[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/9/06, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I really take H's the main point about death, to put
> it in plain English, to be that the fact of our
> mortality is the central issue in the life of a human
> being -- not merely something one has to come to terms
> with and learn to accept,a s it were, philosophically,
> as the Stoics taught, or as a gateway to heaven or
> hell, as Christian dogma, but as the fundamental
> structuring fact about the lives of mortal beings that
> influences, or ought to influence, everything in our
> lives. His revulsion against everydayness and losing
> yourself in business comes from this, as does, I
> think, his reaction (literally and figuratively)
> against modernity, which he thinks promotes mere
> business and forgetfulness of the fact that for each
> of us our days are numbered. And it is what is behind
> his idea of truth as Alathea, openness to the world.

For most people in the real world (except the rich who are into
cryogenics), the thought of their own death in itself doesn't mean
much.  What's depressing is others' mortality: people we love -- or
worse, people we wanted to love but couldn't really -- die and leave
us behind.  And what we fear in our own cases is not death per se but
pain that may attend the last moments of our lives, the pain that may
be unalleviated due to lack of money, the "war on drugs" (cf.
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060206/031174.html>),
etc.  A while ago, Jim Devine posted: "A 65-year-old couple retiring
today will need on average a tidy $200,000 set aside to pay for
medical costs in retirement, according to an annual Fidelity
Investment study released this week" (Robert Powell, "Paying for
Health Care in Retirement," 9 March 2006,
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060306/033498.html>).

 $200,000!  I felt like killing myself on reading that.  :-0

--
Yoshie
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