifying
subject who, instead of being in the world, is on it; the authentic death is not a mere effect of
nothingness, but the breaking up with the publicness of existence by precisely showing its public
character. The nothingness of death is a blank space full of self-significance, standing as a new
reference whose origin stems from the reaffirmation of the self as being-total. Hence the
responsibility of "having to be" that anxiety [Angst] reveals, is responsibility to being. And while no
one can die my own death, it can be taken away.
At this point, it seems pertinent to make the following clarification. So far, the analysis has
seen death as an event of existence, and therefore, an event in the history of being, and not as an
essential configuration of the ontological constitution of Dasein. To the breakdown of Dasein’s
mortality in the existential analysis, Heidegger dedicates the epigraphs 46 to 53 of Being and Time.
From them follows a criticism not uncommon: the lack of reference to the other by a self that is, as
a possibility of being authentically, "being towards death”. For example, Levinas claims that, “[t]he
way in which being is with regard to its own nothingness is the oneself [soi-même]”39 ; from which
Byung-Chul Han has deduced that, “my death greatly reduces coexistence. [But] a different death
would be one that does not lead to a ‘lack of references’, but to referentiality; it would be a death
capable of breaking the impenetrability of the self to open it to the other.”40 However, if we
understand death as an event of existence in the history of being, the absence of references to the
other seems to blur. The lack of a certain subject in Dasein as being-thrown makes of death to
reference being, and not the averageness of existence — therefore its nonreferentiality — clothing
being as a whole, enlightening it, “clearing away coverings and obscurities.”41 The history of being
brings together all the entities that are Dasein, and not only the one that has ceased to "be in the
world.” Anxiety is not only the anguish of "having to be", but the ontological treasure of having to
be in responsibility of everything and everyone. The heroism of being towards death is the heroicity
of the Messiah.
And yet, Landsberg critics Heidegger for not seeing that, “[t]he anguish of death, and not
only the pain of dying, would be incomprehensible if the fundamental structure of our being did not
include the existential postulate of something beyond.”42 Landsberg understands that the
relationship with oneself, with the other, and even with the world, goes through this original
postulate which he recognizes as faith, and which, he thinks, shapes the existential structure of the
subject. Even time must be understood in the light of this existential faith. Through it, time is
organized as a movement towards the future, as fulfillment of the self, as trust and patience. True

38 “The person in his uniqueness and ipseity, which is authenticity (the ownmost or proper) itself, is traced back to this
epic of being [la geste d’être”; Levinas, Ibíd., p. 63.

39 Levinas, Ibíd., p. 56.

40 Han, Byung-Chul (2018), Muerte y alteridad, Barcelona, Herder Editorial S.L., p. 75. Translation is mine.

41 Being and time, p. 121.

42 Landsberg, Ibíd., p. 25.
time, revealed by faith, is one of freedom and personality, a time that is not directed towards
nothingness, but to being in a continuous and permanent formation of the person. That is why
Landsberg states that, “[a]t the root of all being there is an act, the affirmation of the self, the
affirmation of one’s own self discovered uniqueness moving towards its own realization, an
affirmation which implies the tendency to surpass the limits of time.”43 Yet, wouldn't the same
response to Sartre’s criticism also apply to Landsberg’s? Isn’t this subject of faith an ego that is on
the world and, even more, that is already constituted on it antecedently to its throwness? Moreover,
Landsberg affirms that anxiety only makes sense granted an ontologically prior faith, and still,
doesn’t the idea of faith on something higher presuppose the recognition of an original finitude,
which ultimately, is the concept upon which "being towards death" is built?
At this point, it is worth asking how valid the postulation of death as an ontological
infidelity can still be, and in what sense it can not only be innovative, but also shed light on the
possible ontological state of patients in vegetative state. Trying to respond to this is the task of the
last section.

3. Death as an ontological infidelity

Throughout the analysis of the three authors, Kierkegaard, Scheler and Heidegger, a
constant has been maintained: the spiritual reality of man. In Kierkegaard, the self was understood
as spirit in the sense of a synthesizing action between the finite and the infinite; it was eternal in as
much as an eternal re-affirmative return to itself. In that return to itself, of which time was both the
necessary and the possible condition, a particular experience was opened, that of dying death
without death being able to effectively arrive. This experience was recognized in hope-less-ness.
On the other hand, for Scheler the self was recognized as spirit in the light of a particular
communion that man was able to maintain with the whole. Properly, the spiritual was a relationship
based on renunciation and surrender, which we called love, and from which things were given word
and speech on their own. The finite was subsumed to the infinite, and one and the other were able to
recognize itself on each other in what Scheler understood was philosophy. This special relationship
opened man to the reality of his own death as an original constitutive of himself. To think of oneself
was to cope with one’s own cardinality, granting access to the self as whole though not in its
entirety. This revealed an essential and constitutive nothingness.
Finally, in Heidegger the spirituality of being was only intuited in the responsibility of
being-thrown [Dasein] on the horizon of its own history; the finite was subsumed to the infinite as
the latter sheltered the former. The spiritual was shown through the special relationship between
man and his own death as a redemptive potentiality in the epic of being. Death, as an individual act,
referred to everything and everyone, thus providing the possibility of a new beginning and a new
referentiality. This way, the authenticity of death drew the idea of a messianic heroism that,
although without references, did not remain a-referential.
Only if we accept man’s spiritual reality can we understand Voltaire’s statement that, “the
human race is the only one that knows that it must die.”44 It is this reality what reveals death as a
unique and characteristic phenomenon of human being. That's why these three elements, —
hopelessness as an act of dying death, love as a renouncing and surrounding communion, and the

43 Landsberg, Ibíd., p. 25.

44Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Vol. 14, p. 63. Quoted in: Landsberg, Paul Louis (2010), The Experience of
Death, p. 3.
heroicity of finitude —, seem to give us the necessary guidelines from which to build an idea of
death as "ontological infidelity.”
Now, at the beginning of this paper we echoed an article that asked what the ontological
status of patients in PermVS was. However, the question has now changed. It is not so much about
the patient itself, but about the relative. That is, what is the ontological status of people close to
someone declared in PermVS? If we stick to the analysis done so far, these patients have been taken
away from the possibility of their own death, understood this as the possibility of absolute
impossibility, and as the ownmost, nonreferential and impossible to bypass possibility. And still,
what remains of them awaits in their relatives. It is through their particular experience of having
someone close in a space in-between which can give us access to the experience of death. Here the
spirituality of man is not in an eternal return that relates itself to itself, but an absolute surrender to
the other, a renouncement that lets the other speak. But the other has no longer a word. The self
awaits an answer that does not come; awaits on the awareness of nothingness, but not a constitutive
nothingness, — the necessary and possible condition of all waiting—, but an effective nothingness.
An absence. The eternal of the relationship, that goes from the self to the other by way of
visualizing the infinite in the other’ selfspeech, and that other that responds to one’ supplication, is
truncated, betrayed, for the answer is rather a forced silence. The responsibility of the other
regarding his own death now rests rest upon oneself, who must now face a double burden, his own
and that of the loved one.
At this point a new feeling comes up that should not be overlooked: guilt. Is guilt an original
phenomenon capable of granting an access to death other than that which can be given to us by
anxiety [Angst]? If so, Heidegger's mistake does not lie so much in having made of the latter a type
of primordial access to nothingness, as Landsberg argues, but of having understood in it the only
possible one. Guilt directs the self towards the other, it is always transcendental, and speaks about
the self in relation to the other. If death is to be understood as an intersubjective phenomenon, and
infidelity is necessarily an intersubjective phenomenon, guilt plays a relevant role in its analysis. In
the heart of responsibility lies oneself’s retirement to let the other speak; it is born from as an action
of listening that once granted cannot be denied without betraying. Landsberg has seen the abyss in
infidelity because he recognizes love as an act of faith and hope. However, his mistake has been to
confuse it with an eros that in its lacking, looks to possess, and in its possession devaluates what
once was absolutely desired. Faith does not reclaim, but looks the abyss to its face and sees it
calmly.
But in the double responsibility of the self to its own death, and to the other and his death
taken away, guilt reveals death as a question which answer can only come from our word or our
silence.
To conclude, it should be noted some ambiguity in the analysis. The difficulty of the subject
makes it particularly difficult to draw the line that divides the ontic from the ontological. We are
aware that this, at times, seems to have blurred. However we believe it has been necessary in order
to maintain a line of coherency in the argumentation. At the same time we take this fault as the
possibility of continuing delving into the peculiarity of death as an ontological infidelity. We also
understand that other aspects of the subject have in turn been neglected or rather omitted, especially
in relation to the relationship between death and corporality. What the body can tell us about death
is something still to be investigated, and a section that deserves our full attention. For now, we are
content for having drawn enough lines to start addressing the issue of death from the perspective of
infidelity.
Bibliography

Frings, Manfred S. (2003), Lifetime, Max Scheler’s Philosophy of Time. A first Inquiry and
Presentation, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Gonzales, Mauricio (2005), Fuera de casa o de la existencia impropia - Hacia otra lectura de Ser y
tiempo, Bogotá, Universidad de los Andes.

Heidegger, Martin: _(2012), El ser y el tiempo, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica.

_(1996), Being and Time, Albany, State University of New York Press.

_(2012), ¿Qué es metafísica?, Madrid, Alianza.

_(2010), Key Concepts, Ed. Bret W. Davis, United Kingdom, Acumen.

_(1999), Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana, Indiana

University Press.

Han, Byung-Chul (2018), Muerte y alteridad, Barcelona, Herder Editorial S.L.

Kierkegaard, Soren (1980), The Sickness not Death, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University
Press

Levinas, Emmanuel (1993), God, Death, and Time, Princeton University Press.

Landsberg, Paul Louis (2009), The Experience of Death, United Kingdom, Living Time Digital.

Rodríguez, Ramón: _(2006), Heidegger y la crisis de la época moderna, Madrid, Síntesis.

_(2015), Ser y tiempo de Martin Heidegger. Un comentario fenomenológico,

Madrid, Tecnos.

Sartre, Jean Paul : _(1978), Being and Nothingness, a Phenomenological Essay on ontology,
Colorado, Pocket Books.

_(2016), El ser y la nada, España, Editorial Losada, S.L.

Scheler, Max: _(2001), Muerte y supervivencia, Madrid, Ediciones Encuentro, S.L.

_(2017), El puesto del hombre en el cosmos, España, Editorial Losada, S.L.

_(1980), La esencia de la filosofía y la condición moral del conocer filosófico,

Buenos Aires, Nova,

_(1957), Esencia y forma de la simpatía, Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, S.L.

 _(1974), Centennial Essays, Netherlands, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.

Schumacher, Bernard N. (2018), Muerte y mortalidad en la filosofía contemporánea, Barcelona,

Alianza Editorial, S.L.

Von Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm (1997), La segunda mitad de Ser y tiempo, Madrid, Editorial
Trotta, S.L.

Artículos

Holland, S., Kitzinger, C., & Kitzinger, J. (2014). Death, treatment decisions and the permanent
vegetative state: evidence from families and experts. Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 17(3),
413–423. doi:10.1007/s11019-013-9540-y