Original scientific paper

"BEING TOWARDS DEATH" (TOLSTOY AND HEIDEGGER)

Zoltán Hajnády

Abstract

The present study gives a comparative analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s short story The Death of Ivan Ilich and Martin Heidegger’s philosophical tract, Being and Time. Both works deal with the fundamental ontological questions, namely with the problems of the inauthentic mode of being, whose symptoms include the objectification of
man, alienation, loneliness, being-fallen (Verfallen) and idle chatter (Gerede). Life becomes degraded, empty, inessential, to use Heidegger’s phrase, it ends up in the final stage of "leaving Being". For man to emerge from an inessential being, such boundary situations (Grenzsituationen) of life are necessary as presented by misery, fear of death, self-sacrifice or some other severe blows. It is only then that the real being of the mass man without personality, hidden behind das Man, is unveiled. Though the article does not offer a point-by-point comparative textual analysis, it still emphasises the dominance of the differences coexistent with the similarities between the two works. Tolstoy’s and Heidegger’s thanatological
views are fundamentally different because the former always focuses on life, even when he writes about death. In his texts the ethos of life always prevails over the pathos of death. The generative principle of Tolstoy’s text is an attempt of a man without personality to formulate his identity (the verbalisation of spiritual rebirth from the state of being of suffering and dying), centred on an individual who is
gradually liberated from the constraints of time, space and society, whose life and dying becomes a universal model of fate. It is possible to understand the deeper meaning of these parables only if in the deep structure of the concrete text one is able to discover the system of motifs consisting of archetypal mythemes, such as the phoenix, the ladder, the sack, the black hole, the light, and trace them back to their primal form and myth, which universalise the mysteries of death and resurrection for the receiver.

Keywords

Tolstoy; Heidegger; ontology; thanatology; inauthentic mode of being; "being towards death"; rebirth

Hrčak ID:

49812

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/49812

Publication date:

5.3.2010.

Article data in other languages: russian

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