There are three critical aspects to the conception about death. The first and most apparent revolves around those values or beliefs that involve a denigration or even rejection of life – either this life (as opposed to the ‘afterlife’) or aspects associated with the living body (sex, passion, pleasure, etc.). A key passage in this regard would be Zarathustra on the ‘preachers of death’. The rejection of life on the part of the ascetic priest is only clear; such asceticism is a means to carry on living despite suffering and degeneration. A related idea is a danger that the philosopher will meet in his or her attempt to overcome values. The death of the tight-rope walker, who made danger his ‘vocation’, is an example. Finally, metaphysics will often involve rejection of becoming or a positing of facts and values as eternal. This is often described with metaphors of death: for example, the ‘mummified concepts.
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The ‘death of God’ is the second notion. Belief in God – and the values that go with such belief – is no longer possible or relevant within modernity. This is both a liberation and a crushing blow (for it means that the burden of creating and justifying values falls upon the human). Here, ‘death’ means old, weak, irrelevant, and historical, transient, and indeed not eternal. The third concerns are either the notion of euthanasia or the relation of life to the thought of mortality. Some of the most beautiful passages are pleas for a ‘rational’ or ‘free’ death, one that precisely from out of ‘love of life’ does not allow the body entirely to outlive its usefulness and capacity for action. The thought of old mix a drop of ‘foolishness’ into life, rather than gloom; this partly is because, without the need to come rapidly to a judgement about the significant issues for the sake of one’s eternal soul, the thought of our mortality frees us.
However, what does it mean to ‘summon one to Being-guilty’? The meaning of “summon” is temporality. We have shown that the authentic meaning of this term is temporality. In our further analysis, we shall make this even more clear. Nevertheless, we may venture a projection of the ontological genesis of the sense of “Being-guilty” in general. <|endoftext|> Our next aim is to find the right position for attacking the primordial question of the essence of history-that is to say, for construing historicality existentially. This position is designated by that which is primordially historical. Therefore, we shall begin our study by characterizing what one has in view in using the expressions’ history’ and ‘historical’ in the ordinary Interpretation of Dasein. These expressions get used in several ways. The most obvious ambiguity of the term ‘history’ has often been noticed, and there is nothing ‘fuzzy’ about it. It evinces itself in that this term may mean the ‘historical actuality’ and the possible science of it. We shall provisionally eliminate the signification of ‘history’ in the sense of a “science of history” (historiology).
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