Keim

Abstract

This text aims to make a contemporary Hegelian analysis of the requirements for an analysis of death. By following Sebastian Rödl’s Categories of the Temporal, I show that thought requires a temporal object. I then try to extend Rödl’s framework by showing that the temporal object, as it is proposed in Rödl’s book, has a number of deficiencies. These deficiencies can be resolved, I claim, by following the dialectical process of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik. In doing so, the temporal object of thought is shown to necessarily pertain to life. I then continue in the second half of this text by looking at the accounts of life in Aristotle’s De Anima and the works of contemporary metaphysicians Michael Thompson and Jesse Mulder. These accounts, although not informed by Hegel’s dialectic development, help us to understand how we can think of living beings. I then use Hegel’s development of the categories of life to show that living beings are inherently bound to death. Their exact relation to death, however, is dependent on the type of living being under consideration. On my interpretation of Hegel, death is both that which shows living beings to be dependent on their, lower, material substratum and that which shows the necessity of higher forms of life. In this text, I do not fully develop the nature of death. Instead, I aim to show what is required to start analyzing death.