Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 40, No.

1, January 2009

DEATH, FRIENDSHIP AND THE ORIGINS OF

SUBJECTIVITY: SZ 47 AND THE BURIAL OF
AUGUSTINE
JOSEPH J. TINGUELY
The purpose of this essay is to indicate the extent to which there is a
privileged relationship between the death of a friend and an understanding of
what it means to be a human self or a subject. In particular this claim is raised
against Heidegger who in 47 of Being and Time seems to have considered
and explicitly denied any such connection but on closer review turns out to
have in fact ignored it altogether. Heideggers neglect of the question of
friendship in general and the death of a friend in particular could be dismissed
as an idiosyncrasy of one mans character or as an indication of the special
challenges of the first-person phenomenological viewpoint to capture the
social nature of the subject, were it not that Heideggers treatment of a dead
friend is uncannily consistent, despite a few notable exceptions, with the wider
philosophical tradition. However, to reject altogether the framework of
Heideggers thought on account of this all too common neglect of an others
death would be too steep a price to pay given the power of his existential
analysis to bring into view such insights as the ready-to-hand (zuhanden)
priority of being, our embeddedness in a world with others (Mitsein), and an
unflinching affirmation of our finitude (Sein-zum-Tode). And yet, despite
Heideggers otherwise bold reflections on death, the rather strange experience
of an others dying is politely passed over not only by the philosophical
tradition of which Heidegger is a part but also, it seems to me at least, in the
contemporary popularity of all things intersubjective. In spite of this
awkward silence, this essay aims to promote a revised and robust
Heideggerian spirit capable of wrestling back from the letter of Heideggers
text the irreducible phenomenological significance of an others death. In other
words, Heideggers particular treatment of the death of an other in 47 can be
shown to be at odds with the very human being-in-the-world which
Heideggerian commitments on the whole bring into view.
The strategy of this essay for highlighting the discrepancy between the spirit
and the letter of a Heideggerian account will be to locate a possible conception
of otherness open to Heidegger in his early Freiburg lectures of 1920-1921.1 In
these recently published original source materials we can see retrospectively
the introduction and formation of many of the crucial characters of what would
become the existential analysis of Sein und Zeit. By exposing a road open to
Heidegger but not taken, these lectures point to a decisive turning point in the
development of Mitsein, of the human self who exists always already along
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with others. It is, in particular, the 1921 summer lecture course on Augustine in
which Heidegger crucially forgoes a specific model of intersubjectivity:
namely, friendship. In light of this decision to conceive of otherness without
friendship, it is no coincidence that when Heidegger does explicitly raise the
question of the death of another in 47 of Sein und Zeit, the other who dies is
no friend at all but just some random strangerthe kind that one reads about
in the obituaries with a kind of idle curiosity (SZ 239).2 My suggestion then is
that it is precisely because Heidegger considers only the death of a stranger, just
one more instance of das Man, rather than anybody that one actually cares for,
that he is able to dismiss the significance of the death of another. Against the
letter of Heideggers texts, this essay will argue that when a friend dies one
loses not only her friends presence but also something of her own (eigen),
something authentic (eigentlich). In sum, the goal of this essay is to show the
sense in which there is a genuine kind of human being-in-the-world which can
be neither achieved nor understood apart from an acknowledgement of the
finitude of ones friends.
Death and Otherness
Heidegger is by no means unaware that the death of an other offers a
potentially rich store of phenomenological insight into our own lived
subjectivity. He in fact explicitly raises the question of The Possibility of
Experiencing the Death of Others in 47 of Sein und Zeit. In an earlier draft
of this section used as the text for a 1925 lecture course (published as History
of the Concept of Time) Heidegger writes:
But there still seems to be a way to make Dasein in its wholeness the theme of a
characterization of being, particularly if we do not lose sight of a character of Dasein which
we have already demonstrated. Dasein as being-in the world, we said earlier, is at the same
time being-with-one-another. Insofar as death for Dasein constitutes being-at-an-end in the
sense of no longer being Dasein, death in fact prevents me from having and experiencing my
own Dasein in its wholeness. But this possibility still remains for the other with whom this
Dasein as being-with once was. The Dasein which still is for the time being as being-with
others has the possibility of regarding the Dasein of others as concluded and, it seems, to read
off in it the totality of being of such an entity.3

Among other things, here Heidegger raises the possibility that one way to
understand ones own subjectivity is to analyze the death, or finitude, not of
oneself but of others. But this strategy is immediately dismissed as a dubious
bit of information. It is the ensuing demonstration why this alternative is in
principle inappropriate that becomes expanded into 47 of SZ.
To project ahead, the goal of 47 is to demonstrate in no uncertain terms
that the death of others cannot serve as a substitute theme (SZ 238) in the
attempt to bring the wholeness of Daseins subjective self-understanding into
view. After Heidegger has dismissed the possibility that the death of an other
can really bring us to the heart of ones own subjectivity, he will carefully
22

proceed to argue that Dasein can nevertheless still achieve an understanding of

its own death, and thereby its own totality and finitude, while still living. That
is, after disqualifying the possibility that the death of an other provides a
sufficient understanding of human subjectivity, Heidegger then methodically
builds up to the conclusion that Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety
(SZ 266). Anxiety (Angst) is a term Heidegger uses to token that peculiar
mood in which a living Dasein reflects upon its own impending death. In his
final analysis, it is only in the throes of anxiety that Dasein can get a sufficient
grip upon its own essential finitude. In other words, Heidegger thinks he needs
to dismiss the significance of the death of an other so as to clear the way for
the experience of anxiety which alone can shake Dasein to its existential core
thereby finally bringing into full view the full but finite structure of Daseins
subjectivity.
Upon closer review, however, Heideggers dismissal of the significance of
the death of an other as a means for understanding ones own subjectivity
works only given a rather blunt and questionable conception of
intersubjectivity.4 And in so far as Heideggers rejection of the death of an
other builds uncritically from a questionable, albeit traditional, understanding
of otherness we have reason to suspect that Heidegger has failed to recognize
just what death as experienced in Others (SZ 239) really means for ones
own finite subjectivity.
47 and the Augustinian Palimpsest
Heidegger titles 47 of Being and Time The Possibility of Experiencing
the Death of Others, and the Possibility of Getting a Whole Dasein into our
Grasp. It is by no means coincidental that even in this way of framing of the
paradox, Heidegger echoes the writings of Augustine, who grapples with just
this problem in chapter XIII.9 of City of God entitled Problems about the
meaning of death, dying, dead.5 There is good reason to think that
Heidegger would have been intimately familiar with Augustines discussion of
death. Recent scholarship has begun to unearth Heideggers early engagement
with the existential kernel of early or primal Christian thought, as he called
it.6 In the 1921 Summer Semester Lecture course Augustine and NeoPlatonism, and specifically in the lectures on Augustines Confessions,
Heidegger first introduces no less an important concept as care itself.7 More
specifically, it is with his treatment of Augustines notion of cura in chapters
28 and 29 of Book X of the Confessions that Heidegger introduces the notion
of self-concern (sich bekmmern) which bears the structural antecedents of
the phenomenon that will be analyzed as the care (Sorge) structure at the
heart of SZ.8
But it is precisely because Heidegger was so familiar with Augustines
writings, and the Confessions in particular, that it is telling that he would fail
23

to locate properly what he himself praises as the very kernel of Augustines

existential insight, that is, the famous quaestio mihi factus sum.9 It is this
quaestio, the act of self-questioning, that Heidegger celebrates as
philosophys inaugural turn inward towards the discovery of subjectivity.
Always on the lookout for factical, existentiell, or even literary
attestation (Zeugnis)10 for his existential analyses of Daseins subjective
lived experience, Heidegger would surely have been aware that the experience
which first precipitates Augustines heart-wrenching quaestio mihi factus
sum does not lie in Book X (a philosophical reflection on memory and
temptation), the sole text of the 1921 lecture course, but follows immediately
in the aftermath of the death of his friend in Book IV. So while on the one hand
Heidegger highly praises Augustines quaestio mihi factus sum for its
radical turning of philosophy inward toward subjective self-scrutiny, on the
other hand Heidegger fails to register the rather unmistakable fact that
Augustine is turned inward by nothing less than the death of his friend.11 In no
uncertain terms does Augustine report that it was amidst the agony and grief
at the loss of his friend that he first turns on himself: I had become a puzzle
to myself, asking my soul again and again Why are you downcast? Why do
you distress me? But my soul had no answer to give (IV.4).12
In other words, Heidegger would have known full well the Augustinian
challenge to which he would have to respond in eventually dismissing the
existential significance of the death of an other. It is therefore no surprise that
he raises the possibility of a deep philosophical meaning in the face of an
others death. And, to be sure, Heideggers analysis of the death of an other is
by no means nave. When he notes that the end of the entity qua Dasein is the
beginning of the same entity qua something present at hand, he is quick to
point out that this something which is just-present-at-hand-and-no-more is
more than a lifeless material Thing. That is, the experience of another
Daseins death is not that of verifying that his body is now as non-responsive
as a sack of potatoes.13 Rather the survivors relate to the dead Dasein in a
specific mode of tarrying alongside him in their mourning and
commemoration, those who have remained behind are with him, in a mode of
respectful solicitude. (SZ 238)
Heideggers polite and impersonal depiction of the death of the other is
hardly the existentially fraught sorrow of Augustines Confessions; but neither
is it for that matter formally incorrect. That is, if one were to begin with a
certain set of notions about self-understanding and its relation to otherness
Heideggers conclusions would follow consistently. What might be
structurally or phenomenologically contestable, however, are those notions
themselves as they are revealed in what follows.
The greater the phenomenal appropriateness with which we take the no-longer-Dasein of the
deceased, the more plainly is it shown that in such Being-with the dead, the authentic Being-

24

come-to-an end of the deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience.
Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain.
In suffering this loss, however, we have no access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying
man suffers. The dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense
[im genuinen Sinne]; at most we are always just there alongside. (H 238f)

Of course nobody alive would argue that in the death of the other those who
remain have been through an identical experience of dying, that they know
in that sense what the departed had undergone or suffered in her death. But
does it follow that those who remain, those who mourn the loss of friend or
family have no access to the loss-of-Being? Has Heidegger thereby shown
that the dying of Others cannot be in a genuine sense an essential
experience of ones own subjective self-understanding?
Augustines own account of the burden and desolation of surviving the
death of his friend offers a different testimony (Zeugnis):
My heart grew sombre with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only death. My own country
became a torment and my own home a grotesque mode of misery. All that we had done
together was now a grim ordeal without him. My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he
was not there to be seen. I hated all the places we had known together (IV.4)

Far from being at mostjust there alongside Augustine rather speaks to

his own grief at the irredeemable loss in the absence of his friend, that is,
something of his own being that can never be recovered no matter where his
eyes search. The grief which Augustine recounts exposes a loss of being borne
not just by his friend but also suffered on Augustines part as something
suddenly and irrecoverably vanished from his own practices and view on the
world. Already we can begin to see a meaningful sense in which Augustines
own being and self-understanding are tied up with the being of his friend and
are revealed as such in his friends death.
As an extreme or limit case the death of an other has the power to reveal in
a clear light the way in which a familiar set of practices and views on the
world, which one identifies intimately as ones own, can be tied up in the
practices and views of an other. But there are also kinds of situations other
than the extreme case of death that tread on these same dependencies. Even
before his friends death, Augustine begins to realize that his own selfunderstanding and self-constitution is tied up in his intersubjective relations,
in particular with a small group of friends. The famous and misadventurous
story of stealing pears with his friends from his neighbors tree only to toss
them to pigs is a case in point. In trying to explain the utterly useless, wasteful
transgression or sin Augustine repeatedly insists upon the irreducibly social
nature of the act. Three times he denies full responsibility: I would not have
done it on my own, I am quite sure that I would have never done this thing
on my own, and by myself I would not have committed that robbery (II.9).
By drawing attention to the destructive (sinful) potential of our social
practices, Augustine reveals an everyday sense in which in friendship with
25

others, for better or for worse, we are someone wholly different than we would
be left entirely alone. It is given this prior insight into his own souls fateful tie
to his friends in Book II that the terrifying loss of his friend in Book IV can
precipitate the final inward push into the quaestio mihi factus sum.
Thus Augustine only comes into his own in an exchange with his friends.
But if in the absence of his friends his own soul would not have had the
occasion to steal the pears and thus later bear the guilt, the remorseful sense of
his own salvation compromised, it follows that when his friend dies so too dies
something of his own soul, that is, part of his ownmost Being. Because the
very occasion for Augustine being himself was tied up with his friends, the
loss-of-Being in the death of his friend was not in his case something that
at most we are always just there alongside but is rather something he was
violently forced to undergo and suffer through. Thus the grief which
Augustine so powerfully records attests that what is irrecoverably lost is not
just someone else, but in a very significant sense the loss of oneself.
The Other vs. an other
Augustines candid description of the death of his friend calls into question
the premises of Heideggers particular conception of Mitsein and by extension
how we understand what it means to be an individual human subject in the
midst of others. But the reason that Heideggers treatment of the death of an
other is worth our attention is that in his neglect of the experience of friendship
he reveals a rather all too familiar way in those of us who find ourselves
speaking about the essentially socially embedded nature of human being think
about intersubjectivity in terms of The Other. But the very idea of friendship
means precisely that otherness is not one-size-fits-all. That is to say, there is a
qualitatively different experience of the otherness as The Other whom I pass
on the street or pay at a restaurant and an other who is always this particular
one, not capable of being replaced or substituted like waiters on a shift change.
It might even be the mark of friendship that it would be inappropriate to send
a substitute when it was you in particular who was called for.14
As an extreme or limit case, it is the experience of the death of an other that
demonstrates a categorical difference between The Other in general and an
other in particular. Quite simply the death of the Other includes the loss of
any and every other. But the death of a friend, is completely singular; it
refers to a specific individual here and now that I can know and intimately
care for but cannot possibly replace. There is then something about death itself
that remains hidden and elusive in the absence of friendship. So, on one hand,
John Donne is not wrong to notice that Any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.15 On the other hand, the experience of hearing
mankinds funeral knell is entirely different than choking down ones own
26

muted sobs at the wake of a close friend. One feels grief precisely not for
mankind as a species that dies in each death and is born in each birth and
thereby lives on immortally, but grieves for this one here, my friend, who will
not be reborn. Thus it would be somewhat disingenuous to lament at each
instance of the death of The Other, das Man, who in any event always lives
on in an eternal recurrence of new birth. But it is almost impossible not to be
shattered by the loss of ones friend who, on the contrary, will in fact never
return. Mankind, The Other, das Man out on the street lives on. My friend,
on the contrary, is really dead, once and for all. It is precisely because only the
particular is truly mortal that Augustine shudders at the sight of his dead
friend, I shrank from death, for fear that one whom I had loved so well
might then be wholly dead (ne totus ille moreretur, IV.6, emphasis added).
We can see then through the experience of Augustine the extent to which there
is a privileged link between our understanding of friendship and our
understanding of death.
It is because the experience of the death of a friend has a unique once and
for all quality that it may well be deeper reaching phenomenologically, not
only than the death of a random stranger, but even than the anxiety in the face
of ones own looming mortality. Whereas we might despair of a strangers
death we might also take hope of the possibility of new birth. But in no
momentary lapse of weakness can we sink back into the blissful or comforting
forgetting of our friends death in the way that we can, and for most practical
purposes must, inauthentically forget our own death in order to carry on with
life.16 In other words, while it may be advisable to forget my own impending
oblivion if I want to go out on a Friday evening and have a couple of beers with
some friends, it would be entirely inexcusable to explain to my friends spouse
that I called to invite him out for the evening because I momentarily forgot that
he passed away a few months ago. Even anxiety can and often must be
relinquished in the blissful forgetfulness of inauthenticity. The death of the
friend, on the other hand, is final and cannot be forgotten. It is a ruthless and
relentless memento mori.
The Vulnerabilities of Friendship as a Glimpse into the Ready-to-Hand
The suggestion of this essay then is that there is in a meaningful sense a
privileged relationship between the death of a friend and ones own practical
and reflective self-understanding. But we need not be reckless with this point
which would be obviously absurd if taken to mean that my best mate must first
die tragically and prematurely before I can ever become aware of my lived
togetherness with particular others. First of all, it was not my friend who died
but Augustines, which occasioned the writing of this essay. Secondly, there
are other less extreme, everyday experiences which can also prompt similar
kinds of self-reflection, such as the feeling of guilt for taking part in a
27

collective action. Reading and appreciating Augustines Confessions could be

another everyday way of recognizing the implications of friendship for firstperson self-understanding.
The problem then becomes how, without relinquishing the fruitful insights
of Heideggers existential analysis, we can still work our way out of a position
from which it appears that access to ones own self-understanding is only
really possible in the mood of anxiety in the face of ones own impending
death. It is from within this viewpoint that it appears the only kind of
authenticity one can realize would have to be utterly solitary. Of course there
is no reason why some individual of mature age couldnt opt to live a solitary
life, restricting relations with others to those minimal interactions required to
survive. And there is no reason why such a recluse could not achieve some
kind of authentic self-appreciation. Indeed, for such a person anxiety in the
face of ones own looming death does seem to be the only available
mechanism for bringing the whole of ones Dasein into view, precisely as
Heidegger argues. But it does not follow that the philosophical resources
available to a recluse for genuine self-understanding need to be the only
philosophical resources open for the rest of us. The point here is that whether
or not isolation is a second best kind of life, anxiety really is a second best
mode of self-understanding as compared to the kind of self-awareness exposed
by the vulnerabilities faced by those of us who live in friendship.
The way I propose in this essay to support this claim and thus work out of
the ruts of Heideggers well-worn account is to turn in a Heideggerian spirit
to examples of literary attestation17 in which actual treatments of the death
of a friend destabilize the quick rejection of any authentic self-awareness
dependent upon others. Augustine is a particularly useful example since we
have reason to believe that the Confessions were practically on Heideggers
lap as he formulated key ingredients of Being and Time. But other candidates
can be found as well. Certain essays of Montaigne (discussed below) or
poetic verses of George Santayana18 offer a similar insight into the way the
death of a loved one changes the very intimate ways one understands and acts
in the world. There is, of course, hardly anything new or uncommon about the
experience of grief and the expression of this sorrow in art or culture. What
is uncommon, as I will later discuss, are the occasions on which such
treatments find voice in traditional modes of philosophical expression. They
tend rather to crop up in poetry, autobiography, or tragedy. I will say
something more in the next section about how the question of an others
dying is persistently avoided or mistreated by philosophy. But I would also
like to show that in addition to poetic or autobiographical expression there is
no reason why the death of a friend and the form of self-awareness that it
occasions cannot also be fruitfully taken up in philosophical articulation,
such as that of Heidegger.19
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A robust notion of Mitsein which has room for friendship as part of ones
own self-identity would appear to fit seamlessly into other aspects of
Heideggers existential analysis. One of the rich insights of this analysis which
has profitably changed the way philosophers understand the world is that
access to and the meaning of a thing does not come when it has been arrested
and isolated from the rest of the world as some object present-at-hand
(vorhanden). Rather a thing is first and foremost what it is when it is readyto-hand (zuhanden), always already at work in the world with other objects
and practices. When turning from the question of the being of some object to
the meaning of the human subject, a consistent Heideggerian account would
not want to rescind the superiority of the ready-to-hand mode of
understanding. It would seem rather un-Heideggerian to locate the truest sense
of the human being only when, isolated by a reflection on its death, it is taken
out of its ongoing practices and relations as something spiritually or
subjectively present-at-hand, so to speak. But if this is so then the human being
is most itself, most authentic as it were, not in isolation but in communities of
practice.
The challenge for phenomenological description is to achieve a glimpse
onto a thing, say in a moment of critical reflection, without abstracting it from
the active and ongoing practices and relations. Anxiety gives us a clear sight
onto ourselves, but at the price of giving us a self that is present-at-hand and
hence abstract. What, if anything, can give us insight into our selves in their
ready-to-hand active and embodied modes? The wager of this essay is that
a reflective appreciation of how we are most ourselves in our active and
practical modes comes in the form of the experience of the everyday
vulnerabilities of friendship which is most clearly visible in the extreme case
of a friends death.
Given the way a revised and robust conception of the kind of Mitsein of
friendship fits into the rest of the framework of Heideggers existential analysis,
one might be tempted to deflate the claim that there is really anything at odds
with Heidegger here that needs to be wrestled back from his texts. This reading
of SZ would have it that Heidegger treats only the possibility of inauthentically
relating to the death of an other while leaving open the possibility of gaining
ones finitude via the death of another. Thus what we would have here is not a
discrepancy but more innocently a lacuna that we are free to fill in. While this
line of argument is close to what I am trying to accomplish in this essay, it does
fail to appreciate the way in which Heideggers actual texts on these topics
cannot literally be read as neutral or open to this possibility. Rather, given the
way Heidegger structures the development of his analysis, he has reason to be
openly hostile to this direction of thought. Ive tried to show above how the
death of an other figures in Heideggers writings as a threat he feels he needs
to overcome in order to move anxiety into a place as the privileged mechanism
29

for achieving self-understanding. In other words, it is unlikely that Heidegger

would have felt there to be any lacuna in his account. Before we can fill in any
hole in Heideggers treatment of Mitsein we must first create one. I am trying
to open up this space by arguing that the death of another need not pose a threat
to an authentic coming into self-understanding but is rather a rich, albeit sad,
source of self-awareness which can fit as well, if not better, into the rest of the
existential analysis.
Friendship in Philosophy
I have tried to show that the link between our understanding of friendship
and our understanding of death will remain ineradicably covered over so long
as friendship is treated, if at all, as a special problem of otherness in general.
We have already seen that Heideggers argument in 47 requires from the very
start that the dead other be nobody anyone really cares for but rather an
unknown and exchangeable stranger. Beginning from this premise, the
argument can then follow that what one presupposes when one is of the
opinion that any Dasein may be substituted for another at random [is] that
what cannot be experienced in ones own Dasein is accessible in that of a
stranger. (SZ 239) While the Augustinian heritage of the existential analytic
should require us at this point to consider the death of a friend, it is precisely
because Heidegger himself presupposes that the dead other is only another
at random that he can make such quick work of the much weaker suggestion
that another Dasein, as any other, might be able to serve as a proxy or a
representative which would tell oneself what death is. The validity and success
of Heideggers rejection of the implicit Augustinian challenge requires that he
illicitly substitute the death of a random stranger for the death of a loved
one, thereby treating the Mitsein of the friend and stranger as one-size-fits all.
But Heidegger is by no means alone in uncritically treating the question of
intersubjectivity as all-or-nothing. In fact even the popular and sociallyminded critiques of Heidegger fuelled by the sophisticated theories of Fichte
and Hegel, which are otherwise obsessed with the question of otherness, are
tellingly silent on the question of friendship. While the social constitution of
personal subjectivity is given deep and complex consideration by the theories
rooted in Fichte and Hegel, still these theories rarely address the philosophical
significance of otherwise politically or historically insignificant concrete and
particular others. For Fichte, for instance, the other figures primarily not as a
specific other but as a formulaic and necessarily interchangeable Not-self.20
While on the one hand, there is no self for Fichte without the other (the NotI), on the other hand, the Not-I figures as a purely formal or structural feature
within a full conception of subjectivity. Thus unlike a friend or a loved one,
the Not-I need not be tied to any one particular other. For a Fichtean, if you
have really seen one Not-I, youve seen them all.
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This Fichtean tendency to conceive of the other as a function or a

constitutive moment within subjectivity is recommitted by Hegelians who
insist that ones self-understanding requires first and foremost a form of
political recognition. Despite its other virtues, political function for Hegelians
requires that one comports oneself to others as a bearer of roles or political
identities which we are granted and take upon ourselves. The point here is not
to abandon the insights of Hegelian political theory but to acknowledge that
just as political roles can be taken up they can also be set aside and in turn
taken on by another. Given a hegemony of political identity, our naked or
intimate identities which cannot be freely taken up and set aside are thus
relegated to the private realm. Of course a thinker as subtle as Hegel can be
vindicated against crude versions of political Hegelianism, but this
reclamation would require a careful reading of the role of the family and a
return, yet again, to Antigone who finds herself opposed to the political order
in her obstinate insistence upon burying her brother, Polynices, who was
stripped of all political recognition. And yet if the role of the friend or loved
one in Hegel is to be saved, the bulk of the work is left to us. Not only is little
said about the role of the family other than to acknowledge its function as the
guardians of death and birth but, moreover, any hope in a form of life modeled
on a group of friends is explicitly derided in the Phenomenology as the
youthful and romanticized beautiful ethical life which dialectically
collapses upon itself.21 Barring the rare instance of world-historical
individualsthe fictional Antigone who lives in a book or the heroicized
Napoleon who rides through history on his horseneither Fichte nor Hegel
are all that interested in the philosophical significance of the utter specificity
of any concrete and particular other. So while Fichtean and Hegelian social
theory provides us with invaluable insight into what it means to be a bearer of
social and political identities, these sophisticated conceptual resources are not
equipped to deal with friendship as a specific kind of relationship that is
inseparable from the naked individuality of just this specific other here and
now.
And yet Fichtes and Hegels awkward silence about friendship is quite
consistent with most of the philosophical tradition.22 The suggestion here is not
that friendship is somehow repressed by philosophy but rather that when it is
treated it is most often misrecognized either as a special problem of otherness
in general or as a special problem of ones own prior self-relation. In addition
to Fichtean and Hegelian social theories, an example of the first type of
misrecognition occurs in a kind of Levinasian inspired speech about The
Other which lumps together general and finite, particular others. Levinas
himself, however, seems attuned to categorical difference between these two
senses of The Other. In a very suggestive essay entitled Mourir Pour he
specifically considers the occasion of the death of the other. There Levinas
31

argues, contra Heidegger, not only is there a meaningful sense in which we can
substitute or sacrifice our own death for that of another and thus die for her,
but there is also another sense in which we can die together along with another
(Mourir Ensemble, as the essay was almost named).23 Despite this initially
suggestive insight, however, the essay itself leaves little room to make a clear
phenomenological distinction between a particular other who dies and The
Other in general who does not. Again, if this distinction is to be made, the
bulk of the work is left to us.
The second kind of philosophical misrecognition of the link between the
vulnerabilities of friendship and ones own self-understanding is to insist that
true friendships are only possible on the basis of a prior and independently
achieved self-relation. Modern versions of this conception of friendship can be
found in thinkers as diverse as Kierkegaard and Emerson and seem to be
rooted in a tradition at least as old as Aristotle and Plato.24 Of course, the roles
of friendship in both Plato and Aristotle are notoriously complex and would
take a much longer discussion to treat fairly, but both tend toward a notion of
friendship conceived as a subsequent relation between previously and
independently constituted selves.25 Plato might be considered an exception, in
which case the Phaedo would be an example in the first instance of the
intimate relation between friendship, death, and philosophical reflection. But
it is hard to make out to what extent Plato himself appreciated this point. If the
wider form of Platos dialogues is inherently intersubjective, the content, at
least of Socrates maieutic philosophy, repeatedly insists that the other
merely helps one discover or deliver ones prior subjectivity rather than
providing the necessary seeds for ones own self-constitution.26 Glancing back
over the history of philosophy it is hard to find a welcome place for the kind
of friendship Augustine speaks of in which a friend plays an essential role in
ones own self-constitution and awareness.
There are important exceptions to these trends, however. In the course of his
Essays Montaigne, for example, identifies an essential connection between his
own self-understanding and a particular, nameable other. It should not strike
us as sheer coincidence then that Montaignes essay On Friendship opens by
invoking the specter of a dear and deceased friend. As in Augustine,
Montaignes autobiographical account suggests that when given adequate
recognition, a privileged link emerges between friendship, death, and ones
own self-understanding. In the experience of those who try to write their own
livesthat is, to place the whole of their lives before themselveswe find that
self-understanding, friendship, and death are not had apart from one another. I
have been trying to show, however, how an appreciation of an others death
need not be reserved only for autobiography, poetry, or tragedy but can also be
fruitfully analyzed in a mode of philosophical articulation, even a
Heideggerian one.
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Philosophy in Friendship
By turning our attention to the significance of the death of an other this
essay wants to show how Heideggers notion of Mitsein can be revised and
appropriated so as to fill a gap in contemporary discussions of
intersubjectivity. That is, within the contemporary eagerness to include
otherness wherever possible, a revamped Heideggerian approach would
refuse to hush the somewhat awkward and impolite experience of an others
death. In so doing, furthermore, such an approach would free the particular
individuality of the friend from the otherwise universal and formulaic, i.e.
political, other of Fichtean-Hegelian brands of theory. Freed in her utter
specificity from the generic grouping of any and every other, we can recognize
in the friend a vulnerability to which The Other writ large is not
susceptiblesimply put, the death to which The Other as the ever-present
das Man is constitutively immune barring the complete extinction of the entire
human race. By making the distinction that only a particular other can die, we
thereby identify the appropriate sense in which there is a privileged and
irreducible link between our understanding of friendship and our
understanding of death.
It is thus the death of a friend which can serve as the ground for a revised
and robust conception of how our understanding of human being in an
essential and genuine sense is a being-with, a Mitsein. Furthermore, this
Mitsein of friendship need not be seen as a threat to ones being
authentically ones own. But before a much broader reconstruction can work
out how a Heideggerian conception of authenticity is to be reconciled with
human plurality, the spirit of a robust appreciation of Mitsein must, in a sense,
be rescued from the letter of Heideggers treatment. That is to say, a
preparatory critique must be made against portions of Heideggers texts in
order to show that the death of an other is worth considering
phenomenologically as fertile grounds for ones ownmost self-understanding.
This essay offers one step in this direction by returning to a rich source of
material in Heideggers own early engagement with Augustine, who is by no
means an arbitrary figure in this wider reconstitution. Among the first to
attempt to write his own lived experiences, to place the whole of his life before
himself, Augustine thereby testifies that it was nothing less than the death of
his close friend that turned him inward and precipitated his quaestio mihi
factus sum as good a slogan as any for the activity of philosophizing. This
essay has exposed a road open in Heideggers early engagement with
Augustine and has attempted to show how it could and should have been
taken. That road, in sum, would have it that friendship (philia) is an essential
antecedent to self-knowledge and wisdom (sophia) itself.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota

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References
1. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 60: Abt. 2, Vorlesungen 19191944,
Phnomenologie des religisen Lebens, Frankfurt, M: Klostermann, 1995.
2. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, Being and Time, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1962, hereafter SZ, page numbers refer to the German pagination.
3. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985, p 309, hereafter HCT.
4. I make use of the word intersubjective as a handy and customary way of referring to the
social embeddedness of the human being, but the term itself threatens to lead into the very
trap I am trying to work out of in so far as it suggests that sociality is best understood as a
subsequent relation between previously formed and independent subjects.
5. Augustine, City of God, trans. Bettenson, New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003, p 517.
6. Scholarship on Heideggers foundational engagement with Christian theology and mysticism
in the decade preceding SZ has risen on the heels of the publication of GA 60 (op. cit.). For
example, see John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King,
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994, pp 131-202.
7. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, volume 60: Phnomenologie des religisen Lebens,
trans. Fritsch and Gosetti-Ferencei, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2004. See pp 151-155, 12. The curare (Being Concerned) as the
Basic Character of Factical Life.
8. See also, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, op. cit. Appendix II pp 203-206.
9. For Heideggers treatment of the quaestio mihi factus sum in the lectures see op. cit., p 130.
10. On the crucial role of existentiell attestation or testimony in Heideggers early thought, see
both HCT 301-303 and Robert Bernasconi, Literary Attestation in Philosophy: Heideggers
Footnote on Tolstoys The Death of Ivan Ilyich in Heidegger in Question: The Art of
Existing, New York: Humanity Books, 1993, pp 76-98.
11. This criticism might have been available as early as Hannah Arendts 1929 dissertation, now
published along with later revisions as Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Scott and Stark,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. See in particular pp 13-14.
12. Augustine, Confessions, London: Penguin, 1974. Citations of the Confessions are by Book
number followed by chapter number. Heideggers acknowledgement of Augustine in SZ is
limited to six footnotes. These footnotes serve, in effect, as an epitaph to the buried
Augustinian heritage of the text.
13. Cf. James: To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere
fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred
ever after. Some Metaphysical Problems in Pragmatism and Other Essays, New York:
Washington Square Press, 1970. p 43.
14. This provocation has been disputed on the following lines: The inappropriateness of
fungibility is not a unique mark of friendship but may also characterize certain contractual
arrangements such as relying on the availability of a certain obstetrician whose services have
already been engaged only to have a substitute gratuitously foisted on the mother at the onset
of labor. On closer scrutiny, however, this objection actually affirms rather than refutes the
unique relation between infungibility and friendship. That is to say, the example of the
contracted obstetrician is an instance of infungibility only in practice, not in principle. The
reason for the infungibility in this case are the practical limits of human life; given the
complexity and time commitment required for such a delicate procedure, it would be
practically impossible to bring a replacement up to speed at the last minute. And so a patient
concerned to avoid a last minute switch would be prudent in securing some sort of
infungibility contract with her physician. However, given some imaginary scenario in
which an obstetrician could be brought up to speed on every minute detail concerning the
case, the patient would have no principled, strictly medical reason to require the care of this
particular doctor over another. Now of course such transfers of information and
understanding are impossible in practice, and so this specific obstetrician is for practical

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15.
16.

17.
18.

19.

20.

21.
22.
23.

24.

25.

purposes irreplaceable. One might continue to protest that a patient in the imaginary scenario
might agree that while some particular obstetrician is not medically different than the
replacement, there may be some significant personal difference between them given the
intimate nature of human contact and relations involved in the birthing process. But that
objection seems not to threaten the unique irreplaceably of friendship but to bolster it. That
is, while it may not be strictly medically relevant to a patient which particular obstetrician
delivers her baby, it may be very much personally relevant. But that seems to me to show that
the real world of human practices and limits is one not only in which contracts are practically
necessary but is also one in which relationships that might have begun as professional can
somewhere along the line develop the characteristics of friendship.
John Donne, Devotions XVII, Selections, ed. John Booty, New York: Paulist Press, 1990,
p. 268.
See Lukcs Metaphysics and Tragedy in Soul and Form, trans. Bostock, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1974. p 153: It cannot last, no one would be able to bear it, no one could live at
such heightsat the height of their own life and their own ultimate possibilities. One has to
fall back into numbness. One has to deny life in order to live.
See note 10 above.
A reader of an earlier draft of this essay pointed me to George Santayanas poem To W.P.
part II in particular. It should be clear as I proceed why I would expect many other such
connections to be made and why they are likely to be found in poetry.
It has been suggested to me that Michel Henrys discussions of our feeling with (pathos
avec) in which we participate in community with the dead is another attempt to speak in
philosophical concepts about the ways in which we are tied in relation with the dead. (See
Phnomnologie matrielle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990 p. 154.) To this
one could also add Christian Lenhardts essay Anamnestic Solidarity (Telos 25: pp. 133154) which discusses the question of solidarity with the dead in various strands of Marxism.
The claim in particular I am trying to press in this section and the next, however, is that the
full power of our relations with the dead or vulnerable is missed to the extent that the dead
are generalized, since it is only the particular that truly dies, never to be reborn. I take it that
the wider point of contact between these projects and mine is that there is a sense in which
a people as a community can also be said to be truly finite as in the cases of genocide or
extermination. Finally, I do not mean to suggest that I am the only one who has ever noted
and tried to articulate conceptually the connection between the death of others and selfawareness since, as I will suggest below, I think that it is along these lines that Hegels
treatment of Antigone is to be read. On the other hand, I will also try to show that there is on
the whole something unsatisfying about the way traditional philosophy has dealt with this
issue.
On the generic quality of the other in Fichte see, for instance, pp 39-49 of Foundations of
Natural Right ed. Neuhouser, trans. Baur, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
That the Not-self must in principle lack specific content see pp 230-231 (I, 261) of The
Science of Knowledge, ed. Heath and Lachs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
See, for example, 441 and 463 of G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.
Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. p 278.
Cf. note 19 above.
On this point, and the wider discussion of the Levinasian phenomenology of the death of the
other including the passage from John Donne, see Robert Bernasconi, Whose death is it
Anyway? (www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/typanum/4/bernasconi/html).
For an example of Emersons conception of the self at a remove from and prior to friendship
see Friendship in Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, New York: Penguin, , 1983, pp 339-354.
For a similar thought in Kierkegaard see Either/Or, Part II, ed. Hong and Hong, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987. p 319.
For a very helpful and thorough discussion of friendship in Aristotle see John Coopers
Aristotle on Friendship in Essays on Aristotles Ethics, ed. Rorty (Berkeley: University of

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California Press, 1980. pp 301-340.) Coopers appreciation of the philosophical importance

of friendship comes very close to what I am aiming at in this essay. But in the final instance
Cooper stops short of and explicitly rejects my privileging of friendship as a mode of selfunderstanding. [It can be argued that] it is in the consciousness of the existence of another
that a man becomes truly conscious of himself. Why, however, should one believe this? No
reason is given, and offhand it does not seem true that merely in order to be distinctly
conscious of oneself one need to be aware of other persons first. But even that one cannot
attain self-consciousness except through consciousness of another person and his action, it
would still not follow that one needs friends for this purpose. Why wouldnt a casual
acquaintance do just as well? (p. 319) I hope that this essay will both provide reasons how
consciousness of another can be related to consciousness of oneself and why a casual
acquaintance would not do just as well.
26. Hence Socrates assertion of his own infertility. See, for instance, Theaetetus 149a ff. Martha
Nussbaum gives a helpful interpretation of Platos later theory of the soul which would allow
us to distinguish Platos own account from a Socratic maieutic position. But in that light it
is hard to see how friendship as an intimate bond between selves or souls isnt eventually
drained into one universal soul existing en masse. See her Shame, Separateness, and
Political Unity, (pp. 413-15 in particular) in Essays on Aristotles Ethics, op. cit., pp. 395435.

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