The understanding that we are Dasein or ‘there-being’ is offered as an alternative to the traditional notion that we are a ‘rational animal’. Thus for Heidegger, to be aware of death is a rupture with living and the purposes of living. It is really something like a realisation of the ultimate pointlessness of living and of reasoning – all of which, for him, including nearly all philosophy hitherto, is really ‘idle chatter’. This is a horrible foreshortening of our existential situation. As Heidegger’s pupil Hannah Arendt said, we live as much in relation to birth and constant new beginnings as to constant endings. We also live ecstatically in space besides time: in terms of our habitual attachments to and relationships with other people, animals, things and places. In short, Heidegger lagged well behind Bergson in his understanding of human existence: in being alive we are as we are also equally orientated towards birth, towards creativity human and creaturely others as we are towards death.

¶ 4:27 PM