A PHENOMENOLOGICAL LOOK AT W. B.

YEATS AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH WITH HELP FROM SOME THOUGHTS IN MARTIN HEIDEGGERS BEING AND TIME
Thesis submitted to the Institute of Social Sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in English Language and Literature by Hamdi Ali SERDAR

Fatih University March 2008

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DEDICATION PAGE
I dedicate this work first to my dear mom and then to my dear dad, my brothers and my sister; to my dear friend Semiha Topal, who always inspired me in her words to think and to do better; to Mustafa Cokun, who always encouraged me to be an academician; to Hsn Ylmaz, who always kept himself in close proximity with me; to my cousin, who has always been my best friend; to Sevgi Kr, who has forgiven me even when I broke her heart; to Behra etin, who always gave me support when I felt the most need for it; to Handan z, who extensively cared for me; to Dr. Baki akr, who showed willingness to help me professionally, to Tahir t, who did the courtesy of sharing the same room with me when I was suffering from loneliness; to lhan Glgnl, who tried to show the right path for me to take; to Mehmet Blent Bur, who illustrated to me the significance of patience; to Prof. Dr. Alparslan Akgen, who kindly accepted, though he was much too busy, to be in the jury when I defended my thesis; similarly to Prof. Dr. Visam Mansur for his agreement to join the jury; and finally to my dear mentor, Assist. Prof. Ali Muret Yel, who gave me the sole chance to study Martin Heideggers Being and Time.

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APPROVAL PAGE
I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.

Assist. Prof. Martin Cyr HICKS Head of English Language and Literature Department This is to certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.

Assist. Prof. Ali Murat YEL Head of Sociology Department Supervisor Examining Committee Members:

Assist. Prof. Ali Murat YEL Prof. Dr. Alparslan AIKGEN Prof. Dr. Visam MANSUR

_______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________

It is approved that this thesis has been written in compliance with the formatting rules laid down by the Graduate Institute of Social Sciences. Assoc. Prof. Mehmet ORHUN Director March 2008

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AUTHOR DECLARATIONS
1. The material included in this thesis has not been submitted wholly or in

part for any academic award or qualification other than that for which it is now submitted. 2. The program of advanced study of which this thesis is part has

consisted of: i) Research Methods course during the undergraduate study

ii) Examination of several thesis guides of particular universities both in Turkey and abroad as well as a professional book on this subject.

Hamdi Ali SERDAR March 2008

ABSTRACT Hamdi Ali SERDAR March 2008

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL LOOK AT W. B. YEATS "AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH" WITH HELP FROM SOME THOUGHTS IN MARTIN HEIDEGGERS "BEING AND TIME"
The need for phenomenology is expected to instantly emerge when life and death becomes a subject for academic discussion. This type of situation can perhaps be best referred to as the emergence of collaborative work between literature and philosophy. Philosophically phenomenological handling of life and death as literary subjects of topic can possibly be exemplified in a work of this kind. Approaching life from the angle of death may sound startling initially; however, a deeper level analysis can be encouraging in terms that the existential type of phenomenology tends to prescribe. So the work at hand would rather demand to be covered inversely. To this end, literature has been put in this work at the service of philosophy. It essentially sought the answer to the question of what and how literature could benefit from its collaboration with philosophy. Perhaps, this thesis allowed William Butler Yeats, a leading figure of literature, who wrote a 16-line tiny poem, to have his first contact with Martin Heidegger, a leading figure of philosophy, who wrote a masterwork of over 400 pages. This work is basically intended to prove right the need for further contacts of this type between men of literature and philosophers. Key words: Phenomenology, existentialism, temporality, spatiality, death

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KISA ZET Hamdi Ali SERDAR Mart 2008

MARTIN HEIDEGGER'N "VARLIK VE ZAMAN" ADLI ESERNDE BULUNAN FKRLERDEN STFADE EDEREK W.B. YEATS ADLI RLANDALI ARN "AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH" RNE FENOMENOLOJK BR BAKI
lm ile hayat kavramlar akademik bir tartma konusu olduklarnda fenomenolojiye olan ihtiyacn annda ortaya kmas beklenir. Bu tr durumlar belki de en gzel ekliyle edebiyat ve felsefe arasnda ibirliinin douu olarak isimlendirmek doru olacaktr. Byle bir alma lm ile hayatn birer edebiyat konusu olarak felsefi manada fenomenolojik adan ele alnmas eklinde rneklendirilebilir. Hayatn kendisine lmden yaklalmas balangta artc gelebilir; ancak, daha derin bir analiz ile fenomenolojinin varolucu trnn ortaya koyduu artlar balamnda bu engel alabilir. Bu almada, temel olarak, edebiyatn felsefe ile yapaca ibirliinden ne tr bir fayda salayacana dair sorunun cevab aranmtr. Belki de bu eser araclyla, 16 satrlk kk bir iiri ile edebiyat dnyasndan gelen William Butler Yeats, 400 sayfay akn aheseriyle felsefe dnyasndan gelen Martin Heideggerle ilk defa temas kurma ansn yakalamtr. Bu eser, temel olarak, edebiyatlarla felsefeciler arasnda benzeri temaslarn daha fazla olmasnn gerekliliini dorulamak amacn gtmektedir. Anahtar kelimeler: Fenomenoloji, varoluculuk, zamansallk, uzamsallk, lm

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LIST OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION PAGE APPROVAL PAGE AUTHOR DECLARATIONS ABSTRACT KISA ZET LIST OF FIGURES iii iv v vi vii x

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION 1.1. Overview of the Main Chapters 1.2. Aim 1.3. The Poem

11
11 11 14 16

CHAPTER 2
THE NEED FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 2.1. Ontology in Its Hermeneutically Phenomenological Form 2.2. The Ontological Difference

20
20 20 23

CHAPTER 3

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SPATIALLY BASIC EXISTENTIAL STRUCTURES OF THE BEING OF DASEIN 30 3.1. The Three Ontological Constituents of Dasein 3.2. Daseins Being-with-others in a Shared World 3.3. Self-understanding of Dasein and Authenticity 30 38 47

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CHAPTER 4
TEMPORALLY EXISTENTIAL STRUCTURES OF THE BEING OF DASEIN 4.1. Introduction to Temporality 4.2. The link between Being and Time 4.3. Because Time Is, Being Has To Be

58
58 58 60 65

CHAPTER 5
AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH DEATH FROM AN EXISTENTIALLY PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANGLE 5.1. Heideggers View of Death as Utmost Possibility 5.2. Heideggers Formulation of Moribundus Sum 5.3. Time defends Dasein against death

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70 70 74 84

5.4. Pretentiousness in deaths claim to get to be the temporal potentiality-for-Being85 5.5. A Phenomenological Attempt To Explore Death As the End of Daseins Being 89 5.6. Schematic representation of deconstructive function of death 92

CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION & EVALUATION

101
101

BIBLIOGRAPHY

105

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Existentially Complete State of Daseins Being Figure 2. Daseins Ontological Development into Its Existential Totality Figure 3. Deconstruction of Daseins Existential Totality 93 94 96

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
The idea of writing this thesis first arose when it became philosophically apparent to me that humans have to maintain their existence in one way or another as long as they are in the world. This leads to the tantalizing question of what if, just like me, one was not able to keep ones existence on in the world. Individual incompatibility with the ontological needs of maintaining everyday life exists as a fact; and it has its fictional examples in literature as well as in philosophy. This thesis rests on the assumption that William Butler Yeats Irish Airman exhibits such incompatibility and that Martin Heideggers Dasein can rightly be taken philosophically to account for the Irish Airmans incompatibility. 1.1. Overview of the Main Chapters To begin with the second chapter, it is intended to state the need for phenomenology as a device for any philosophical excavation of the literary meaning from its poetically condensed form. Phenomenology, defined as the science of ontology, gets attached to ontology at the one end and to hermeneutics at the other end. This type of a two-way attachment is meant to tailor ontology to fit its hermeneutically phenomenological version. With ontology thus rendered available in its hermeneutically phenomenological form, both

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our understanding of space and our interpretation of time get redesigned simultaneously to locate with pinpoint accuracy the fundamental

phenomenology of Being as such. This is followed by the working out of a qualitative analysis of William Butler Yeats An Irish Airman foresees his Death with the help of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1889-1977). The fundamental ontology is accorded a special status as well as a particular usage in Heideggers terminology. The terminus a quo for the fundamental ontology is set to the ontological distinction between a being as an entity and its Being as the way it is. The need is satisfied for a search of the kind of entity ontologically distinguished in its Being from other entities with its understanding of Being as such when Dasein comes up as such one and sole entity. The second chapter ends with a transitional remark about the need to see the spatiotemporally existential structures of the Being of Dasein. The third chapter covers spatially basic existential structures of the Being of Dasein. The attempt is made to exhibit Heideggers construction of the existential triad of existence as the ontological essence of Dasein, Being-in-theworld as the spatial constitution of Dasein, and care as the Being of Dasein. How existence is reciprocally connected to Being-in-the-world and to care is shown. The similitude between the Being-in of Daseins Being-in-the-world and the Being-with of Daseins Being-with-others is demonstrated too. Answers are sought to how Dasein gets circled in its everydayness by the publicness of Das Man, usually translated from German as the they; and whether Dasein can ever

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authentically accomplish a full detachment of itself from the they-self? The practical side to the Being of Dasein is slightly discussed. Discussion of the discrepancy between authenticity and inauthenticity leads to thoughts about Daseins Jemeiningkeit, or its mineness. Authenticity is established as the possibility of self-understanding for Dasein. The existential essence of Dasein is illuminated in its constant Being as Being-there. The fourth chapter connects spatial situatedness with temporal projection as the two characteristics of Daseins existentiality. An early attempt is made to show that time is tied to Being as such. Being-in-the-world is highlighted as the spatial property of Dasein. The temporal precedence of Being as such over the triad of beings, the Being of beings, and the Being of Dasein gets established. Time is viewed as a force behind the transformation of the Being of Dasein into its understanding of Being as such. A short demonstration of the priority of the Being as such over the Being of being is supplied. Daseins being-there in the world leads to a discussion over the temporal need for Being to be. The ontologically spatial existentiality of Dasein as Being-in-the-world gets linked efficiently to its hermeneutically temporal existentiality as having-to-be-in-theworld. Three joint features of both Being as such and time are demonstrated to be unstoppability, undeniability, and undeferrability. The fifth chapter on death as a phenomenon of life opens with remarks about death defined by Heidegger as an existentially distinctive possibility. The phenomenon of death is further termed a philosophy of life. Care is

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afterwards taken to provide the linkage between Being as such and death in order to explore Heideggers distinct formulation of moribondus sum in itemized detail when care alters having-to-be-in-the-world-towards-death as the anxious Being of Dasein into the inauthentic everyday Being of Dasein as having-to-bein-the-world-waiting-towards-the-death. Phenomenology is reworked in more detail as a scientific method of ontology. The hermeneutic circle of phenomenology gets its full description from remarks about an ontological journey from phenomenological reduction through phenomenological construction to deconstruction. Time is defined as the close defender of Dasein as ibnu-l waqt against death. Dasein is, therefore, advised to seek eternal friendship with time. Fatally detrimental consequences of refusal to do so are exemplified from a Turkish novel, Tutunamayanlar, where an act of suicide comes just days after a decision to renounce the existential bond of friendship with time is signalled textually. Death is also assigned a linkage between Dasein, Being as such and time. A closer analysis of the death moment is supplied. Over the rest of this chapter is there an attempt to phenomenologically schematise the

deconstructive face of death. 1.2. Aim This work is specifically designed to incorporate four main chapters with their own promising contributions towards the accomplishment of the overall objective, which is set out as making the effort to think through the means of

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hermeneutically ontological phenomenology within the purview of poetic literature. The second chapter essentially aims at introducing a preliminary structure of its phenomenological kind for the ontological work to be done philosophically on a literary text later in the subsequent chapters. The third chapter has it as its main goal first to explore the spatially basic existential structures of the Being of Dasein with a view towards moving on to a narrow discussion of authenticity as a possibility of Being while Dasein is constantly thwarted publicly in its attempts to be itself, and then to seek a sound establishment of argumentation behind Being-in-the-world as the ontologically spatial existentiality of Dasein. Each of the spatially basic existential structures of the Being of Dasein is linked, or even attached, to the Irish Airmans existentiality. The fourth chapter has it as its main goal to explore the temporally basic existential structures of the Being of Dasein with a view towards approaching time as a sort of primordially transformative force behind the mysterious shift from the spatially ontological Being of Dasein forward into its temporally existential understanding of Being as such. It also aims at joining together the ontologically spatial existentiality of Dasein as Being-in-the-world and its hermeneutically temporal existentiality as having-to-be-in-the-world. The implications of Daseins Being-in-the-world and its having-to-be-in-the-world for the Irish Airman are analysed separately.

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The fifth chapter aims at finalizing our phenomenological project of illustrating schematically the irrecoverable deformation of the existentially spatiotemporal Being of Dasein as having-to-be-in-the-world-towards-death when the moment of death comes. The Dasein side of the Irish Airman is brought to a whole with the schematization of the phenomenology of death. 1.3. The Poem I assume that An Irish Airman foresees his Death is a simple, anti-war poem that was written by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats1. Although Yeats wrote it in 1918, it first appeared in 1919 as part of The Wild Swans at Coole collection of poems

Though generally considered to be a writer, William Butler Yeats is best described as a poet,

since Yeats excelled at making creative use of poetic imagination to its maximum effect. Williams Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, as the son of the renowned Irish painter John Butler Yeats. He grew up developing interests in Irish tradition on the one hand, in subjects like Hinduism, theosophy and occultism on the other hand. His personal sense of attachment to Ireland began to form a view of Ireland with a hidden tradition more powerful than the Catholic or the Protestant. His tendency towards Irish nationalism is evident in his The Celtic Twilight (1893). Later, however, he developed a more equivocal attitude towards the political fighting for Irish independence. Because shortly after he was born his parents moved to London to make a better living, he went to school there; however, most of his boyhood years were spent in Sligo, Ireland, with his grandparents. He was granted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats later writings are by and large deemed the best. Biographical notes that appear in Encyclopaedia Britannica (1972) about Yeats even contain the following comment: There is no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest works between the ages of 50 and 75 (vol. 23:881). Yeats died in Roquebrune, France, on January 28, 1939. His body was taken later in 1948 back to Sligo.

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The Wild Swans at Coole contains poems most of which were written between 1915 and 1918. When the collection was first published in 1917, it only had the following four poems in it: The Wild Swans at Coole, Ego Dominus Tuus, The Scholars, On being asked for a War Poem. It was later expanded to include some other poems as well. This poem is basically intended to reflect the final train of thought, both intellectually and emotionally, of a First World War aviator. The aviator, Major Robert Gregory (1881-1918), joins the English in the war against the German. He soon realizes the nullity behind the idea of joining the war for reasons that reflect the common sense of his people. Therefore, his participation in the war is driven by an entirely different motive: His love for flying. Yeats poetry is relatively simpler to understand than others. Similarly, An Irish Airman foresees his Death appears to be written elegiacally to mark in the easiest way ever poetically possible the lonely impulse of delight as the sheer motive for Robert Gregory to join the British Royal Flying Corps in 1916. However, his love of action led him to an untimely death abroad (Jeffares, 1968:162). Robert Gregory was a close friend of Yeats as the only child of Lady Gregoryan associate of Yeats. Four poems of Yeats, including An Irish Airman foresees his Death, were later dedicated to Robert Gregory after he was killed at 37, in 1918, in Italy in an accidental shoot-down by an Italian pilot. However, his accidental killing was neither disclosed to Yeats nor his family. The other three poems

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that had been written in memory of Robert Gregory were In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, Shepherd and Goatherd, and Reprisals. Below is the Macmillan version of An Irish Airman foresees his Death from Yeats The Poems (1989), which was edited by Richard J. Finneran: An Irish Airman foresees his Death2 W.B. Yeats I know3 that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above: Those that I fight I do not hate, [1] [2] [3]

The title of this poem has been reproduced here exactly the way it appears in its 1989

Macmillan version, with the initials of both foresees and his typed in lowercase, though it appears differently in different versions.
3

Different versions of this poem have different ways of typing for the word knowwhile

some have it in all capital letters, some others have it in all small letters. Those are some among the versions that have it in all capital letters: Macmillan, London, 1919 & 1967 Macmillan, New York, 1946 And those are some among the other versions that have it in all small letters: Macmillan, New York, 1989 Simon & Schuster, New York, 1942 W. W. Norton, New York, 1973 & 1983 & 1996 Wordsworth, Hertfordshire, 1994 I have put this information here, though it can seem redundant to an ordinary reader, because the word know, when typed with capital letters, would signify the poets urge for special attention from the reader to it. Yet, we chose to adopt the version in which the word know appears in small letters so that we will not devote special attention to it as we move on.

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Those that I guard I do not love: My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.

[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]

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CHAPTER 2 THE NEED FOR PHENOMENOLOGY

The phenomenological project, as a philosophical practice, writes Steven G. Crowell, proves to be an art of existing [emphasis added] (2000:330). The chapter ahead is intended to explain why it is an art of existing and how it can possibly be achieved. 2.1. Ontology in Its Hermeneutically Phenomenological Form A literary study of a particular text may often call for the escort of an analytical investigation. Any textual analysis could thus be appreciably refurbished in a hermeneutic style, for example. Literary studies may in effect need to be philosophically tooled up for creative amplification of the meaning as well. Intensive philosophical enhancement of the meaning can probably acquire further significance as one major method of actual contact with literary experience. Philosophically laborious disinterment of meaning from the poetic form of such experience will principally take root in a predominantly phenomenological outlook. A phenomenological close-up of what seems to be the poetically depicted epistemological anxiety, as articulated by Dorothy Walsh (1970:271) as well, over a future encounter with death, for instance, would be expected to entail assistance from philosophical thoughts.

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This kind of epistemological anxiety is evident right at the start of the poem. When we read the very first of our poem, we can see that the Irish Airman makes a reference to his epistemological anxiety by using the verb know as follows: I know that I shall meet my fate We are using epistemological anxiety, as a phrase to refer to the Irish Airmans state of mind, based on the evidence that epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge. Therefore, from the very start, we get the signal that the Irish Airmans stance on death will have to be approached from a philosophical angle. The Irish Airmans epistemological anxiety is existential. The reason why it is existential will be explicated later in Chapter 5. As we move on, philosophical assistance would, as Francis F. Seeburger argues, fittingly find its exact form in a hermeneutically shaped circle of phenomenological ideas: Phenomenology can never escape the

hermeneutical circle. (1975:215) This way of hermeneutic encirclement is calculatedly taken to be a closer counterpart to the existential analytic in Being and Time. The author, M. Heidegger , gave us in his close alliance with the hermeneutically phenomenological ontology a fine illustration of absorption in the core question of the meaning of Being in general: The meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation (1926/1962:37/61).

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Heideggers reliance on phenomenology as the science of the Being of entities (1926/1962:37/61) appears to have its roots in his pungent remark that only as phenomenology, is ontology possible (1926/1962:35/60). The ontological need for phenomenology would need with full certainty its complementation with the phenomenological need for hermeneutics. Sound organization of the phenomenological ontology is then primarily bound to bring into play hermeneutics because time as an institutive Heideggerian instrument for understanding Being as such4 primordially needs hermeneutic interpretation of its best kind. The basic phenomenology of Being as such would, as a final point, compellingly demand a formidable combination of an ontological understanding of space on the one hand and a hermeneutical interpretation of time on the other hand. Most qualitative analyses of focal literary texts would in the end have to rely on hermeneutic guesswork intertwined with phenomenological

postulations. One such example is Yeats An Irish Airman foresees his Death, and it evidently seems pregnant with existential motives for a qualitative analysis of the kind just mentioned above. With Lines 14 and 15 taken together, for example, we can see a direct reference to the kind of existential analysis that gets marked by a resort to phenomenology:
4

This term, Being as such, shall always be typed this way to ensure maximum consistency in its

typographical usage throughout.

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The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind Ways of retrospective as well as prospective thinking are central to existential considerations. So, we are actually getting a direct clue from the above-cited two lines that this poem permits a detailed philosophical examination of itself. The clue about retrospective thinking comes from the line that says the Irish Airman regards his past as a waste of time, while the clue about prospective thinking comes from the line that signals the Irish Airmans consideration of his future as a waste of time, too. Retrospective as well prospective ways of thinking are also important to enable us to grasp the temporal side to human existentialitya topic that will be discussed in more details in Chapter 4. Before we proceed further, we need to set up a distinction between things themselves and the way they are. This distinction needs to be spotted before we move on because we will make the same distinction between the Irish Airmans existence as someone ontically just like you or me, and as someone else ontologically unlike you or me. This is called the ontological difference. 2.2. The Ontological Difference Our philosophical journey to the attainable depths of literature, especially poetry, will be piloted under the rules of hermeneutically

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phenomenological ontology as paradigmatically set out in Being and Time, the fundamental guidebook to our destination. Categorization of this guidebook as fundamental can best be testified to in Heideggers reference to the highly philosophical inquiry into the question of the meaning of Being (1926/1962:5/24) as the fundamental ontology. Any formal ontological investigation into this core question of the meaning of Being will at any rate have to be approached both existentially and analytically. This type of methodological comportment towards the central question of the meaning of Being counts, as Syed M. Ali states, on a fine, incipient and quite implicit distinction of the ontological kind between Being as such and beings as entities (1999, chap. 6). Only with this entirely incontrovertible distinction can, Heidegger implies, ontology acquire organized existence as a scientific method of inquiry into the Being as such, which can be best defined, with utmost ontological accuracy, as the Being of an entity (Heidegger, 1926/1962:9/29). To return to the poem, it is important to notice at this stage that the Irish Airman also makes a distinction between himself as a member of the Kiltartan people on the one hand and his distinct way of existentiality on the other hand. Lines 5 and 6 point to the Irish Airmans sense of attachment to his people as well as to his country, because he knows that he is, to speak of him as a member of a particular community, simply someone with common characteristics of being a human just like anybody else: My country is Kiltartan Cross,

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My countrymen Kiltartans poor However, Lines 11 and 12 tells us about a different side to the Irish Airmans way of existentiality that nobody from his community shares with him: A lonely impulse of delight, Drove to this tumult in the clouds These two lines seem to be in the poem to point out to the Irish Airmans personal awareness of his own way of Being. To put it shortly, the Irish Airman is ontically in the war just like anybody else is; however, he is ontologically there for entirely different reasons than anybody else has. Heidegger would possibly choose to enhance his definition of the ontological difference, as Paul Garner comments, by saying that philosophical wisdom would only begin to emerge from the exposure of Being as not being any kind of being at all. A careful suggestion of this ontological distinction is treated in the lengthy doctoral dissertation of Ali as an essential constituent of the existential fact that beings partake of5 Being as such (1999, chap. 6). The verification of

It seems probable from S. M. Alis typographical use of the term partake in italics, with the

preposition of, however, left typographically unformatted, that he chose not to treat to partake of as one phrasal verb. Furthermore, he evidently appears confused about what to partake exactly means in this context. However, it could probably have been much less confusing if he had just treated to partake of as one single phrasal verb and if he also had

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this existential fact can only be possible with a separation of ontological from ontical. The Heideggerian terminology has ontical for that which pertains to beings as beings (Ali, 2003, Spring).Differences of any type merely between beings are, however, classified as ontical6. Oscillation throughout the rest of this thesis between beings and the Being of beings will be referred to as swinging between the two adjectives of ontical and ontological, respectively. Therefore, whenever we make a reference to the Irish Airman, the reference will go to the ontological side to his Being. Selecting the existential analytic of Dasein7, the entity that we ourselves are (Heidegger, 1926/1962:13/34),as the benchmark for a fundamental work of ontology would surely generate investigational access to a broader spectrum of

italicized the preposition of as well, because to partake of means, as a formal expression, to have some of a particular quality [emphasis added], according to its definition available in the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, 2005. A slightly different definition of to partake of is also available in the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition, where the expression is defined as to be characterized by (a quality). It seems to me best from these two similar definitions of to partake of to select the first one if we really seek to have a semantically safe understanding of this existential fact, which should actually have been typed with both partake and of italicized, as in beings partake of Being as such, because beings can only have some, but definitely not all, characteristics of Being as such; in other words, Being as such definitely exists to some degree in all beings.
6

Another term available in Heideggerian terminology for ontical is existentiell. Also, there

are times when Heidegger uses existential to signify what is ontological.

7

This term shall always be italicized and never be hyphenated, outside direct quotations, to

ensure maximum consistency in its typographical usage throughout.

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ontologies as well8. Successful conduct of literally choreographic mediation between the fundamental ontology and the existential analytic of Dasein is a result of Daseins ontological comportment towards beings. If Heideggers Dasein can ontologically comport itself towards beings, Yeats Irish Airman can also do likewise. The existential modality of Heideggers Dasein bears perfect resemblance to that of Yeats Irish Airman, and this resemblance will become clearer to the reader as we proceed with our discussion in later chapters. The factual existence of Dasein in its comportment towards beings is most likely to bring home to us a combined understanding of Being as such at both ontological and existential levels: Something like being reveals itself to us in the understanding of being, an understanding that lies at the root of all comportment toward beings. Comportment toward beings belongs, on its part, to a definite being, the being which we ourselves are, the human Dasein. It is to the human Dasein that there belongs the understanding of being which first of all makes possible every comportment toward beings. The understanding of being has itself the mode of being of the human Dasein. (Heidegger, 1927/1988:16) A thorough phenomenological tour of Being as such will only begin with the correct materialization of Dasein at this point as the one and only being to
8

The actual reference to a broader spectrum of ontologies is, in effect, coming from

Heidegger, 1926/1962, p. 13/34, where it reads as follows: Fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein.

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do this tour because, idiosyncratically furnished with the ontological understanding of Being, Dasein is ontological. This primacy of Dasein over all other entities comes from the distinctive ability of Dasein to understand formatively the Being of beings. Just as Dasein, the Irish Airman shows us his ontological side as he can illustrate his understanding of the Being of beings by using such expressions as to foresee his death in the title, to know that he shall meet his fate in Line 1, to balance and bring all to his mind in Line 13. The Irish Airman cannot absolutely disclaim his ontological understanding of Being, even if he wants to do so, because he has the language that is always there to report him as being in denial of his own truth whenever he makes an attempt to refuse to acknowledge his Dasein-hood. The role of Dasein in understanding Being in general is, as Garner argues, closely bound up with phenomenology as the science of ontology: It is a distinctive feature of Heideggers philosophy that all ways of having to do with things, all modes of comportment to entities, and not just perception an observation, let things show themselves in some way. But what lets things show themselves is what normally does not show itself. What lets things show themselves is the understanding of being. Getting being to show itself, letting it be seen, is the task of philosophy9 [or phenomenology]. (1997, parag. 4)

Heidegger tends to define in his introduction to The Basic Problems of Phenomenology the

expression phenomenology as a method of scientific philosophy in general. Philosophy is assigned in this book an ontological dimension both on a basic level and when Heidegger

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Any philosophical attempt to walk along the phenomenological way down to ontology through hermeneutics would ultimately have to depend for success on the understanding of Being as such, a notion that demands a distinction from any kinds of ontical beings. This sort of understanding can only become available to Dasein in its comportment towards beings. The fundamental question about the meaning of Being as such would thus be rendered accessible with an ontico-ontological inquiry into the spatiotemporally basic existential structures of the Being of factical Dasein.

equates philosophy with the science of Beingthat is, ontology. It then seems logically safe to associate phenomenology with ontology as a final point.

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CHAPTER 3 SPATIALLY BASIC EXISTENTIAL STRUCTURES OF THE BEING OF DASEIN

Because human beings are set to be in the world, they have to maintain their existence in the world as long as they are alive. This chapter, therefore, aims at bringing into issue the notion of Daseins spatiality to explain the Irish Airmans spatial position in the world. Yeats Irish Airman is Heideggers Dasein in that they both have spatiality as an essential side to their Being. Therefore, whatever applies to Dasein in its spatiality will apply to the Irish Airman in his spatiality as well. A comparative study of the spatiality on both parts of Heideggers Dasein and Yeats Irish Airman together will be in place before we move on to the existential insight into temporality over the next chapter. The analytic of Daseins spatiality should begin with the three ontological constituents of Dasein, because Daseins spatiality is essentially ontological. 3.1. The Three Ontological Constituents of Dasein Our attempts at a philosophically successful decryption of the poetically decoded meaning in Yeats An Irish Airman foresees his Death will rely on a detection of linguistic signs of space, time and death. Access to such meaning comes through a careful implementation of a phenomenology of space, time 30

and death, all on the part of Dasein as symbolic of Yeats Irish Airman, with much of the focus placed sometimes on a single word or a single word phrase in one line, and sometimes on the whole of one or more than one line. Within this framework, linguistic signs of space will be carefully selected from Yeats poem in this chapter for a reasonably successful conduct of spatial phenomenology. However, before we move on to a phenomenological coverage of Daseins spatiality, a relatively broad discussion of the three basic ontological constituents of Dasein seems necessary, as it will certainly be contributing to our later analyses of Dasein as representative of the Irish Airman. Nicholson aims for a explication of the Heideggerian triadic assemblage of existence, Being-in-the-world and care as foundational ingredients of the Being of Dasein. In view of this explication of Nicholsons, existence is referred to as the ontological essence of Dasein; Being-in-the-world denotes the spatial constitution of Dasein; and care sets up the ontological Being of Dasein. A single-phrased formulation of this would read that Dasein is ontologically concerned with the development of self-understanding through its

circumspective involvement with the world. As for Yeats Irish Airman, he also conforms in his Being to this triadic existential assemblage in that he, too, has his existence as his essence, his Being-in-the-world as his spatial constitution and his care as the constitution of his Being. However, it will be clearer, especially in later chapters, that the 31

existential modalities of these three ontological properties will be covered under the notion of authentic possibility for Being. And because Heidegger defines death as Daseins ownmost possibility, full authenticity needs to be located in the notion of deathwhich the Irish Airman seeks to decipher on his own. Since we have become familiar with the triadic assemblage of Dasein, we can now look at how these three ontological properties interrelate. The existence of Dasein as essence is marked with its reciprocal relation both to the spatial constitution of Dasein as Being-in-the-world and to care as the Being of Dasein. Nicholson tries for an a priori delineation of how this relation is generated from a reading of the second paragraph in Section 4 of Being and Time. The title of Section 4 reads The Ontical Priority of the Question of Being. He first sets out to establish the relation between existence and Beingin-the-world. Nicholson begins with an examination of the first sentence: Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. (Heidegger, 1953/1996:12/10)10

10

Nicholsons version of the translation of Sein und Zeit differs from mine. Nicholson used Joan

Stambaughs translation of Sein und Zeit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). I used John Macquarrie and Edward Robinsons translation (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1962). Therefore, it seems logical to use page references to the original German text of 1926, as specified in the margins of the translation, to avoid confusion. My version of

32

Heidegger tends not to see the presence of Dasein among other beings as just a simple occurrence, Nicholson infers, because the occurrence of Dasein as Existenz sets it apart from other occurrences as Vorhandenheit, comparable to objective presence as an English expression. Heidegger further makes a distinction between Existenz as a private title for the occurrence of Dasein and existentia as a general term for other occurrences. With this in mind, we should parenthetically note that the reference to the Irish Airmans existential modality calls for the use of Existenz to designate his difference from existentia. According to Nicholson, Heidegger promptly argues for this type of distinction as a need to forestall a possible ontological distortion of Dasein (2005:52). With its spatial constitution as Being-in-the-world, Dasein actually exists as a dweller in the world. The construal of Dasein as a dweller in the world derives from Heideggers etymological breakdown of bin as in Ich bin. Bin, according to Heidegger, is etymologically associated with bei. For that reason, Ich bin originally means, I dwell, or I linger over. Nicholson concludes from the Vorhandenseit side of Dasein having thus been shaken off in the first sentence that a room for Existenz has also been made. In other words, the reciprocated connection between the spatial constitution of Dasein as

the same sentence reads as follows: Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities (Heidegger, 1926/1962:12/32).

33

Being-in-the-world and the existence of Dasein has been established in this way. Taking our direction back to the poem, the Irish Airmans ontological attachment to the world is not good enough, because he seeks to set his life up in the clouds. His choice of location for his death, for example, becomes interesting when we learn from his words in Lines 1 and 2 that he will die up in the air, not down on the earth: I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above So, this means that his search for a place in the world to occupy ontologically did not apparently work. As a result of this, he had his own impulse of delight to drive to the tumult in the clouds. Again, he perfectly knows what he is going to meet when he chooses to be up in the clouds: a tumult. This is called self-understanding and will be analyzed in more depth in subsequent lines. Since we have grasped the relation between Being-in-the-world and existence from both viewpoints of Dasein and the Irish Airman, we can now seek to establish the relation between existence and care. Nicholson moves on to his examination of the second sentence:

34

Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its being, this very being is of concern to it (Heidegger, 1953/1996:12/10).11 The clear inference is that Dasein is not unmindful12 of its Being at all, because its Being existentially, but not ontologically, matters to it. Likewise, the Irish Airmans ontological connection to the war comes from his existential concern for himself, not from his ontological concerns about the war. And this disables him to find meaning both in his fight against those that he does not hate and in his protection of those that he does not love, as is poetically put in Lines 3 and 4: Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love. In short, he simply cannot share the ontological meaning of Being-inthe-world with others for whom it is perfectly normal and appreciable to be in the war for ontological reasons alone. To return to Nicholson, his closer analysis of this sentence reveals the distinction to be ontologically applying to our way of Being: What differentiates us is not a characteristic or property that attaches to our species like the relative hairlessness of our bodies, something ontic. It is an ontological distinction, one that pertains to
11

The translation of this sentence in my version of Sein und Zeit reads: Rather it is ontically

distinguished by the fact, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it (Heidegger, 1926/1962:12/32).
12

I was inspired to use this word here after I got a glimpse of the 2006 publication of

Heideggers Mindfulness as the English translation of his Besinnug.

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our way of being. To be concerned about our being is fated and ordained for anyone whose being is of our kind. (2005:62) Nicholsons further interpretation establishes one key characteristic of the Being of Dasein as arousal of the concern for the Being of Dasein by virtue of its Being. The Being of Dasein as the existential way it is propels it into a concern with its Being, whereas the Being of other things remains a plain occurrence (Nicholson, 2005:62). Care takes on a specific role at this point as circumspective concern about existence. Nicholson deduces from Heideggers demonstration of a

relationship between existence and Dasein in Section 4 that Dasein establishes its relationship to existence through a concern about existence. Heideggers illustration of this sort of relationship emerges from his earliest mention in Being and Time of existence together with Dasein: We shall call the very being to which Dasein can relate in one way or another, and somehow always does relate, existence. (Heidegger, 1926/1996:12/10)13 We understand from this quotation that the human existence is something that humans care about on different levels. Some humans prefer to care about their existence on a rather mental level, while others prefer to do

13

My version of Sein und Zeit has the following translation of this sentence: That kind of Being

towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call existence [Existenz] (Heidegger, 1926/1962:12/32).

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the same thing on a much more physical level. However different the case may be, care about existence plays a pivotal role in human existence. To bring this up as an issue for discussion in the light of our poem, we can say that if the Irish Airman had not ever pronounced Lines 7 and 8, then he would have been perfectly qualify as someone with solely ontological concerns about things such as war: No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before It is clear from these two lines cited above that the Irish Airman is not concerned with the practical outcomes of the warlike who will win and who will lose; he is, rather, concerned with the kind of outcomes that will affect his comportment to his own existencelike whether or not the war will ever bring him home to his existential awareness. While others care about the war as a showcase of their ontological superiority, the Irish Airman tends to approach the war as a signal of further care for his own existentiality. To sum it up, care emerges as an ontological appellation for what connects Dasein to its existence. The Being of Dasein as care throws Dasein ad infinitum back into a relationship to its existence. The reciprocal relation between the existence of Dasein as essence and care as the Being of Dasein has thus been built. In addition to the three ontological properties discussed above, the plurality of Dasein also needs to be addressed, because Being-in-the-world

37

entails a different mode of Being that exists for a particular Dasein as an agreement to share the world with other Daseins. We name this mode of Being Daseins Being-with-others, which we will discuss in subsequent paragraphs. 3.2. Daseins Being-with-others in a Shared World The basic erection of Dasein as a spatial being is set for the most part to its Being-in-the-world. This state of spatiality of Dasein fixes its Being up in the world. Dasein, thus, finds itself bafflingly thrown along with other Daseins into a combined space of places where it existentially has to share Being as such (Heidegger, 1926/1962:104/138). Overpowering compulsion of this sort on Dasein to share in the world the Being as such gains it in return a status of Being-with-others. Being-in is, as formulaically defined by Heidegger in his Being and Time, Being-with Others (1926/1962:118/155). Turning back to the poem, it appears to be true that the Being-in-theworld-hood of the Irish Airman as Dasein emerges as pressure on him to yield to his Being-with-others-hood. However, as we have already seen in our above remarks that his way of being in the world does not quite match up to the common sense of being in the world. Therefore, he is seen to relinquish, admittedly though, his being-with-others-in-the-world-hood in Lines 9 and 10: Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.

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When looked at from this point of view, a decision for the Irish Airman to choose his own death over the publicly shared way of Being is seen to be signalled in the poem right in these two lines. We may now ask whether the Irish Airman could not have pretended to be just like others? The answer seems to be that he could have done so only if he had not had an anxious pursuance of existential authenticitysomething that can only be attained in his own death. Social life may in fact earn individual human existence some protection from the existential sort of extreme anxiety. However, anxiety never completely disappears from human life. Even in small proportions, it remains to exist in various patches of human existence, because there is bound to be some distantiality in any characterization of Being-with-one-another. Therefore, even ones attempts to eliminate ones differences from others converts Being-withone-another into Being-against-one-another. This unavoidable distantiality even in Being-with-one-another is stretched to the limit in the case of the Irish Airman, because his existential anxiety has already reached the point where he does not allow himself to seek sociability any more. Hence, the Irish Airman distances himself from others all the more. The Irish Airmans distantiality is obvious even in his choice of word. While the Irish Airman uses the adjective happy in its comparative form in Line 8 to refer to the state of mind that the Kiltartan people expect to have if 39

they win the war, he uses the noun delight in Line 11 to refer to his own state of mind just before he joins the war. The fact that the Irish Airman is not alone in his state of being in the world hints at him being surrounded by a social circle. In Irish Airmans case, his social circle is obviously the Kiltartans. It is important to notice that the Irish Airmans state of being surrounded by the Kiltartans is a side effect of his being with them. We will call this side effect the formation of the theya term Heidegger specifically uses to refer to Daseins average Being. Even distant participation of an individual human being in a shared lifeworld forms a social circle around him or her that becomes what Heidegger calls the they. Figal interprets the they as determination of the Self by an outside force. Heideggerian designation of the they as an uncanny fusion of both nothing definite and something all prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness (Heidegger, 1926/1962:127/164).With the Being of everyday Dasein sharply juxtaposed to the Being of the particular Dasein, it appears sensible from the point of view of Heidegger to say, with as little ontological delusiveness of its subtlest kind as possible, that the they assists the particular Dasein in its everydayness with disburdening itself of its Being. The domineering presence of the they, however, only gets far stronger with the particular Dasein constantly left disburdened of its Being: The particular Dasein in its everydayness is disburdened by the they. Not only that; by thus disburdening it of its Being, the they accommodates Dasein if Dasein has any tendency to take things 40

easily and make them easy. And because the they constantly accommodates the particular Dasein by disburdening it of its Being, the they retains and enhances its stubborn dominion (Heidegger, 1926/1962:128-8/165). It is apparent from the above quotation that the disburdenment occurs in everyday life. It makes everyday life easer for Dasein to live. In exchange for its assistance in disburdening Dasein of its Being, Dasein bows to the dominion of the they. Refusal to listen to the they, however, has immediate implications. One of these implications can be observed in the case of the Irish Airman, whose refusal to acknowledge the common-sense approach to the war that is poetically put forth in Lines 7 and 8 renders him a plain target for immediate alienation from his immediate world. So, with his Being-in-theworld-hood negated publicly, his choice of life becomes a choice of death of his own. That is why the Irish Airman must have resorted to setting up a balance between life and death in Line 16: In balance with this life, this death. The Irish Airmans equation of life to death seems to be an existential act, because an equation of this type will appear to violate the ontological codes of having some space and time to live in. What is more, the commonsensical approach to life will dictate on Dasein its ontological denial of existentiality at any rate.

41

We have seen that Dasein is encircled by other Daseins, and as such it is able to adapt itself more easily to everyday life. Our discussion now broadens to include further details about Daseins being surrounded by public. Dasein seems to have a natural predisposition to feel bordered by the they in its public form. An enclosure of this sort would most sensibly elicit an energetic response from the particular Dasein to remain faithful to its distinction from everyday Dasein. This kind of distinction would reflect itself best in the discrepancy between the selves of both everyday Dasein and the particular Dasein: The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Selfthat is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way [eigens ergriffenen]. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the they, and must first find itself. (Heidegger, 1926/1962:129/167) A congruently supportive argument about the above mentioned linkage between the self of everyday Dasein and the they-self comes from Steven Crowell as well. With everyday Dasein left under the seemingly inexorable governance of publicness, Crowell argues, it becomes plain that everyday Dasein chooses intently not to single out itself from others. In stark contrast with everyday Dasein, however, the particular Dasein seeks to maintain a mature incongruity with the entire publicness around it. An example of the conflict between the particular Dasein and its everyday version is doubtlessly the one between the Irish Airman and the Kiltartan

42

people. Lines 9 through 12 from the poem appear to relate with sufficient textual testimony both to the encirclement of Yeats Irish Airman as an example of Heideggers particular Dasein by the publicness of the they and his effortful maintenance of a mature incongruity with it: Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds. What really sets the Irish Airman apart from the publicness of the they is his lonely impulse to join the wartime chaos up in the sky. As the word itself suggests, an impulse is, according to its definition in the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (2000), a sudden strong wish or need to do something, without stopping to think about the results. In this respect, too, is there a resemblance between Heideggers Dasein and Yeats Irish Airman in that both strive for authenticity in their existence, because Heidegger defines the temporal meaning of authenticity as Der Augenblick in German, which can contextually translate in English to the vision of moment, though its literal translation reads the blink of an eye. Often, an impulse and a blink of eye are both sudden occurrences; and therefore, both can be related to authentic action in the end. The notion of Augenblick deserves thorough discussion separately in its relation to authenticity in the temporal existentiality of Dasein. This, however,

43

is not possible to do within the scope of this work. For that reason, further elaboration on it will not be supplied here. Speaking of the everyday Being of Dasein in relation with the particular Daseins struggle not to be dominated by it, we can now turn our attention to one of its significant implications for the particular Dasein, which we will name practicality, and discuss it in connection with the Irish Airman. Jeffrey A. Barash (2005) regards as secure Heideggers association of Daseins tendencies to have an advanced level of practical handling of things with the assistance of the they. Here, Heidegger in effect seems to be referring to my formulation of Being-practical as one essential form of everyday Daseins Beinga point that we will cover in the subsequent lines. We begin our discussion with the question of why Dasein feels the need to be practical in its everydayness? The answer to this question lies in Daseins thrownness. Dasein is always in each case mine, because we are answerable or responsible for how we create our lives. This much too individualistic Heideggerian maxim gets support from Guignon when he says that individual answerability for social actions in a publicly shared world determines the degree to which human existence can be rendered as a successful carrying out of a project: To be human is to be a thrown project. Heideggarian illustration

44

of human existence as being inextricably bound up with a public life-world14 forces human existence to rely on individual conscious efforts to find a place to occupy in a spatiotemporal system of existentiality among other beings in the world (Guignon, 2005:80). It is important to notice before proceeding further with our discussion that the mineness of Dasein remains in close proximity with the loneliness of the Irish Airman. What the Irish Airman seems to have in his mind when he says in Line 13 that he thought deeply of anything that he could ever think of before he decided to have his death in his own way: I balanced all, brought all to mind The Irish Airmans decision to have his death in his own way comes right after he convinces himself of the futility of his own life. In both cases, he is perfectly aware of the decisions he is making on his own. His own self belongs wholly to him only. Whatever decision he makes, whatever choice he comes up with and whatever he does, are all a result of his mineness, a topic that we will discuss in more detail in 3.3.1. Back to our discussion, as a thrown project, Daseins shared being emerges best in its daily practical dealings with others. How Dasein tends to share a public life-world becomes most explicit in its daily practical dealings.

14

The source for this quotation actually comes from Hubert L. Dreyfus Being-in-The-World: A

Commentary on Heideggers Being and Time, Division I (1991).

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The daily encounter of Dasein with behavioural as well practical patterns of others is embodied in Daseins ontological property of Being-with-others. Doing is thus taken by Dasein in its daily practical dealings to be an instrument of defining others. In Figals view, Daseins attempts to define ways of doing of others single them out as definite ones because they are always these definite ones insofar as what they do admits comparison with our own doing, and this comparability also allows us to distinguish ourselves from each other (2005:111). Fighting is a kind of doing. We do the fighting when we fight. When the Irish Airman fights, he does not do his fighting because he was publicly told to do so and to join the cheering crowds; he does his fighting, to repeat over again, out of a lonely impulse of delight, just as he says in Lines 9, 10 and 11: Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight This is also important to notice, because discrepancy between somebodys way of doing something and somebody elses way of doing something is not only a simple difference. A difference of that kind is so gross that it can set up somebodys existential position at once, because doing is kind of comporting and comporting in turn is existential. As the quality of others being definite renders us distinct in our daily practices, we become involved in publicly joint doings. Distinction in our

46

management of daily life may force us to distance ourselves from the definite others. As our daily practical dealings gain us distinction from daily management of others, our ontological property of Being-with-others becomes Being-in-gaps-with-others. A further investigational analysis of Being-practical is not possible at this stage, as it would methodologically lie beyond the scope of this work. As we have already said, Yeats Irish Airman has to copy the everyday practical Dasein in his attempts at practicality more than anybody else if he really wants to have ontologically good command of a military aircraft and successfully display his existence in a series of joint activities at war. Though the Irish Airman is expected to join up with others in their undirected war for entirely practical reasons like the taking ultimate advantage of aerial manoeuvres, his authenticity rather shows in his lonely [emphasis added] impulse of delight to get to the tumult in the clouds to no purpose at all. Being-with-others, as the ontological character of Yeats Irish Airman as an occurrence of Heideggers Dasein, gets unsurprisingly transformed to Beingin-gaps-with-others. With authenticity just hinted at, it is now the time to try to establish the origin of authenticity, i.e., what makes authenticity possible. For this aim, we will consider self-understanding as the locus of authenticity. 3.3. Self-understanding of Dasein and Authenticity

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In addition to the existentially ontological characteristic of Dasein as Being-with-others in a shared world, Daseins compatibility with shared patches of life in the world also gains significance as Dasein gradually grows into awareness of its possible ways of access to a variety of modes of Being. Its thoughts about these modes of Being can vary in accord with a shift in its focus on authenticity away from inauthenticity. Dasein is simply not an entity that expresses a what as in the case of table, house or tree, because Dasein expresses only a being. What is basic about this being is that it is actually a possibility. It is, in other words, the possibility of being myself or not being myself. This is best expressed philosophically, according to Nicholson, as the alternative between

authenticity and inauthenticity. As a possibility of Being, authenticity rests on proper self-understanding. Self-understanding is basically Daseins understanding of itself in terms of possibilities. This kind of understanding can generate authenticity if and only if death is viewed as the ownmost distinct possibility of Dasein. Yeats Irish Airman seems to have succeeded in reaching this level of self-understanding. As we have said previously, inauthentic versus authentic existence is central to Heideggers discussion of Dasein and Yeats description of the Irish Airman, both. Neither the particular Dasein nor the Irish Airman is willing just to be in the world and to enjoy their life accordingly. The existential truth that prescribes to the kind of Being that both Heideggers authentic Dasein and

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Yeats Irish Airman exhibit in themselves equates death to life, just as it is done in Line 16, in a manner which is not comprehensible to the inauthentic Dasein and its derivatives. In balance with this life, this death. In the end, both Heideggers authentic Dasein and Yeats Irish Airman seem to be prescribing to the following maxim when they approach death: Life is comprehensibly nonsensical. Having established the connection between authenticity and selfunderstanding in this way, we can now turn to what Heidegger calls in German Jemeiningkeit or mineness in English. Nicholson finds it important to note that Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Dasein has the ontological property of Jemeiningkeit (mineness)that says Being is in every case mine. The entrenched first-person claim over the Being of Dasein originates from the exposition of Dasein as an entity which is in each case I myself (Heidegger, 1926/1962:114/150). Mineness is assigned in the Heideggerian system of thought the two compound functions of characterizing any existent Dasein (Heidegger, 1926/1962:48/68) and belonging to it [any existent Dasein] as the condition which makes authenticity and inauthenticity possible (Heidegger, 1926/1962:53/78). The notion of mineness can be extracted from the poem beginning in its first line with the word I and then proceeding in a similar line of thinking to

49

emphasis the first-person remarks of the Irish Airman. The poem has the word I in Lines 1, 3, 4 and 13. This has a special meaning to consider when we try to make sense of the totality of the poem: The whole of the poem belongs to the Irish Airman. The Irish Airman is in the poem of his own. When he says in Line 13, for example, that he has thought of anything he could think of, he is at the same time making an implicit reference to others being unable to reflect upon all the things: I balanced all, brought all to mind If someone else was similarly able to consider all, the Irish Airman would have been expected to use the first-person plural pronoun We instead of the first-person singular I. However, it appears that nobody has been able to do it. So, he finds himself alone with his own existential obligation to reflect upon anything that he can think of and make a decision authentically in the end. Besides, Heideggers philosophical pursuit of a fundamental ontology hinged initially on a [pilot] study of our own particular way of Being (Nicholson, 2005:47). An outer look from Dasein at its inner self is treated in Being and Time as a benchmark against which the ontological foundation of beings can be successfully measured. Heideggerian characterization of Dasein finds its way to an elucidation in the following argumentation from Nicholson: It is an aspect of our being that we are ontological, endowed with the understanding (logos) of being (tou ontos). The ontic distinction of Dasein lies in the fact that it is ontological. The wording of this claim continues to undergird the running emphasis that our concern for being, our relationship to it and understanding of it are 50

to be understood not only as endowments of ourselves or our species, but as expressions of our being. By italicising the last word ist, Heidegger is playing on the double possibility of a German word to function both as adjective and adverb. The ontological character, then, attaches not only to us but our way of being: we are ontological, but it is also true that we are, ontologically. (2005:65) The human self-examination emerges from the unique capacity of Dasein to dissect the meaning of the question of Being. Dasein is, however, endowed with the sheer intellectual ability to fully grasp its existentially distinct way of Being as well. Therefore, ontology begins at home, argues Nicholson (2005:47) and adds confidently that an ontological inquiry into the question of the being, or die Frage nach dem Sein in German, thus calls for a preliminary scrutiny of the Being of Dasein, or das Sein des Daseins in German. It is noticeable, according to Nicholson, from Heideggers disquisition on the human existence in Being and Time that the self-understanding of Dasein comes out of its own existence. William McNeill reinforces this idea by saying that the human self-examination appears as a keynote of the Heideggerian treatise on the individual way of Being of Dasein. As Hubert L. Dreyfus has also shown, Daseins primordial understanding of its own Being grants authenticity as well. Dasein existentially acquires selfunderstanding in its possibility to be itself--authenticity, or not to be itself-inauthenticity. This type of self-understanding enables Dasein to fully realize its potentiality to be itself.

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This relatively short discussion of authenticity as an upshot of Daseins acquisition of self-understanding appears to call for an attempt to think about the likeliest implication of Yeats choice to use to foresee as the verb in his seemingly prosaic title to An Irish Airman foresees his Death. Heidegger would possibly not have said that Yeats preference for to foresee to use as the verb in the title to his poem was simply coincidental if Heidegger had actually read Yeats An Irish Airman foresees his Death from his phenomenological point of view, because Yeats Irish Airman is signalled in his ontological act of foreseeing his death to be getting ready for his own appropriate conceptualization of existential authenticity as the authentic potentiality-for-Being-ones-Self from the end: The authenticity of the potentiality-for-Being-one's-Self guarantees that primordial existentiality is something we see in advance, and this assures us that we are coining the appropriate existential concepts. (Heidegger, 1926/1962:316/364) The Irish Airman has the temporal foresight to care about his death well before it gets transformed from sheer possibility into physical actuality. The Irish Airmans quest for authenticity as Being-ones-Self can therefore be accounted for by his foresightedness. Furthermore, Yeats Irish Airman appears to have modelled himself on Heideggers Dasein, unknowingly of course, in his effort to attach his life to his death, and vice versa. The notion of life without death is not credible at all either for Yeats Irish Airman or Heideggers Dasein to hold on to when they

52

are set resolutely to reach the existential state of authenticity in their potentiality-for-Being-ones-Self. As Heidegger made it clear in his Being and Time, our view is bound to remain much too short-sighted if we make a problem of life, and then just occasionally have regard for death too (1926/1962:316/363). Textual evidence for introspective efforts on the part of Yeats Irish Airman to remain authentic in his own Dasein comes from Line 13, where his existential self-examination as an underlying sign of fundamental ontology evidently starts: I balanced all, brought all to mind. There is here a mental struggle of its hardest kind, doomed to unavoidable failure in the end though, to work out a permanent way of authenticity as an outcome of existential self-understanding. The reason behind such unavoidable failure is bound up with the possible possibility of ontological Being and the impossible possibility of existential Being, and will hopefully get more obvious in Chapter 4, where the notion of death will be explored from an existentially phenomenological aspect. With the inquiry established into auhtentictiy and its relation to selfunderstanding as well as mineness, we will now seek the potential capacity of mankind to assert firmly its existential position over other things. Man is not the lord of beings, says Heidegger, and defines man as the shepherd of Being (1993, p.245). This essential distinction is important to

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notice in Heideggers entire system of philosophy. The lines that follow are intended to clarify this distinction in detail. Essential to a philosophical investigation into life and death as matters redolent of the ontological magnitude, existence would fittingly merit closer examination along the lines of phenomenological thought that often solely designates man. This discrete position of man among beings is purposively singled out in the Heideggerian system of thinking to show that man actually appropriates presence, or man is an event of appropriation of presence; in other words, mans Being is a consequence of his existentiality: The being that exists is man. Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist. Angels are, but they do not exist. God is, but he does not exist. (Heidegger, 1949/1956:214) Where does the notion of appropriation fit in Yeats poem? The Irish Airman as a human being has the distinction of being able to foresee his death before it comes. His level of consciousness enables him to do this, whereas others cannot attain the same kind of foresight simply due to their lack of philosophic contemplation. That man appropriates presence and adds it to his own existence is most notably available in the notion of war, where somebody feels the need to take away somebody elses life just to maintain his or her own existence. The Irish Airman joins the war not to appropriate somebody elses life but to have his own death in his own way. While the people of Kiltartan fight their war to remain longer alive at the expense of somebody elses death,

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the Irish Airman simply shuns away from appropriating the existence of somebody else for his own survival. Distinct understanding of the existence of man in the Heideggerian formulation of thinking will in due course yield the essence, or Being of Dasein. With the constitutive status of man set exclusively to the essential way of Being of Dasein as Being-there, man is moving only forward towards his Being in some segments of both time and space, as existentially as well as worldly appropriated to him, from there to there, definitely not from here to there or from there to here, because, as we learn from Heidegger, Dasein is described as: The entity which is essentially constituted by Being-in-the-world is itself in every case its there. (1926/1962:132/171) Along with this ascription of thereness under Heideggerian tutelage as one fundamental attribute of Dasein to man, a linguistic genealogy of the English word presence would as well hopefully help to elucidate the philosophical designation of Dasein as Being-there: Being-there is the word-for-word English translation of the German Dasein. Being-there is also one of the English synonyms for presence. The Latin word for presence is praesentia, the literal equivalent of being at hand. Praesent is the Latin present participle of praeesse, a combination of prae as before and esse as be. Esse is also the root of the Latin essentia, the English translation of which is essence.

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Conclusively, the essence of Being-there evenly matches up with the Being of Dasein. With all this said, we can now turn back to the poem again momentarily and say that when the Irish Airman expresses his future encounter with his own death spatially somewhere among the clouds in Line 2, he is actually referring to his own Dasein-hood. Somewhere among the clouds above; His movement solely forward towards his ultimate possibility of spatiotemporal Being is set to end in his death somewhere in the clouds. Just as Heideggers Dasein is, Yeats Irish Airman has to choose somewhere where he can have his distinct possibility realized in his own death. Man, all in all, walks as an unescorted being out along an individual temporal path to his own Being. This temporal solitary walk of man out on an isolated path to self-actualization can be called the human existentiality. Man, in other words, exists as a temporally unaccompanied being in order just to be. And Yeats Irish Airman is doubtlessly just one such man. Therefore, as Ali draws from the Heidegerian formulation of ontology, the essence of man lies in his existentially self-realized way of Being; or concisely, in his existence.15

15

An apparently substantial quotation from Being and Time would bear a perfectly apposite

testimony to the above-cited existential primacy of existing for man: Mans substance is not spirit as a synthesis of soul and body; it is rather existence (Heidegger, 1926/1962, p. 153/117).

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This notion of existence as the essence of man also brings us face to face with what Heidegger tends to call the authentic potentiality for Being of Dasein. That is to say, Dasein can have its authentic potentiality for Being only after it acknowledges with fully existential consciousness that its essence lies in its existence. While the next chapter, therefore, resolves to explore the existential, not the ontological, side to Daseins Being, Chapter 5 is an attempt to say that Daseins authenticity is a result of its existential Being only, but definitely not its ontological Being.

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CHAPTER 4 TEMPORALLY EXISTENTIAL STRUCTURES OF THE BEING OF DASEIN

Below is a passage from the English translation of Saatleri Ayarlama Enstits (1961), a famous Turkish novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpnar (1901 1962). The translation, by Ender Gngr from the original 1961 version of the novel into English, appeared as The Time Regulation Institute in 2001. In fact, he hardly made any differentiation between men and watches. He often said: God created man in his own image, and man created watches in his own likeness. He would then add the following words in corroboration of his idea: Man must not forsake watches, as otherwise they will perish like a man abandoned by God. His mediations on watches sometimes went far deeper: Watches are the space, their march, time and their regulation man himself. This proves that time and space coexist with man. (Tanpnar, 1961/2001:48) This passage was selected and put here to provide a clue for what will follow in the upcoming analysis of Daseins temporality and its relatedness to the Irish Airmans temporal status because it puts the notion of time in a central position between human beings and their existential relation to space. 4.1. Introduction to Temporality

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Structural to the ontological existence of Dasein are spatial situatedness and temporal projection. The situation of Dasein in the world is referred to as its spatial situatedness, or its spatially situational existentiality. The spatially situational existentiality of Dasein is accompanied by temporal projection along the path Dasein takes towards the realization of its future chances to exist among other projections of similar kinds. Temporal projection can then be cited as a term for designating the futural dimension of a life happening at the moment (Guignon, 2005:78). The spatially situational existentiality of Dasein can only flourish as the phenomenal expansion of a temporal project thrown into the future when temporality is definitely allowed a lead role in relating Dasein to the understanding of Being as such, since it is only in and through time that Dasein can, in effect, aspire to Being as such. Just as the notion of temporality plays a major role in helping Dasein to understand Being as such, the Irish Airman also benefits from temporality when he reflects philosophically upon his past as well his future in Lines 13 through 15: I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind The philosophical consciousness of temporality is the only mode of human existence where existential authenticity can begin to emerge. Once

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philosophical thinking embarks on temporalization, the existential journey to Being as such also begins. To put briefly, Dasein is not only spatial but also temporal. It is accorded a spatiotemporal dimension while it is in the world. The following sections of this chapter cover how the Being of Dasein is linked to time. What will then follow is an attempt to benefit from the analysis of Daseins temporality to see the temporal side to Yeats Irish Airman as well. We will first try to establish a link between Being and time. 4.2. The link between Being and Time Time binds beings to their Being. It is noticeable, as Frederick Sontag agrees, from the Heideggerian system of thinking that Being is, therefore, most primordially discovered via time. With this in his mind, Heidegger strives to turn the spotlight on his elucidation of the meaning of the oblivious question of Being what it means to be, or what it means to be an entity that there is. Daseins detection of itself as a temporal being in the world comes primarily from its existential understanding of the question of Being. The question of Being is spotlighted to supply Dasein with a sense of selfhood, since Dasein tends to be temporally present, as Jon Mills phrases it, as an existential ontology of selfhood. This temporal presence of Dasein as selfhood is, Mills adds, well grounded in the insight into its way to be.

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To see the matter from the Irish Airmans side, we will consider his sense of self-hood. While the Irish Airman begins with the cognitive act of knowing certainly that he shall have his death somewhere up in the air, he is in fact making an attempt to assure his epistemological grasp of his own Being. His assertive use of the word I in combination with know in Line 1 signals the Irish Airmans firm and mature projection on his own self: I know that I shall meet my fate If the Irish Airman had not have an existential sense of selfhood, he would not have been able to begin with a philosophically cognitive assertion of the kind available in Line 1, because as we said just above, the existential understanding is an offshoot of the Selfs understanding of its selfhood. The Irish Airman has to temporalize his sense of self-hood, because Dasein can only manage to retain an existential sense of self-hood as long as it holds on to a worldly occupation of time.16 Daseins apprehension of the temporalization of time emanates from its hermeneutically phenomenological observation of time as a conglomerate of flowing nows17. The spatiotemporal

16

It is intrinsically important to detect here one of the three basic senses of the adjective

temporal as being connected with the real physical world, not spiritual matters, according to its definition available in the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, 2000. The temporal dimension of Dasein always joins together with its spatial dimension as long as it is in the world.
17

I must admit to having sought initial justification from the outside of Being and Time for

using with some hesitation the temporalization of temporality as a phrase in my thesis. With this in mind, I first relied on Mike Sandbothes The Temporalization of Time (2001). On my

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position of Dasein in the world is an indication of its association with beings as well, since Dasein has primarily the spatial property of Being-in-the-world. The basic phenomenology of the Being of Dasein is thus meant to demonstrate succinctly the combined existence of Dasein both in its ontological spatiality and hermeneutical temporality in the world. With the link between Being and time established this way, we will now try to put as clearly as possible why temporality comes before spatiality for Being in general. A textbook transition from the spatial ontology of Dasein to its temporal version seems feasible and indispensable for our analytic of Dasein here. Commitment to philosophical appreciation of the entire existential structures of Dasein would, ironically enough, confer upon us an inquiry into the temporal precedence of Being as such over not only beings but also the Being of beings as well as the Being of Dasein. A quote from Theodore Kisiel will hint at the significance of phenomenological exposition of temporality in understanding Being as such: The phenomenological language of Being as such is the language of Temporality, which is properly the transcendental horizon for the question about being. (2005:195)

further readings of later passages from the 1962 translation of Being and Time, however, I came across different mentions of this aforementioned phrase in several places of Being and Time (1926/1962), three of which can be cited at p. 304/351; p. 328/377; p. 331/380.

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Existentially accorded a status of priority, temporality asserts in each case its unsurpassable dominance over spatiality. Let us try to see the matter at hand from the Irish Airmans viewpoint. The Irish Airmans conclusion that neither his past nor his future made sense to him came from his temporal analysis of his own life. In other words, he saw his own Being through the eyes of time. Did he ignore his ontologically spatial position in the world when he came to this conclusion? Definitely not, because he admits early in the poem to being a member of the Kiltartan people, who live in the Kiltartan Cross: My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor. Although life is alternatively available to live in different parts of the world, it needs to be led in the same existential way over and over again in time, because time does not change; it only repeats itself. This must be the reason why the Irish Airman tends to equate his wasted past with his future in Lines 14 and 15: The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind Through his authentic hermeneutics of time, the Irish Airman is eventually as well as assuredly able to see that life is even the same as death in the last line of the poem.

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We earlier said that Dasein is distinctly able to understand Being; however, we did not state how this is possible. The answer lies in temporality. Temporality is the thing that enables Dasein to understand Being as we have shown below. Heidegger chooses with wisdom and witty intelligence, as Garner and Michael E. Zimmerman also confirm, to remain assured in his basic ontological assertion even after he wrote Being and Time that time is the horizon from which something like Being becomes at all intelligible (1927/1988:16-17). Reliable verification of this assertion comes, according to Heidegger, from temporality constituting the meaning of the Being of Dasein and from the understanding of Being as such belonging to the constitution of the Being of Dasein. Temporality can then be referred to as the exposition of the Being of Dasein in its understanding as well as interpretation of Being as such. The existentially temporal precedence of Being as such over both beings and their Being sets the temporal position of Being as such sequentially earlier in time vis--vis beings; therefore, the ontological Being of beings comes spatially before beings and the existential Being as such comes temporally before the ontological Being of beings. We can even schematize this hierarchy as follows: The existential Being as such > The ontological Being of beings > The beings

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Where exactly does the Irish Airmans existential search for the meaning of the question of Being in general fit in the above schematic representation? It seems to fit in the middle position, where the ontological Being of beings is of concern to the Irish Airman, although the Irish Airman is authentically at pains to extend it to cover the existential Being as such, too. To turn back to the precedence of time over space, we can even say that time temporalizes space for Being to be. To explain how, we will first try to grasp that Being has to be as long as time is, and then we will look at three properties of time in connection with Being in the following section. 4.3. Because Time Is, Being Has To Be Ontologically qualified to understand the Being as such, the Being of beings and its own being, Dasein is equipped, as Steven G. Crowell says, with the mere ability to penetrate the temporal dimension of Being as such as well. Daseins attempt to grasp the temporal dimension of Being as such will favourably be conducive to its accurate localization of the spatial ontology of its own thereness in the world. The inferential valorisation of time for the pursuance of Daseins own spatiality, articulated as thereness in the world, will positively bring home to us that because time is, Being has to be. What existentially gives a being its possibility of Being is time. Therefore, time indubitably bestows upon Dasein its spatiotemporal possibility of Being as having-to-be-in-the-world. The spatial Beingof Dasein as Being-in-the-world has

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thus been linked successfully to the temporal Being of Dasein as having-to-bein-the-world. The temporal Being of Dasein as having-to-be-in-the-world reveals itself in the case of the Irish Airman to be a lonely impulse of delight to join the chaos up in the clouds. The Irish Airman has a full consciousness of the existential fact that he has to be in the world in one way or another. A careful look at Lines 7 through 12 would tell us that although he was told neither by law nor by the public to join the war, and although he can sense the absurdity behind the logic of war, he nevertheless feels the need, or the obligation, if we may use this word, to be in the war, albeit for entirely different reasons. This sense of obligation is seen to be purely coming from the Irish Airmans temporal Being as having-to-be-in-the-world. His temporal Being tells him that he has to be in the world. This may count for his decision to join the war. Since we have shown shortly how time necessitates Being, we can now look at the three properties that Being obtains from its relation to time. As time forcibly generates each time time is the possibility of Being as such being, characteristics of Being as such are thus bound to take the form of characteristics of time. A brief demonstration of how three of those characteristics of time can be attributed to Being as such will be supplied below. The first one of these three characteristics of time is unstoppability.

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Characteristically, time is first of all unstoppable. The unstoppability of time sets Being as such in constant motion until it faces, usually without prior notice, the extinction of its own possibilities to further be. In other words, beings cannot be stopped from Being as long as they can stick to temporality as their existential structure. Also, the temporal unstoppability forcibly enables Being as such to let beings be in some form or another. The immediate implication of this characteristic of time for the Irish Airman is that the Irish Airman knows how to put an end to his existence: He can do this by cutting himself off from time; or in other words, he can do so by assuming that the time has come to remove the temporal side to his own existentiality. When he regards in Lines 14 and 15 both his future and past as a complete waste of time, he, in fact, takes a step forward in the direction of distancing himself from time and denying its role in his existentiality. The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind He is, simply put, making a decision to stop the stoppability of time. The second one is undeniability. Characteristically, time is second of all undeniable. This characteristic of time inexhaustibly serves as attachment of an undeniably existing dimension to the temporal structure of Being as such. Indefatigable attachment of this sort leaves Being as such uncompromisingly secure in its protection against denial and refutation until time gets eventually worn out of such further attachments.

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These lines are telling us something about the Irish Airman, as well: The Irish Airman perfectly knows that as long as he lets time exist, he will have to exist, too. Therefore, he simply decides to deny time and instantly begins to conceptualize how his death will be. He is simply denying the undeniability of time. The third one is undeferrability. Characteristically, time is third of all undeferrable. Undefferability as the third property of time best echoes with Being as such remaining faithful to its temporality as its basic constitution. Beings desperately have to wait for the time to come and to disclose their Being undeferrably. Consequently, the undeferrability of time emerges as an unarguable evidence for the temporality of Being as such. Beings undeferrability is an issue of concern to the Irish Airman, too, because when he decides to deny time, he also dismisses the undefferability of time. He is thus playing around with the undefferability of time. With all this said, just as Dasein intends its own sense of selfhood as the basic index of authenticity to originate from a primary localization of its worldly spatiality, so does the Irish Airman. An authentic grasp of temporal emptiness reveals itself in the Irish Airmans qualification of both his past and his future as a waste gallimaufry of breathes. Authenticity is rather the individual attestation of Being-ones-Self, a phrase taken from Heideggerian terminology, that emerges from an existential projection both backward and forward in time. 68

Yeats Irish Airman is, in fact, approaching gradually the level of authenticity through his own projection that Heidegger marks with special words from his own lexicon of ontology when he tries to develop an existentially phenomenological interpretation of death. A personal

authentication of this kind of interpretation will be available in Chapter 5.

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CHAPTER 5 AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH DEATH FROM AN EXISTENTIALLY PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANGLE18

Heidegger wrote that dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially (1926/1962; p. 240/284). This chapter is entirely devoted to a condensed coverage of death as an existential phenomenon and its implications for Yeats Irish Airman. We will begin our discussion with Heideggers distinct view of death as the utmost possibility. 5.1. Heideggers View of Death as Utmost Possibility Our search here for a coherent way to associate unstoppability, undeniability and undefferrability as the three characteristics of time with Being as such would indubitably remain incomplete without an inquiry into the notion of death as an unstoppable, undeniable and undeferrable fact of life in general.

18

Procedural limitations do not unfortunately allow for a far deeper and more extensive

analysis of Heideggerian existential phenomenology of death than could possibly be done here. Therefore, I highly recommend you to see Chapter I of Division II of Being and Time, where the title reads Daseins Possibility of Being-a-whole, and Being-towards-death, and where Heidegger seems to have gone far, far beyond what one could possibly imagine.

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Though precisely identical in its three characteristics to both Being as such and time, death rather appears to operate devouringly as an inescapable engulfment of Being as such in its obstruction of time as the sheer repository of possibility for Being in reaching out to Being as such. Defining death this way, we can take a short look at its implication for the Irish Airman. We said just before we closed Chapter 4 that the Irish Airman denied the undeniability of time, stopped the unstoppability of time and played around with the undefferability of time. He was able to do so only on the basis of his choice of death over time. If he had not chosen death over time, he would not have been able to dispense with the temporal side to his own existentiality. It is death, not himself, that enabled him to discard temporality. In conclusion, the Being of death substituted for the Being of time. Deaths substitution for time should be key to our understanding of Yeats poem if we want to see the rationale behind Irish Airmans choice of death over life. To turn back to Heideggers view of death, we see that his comportment in his Being and Time towards death chooses to classify it as a distinguished possibility. Paul Edwards spots a link in Heideggers scrutiny of death between it as a distinguished possibility on the one hand and existence on the other hand when Heidegger refers to death as the possibility of measureless impossibility of existence (1926/1962:262/307). A distinctive possibility of this sort is further referred to, Edwards cites, as the total nothingness of any

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existential possibilities whatsoever in Heideggers idiosyncratically ontology (1975:557).19 The factual distinction of this existentially fatal possibility, which is death, lies, perplexingly enough, according to Edwards interpretation of Heideggers words, in its obdurately blunt refusal of permission both for further comportment of any type towards beings and further existentiality at all its levels. Was the Irish Airman aware of the distinctiveness of death as a possibility? He possibly was, as long as his choice of death over life is considered from the point of view that we have made clear just above. Also, aside from the distinctiveness of death, the instantaneity of death, for example, might have driven the Irish Airman to see pleasure of the existentially authentic kind in death, since we learn in Lines 11 and 12 from him that he made an impulsive decision to join the war and die. Whatever the case for the Irish Airman was, it remains obvious that, at the end of the day, he did not compulsively choose death over life; or to put in another way, he was not fascinated by death at all when he chose death over life; he chose death over life because he was simply disappointed with life itself.

19

The total nothingness is Edwards modified translation of the German schlechtinnige

Nichtingkeit, which appears, as Edwards himself also acknowledges in his own article, in the 1962 translation of Being and Time as the utter nullity. Edward also acknowledges Heidegger to be quite right in his description of death as a total absence (1975, p. 557).

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Heidegger does not only see death as a distinct possibility but he also regards it as the vantage point from which to look at existence, just as shown below. The distinctive classification of death in the Heideggerian system of thinking as a supreme possibility (R. Detweiler, 1972:292), argues Edwards, helps to show the correct attitude of man towards death (1975:548). Accurate guidance to death would result, according to Detweiler, largely from Heideggers attempts to transform the phenomenon of death into a philosophy of life. Such consummate attempts appear, with appreciably ontological relevance available in Detweilers discussion of some thoughts about the death moment as articulated from primarily a phenomenological point of view in Being and Time, to provide the authentic Dasein with an arcane chance to face existence from the angle of death. Doubtlessly, facing existence from the angle of death was a strenuous work for the Irish Airman to do. He succeeded in doing it, however, with the help of his awareness of death having its own existentiality to substitute for the temporal side to his own existentiality. This substitution was never accidental at all. The existential totality of the Irish Airman necessitated the substitution of the Being of time with that of death even when the Irish Airman denied the undeniability of death. This can be accounted for by the existential fact that existentiality never allows its totality to break down

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Although existentiality does not allow its totality to break down, Heidegger remains firm to put death at the centre of life through his formulation of Moribundus Sum, which prompts deaths role in acquiring existential consciousness. 5.2. Heideggers Formulation of Moribundus Sum Anything that is, or that there is, undeniably is. This undeniability of the Being of beings is, in effect, a formal indication of what appears in the acquisition of the sense of Being as such to be the spatiotemporal undeniability. Is this spatiotemporal undeniability on the part of Being as such secure from eternal invalidity? Unfortunately, with the existentiality of death, security of this type for Being as such from eternal invalidity seems impossible to guarantee. Death has its own kind of existentiality, which is seemingly identical in its three main properties of unstoppability, undeniability and undeferrability to the existentiality of Dasein, but in actual fact, is essentially distinct from it. Daseins existential distinction from death lies in its existence as ibnu-l waqt.20 Death,

20

This Arabic expression is usually translated into English either as the Son of Moment or

the Son of Time. It comes as an original idea from Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah, or Meccan Illuminations in its English translation, the name for a huge collection of the writings of Ibn 'Arabi, a 12th-century Sufi Muslim scholar. Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah is considered to be Ibn 'Arabis magnum opus. It consists of 560 chapters in six separate volumes. For further information, please see William C. Chitticks article "Presence with God," which first appeared in the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society, Vol. 20, 1996.

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however, waits watchfully for the time to come when it can go, without delay, in between Dasein and time and wrest the existence of Dasein as ibnu-l waqt from times firm grasp as soon as time gets worn out of attaching further undeniability to Dasein, just as discussed above under the heading of Beings undeniability. With death thus emerging defiantly as a constant threat of blockage in the assignment of the potentiality-for-Being to Dasein, the ability of Dasein to care for its own existentiality takes precedence over its ability to reason its own survival, as Crowell argues: Heideggers great achievement in Being and Time is to have demonstrated that care is prior to reasonhomo cura is more fundamental than the animal rationale. (2005:128) In stark contrast to Ren Descartes widely-known philosophical formulation of cogito, ergo sum as substantial proof for his rational existentiality, Heidegger chooses with highly sophisticated exactitude of his own kind to approach the sum from a completely reverse angle as he comes up with his own philosophical formulation of moribundus sum as the evidence for his careful existentiality: This certainty, that I myself am in that I will die, is the basic certainty of Dasein itself. It is a genuine statement of Dasein, while cogito sum is only the semblance of such a statement. If such pointed formulations mean anything at all, then the appropriate statement pertaining to Dasein in its being would have to be sum moribundus [I am in dying], moribundus not as someone gravely ill or wounded,

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but insofar as I am, I am moribundus. The MORIBUNDUS first gives the SUM its sense. (1979/1992:316-17) An existential approach of this kind to life from death, definitely not conversely to death from life, is successfully linked to a profoundly significant paradigm in Heideggers distinct phenomenology of death when he says in History of the Concept of Time that, only in dying can I to some extent [emphasis added] say absolutely, I am (Heidegger, 1979/1992:318).21 Up to this point, we have had some clues to set up a further existential linkage between Heideggers Dasein and Yeats Irish Airman. This existential linkage rests largely on Heideggers phenomenological evaluation of death. To begin with, existential reasoning about death enables both Dasein and the Irish Airman to say that the moment of death is the moment of visiona term that Heidegger uses in German as Augenblick to refer to the kind of existentiality that is utterly authentic. We should take notice of the sense kinship between vision and foresight. It would definitely have been a different kind of existentiality for both Dasein and the Irish Airman to have if they had ignored, that is to say, if they had not cared at all about death and if they had simply focused on life itself.
21

Philosophy seems to be in close proximity with poetry even on a universal level. smet zel

(1990), a contemporary Turkish poet who is still alive, has in one of his poems, namely Yklma Sakn, the following line in Turkish: lyoruz, demek ki yaanlacak. The English translation for it would probably read as follows: We die, thats why well live. Like Heidegger, zel takes death as his point of departure in approaching life. While Heidegger does it in philosophy, zel does it in poetry.

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What actually makes both Dasein and the Irish Airman authentic in their existentiality is that their existentiality begins with death. However, with the they, the case is entirely different, because their existentiality begins with birth: I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath. The first one of these two lines cited above is an indication that the Irish Airman first thinks about his future, and the second one says that he afterwards reflects upon his past. This is important to notice, because it supplies evidence for our argument that authentically constructed existential contemplation for the Irish Airman, just like for Dasein, begins from the end. Both Dasein and the Irish Airman are perfect examples of moribundus sum. Both of them seek their existentiality in death. In balance with this life, this death. This line tells us much about the moribundus sum side to the Irish Airman. His equation of death with life, and vice versa, is actually an equation of death with the kind of existentiality he longed for. Unable to find meaning in his life, the Irish Airman hopes to awaken to the general existential truth at the moment of death. And according to Heidegger, the Irish Airman would be right to seek meaning in death, not in life, about his own existentiality. To return to our discussion, we can proceed to remark that Daseins unequivocal recognition of its authentic potentiality-for-Being-ones-Self

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begins from the end. It is, in other words, death that first gains Dasein its fully authentic sense of Being as follows: 1. Death functionally creates anxiety on an existential level on the part of Dasein about its primordially spatiotemporal form of Being as having-to-be-in-the-world when Dasein first experiences the

phenomenal threat of death of any kind either directly or indirectly, 2. Death compellingly transforms this form of Daseins Being into a spatiotemporally anxious form of Being when death succeeds in attaching itself first distantly and subsequently inextricably to it, 3. With the distant inextricability of death, the Being of Dasein at this stage becomes anxious having-to-be-in-the-world-towards-death, 4. Existential anxiety in the face of deaths distant inextricability gets levelled down to a mixture of both relatively ontological and existential versions of care in the everyday inauthentic Being of Dasein,22

22

Robert Detweiler makes a point that seems similar on the surface to my argument here when

he expresses the situation experienced in the disjuncture of the death moment as a movement in Heideggarian terms from anxiety to concernone among the types of care. Disjuncture is employed as a term in Detweilers discussion to signify a phase of the death moment when the diers consciousness loses its integrity and when the dier confuses time as well as the senses. While Detweilers version of the movement from anxiety to concern happens during the disjuncture phase of the death moment, my version of the same movement happens before the death moment comes. Moreover, the starkest difference between the two versions of the same type of movement lies in the way the functionality of death gets interpreted: while Detweiler

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5. Care in its relatively ontological version increases the inauthenticity of the everyday Being of Dasein, whereas care in its relatively existential version renders Dasein only less inauthentic in its everyday Being, 6. Care in Daseins having-to-be-in-the-world-towards-death shows itself in the everyday Being of Dasein with some level of absolute inauthenticity as having-to-be-in-the-world-waiting-towards-the-death, 7. The inauthentic everyday Being of Dasein as having-to-be-in-theworld-waiting-towards-the-death finds genuine expression in

Daseins articulation of I guess I should be, as I will certainly die. This personal seven-step formulation of an individual framework for sound authentication of of the moribundus existential sum springs from Heideggerian Without the

implementation

phenomenology.

phenomenology of this type, it could then be arguably said that, Heidegger would not possibly have been able to build his own ontology of Being around the notion of death. Heideggers philosophically deliberate and phenomenological

formulation of the ontological characteristics of Daseins existentiality closely matches up to Yeats extrinsically poetic portrayal of the Irish Airman as a warrior with a rather critically cynic approach to life. This sort of cynicism is
tends to view the death moment as an event when anxiety gets levelled down to concern, I choose to see death as the major cause behind a reverse movement back from care to anxiety.

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especially obvious in Lines 7, 8, 14 and 15, where the Irish Airman seems to fully acknowledge the tonal resolution in Heideggers words to detach the particular Dasein from its lostness in everydayness, for example. Yeats poetic assignment of the Irish Airman to speak out the message that nothing will ever change after the war finds a mutual echo in Heideggers characterization of everydayness as all one and the same, though whatever the day may bring is taken as diversification (Heidegger, 1926/1962:371/422). The Irish Airmans society inauthentically expects the war to bring about an essential change. Nothing significant enough to add meaning to his life will, however, ever occur. Having broached the relation between phenomenology, Heidegger and the poem, some parenthetical remarks about Heideggerian version of phenomenology23 would be in place at this stage. The Heideggerian sense of phenomenology is to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself (Heidegger, 1926/1962:34/58). The thing that reveals itself as a phenomenon as an object of a persons perceptionis phenomenologically perceived to be an entity that exists with Dasein. When Dasein casts an analytically phenomenological look at an object, this phenomenological act of looking

23

Heideggerian phenomenology is also referred to as post-metaphysical ontology in Alis

(1999) The Concept of Poiesis and Its Application in a Heideggerian Critique of Computationally Emergent Artificiality.

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frees the object in its Being. Daseins existential position as the sole freer of beings in their Being in the world is, therefore, encoded in a

phenomenological language. Similarly, the Irish Airmans position as a freer of the Being of beings in the world can be approached from the phenomenological angle. It is precisely the moment when Yeats Irish Airman decides to foresee his death that he also frees his death in its Being; in very simple words, he gets his death being at exactly the same moment he casts a phenomenological look at his death. The phenomenological language is methodologically intended for use in a scientific examination of the Being of beings, namely ontology.

Phenomenology is, therefore, assigned the task of making Being, and initially the Being of Dasein, explicit and thematic. Existential thematization of Daseins Being at all its levels emerges subtly as collaborative work between phenomenology and ontology. That is why we chose to apply the phenomenological method of ontological analysis in our existential

thematization of Yeats Irish Airman. Heidegger admits a debt of gratitude to Edmund Husserl for his formulation of phenomenology as an ontological method in his introduction to The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Husserl, as the German philosopher, founded phenomenology as one major philosophical movement of the early 20th century. While he was a professor at Freiburg, Heidegger was among the pupils he taught. Heidegger, also as the former assistant at Freiburg to his

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professor

Husserl,

takes

from

Husserls

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure

Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913) the focal idea of phenomenological reduction as one of the essential components of

phenomenology. Husserlian discussion of the phenomenological reduction will be intentionally left absent from this work because it appears to be logically as well as methodologically outside the scope of this dissertation. Phenomenology as one method of ontology starts with phenomenological reduction, because ontology, according to Heidegger, always moves away from the understanding of a being back to the understanding of (its) Being. Dissimilar from the kind of phenomenological reduction in Husserlian phenomenology as a basic method for the philosophy of consciousness, Heideggers ontological version of the phenomenological reduction is defined in Heideggers own words as follows: For us, phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed.) (1927/1988:21) Phenomenological reduction of this sort back from a being to its Being will radically need to be elevated from ontology to a particularly elemental level of phenomenological construction, according to Heidegger, because phenomenological reduction is neither solely basic nor central to the phenomenological method.

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The meaning of phenomenological construction relates itself to some type of free projection or comportment on the part of Dasein forward towards the Being of beings. Phenomenological construction, in Heideggers view, is a projective approach for Dasein to try to understand not only the Being of a being but also the ontological structures of the Being of a being, because the Being of a being does not become accessible like a being. This projective approach is obvious in the use of to foresee as a verb by the poet to convey the Irish Airmans free projection of himself on the future of his own. Death, among other things, is itself a project in the exact sense of the word. Without it being projected beforehand upon, death would not be rendered basic to the notion of Being as we have been discussing it here in connection to both Heideggers Dasein and Yeats Irish Airman. The ontological need for phenomenology will presumably be expected to get conceptually clearer with a philosophical insight into the role of phenomenology as a guide to ontology. Sound organization of any ontological work will ultimately depend, Heidegger says, on fairly substantial

understanding of phenomenology as one essential sort of destruction: There necessarily belongs to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, that is, to the reductive construction of being, a destruction - a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are de-constructed down to the sources from which they were drawn. Only by means of this destruction can ontology fully assure itself in a phenomenological way of the genuine character of its concepts. (1927/1988:22-23) 83

Any ontological project will remain functionally imperfect without conclusive phenomenological deconstruction. Therefore, ontology in its full version as a hermeneutically circular journey begins with phenomenological reduction and then gets guided by phenomenological construction towards its grand finale in deconstruction. Phenomenological deconstruction best works especially when the building blocks of any structure such as time, death and life are to be laid out. Used to this end, phenomenological deconstruction also helps to disclose the referential position of us vis--vis any structure. The following section is an example of such a disclosure of the referential position of Dasein with respect to time and death, which says that time can protect Dasein from death. 5.3. Time defends Dasein against death It is obvious from the demonstration of moribundus sum above that death can attach itself first distantly and subsequently inextricably to the spatiotemporal Being of Dasein as having-to-be-in-the-world. In fact, death has to resort to distant attachment in the first place to the spatiotemporal Being of Dasein, because time, as a close defender of Dasein, would definitely not allow death any sorts of close attachment to the Being of Dasein. Time closely defends Dasein as ibnu-l waqt against death. As long as time can closely defend Dasein, death can only watch Dasein from a distance.

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The inextricability of death in its attachment to this form of Being of Dasein is, however, a natural consequence of the success of death in attaching itself distantly to the Being of Dasein. Death gets so firmly affixed to Dasein in its Being that it never allows itself to get detached back from Dasein. This type of firm affixation to Dasein is undoable. The role of time as the only close defender of Dasein against death can be seen in Yeats poem in that the Irish Airman leaves time for death. In other words, he rejects times offer to protection him from death. It is obvious from a general look at the whole poem that the Irish Airman has given up hope of adjusting to the life as it is lived commonly. For the Irish Airman, the future is without hope, just as the past was. In short, after his hopes dimmed away completely, he felt that he had to abandon himself to his fate, just as he says in Line 1, and embrace his own death. There is a particular reason why the Irish Airman rejects times offer to protect from death. To put it very simply, the Irish Airman is deceived by death into believing that death will give him what time did not give him. We now turn to see why and how this happens in the upcoming section. 5.4. Pretentiousness in deaths claim to get to be the temporal potentiality-for-Being Heideggers classification of death as the distinctive possibility would make sense with a discussion of proneness on the part of time to eventual

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weariness in its attachments of the potentiality-for-Being to Dasein. With time much too worn out to pursue further attachments of the potentiality-for-Being to Dasein, death gets closer and closer to the exact point where it will replace pretentiously the very first missing attachment of the potentiality-for-Being. Not able to distinguish the pretentiousness in deaths claim to get to be the temporal potentiality-for-Being because of the identicalness in deaths three properties of unstoppability, and undeniability undeferrability with both time and Being as such, Dasein resorts to bricolage, one of the key terms employed in Detweilers largely structuralist discussion of the death moments in modern literature to refer to an attempt of man at the moment of death to find meaning in whatever [emphasis added] fragments of life remain available to his consciousness, and welcomes, in desperate pursuance of further existence, the death of its own (1972:279). This phenomenological analysis of death as the distinctive possibility has exhibited a need for Dasein [Being] first to establish friendship with time and then to remain eternally faithful in its friendship to time, which the Irish Airman seems to have failed to do. If the Irish Airman had retained his friendship with time, he would possibly have been still alive after the war ended. His decision to let himself be caught in death as a result of his untimely breakaway with time can be discussed from a different phenomenological angle, because our discussion of Daseins relation to death as well as to time does not entail an untimely

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breakaway with time; rather, we tried to show the moment when time gets, perhaps naturally, much too worn out to maintain further attachments and thus fails to prevent death from stepping in. With the Irish Airman, however, it is different, because it is as if the Irish Airman himself tells time not to make further attachments and accepts, possibly out of despair, to have an untimely meeting with his own death. In addition to the Irish Airman, there is another example of untimely breakaway with time as well, which comes from a Turkish novel: Tutunamayanlar24. The fatally detrimental effect of either incidental or intentional break-off in a bond of friendship of the kind that exists between Dasein and time on Dasein can presumably be best seen in Selim Iks decision to leave the second last entry undated in his diary just days before his suicide. The second entry from the end in the personal diary of Selim Ik is left intentionally undated. The last second entry is instead tagged with his Turkish words Artk tarih atmyorum (Atay, 2006:671), which could possibly read in its

24

Tutunamayanlar is a Turkish novel that was written by Ouz Atay in 1970-71 and was

published the year after. Although no complete translations of Tutunamayanlar have yet appeared in foreign languages, the title for this novel appears in English as The Disconnected. It features individual attempts on the part of Turgut Benli to desperately find out the reason behind the abrupt suicide of his dearest friend Selim Ik as his existential self-destruction.

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English translation I no longer date entries. This could perhaps generate such conclusive remarks on a phenomenological level of reading as follows. It is obvious both from the first entry from the end, dated April 30, and from the third entry from the end, dated April 16, that it is not longer than a fortnights period of time since his decision to break away from time when he commits suicide. The last entry in the personal diary appears to be marked with a date in flat contradiction to Selim Iks decision not to date entries any longer. This contradiction could presumably be best accounted for as deaths pretension to replace the very first missing attachment of the potentiality-for-Being to Dasein, when time gets worn out of its fatherly pursuance of existential attachments of the potentiality-for-Being to Dasein. In short, we may say that the break-off in the friendship between time and Dasein in general, or Selim Iklar or the Irish Airman in particular, all point out to an end to an analogical relation between a father and his son or his daughter. With family ties completely cut off, there is no chance left for family members to enjoy further moments together. Having emphasized the need for maintaining friendship between humans and time to avoid death as long as possible, we may now turn to explore death and its relation to Being deeply in phenomenological terms. The following sections are designed to provide a schematized illustration of the relation between Being and death that emerges through time. We will begin our 88

exploration of death as the end of Daseins Being with a discussion of its state of having to be in the world towards death. 5.5. A Phenomenological Attempt To Explore Death As the End of Daseins Being An existential inquiry into death is most likely to force the Being of Dasein to emerge as an unstoppable, undeniable and undefferable instance of Being-towards-death. Therefore, unstoppability, undeniability and undefferability as the three commonly shared characteristics of both Being as such and time will remain concurrently pertinent to Dasein as long as it is towards its death. We consequently find that what links Dasein on an ontological level to the spatiotemporal combination of Being as such and time is death. Coalescence of the primarily spatiotemporal25 aspect of Dasein as having-tobe-in-the-world with Being-towards-death finds its most genuine expression as spatiotemporal carefulness in having-to-be-in-the-world-towards-death. The phenomenological reading of time as an object of conscious experience enables the circumspective comportment of Dasein towards Being as such at its all levels.

25

Having-to-be-in-the-world as the hermeneutically temporal way of Being of Dasein is

primarily spatiotemporal, because it transforms Daseins ontologically spatial way of Being as Being-in-the-world into its hermeneutically temporal way of Being as having-to-be-in-theworld.

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Death is so central to our discussion that if it were not for death, we would not have been able to adopt a phenomenological attitude towards the Irish Airmans case at all. That his being towards death is signalled right at the start of the poem shows his firm, intentional directionality in Lines 1 and 2: I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above The Irish Airmans conscious effort to localize his death somewhere among the clouds above is bringing us closer to the point where we realize that intentionality and directionality are the two key words of the Husserlian phenomenology. This hints at the possibility that these two lines can be approached phenomenologically in the Husserlian sense, too. Without a doubt, these two terms need special attention, but just elsewhere, because an inquiry into them in the Husserlian sense of phenomenology here would only stretch the boundaries of this work beyond its limits. To turn back to our discussion, the expectation of the death moment prompts Dasein to work out some modes of survival to carry on with its primarily spatiotemporal property of having-to-be-in-the-world. The

likelihood of Dasein sustaining its existence until the death moment depends on a relatively successful continuation of its ontological position as an unescorted dweller alongside beings ready-to-hand and present-at-hand in the world. The ontological meaning of human existence as Dasein gets confirmed

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as being truly relational to a phenomenological disclosure of a being in its eventual encounter with the death moment. Faced with the death moment, Dasein experiences the fundamental existential crisis because death projects itself as a state of overwhelming crisis. The moment of death can be pictured as an expedient to bring Dasein as a temporal being out of contact with other temporal beings. Moreover, because Being as such is time-locked, the death moment appears to release Being as such from time as well. However, as Being as such gets detached from time, Daseins understanding of itself as an spatial being-in-the-world ceases to exist too, because this momentary departure of Being as such from time signifies an eternal and irrecoverable expulsion of Dasein from the temporal world at the same time. Eventual as well as inescapable goodbye from Dasein to the world would, therefore, constitute an irretrievable break-off in its spatiotemporal relation both to the world and time. True though this may be for Heideggers Dasein, it is a different case with Yeats Irish Airman, because his goodbye to the temporally existent world is an eventual, inescapable and voluntary one. It is as if he is running towards his death, unlike Dasein, who is simply walking towards its death. In the end, however, both are set to be toward their own deaths. After discussing all these phenomena, the time has come to schematize the phenomenological rendering of death, which will constitute the upshot of

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our thesis. It will consist of three figures. The first figure will show the existentially complete state of Daseins Being as having-to-be-in-the-worldtowards-death. The second figure will illustrate Daseins development in time into its existentially complete state. And the final figure will demonstrate how Daseins existentially complete state falls apart in death. 5.6. Schematic representation of deconstructive function of death Death finalizes the diligent totalization of the constitutive components of Dasein. Just as Dasein appropriates, while it is, the presence of entities both present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, Death appropriates, when it is, the existence of Dasein, as well. Death seems obliged to resort to rupturing the spatiotemporally existential totality of Dasein as having-to-be-in-the-world-towards-death. Dasein, however, seems to be allowed, until death comes, first to form its spatiotemporally existential totality and then to retain it. Is this the case for both Dasein and the Irish Airman? The answer is a plain yes because death operates the same way for anybody that it comes to. The following lines are, thus, meant to illustrate phenomenolically how death operates both for Dasein and the Irish Airman, among others, step by step: To begin with, the existentially complete Being of Dasein as

spatiotemporal carefulness can be schematically rendered, as shown in Figure 1, into its constituent compartments in the following form of words.

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FIGURE 1. EXISTENTIALLY COMPLETE STATE OF DASEINS BEING

Having-to be in-the-world towards-death

Daseins Temporality

Daseins Primordial Mode of Being Existence

Daseins Spatiality

Daseins Carefulness

As long as Dasein has not reached its existentially complete mode of Being in the form of spatiotemporal carefulness, Dasein remains in one of its ontologically deficient modes of Being. Deficiency is always ontological because the existentiality of the existence of Dasein would never tolerate any ontological deficiencies at all. Therefore, Dasein is always ontological; however, Dasein is not always existential. In either case, care would, however, have an equally pivotal role to play: while the ontological Dasein would either strive with care for the future construction of its own existential totality first and then against the ontological deconstruction of this totality, or, it would strive with care for the continuous preservation of its ontologically deficient mode of Being, the existential Dasein would rather choose careful involvement in a persistent struggle against exposure to any types of ontological deficiency in its existentially complete mode of Being.

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Aware of his own ontological deficiencies, the Irish Airman can be catalogued as the ontological Dasein that strives with care for the future construction of his own existential totality. The locus of his existential totality is, perplexingly enough, death. Only when he meets physically his fate somewhere among the clouds above, he thinks his existential totality will be secure. His physical contact with his own death, however, means an end to his further chances of grasping the opportunity to remain existential. This is a paradox in itself that the Irish Airman could not possibly foresee. That is why we choose to designate the Irish Airman as an example of the ontological Dasein ambitious to construct his own existential totality. He simply does not want to be directed towards death, but he wants to be at death. However, this obscures his phenomenological foresight of death. We will see why later in this chapter. Having examined the existentially complete state of Daseins Being, we can now make the effort to visualize how the Being of Dasein develops, as shown in Figure 2, from its ontologically primordial mode into its spatiotemporally careful mode as it attains its existential totality until death comes. In other words, the figure below shows several stages of a full transition into existentiality.

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FIGURE 2. DASEINS ONTOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT INTO ITS EXISTENTIAL TOTALITY Being Being+in-the-world Having-to+be-in-the-world Having-to-be-in-the-world+towards-death

Dasein is in its primordial mode of Being

Dasein is in its spatial mode of Being

Dasein is in its spatiotemporal mode of Being Dasein is in its spatiotemporally careful mode of Being

When death comes, however, the existentially phenomenal deconstruction of Dasein begins and death starts actualizing its possibility with a forcible transformation of the spatiotemporal carefulness of Dasein as having-to-be-inthe-world-towards-death into the extinction of spatiotemporal carefulness as having-to-be-in-the-world-at-death. Death shows up as an irrecoverable deconstruction of the spatiotemporal carefulness of Dasein as its existential whole of Being. Death, more concisely, erases the existential whole of Dasein on an ontological level from the world and brings it face to face with its not-at-home-ness. Just to give a brief note about not-at-home-ness, or umheimlichkeit in German, it fits very well in the context of the poem because the Irish Airman tends to view his death as an escape into a different personal world where he can feel at home. The Irish Airman did not belong in this world anyway; therefore, he sought relief in death before he got stigmatized publicly. 95

The figure below is designed to schematize death after it comes as the ontological deconstruction of the spatiotemporal Being of Dasein as having-tobe-in-the-world-at-death, definitely not any longer as having-to-be-in-theworld-towards-death, simply because Dasein is inescapably engulfed in death just when the moment of death comes. After death comes, the existentially complete Being of Dasein as spatiotemporal carefulness shrinks into nullity, as shown step-by-step in several stages in Figure 3, and death stops it from being further nourished by time for survival. FIGURE 3. DECONSTRUCTION OF DASEINS EXISTENTIAL TOTALITY

Having-to-be-in-the-world-at-death Having-to-be-in-the-world-at-death Having-to-be-in-the-world-at-death Having-to-be-in-the-world-at-death

Dasein is still spatiotemporal, but no longer in its careful mode of Being

Dasein is still spatial, but no longer in its temporally careful mode of Being

Dasein still but only is; no longer in its spatiotemporally careful mode of Being

Dasein is no longer at all

Looking at the above schematization, we see that when the Irish Airman decides on the futility of his past as well as his future and when he visions his death somewhere up in the air, his existential totality begins to deconstruct as follows: His decision to get rid of the temporal side (having-to) to his

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existentiality is followed by preparation for immersion in death by getting rid of the spatial side (be-in-the-world-at-death) to his existentiality. The ascription of thrownness to Dasein as one of its basic ontological features is also preserved both before and after the moment of death: Dasein as a thrown project into the world in its birth is reversed into a thrown project out of the world in its death: Anxiety arises out of Being-in-the-world as thrown Being-towardsdeath. (Heidegger, 1926/1962:344/395) Thrownness sticks to Dasein as long as it preserves its Being-in-theworld-towards-death. Moreover, Daseins genuinely phenomenological

conception of its own thrownness in its resolute Being-set-in-the-worldtowards-death returns it anxiety on an observably existential level. To sum up what we have said so far, Daseins encounter with the death moment ends his potential contact with time. Dasein becomes no longer there; therefore, Daseins primarily spatiotemporal property of having-to-be-in-theworld ceases to exist. Daseins chances of establishing its hermeneutically temporal understanding of time and relating it to its ontically spatial position in the world become literally extinct, too. The death moment comes as annihilation of possibilities Dasein could otherwise have left to exist with. Daseins prior awareness of its loss of contact with time and space inevitably leads it to be more careful thinking about how it could possibly retain its grip on its spatiotemporal positioning in the world. Thinking about the death

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moment before it comes can be looked at from a phenomenological gaze at how death stands in relation to human existence, at how death urges Dasein to care about its spatiotemporal property of having-to-be-in-the-world, and at how Dasein can develop self-understanding, or understanding of the Being of its being, since at any rate it is Daseins own Being that is at stake. We will conclude this chapter with a few remarks about the Irish Airman and his relation to death in particular. The Irish Airmans comparison of the past with the future leads him in Line 16 to a conclusive discovery of unavoidable equilibrium between death and life. Yeats Irish Airman seems to be released from the tight clutch of anxiety when he seemingly surrenders to ontological care in the face of existential anxiety. This, however, is not really the case because of the following reason: Yeats Irish Airman is obviously striving for authenticity in his existence as the essence of his own Dasein while he leads his life in the common everydayness of the they. This is utterly important to notice because it makes, in the first place, a significant difference between living on the one hand and existing on the other as the two modes of Being-in-the-world, and it sets, in the second place, the ontological character of Being of the Irish Airman in his own Dasein apart from that of anything either present-at-hand or ready-to-hand:

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Everydayness takes Dasein as something ready-to-hand to be concerned withthat is, something that gets managed and reckoned up. Life is a business, whether or not it covers its costs. (Heidegger, 1926/1962:289/336) Life is definitely not a business for the Irish Airman to be ontologically concerned with. The Irish Airman rather tends to view life as a limited pool of possibilities with which he expects to gain existential wholeness in his authentic Being-towards-death. However, faced after his existentially temporal projection in Lines 14 and 15 with the impossibility of the possibility of authentic existentiality, he arrives as his own Dasein at nullity at the last stop while he walks anxiously unescorted along the existentially temporal path towards his own death: The nullity by which Daseins Being is dominated primordially through and through, is revealed to Dasein itself in authentic Beingtowards-death. (Heidegger, 1926/1962:306/354) Just as Heideggers Dasein is pursuing in vain purely existential authenticity on an ontological level in its spatiotemporal Being as having-tobe-in-the-world-towards-death, so is Yeats Irish Airman; since while Dasein ontologically is care, it existentially is anxiety: The nothing with which anxiety brings us face to face, unveils the nullity by which Dasein, in its very basis, is defined; and this basis itself i s as thrownness into death (Heidegger, 1926/1962:308/357). With this citation from Heideggers superb, exhaustive discussion of Daseins authenticity in its Being-towards-death in Chapter 3 of Division II of Being and Time, the final question of what exactly enables the Irish Airman to 99

set up a rigid balance of the kind Yeats Irish Airman erects between life and death finds its answer: The unmistakably perfect symmetry between death and life is grounded, through nullity, in thrownness on both parts of the factical Dasein and the Irish Airman as they are f a l l i n g both into the world while they are alive and into death while they are dead.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION & EVALUATION

To sum up what we have done in this thesis, we can sketch it out as follows: Accounting for the existence of an inextricable bond of sisterliness between literature and philosophy was set the point of departure earlier in Chapter 2. Afterwards, plans were announced for working up Yeats An Irish Airman foresees his Death in combination with Heideggers major thoughts from Being and Time into its phenomenological comprehensibility.

Phenomenology, a branch of philosophy methodologically related both to hermeneutics and ontology, was assigned centrality in a combined discussion of spatiality in Chapter 3, spatiotemporality in Chapter 4, and death in Chapter 5. The concluding remarks will be largely available, not about whether or not this work has been successful in its attempt to combine literature with philosophy, but instead about whether it was worth making the effort or not. The answer to this question will come from a personal essay by Leland de la Durantaye, assistant professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. De la Durantayes essay first appeared in the 2007 spring issue of Cabinet Magazine about his travel to Todtnauberg, the name for both a town and a hill in the Black Forest,

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Germany, where he went to see Heideggers hut, the birth place of Being and Time. We learn from de la Durantayes travel notes that when he finally managed to approach Heideggers hut after he took the wrong direction several times, he spotted a few hundred yards away a wooden signpost with a photo of Heidegger on it. The signpost also had a short text just below the photo, de la Durantaye wrote in his Cabinet essay, with the following interesting incipit in German: Wer gro denkt, muss gro irren. Our reading of it in its English translation would probably generate something like this: He, who will think greatly, must err greatly. This kind of an early graduate-level dissertational work may generate criticism for its choice of a philosophical attitude towards fathoming out the one possibly correct meaning from a superficially simple work of literature, like Yeats only 16-line poemAn Irish Airman foresees his Death. Our choice of Heidegger as a philosopher of phenomenology and a selection of his philosophical views to rely on throughout this dissertation is most likely to prove right for our pursuance of further clarification of the aforementioned point that it was worth making the effort. What exactly is it that is being referred to as the effort in these closing lines of the entire work? It is, to be precise, the effort to think. And this effort to think is possible to make only when there is phenomenology: The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own 102

phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favour of the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a mystery. (Heidegger, 1969/2002:82). With this excerpt from On Time and Being, it should now be far clearer why phenomenology, especially in its existential version, which is hence combined with hermeneutics and with ontology, has been exclusively chosen as the basis for our thesis here. Heidegger chose possibility over actuality in his Being and Time, and thus called on to grasp phenomenology as a possibility in its fully as well as solely accurate comprehensibility. For that reason, this thesis has solely been intended as a philosophical attempt to actualize the phenomenological possibility of thinking within the larger, supradomain of literature. All in all, as demonstratively discussed in Chapter 5, this work has been structurally designed to begin at its first stage in Chapter 2 with a preliminary discussion of the need for phenomenology as a scientific method of ontology; it then has moved on to phenomenological reduction at its second stage where the ontological difference between a being, particularly Dasein, and its Being, existence in particular, was marked with as much precision as possible; phenomenological reduction was followed at the third stage by

phenomenological construction as the structuration of Daseins existential spatiotemporality both in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 where effortful

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comportment both on existential and ontological levels toward the Being of Dasein was set up; the reductive construction, an original expression cited from Heidegger to signify the methodologically workable combination of phenomenological reduction and phenomenological construction, has

heralded deconstruction as the last stage of the thesis in Chapter 5, where death as the irrecoverable deconstruction of the whole Being of Dasein was subjected to phenomenological projection. This type of structural organization guarantees the work at hand consistency, coherency and harmony in its methodologically

phenomenological handling of central subjects, such as the human existentiality and death, in concert with Heideggers formulation of the existential phenomenology.

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