Before Explaining His Phenomenology of Death

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Before explaining his phenomenology of death, Dy starts defining confusing terms like Dasein, Care, ahead-of-itself, and other simple words that were put together with hyphens to represent some other complex concept. I have however understood one essential term – being-towards-death, which refers to man and his attitude towards death. I will further talk about this later. Heidegger argues that death should not be defined on the basis of the life after it, if there is. As Dy says in the article, “No one has ever come out alive from death to tell us about death.” I was disappointed at this. I have a lot of questions about the afterlife so I was expecting this article answers them. Nevertheless, I do agree with the author. How will we describe the phase from the point of death to everything after it? There are religious beliefs, each painting a picture of life after death. Who preached these ideas? The prophets. They are dead now. However, they never experienced death when they were still preaching. How can they be sure of the afterlife they believe? For all we know, the prophets could have fooled us. Besides, phenomenology is a process of attempting to disclose the reality of a subject, which in this case is death. Heidegger tried to describe death from the point of view of a living man. He sought real and existing experiences to aid him in phenomenology. So again, what is death for Heidegger? Death is man’s transition between his existence and non-existence. Such transition, according to Heidegger, cannot be experienced. Personally, this might not be entirely true. If there really is an afterlife, then man, or at least his consciousness, continues to experience. However, the afterlife experience cannot be relayed to the living world. Afterlife events stay in the afterlife world because the dead cannot return to life. There is this concept of ‘ghost,’ which stands

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