Philosophy

“Rien n’arrive ni comme on l’espère, ni comme on le craint. Nothing really happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will.”1 Améry appropriates this quote of Proust to highlight how our imaginative powers can never approach its reality during an extreme event. This failure of what he coins our anticipatory imagination is depicted in his phenomenological account of torture, an event whose extremity is later compared to another embodied experience: that of aging. Equating torture with aging may seem shocking to some, and Améry was critiqued for suggesting such a parallel, particularly since he narrates a lived experience with the latter at the mere age of fifty-five. He revisits this critique in the preface to the fourth edition of On Aging: Revolt and Resignation where he states:

"Today as much as yesterday I think that society has to undertake everything to relieve old and aging persons of their unpleasant destiny. And at the same time I stick to my position that all high- minded and reverential efforts in this direction, though indeed capable of being somewhat soothing- are still not capable of changing anything fundamental about the tragic hardship of aging." - Jean Améry, On Aging [Améry’s emphasis]

The “today” of society that Améry referenced was 1977. But what about today? Is Améry correct in projecting that despite our best efforts nothing fundamental can change the quite unbearable experience of aging? Are attempts to aid the aging complicit in a “vile dupery” that ends in “metaphorically empty” phrases such as “rest in peace”?3 I would like to pose these questions in the wake of a heated debate in France regarding the legality of assisted suicide for aging persons (Améry took his own life and sees suicide as an acceptable form of revolt and resignation, the only authentic choices left to the aging). Thus, this paper seeks to not only dissect his account of aging (and the failure of anticipatory imagination in futural projections of it) but to ask whether his philosophy could be read alongside current French thinkers to better assess comment mourir dans la dignité.

Birds do it, bees do it…does Dasein do it? This question is less about whether members of Heidegger's community have sex and more about whether the notion of sexual difference plays a primordial role in the existential make-up of a community. John Haugeland states, " Dasein is neither people nor their being but rather a way of life shared by members of some community. 1 " What is shared here is an understanding of being that is, in a certain way, chained to a body that is historically contingent. 2 Does the fact that bodies are sexed say [Sagen/Zeigen] anything about our way of Being? To answer the opening question, according to Heidegger, Dasein doesn't do it. That bodies are sexed merits no serious analysis, and the act of having sex, despite its being responsible for the infinite propagation of beings (for whom Being is an issue) is of no ontological significance: Ni homme, ni femme-c'est un Dasein. This phrase is a reformulation of Guenther Anders' statement, " Ni homme, ni capucin-c'est un Dasein ". 3 Neither surrendering to the desires or material concerns of man, nor transcending to the supra-natural world of the divine, Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein is one of pseudo-concreteness. Dasein is the middleman, forgetful of the milieu 4. If ancient metaphysicians forgot the meaning of Being [ϕνσις] by neglecting its duality, Heidegger is equally guilty in overlooking the dynamic unfolding of the dialectic of sex.

Martin Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art moves beyond an aesthetic reading of the artwork that focuses on questions of judgment towards a hermeneutic understanding of art as a realm where truth happens. Such a truth presents itself as an aletheiac unfolding of the strife between Earth and World, a tension revelatory of our historical situation. To better understand this truth, Heidegger turns to a painting of Van Gogh’s shoes, providing an account of the artwork that moves beyond the “thingly” character of the shoes to its “equipmental being”. That he attributes Van Gogh’s shoes to a peasant woman is telling in that her being female points to a gendered relation between woman and Earth. However, in only focusing on the equipmental being of her shoes and her labor in the fields, a historical truth about the tension between her labor of reproduction and production, a strain inherent in the Earth/World dynamic becomes eclipsed. This tension is felt as a reckoning of, not only one’s finitude, but of one’s natality. Heidegger looks to Van Gogh’s shoes and analyzes how toils in the field set up a world; however, as Gaston Bachelard notes, “Before he is ‘cast into the world,’ as claimed by certain hasty metaphysicians, man is laid in the cradle of the house.” To explore our natal origin that begins in the cradle and stretches along to our death, this paper presents a hermeneutic reading of two works of art, Berthe Morisot’s “Cradle” and “Wet Nurse”, suggesting that in seeking an origin of the work of art and the tension that resides there, an understanding of reproduction  (and its relation to production) should complement Heidegger’s treatment of the artwork.

“In the beginning there was hunger.”  This opening quote from Levinas sets the stage for Pelluchon’s ethico-political project that revamps classical phenomenology’s intentionality of the ego by focusing on the sensing and enjoyment of the “gourmet cogito” who “lives from” and finds nourishment in a world that cannot be reduced to a noeme. She critiques Heidegger’s existential analytic and focuses on an ontology where our love of life precedes our being-towards-death, before boldly mapping out a new social pact, founded on the structures of existence (existentials) that her phenomenology of nourishment reveals.