The claim that modern medicine is nihilistic might seem peculiar at first blush. Aren’t healing and saving lives the goal of medicine? In a time of global pandemic, faith and hope are placed in modern medicine to develop vaccines, to identify effective treatments, and to instruct on proper public health practices. Physicians and nurses on the frontlines are praised as heroes and heroines for putting themselves at risk in the care of their patients. Such imagery evokes a sense of sacrificial love. The three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are named to describe the work and promise of modern medicine.[1] Modern medicine is an unquestioned good, a view commonly shared by church, state, and society alike. However, this pandemic has revealed something about the soul of society – the fear of death. Trust in the healing power of modern medicine is thought to quell the fear of death. But the fear of death reveals something deeper about modern medicine: death lies at the heart of modern medicine and is thus nihilistic.
In The Anticipatory Corpse, Jeffrey Bishop argues that “Death is medicine’s transcendental,”[2] meaning that medicine requires death for its very existence. Bishop examines contemporary medical care of the dying and constructs a genealogy of death, arguing that the dead body is epistemologically normative for modern medicine. The uncertain flux of life has been replaced by the certain fixity of death, so that the corpse is the ideal body mapped onto the lived body. This echoes Hans Jonas’ argument that in the pre-modern understanding of nature, life is natural and death is the problem. But with the modern, mechanical understanding of nature, death is natural and life is the problem, thereby inaugurating a “universal ontology of death.”[3] The result is that causation within nature has no intrinsic telos or ultimate end except for what the will imposes upon nature for its own ends. Despite modern medicine’s efforts to combat this morbid foundation for medicine through the recovery of spirituality or the humanities, Bishop shows that such attempts fail because they still operate under the metaphysics of efficient causation, which is a metaphysics of the dead body. He then ends his book with a provocative question, “Might it not be that only theology can save medicine?”[4]
In what follows, I will further develop the metaphysical roots of Bishop’s diagnosis that “death is medicine’s transcendental.” Assuming this diagnosis is right, I devote the bulk of the essay arguing that modern medicine is intrinsically nihilistic, drawing heavily on Heidegger’s critique of technology as ontotheology and his analysis of Dasein as being-towards-death. I will show that Heidegger’s philosophy follows the “logic of nihilism,” which is the nothing as something.[5] Modern medicine is nihilistic for two reasons: (1) the metaphysical constitution of medical technology attempts to overcome death through the exaltation of health in man’s domination over nature, and (2) when death cannot be overcome, death itself becomes an eschatology of the Nothing.[6] Modern medicine is doubly nihilistic and cannot escape death; modern medicine needs death for its life. In response to the double nihilism of medicine, I will then draw on Maximus the Confessor to conclude with a brief sketch of an alternative Christian theological metaphysics of the Incarnation that overcomes the nihilism of medicine by transforming Nothing and Death as the very means unto life, the life of Christ.
Nietzsche’s Nihilisms
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) charges Christianity with nihilism because it negates life. Yet he does not regard nihilism as inherently negative, for nihilism is an ambiguous notion. Nietzsche himself offers a two-fold aspect to nihilism. He defines nihilism as “the highest values [that] devaluate themselves,”[7] which can be either life-affirming or life-denying. On the one hand, there is passive nihilism, which is “decline of the power of the spirit,” characterized by negation and weakness. This he ascribes to Christianity and all of Western culture which holds to any sense of morality. On the other hand, there is active nihilism, which is a “sign of increased power of the spirit,”[8] characterized by life and will to power.
In the wake of nihilism in which the highest values devaluate themselves, there is subsequent revaluation of all values in its place. Rather than remain in what is lowly, nihilism seeks out life such that it becomes a generative force that embodies the ideal of superabundant life.[9] Nietzsche considers nihilism to be the inner logic of Western history with a continual devaluation and revaluation of values. With nihilism, Nietzsche seeks to invert Platonism, such that the highest values of Western culture and history (i.e. Christianity, morality, and the world of ideas and being) are brought low and replaced with the world of becoming, life, and will to power. Based on this two-fold schema of active and passive nihilism, active nihilism is what characterizes modern medicine’s drive to exalt health through the exercise of will to power to overcome death, whereas, for Nietzsche, passive nihilism characterizes Christianity as a negation of life and weakness.
Medical Nihilism: Heidegger’s Critique of Technology
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) offers a powerful critique of technology through a sweeping understanding of the history of Western metaphysics. He employs Nietzsche’s active nihilism of will to power within his own interpretation of Western metaphysics, which provides the philosophical ground for his critique of technology as ontotheology. Heidegger regards Nietzsche’s will to power to be the culmination of Western metaphysics and the epitome of nihilism. Such a critique applies directly to the spirit of modern medicine that attempts to overcome death through the exercise of power over nature and ultimately power over man through the use of technology. It is precisely this overcoming of death that makes death medicine’s transcendental and reveals the nihilism of medicine. We will unpack Heidegger’s critique of technology as ontotheology and how it grounds a nihilistic understanding of modern medicine.
The novelty of Heidegger’s thought is that the metaphysical claims about beingtake the same twofold form throughout history, which he calls ontotheology.[10] In the history of philosophy, every fundamental metaphysical position has a double ground: (1) ontology, which searches for the most general ground of entities and that which all entities share in common, and (2) theology, which conceives the highest entity as the ultimate ground of the being of entities.[11] The primary historical role for metaphysics is the establishment and the maintenance of the double ground for what is. Yet, in Heidegger’s estimation, it is precisely this seeming secure double ground that obscures the reality that in the history of metaphysics there is a continual series of ontotheologies that overturn previous ontotheologies.
According to Heidegger, Nietzsche uses nihilism as the name for the historical movement of Western thought, summarized by the sentence: “God is dead.” The Christian God in this sense is the transcendent realm that provides the ground for ideas, goals, and values – that is, meaning – which exert power over beings and man. After the event “God is dead,” nihilism calls for the freedom from values as the freedom to revaluate all values.[12] Here Nietzsche thinks metaphysics has been overturned. Heidegger regards Nietzsche’s philosophy as the epitome of nihilism through the complementary metaphysical doctrines of (1) the absolute subjectivity of the will to power and (2) the eternal recurrence of the same. This nihilism entails a series of violent power struggles trapped in the realm of immanence. In Heidegger’s judgment, insofar that overturning metaphysics entails a revaluation of all values, and that metaphysics consists in grounding the truth of being as a whole, Nietzsche is still guilty of espousing a metaphysics.
Nietzsche’s nihilistic metaphysics of will to power entails that there is no transcendent realm of being beyond the realm of becoming. All that remains is a purely immanent realm of flux and nothing else. After the event “God is dead,” the old order collapses, leaving man himself as the measure of all values, as a kind of modern Protagoras. The ideal man, the Übermensch, is then “assigned the task of a revaluation of all values to the individual power of his will to power and…is prepared to embark on the absolute domination of the globe.”[13] In other words, Nietzsche’s nihilism, as the consummation and end of metaphysics as ontotheology, results in man exerting his power and control in dominion over the world. When modern medicine is seen through the prism of Nietzsche’s nihilism, autonomous man, who is the measure of all things and is stuck in immanence with no recourse to transcendence, now turns to technological power to control nature, and ultimately to overcome and control death. Even in Nietzsche’s active nihilism that exalts power and life, death is always lurking. Indeed, death is modern medicine’s transcendental.
A key to Heidegger’s genealogy of nihilism is the connection between Descartes and Nietzsche. In Heidegger’s reading of Descartes in the history of metaphysics, the cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) provides the certainty of knowledge for man through mathesis – that is, mathematical representation – which provides the method for the objectivity of nature. As such, Being is representedness in its objectivity.[14] Because of the cogito, man essentially has become the subject who defines the objects of nature and ultimately decides what is true and real. Nietzsche adopts Descartes’s interpretation of Being in his doctrine of the will to power, in that Being = representedness = truth, rooted in the cogito. Being and truth are thereby established as representing and securing, respectively.[15] After the event “God is dead,” the primacy of representational reason collapses. In its wake, man as subject and his will to power subsumes reason as representation and knowledge as certainty under itself by taking quantitative, calculative thinking into its service.[16] Examples in modern medicine include evidence-based medicine, biostatistics, randomized controlled trials, and even spiritual assessments. Quantifying and calculating every domain of the human person creates the illusion that the medical patient can be represented accurately and known with certainty. Thus, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power consummates Descartes’s metaphysics of subjectivity as the essence of everything real.[17] With the establishment of reality based on man’s will to power wielding the instrumental use of quantitative reason to define nature, man as subject can then exert dominion over nature, which is exercised through technology.
Heidegger famously stated that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”[18] Here essence does not denote what a technological thing is in a static sense. Rather, the essence of technology denotes the way technological entities reveal the world to us. So for Heidegger, a critique of technology does not mean asking whether it is good or bad to use smartphones, online videoconferencing, or even mechanical ventilators. The deeper concern is how technology fundamentally mediates and constructs reality for us. For Heidegger, truth is an unveiling, a revealing, so the essence of technology is the way technological entities reveal the world to us.
A concrete example from medicine at the beginning of life illustrates how technology mediates reality for us. Before the invention of pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, the mother becomes certain of being pregnant at the time of quickening (around day 40 after conception), when she can first feel the unborn child move. Thomas Aquinas considered quickening to be the moment of ensoulment. In modern obstetrics, however, ultrasound technology mediates a new way of relating to the unborn.[19] At the phenomenological level, a probe is placed on the mother’s abdomen and, magically, a motion picture of a human person appears on a screen. However, what is actually happening in the ultrasound machine is quite different. Ultrasound waves transmitted from the probe bounce off the entity in the womb. The ultrasound waves that return to the probe are then mathematically translated through computer calculations, which then represent a picture on the screen. The visual image constructs a new world for the mother (and father) to perceive the unborn in two ways: (1) fetus as person, and (2) fetus as patient.[20] On the one hand, the fetus as person allows the mother to relate to her unborn as an individual person, which allows for increased bonding. On the other hand, the fetus as patient is now objectified and medically surveilled for having any genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome. The visual objectification by obstetric ultrasound essentially creates the preconditions of possibility for a new moral phenomenon: the choice of whether or not to abort the unborn child based on perceived future suffering.
Such objectification through the mediation of technology is what Heidegger calls the Enframing. The Enframing is the mode of revealing in this age by which everything is increasingly viewed as resources to be optimized, which Heidegger calls “standing-reserve.”[21] In other words, everything is viewed as an inert thing for humans to use. Because this age is pervaded by the essence of technology, the Enframing conditions how we make sense of the world, ourselves included. The ordering of nature that Enframing demands is made possible by the modern physical theory inaugurated by Descartes, which is knowledge as representation of mechanical nature. Nature can be measured and calculated exactly, and causality becomes reduced to a mechanism for nature as standing resources.
Coupling this mechanistic conception of nature as standing resources with man as subject exerting dominion over the world, Nietzsche’s ontotheology of will to power takes full force. The only purpose in the world is for man to exert his power for the preservation of his power. The means of preservation is making nature the object of technology, whereby everything becomes standing resources to be analyzed and employed for man’s will. The final object to become standing resource is man himself. Medical technologies exert power over humans as resources to be more efficient but ultimately without intrinsic meaning except for what values man’s will chooses to impose. With man as standing resource, health and death become the ultimate phenomena of nature over which man exerts dominion, which is accomplished through modern medicine.
When health as secured through medicine’s dominion over nature is woven into Heidegger’s history of metaphysics, we clearly see the nihilism of modern medicine. In the pursuit of health as the chief good, man, as part of nature, then becomes the final object of dominion. Man as subject becomes man as object. The essence of man as subject is to preserve and to secure his power. The ultimate way for man to preserve power is to preserve his own existence. Thus, death must be overcome. In the Enframing, with the human body as object, death is defined in mechanistic, physicalist terms, such that death is the cessation of matter in motion. But this entails transforming man into standing resource that can be measured, calculated, optimized, and maximized for efficient functioning, which is “quantifying the qualitative.”[22] Yet, ironically, when man transforms himself into standing resource for the sake of overcoming death, man becomes another dead, meaningless resource among other dead resources. The essence of modern medicine reveals an ontology of death. Indeed, death is medicine’s transcendental and unveils the nihilism of medicine.
A concrete example of medical nihilism at the end of life is the metaphysics of organ transplantation. With the advent of mechanical ventilators in the 1950s, patients who would have otherwise died could be maintained alive. But some of these patients were found to have irreversible coma. Around this same time transplantation technology was developing. In 1968, a Harvard ad hoc committee sought to re-define death to include brain death, alongside the traditional cardiopulmonary death. One major reason to re-define death as brain death was to harvest organs from a dead patient, not a living one.[23] But the brain dead patient is phenomenologically a living cadaver: dead by medical-legal standards, but with a beating heat and breathing lungs, supported by the mechanical ventilator. Technology thus creates the living cadaver who is now a medicalized object. Living organs harvested from a dead person are transformed from social gifts[24] into mere resources to be used to exert power over death. In a sense, organ transplantation is the paradigm for the nihilism of modern medicine with death as its transcendental since organ transplantation technology requires death in order to exercise power over death. From the violence of death comes an even greater power of technology to overcome death. This follows the logic of nihilism: out of the nothing of death comes something, life.
In the next section, we will see how Heidegger attempts to overcome the nihilism of the age by considering lived experience through the lens of the Nothing, and its corollary, Death. Yet, in attempting to overcome one nihilism, he is overcome by an even greater nihilism, the abyss of the Nothing, which is the true ontology of death.
Overcome by Nihilism: Heidegger’s Thanatological Eschatology
In Being and Time, Heidegger describes human existence as Dasein which is being-in-the-world, a “being-towards-death,” which is characterized by temporality, authenticity, anxiety, and care. On its face, such a conception is useful as it affirms the finitude of human existence. Christian theology would be the first to affirm human finitude. But it should be noted here that Heidegger’s philosophy completely brackets out God and theology, so instead he turns to Death and the Nothing. Thus, his notion of being-towards-death is pervaded by the Nothing. But what does this mean? Let’s explore the relation between Dasein and death.
For Heidegger, death actually defines Dasein in its totality. His language is so strong that the certainty of Dasein rests in its certainty of death: “Only in dying can I to some extent say absolutely, ‘I am.’”[25] The certainty of death ensures the certainty of Dasein, which is the foundation for all other truth. One could say that for Heidegger, death is the a priori condition for the certainty of objects in the world. In other words, death is Dasein’s transcendental, and by implication, is medicine’s transcendental.
In Heidegger’s Eschatology, Judith Wolfe argues that Heidegger’s being-towards-death is best understood as an eschatology “because it envisions the possibility of authentic existence as dependent on a certain relation to one’s future.”[26] Dasein as being-towards-death is characterized as an “already” and a “not yet” of death, as a sort of parody of New Testament eschatology. On the one hand, when Dasein is anticipating death, death is “already” because death allows Dasein to authentically be. On the other hand, death is “not yet” because it has not become actual for Dasein. This “already” and “not yet” of death for Dasein is a thanatological eschatology. Heidegger develops an eschatology of human finitude characterized by anxiety and affliction which makes Death and Nothing the eschatological horizon, replacing God. In the end, Heidegger advances an “eschatology without eschaton.”[27]
In this thanatological eschatology, Dasein is revealed to be Nothing, a nullity. Heidegger makes it clear that nullity does not mean privation but rather radical finitude.[28] Nevertheless, Dasein’s being is Nothing, grounded in the Nothing.[29] In this way, Being is equated with Nothing. This is an instance of the logic of nihilism, the nothing as something. In shocking language, Heidegger declares that “Death is the shrine of the Nothing,”[30] which highlights the radical finitude of humanity. When understood in a medical-scientific, ontotheological sense, human beings are merely living animals. Instead, to be their essence, human beings must be understood in light of Death and their Nothingness. For Heidegger, death is the “shelter of Being” and presences the “mystery of Being.”[31] In other words, Death and Nothing lie at the very core of the mystery of human beings.
A medical ethics example of the thantological eschatology is the logic of euthanasia. The two main reasons that proponents of euthanasia give are patient autonomy and relief from suffering. Underlying both reasons is the assumption that suffering in the face of radical finitude is personally meaningless and thus should be eliminated. The technology of the lethal drug (the Greek pharmakon means both remedy and poison) is the means by which the thantalogical eschatology is ushered in. Death into the Nothingness of existence becomes a welcome eschatology in the face of meaninglessness.[32]
Despite Heidegger’s profound diagnosis of the nihilism of modern medicine and medical technology, by turning to Death and the Nothing, Heidegger is instead overcome by nihilism.
Overcoming Nihilism: Incarnational Life in Death
In attempting to overcome the nihilism of Nietzsche’s ontotheology, Heidegger turns to a metaphysics of death that is essentially an ontology of Nothing. The turn to the indeterminate Nothing is his attempt to escape the totalization of the Enframing and humans as standing-reserve. Heidegger seeks to recover and to protect the wonder of beings; indeed, he turns to art and poetry in his later thought. Yet, his answer with Death and Nothing evoke fear and anxiety, not wonder or desire. Contra Heidegger, the way to overcome the double nihilism of the metaphysics of death is through an alternative Christian theological metaphysics that turns Death and Nothing on their heads. But how should one approach such an alternative? Heidegger’s logic of nihilism (nothing as something) of Death and Nothing as constitutive for human existence provides the key clue. If one rejects Heidegger’s rejection of theology, the logic of nihilism is properly realized. In creation ex nihilo, God makes nothing creative. In the Incarnation of Christ, life is revealed through death. Theology can indeed save medicine.
Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein is helpful insofar that it recovers the importance of temporal finitude for the meaning of human existence. However, because Heidegger rules out creation ex nihilo from his philosophy, he has nowhere else to turn except the Nothing. In Christianity, humans are finite because they exhibit creatureliness, created from non-being as a gift from God’s fullness. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) develops such a creaturely metaphysics. For Maximus, creaturely, finite being is essentially motion. Maximus’s concept of motion is founded on time and the becoming of creaturely existence and counters Heidegger’s thanatological eschatology, mood of anxiety, and ground of nothingness with beauty, desire, and fullness in the Incarnation.
The basic structure of Maximus’s creaturely metaphysics is the triad of coming to be, movement, and rest. Created existence is in motion toward its ultimate object of desire.[33] Created beings indeed come from the nothing of non-being, but are brought into existence by the unmoved divine. Creatures, then, are in motion in their becoming toward that which they desire as their end. Creatures come from nothing and move toward the fullness of their desire. Heidegger’s being-toward-death is also a motion, but it is from nothing to nothing.
Having established that motion is essential to created existence, Maximus goes on to show that the telos of rest is not intrinsic to the thing itself because it is not self-caused. Only that which is self-caused, namely God, transcends motion because He exists for the sake of nothing outside of Himself. Thus, all created things are in motion until they find rest in the ultimately desirable who is God the Beautiful.[34] With God as the beginning and the end of a creature’s motion, being moved appropriately towards the ultimate beauty results not only in the embrace of the beautiful but also being filled with beauty from the Beautiful.[35] The contrast between Heidegger and Maximus cannot be clearer. For Heidegger, anxiety manifests the Nothing for Dasein. For Maximus, desire moves humanity towards the fullness of God’s beauty.
While Death is Nothing, God is no-thing, since He is not a mere object among other objects for thought. For Maximus, God is beyond thought because He is beyond being.[36] God, who is no-thing, became nothing by taking on flesh in the divine kenosis and, in Heidegger’s ultimate Nothing, by dying. As John Behr points out, the chief way to know God is through Christ’s death on the Cross and His resurrection. The death and exaltation of Christ reveal the same power that He is the sustainer of all creation, in a sort of metaphysics of the Cross. The cosmos itself takes on a cruciform structure: “Christian cosmology…sees the Cross as impregnated in the very structure of creation.”[37] Insofar that Christ’s death reveals knowledge of Himself to humanity, death is indeed a transcendental but only as part of the larger narrative of Christ’s embodied life. For Maximus, the purpose of all divine action, including Christ’s death, is to reveal Christ’s Incarnation: “For the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”[38] The mystery of the Incarnation thus becomes the key for understanding all of reality.[39] The meaning of death is revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection. Thus, contra Heidegger, death is not the end that reveals the Nothingness of one’s existence, but rather death is the means by which the true life of humanity is revealed, Christ incarnate, who is the Truth and the Life. In this way, Bishop’s metaphysical diagnosis of modern medicine of “death is medicine’s transcendental” still rings true but now with an ironic twist. Death is no longer the epistemological norm of modern medicine. Rather, death – the death of Christ – is the means by which true life and healing are known.
In summary, I have attempted to show that “death is medicine’s transcendental” through Heidegger’s critique of medical technology as ontotheology that seeks to overcome death and his own solution of Death and Nothing, which results in a double nihilism of medicine. Yet, paradoxically, in light of creation ex nihilo and the Incarnation, even for Christianity, death is still medicine’s transcendental. Only through the death of Christ can one know the meaning of our being and the fullness of Christ’s Life. Thus, death becomes the very means unto life and health.
Kimbell Kornu (M.A.R. Westminster Theological Seminary) is assistant professor of medicine and health care ethics at Saint Louis University and is a practicing Palliative Care physician. He holds an MD from the University of Texas Southwestern and a PhD in Theology from the University of Nottingham (UK). His teaching commitments include palliative medicine to housestaff, health care ethics to undergraduates and medical students, and theology and bioethics to graduate students. His research focuses on the historical, social, philosophical, and theological determinants that shape the metaphysics and practices of modern medicine. He has published widely in the philosophy and theology of medicine. He is currently working on a book that traces the philosophical history of medical knowing back to the origins of Western medicine through the lens of anatomical dissection.
[1] The 2018 Ken Burns documentary about the history of the Mayo Clinic plays on the theological virtues, which is is entitled “The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science.” See here: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-mayo-clinic/.
[2] Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 53.
[3] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 7–37.
[4] Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse, 313.
[5] Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).
[6] When “Nothing” and “Death” are capitalized throughout the essay, I do not mean to deify these concepts as substitute gods. Rather, capitalization reflects Heidegger’s convention in his writings. Whether it is Heidegger’s intention to deify Nothing and Death is another question entirely and will not be addressed in this essay.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 2.
[8] Ibid., 22.
[9] Ibid., 14.
[10] Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12.
[11] Martin Heidegger, “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Ted E. Klein, Jr. and William E. Pohl (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 340.
[12] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume IV: Nihilism, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 4–5.
[13] Ibid., 8–9.
[14] Ibid., 116.
[15] Ibid., 131.
[16] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 224.
[17] Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 83.
[18] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 4.
[19] This example is drawn from Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 23–27.
[20] It should be noted that using the term “fetus” already creates a medicalized objectification of the unborn made possible by the visual objectification of the ultrasound.
[21] Ibid., 17.
[22] Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology, 22.
[23] Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Death, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” Journal of the American Medical Association 205, no. 6 (1968): 85–88.
[24] The language of “gift of life” and “donate life” pervade public campaigns to increase organ donation.
[25] Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 318.
[26] Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, 2013), 118.
[27] Ibid., 5, 45, 133.
[28] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, ed. Taylor Carman, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 331.
[29] Ibid., 330-331.
[30] Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 178.
[31] Ibid., 178–79.
[32] It should be noted, however, that Heidegger did not appear to approve of suicide as a proper way of being-towards-death.
[33] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 77-79 [PG 91:1069B].
[34] Ibid., 79, 91 [PG 91:1069C-D, 1076C-D].
[35] Ibid., 87-89 [PG 91:1073C-1076A].
[36] Maximus the Confessor, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 143–44.
[37] John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 90.
[38] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, 107 [PG 91:1084C-D].
[39] Maximus the Confessor, Maximus Confessor, 139–40.
The claim that modern medicine is nihilistic might seem peculiar at first blush. Aren’t healing and saving lives the goal of medicine? In a time of global pandemic, faith and hope are placed in modern medicine to develop vaccines, to identify effective treatments, and to instruct on proper public health practices. Physicians and nurses on the frontlines are praised as heroes and heroines for putting themselves at risk in the care of their patients. Such imagery evokes a sense of sacrificial love. The three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are named to describe the work and promise of modern medicine.[1] Modern medicine is an unquestioned good, a view commonly shared by church, state, and society alike. However, this pandemic has revealed something about the soul of society – the fear of death. Trust in the healing power of modern medicine is thought to quell the fear of death. But the fear of death reveals something deeper about modern medicine: death lies at the heart of modern medicine and is thus nihilistic.
In The Anticipatory Corpse, Jeffrey Bishop argues that “Death is medicine’s transcendental,”[2] meaning that medicine requires death for its very existence. Bishop examines contemporary medical care of the dying and constructs a genealogy of death, arguing that the dead body is epistemologically normative for modern medicine. The uncertain flux of life has been replaced by the certain fixity of death, so that the corpse is the ideal body mapped onto the lived body. This echoes Hans Jonas' argument that in the pre-modern understanding of nature, life is natural and death is the problem. But with the modern, mechanical understanding of nature, death is natural and life is the problem, thereby inaugurating a “universal ontology of death.”[3] The result is that causation within nature has no intrinsic telos or ultimate end except for what the will imposes upon nature for its own ends. Despite modern medicine’s efforts to combat this morbid foundation for medicine through the recovery of spirituality or the humanities, Bishop shows that such attempts fail because they still operate under the metaphysics of efficient causation, which is a metaphysics of the dead body. He then ends his book with a provocative question, “Might it not be that only theology can save medicine?”[4]
In what follows, I will further develop the metaphysical roots of Bishop’s diagnosis that “death is medicine’s transcendental.” Assuming this diagnosis is right, I devote the bulk of the essay arguing that modern medicine is intrinsically nihilistic, drawing heavily on Heidegger’s critique of technology as ontotheology and his analysis of Dasein as being-towards-death. I will show that Heidegger’s philosophy follows the “logic of nihilism,” which is the nothing as something.[5] Modern medicine is nihilistic for two reasons: (1) the metaphysical constitution of medical technology attempts to overcome death through the exaltation of health in man’s domination over nature, and (2) when death cannot be overcome, death itself becomes an eschatology of the Nothing.[6] Modern medicine is doubly nihilistic and cannot escape death; modern medicine needs death for its life. In response to the double nihilism of medicine, I will then draw on Maximus the Confessor to conclude with a brief sketch of an alternative Christian theological metaphysics of the Incarnation that overcomes the nihilism of medicine by transforming Nothing and Death as the very means unto life, the life of Christ.
Nietzsche’s Nihilisms
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) charges Christianity with nihilism because it negates life. Yet he does not regard nihilism as inherently negative, for nihilism is an ambiguous notion. Nietzsche himself offers a two-fold aspect to nihilism. He defines nihilism as “the highest values [that] devaluate themselves,”[7] which can be either life-affirming or life-denying. On the one hand, there is passive nihilism, which is “decline of the power of the spirit,” characterized by negation and weakness. This he ascribes to Christianity and all of Western culture which holds to any sense of morality. On the other hand, there is active nihilism, which is a “sign of increased power of the spirit,”[8] characterized by life and will to power.
In the wake of nihilism in which the highest values devaluate themselves, there is subsequent revaluation of all values in its place. Rather than remain in what is lowly, nihilism seeks out life such that it becomes a generative force that embodies the ideal of superabundant life.[9] Nietzsche considers nihilism to be the inner logic of Western history with a continual devaluation and revaluation of values. With nihilism, Nietzsche seeks to invert Platonism, such that the highest values of Western culture and history (i.e. Christianity, morality, and the world of ideas and being) are brought low and replaced with the world of becoming, life, and will to power. Based on this two-fold schema of active and passive nihilism, active nihilism is what characterizes modern medicine’s drive to exalt health through the exercise of will to power to overcome death, whereas, for Nietzsche, passive nihilism characterizes Christianity as a negation of life and weakness.
Medical Nihilism: Heidegger’s Critique of Technology
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) offers a powerful critique of technology through a sweeping understanding of the history of Western metaphysics. He employs Nietzsche’s active nihilism of will to power within his own interpretation of Western metaphysics, which provides the philosophical ground for his critique of technology as ontotheology. Heidegger regards Nietzsche’s will to power to be the culmination of Western metaphysics and the epitome of nihilism. Such a critique applies directly to the spirit of modern medicine that attempts to overcome death through the exercise of power over nature and ultimately power over man through the use of technology. It is precisely this overcoming of death that makes death medicine’s transcendental and reveals the nihilism of medicine. We will unpack Heidegger’s critique of technology as ontotheology and how it grounds a nihilistic understanding of modern medicine.
The novelty of Heidegger’s thought is that the metaphysical claims about beingtake the same twofold form throughout history, which he calls ontotheology.[10] In the history of philosophy, every fundamental metaphysical position has a double ground: (1) ontology, which searches for the most general ground of entities and that which all entities share in common, and (2) theology, which conceives the highest entity as the ultimate ground of the being of entities.[11] The primary historical role for metaphysics is the establishment and the maintenance of the double ground for what is. Yet, in Heidegger’s estimation, it is precisely this seeming secure double ground that obscures the reality that in the history of metaphysics there is a continual series of ontotheologies that overturn previous ontotheologies.
According to Heidegger, Nietzsche uses nihilism as the name for the historical movement of Western thought, summarized by the sentence: “God is dead.” The Christian God in this sense is the transcendent realm that provides the ground for ideas, goals, and values – that is, meaning – which exert power over beings and man. After the event “God is dead,” nihilism calls for the freedom from values as the freedom to revaluate all values.[12] Here Nietzsche thinks metaphysics has been overturned. Heidegger regards Nietzsche’s philosophy as the epitome of nihilism through the complementary metaphysical doctrines of (1) the absolute subjectivity of the will to power and (2) the eternal recurrence of the same. This nihilism entails a series of violent power struggles trapped in the realm of immanence. In Heidegger’s judgment, insofar that overturning metaphysics entails a revaluation of all values, and that metaphysics consists in grounding the truth of being as a whole, Nietzsche is still guilty of espousing a metaphysics.
Nietzsche’s nihilistic metaphysics of will to power entails that there is no transcendent realm of being beyond the realm of becoming. All that remains is a purely immanent realm of flux and nothing else. After the event “God is dead,” the old order collapses, leaving man himself as the measure of all values, as a kind of modern Protagoras. The ideal man, the Übermensch, is then “assigned the task of a revaluation of all values to the individual power of his will to power and…is prepared to embark on the absolute domination of the globe.”[13] In other words, Nietzsche’s nihilism, as the consummation and end of metaphysics as ontotheology, results in man exerting his power and control in dominion over the world. When modern medicine is seen through the prism of Nietzsche’s nihilism, autonomous man, who is the measure of all things and is stuck in immanence with no recourse to transcendence, now turns to technological power to control nature, and ultimately to overcome and control death. Even in Nietzsche’s active nihilism that exalts power and life, death is always lurking. Indeed, death is modern medicine’s transcendental.
A key to Heidegger’s genealogy of nihilism is the connection between Descartes and Nietzsche. In Heidegger’s reading of Descartes in the history of metaphysics, the cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) provides the certainty of knowledge for man through mathesis – that is, mathematical representation – which provides the method for the objectivity of nature. As such, Being is representedness in its objectivity.[14] Because of the cogito, man essentially has become the subject who defines the objects of nature and ultimately decides what is true and real. Nietzsche adopts Descartes’s interpretation of Being in his doctrine of the will to power, in that Being = representedness = truth, rooted in the cogito. Being and truth are thereby established as representing and securing, respectively.[15] After the event “God is dead,” the primacy of representational reason collapses. In its wake, man as subject and his will to power subsumes reason as representation and knowledge as certainty under itself by taking quantitative, calculative thinking into its service.[16] Examples in modern medicine include evidence-based medicine, biostatistics, randomized controlled trials, and even spiritual assessments. Quantifying and calculating every domain of the human person creates the illusion that the medical patient can be represented accurately and known with certainty. Thus, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power consummates Descartes’s metaphysics of subjectivity as the essence of everything real.[17] With the establishment of reality based on man’s will to power wielding the instrumental use of quantitative reason to define nature, man as subject can then exert dominion over nature, which is exercised through technology.
Heidegger famously stated that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”[18] Here essence does not denote what a technological thing is in a static sense. Rather, the essence of technology denotes the way technological entities reveal the world to us. So for Heidegger, a critique of technology does not mean asking whether it is good or bad to use smartphones, online videoconferencing, or even mechanical ventilators. The deeper concern is how technology fundamentally mediates and constructs reality for us. For Heidegger, truth is an unveiling, a revealing, so the essence of technology is the way technological entities reveal the world to us.
A concrete example from medicine at the beginning of life illustrates how technology mediates reality for us. Before the invention of pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, the mother becomes certain of being pregnant at the time of quickening (around day 40 after conception), when she can first feel the unborn child move. Thomas Aquinas considered quickening to be the moment of ensoulment. In modern obstetrics, however, ultrasound technology mediates a new way of relating to the unborn.[19] At the phenomenological level, a probe is placed on the mother’s abdomen and, magically, a motion picture of a human person appears on a screen. However, what is actually happening in the ultrasound machine is quite different. Ultrasound waves transmitted from the probe bounce off the entity in the womb. The ultrasound waves that return to the probe are then mathematically translated through computer calculations, which then represent a picture on the screen. The visual image constructs a new world for the mother (and father) to perceive the unborn in two ways: (1) fetus as person, and (2) fetus as patient.[20] On the one hand, the fetus as person allows the mother to relate to her unborn as an individual person, which allows for increased bonding. On the other hand, the fetus as patient is now objectified and medically surveilled for having any genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome. The visual objectification by obstetric ultrasound essentially creates the preconditions of possibility for a new moral phenomenon: the choice of whether or not to abort the unborn child based on perceived future suffering.
Such objectification through the mediation of technology is what Heidegger calls the Enframing. The Enframing is the mode of revealing in this age by which everything is increasingly viewed as resources to be optimized, which Heidegger calls “standing-reserve.”[21] In other words, everything is viewed as an inert thing for humans to use. Because this age is pervaded by the essence of technology, the Enframing conditions how we make sense of the world, ourselves included. The ordering of nature that Enframing demands is made possible by the modern physical theory inaugurated by Descartes, which is knowledge as representation of mechanical nature. Nature can be measured and calculated exactly, and causality becomes reduced to a mechanism for nature as standing resources.
Coupling this mechanistic conception of nature as standing resources with man as subject exerting dominion over the world, Nietzsche’s ontotheology of will to power takes full force. The only purpose in the world is for man to exert his power for the preservation of his power. The means of preservation is making nature the object of technology, whereby everything becomes standing resources to be analyzed and employed for man’s will. The final object to become standing resource is man himself. Medical technologies exert power over humans as resources to be more efficient but ultimately without intrinsic meaning except for what values man’s will chooses to impose. With man as standing resource, health and death become the ultimate phenomena of nature over which man exerts dominion, which is accomplished through modern medicine.
When health as secured through medicine’s dominion over nature is woven into Heidegger’s history of metaphysics, we clearly see the nihilism of modern medicine. In the pursuit of health as the chief good, man, as part of nature, then becomes the final object of dominion. Man as subject becomes man as object. The essence of man as subject is to preserve and to secure his power. The ultimate way for man to preserve power is to preserve his own existence. Thus, death must be overcome. In the Enframing, with the human body as object, death is defined in mechanistic, physicalist terms, such that death is the cessation of matter in motion. But this entails transforming man into standing resource that can be measured, calculated, optimized, and maximized for efficient functioning, which is “quantifying the qualitative.”[22] Yet, ironically, when man transforms himself into standing resource for the sake of overcoming death, man becomes another dead, meaningless resource among other dead resources. The essence of modern medicine reveals an ontology of death. Indeed, death is medicine’s transcendental and unveils the nihilism of medicine.
A concrete example of medical nihilism at the end of life is the metaphysics of organ transplantation. With the advent of mechanical ventilators in the 1950s, patients who would have otherwise died could be maintained alive. But some of these patients were found to have irreversible coma. Around this same time transplantation technology was developing. In 1968, a Harvard ad hoc committee sought to re-define death to include brain death, alongside the traditional cardiopulmonary death. One major reason to re-define death as brain death was to harvest organs from a dead patient, not a living one.[23] But the brain dead patient is phenomenologically a living cadaver: dead by medical-legal standards, but with a beating heat and breathing lungs, supported by the mechanical ventilator. Technology thus creates the living cadaver who is now a medicalized object. Living organs harvested from a dead person are transformed from social gifts[24] into mere resources to be used to exert power over death. In a sense, organ transplantation is the paradigm for the nihilism of modern medicine with death as its transcendental since organ transplantation technology requires death in order to exercise power over death. From the violence of death comes an even greater power of technology to overcome death. This follows the logic of nihilism: out of the nothing of death comes something, life.
In the next section, we will see how Heidegger attempts to overcome the nihilism of the age by considering lived experience through the lens of the Nothing, and its corollary, Death. Yet, in attempting to overcome one nihilism, he is overcome by an even greater nihilism, the abyss of the Nothing, which is the true ontology of death.
Overcome by Nihilism: Heidegger’s Thanatological Eschatology
In Being and Time, Heidegger describes human existence as Dasein which is being-in-the-world, a “being-towards-death,” which is characterized by temporality, authenticity, anxiety, and care. On its face, such a conception is useful as it affirms the finitude of human existence. Christian theology would be the first to affirm human finitude. But it should be noted here that Heidegger’s philosophy completely brackets out God and theology, so instead he turns to Death and the Nothing. Thus, his notion of being-towards-death is pervaded by the Nothing. But what does this mean? Let’s explore the relation between Dasein and death.
For Heidegger, death actually defines Dasein in its totality. His language is so strong that the certainty of Dasein rests in its certainty of death: “Only in dying can I to some extent say absolutely, ‘I am.’”[25] The certainty of death ensures the certainty of Dasein, which is the foundation for all other truth. One could say that for Heidegger, death is the a priori condition for the certainty of objects in the world. In other words, death is Dasein’s transcendental, and by implication, is medicine’s transcendental.
In Heidegger’s Eschatology, Judith Wolfe argues that Heidegger’s being-towards-death is best understood as an eschatology “because it envisions the possibility of authentic existence as dependent on a certain relation to one’s future.”[26] Dasein as being-towards-death is characterized as an “already” and a “not yet” of death, as a sort of parody of New Testament eschatology. On the one hand, when Dasein is anticipating death, death is “already” because death allows Dasein to authentically be. On the other hand, death is “not yet” because it has not become actual for Dasein. This “already” and “not yet” of death for Dasein is a thanatological eschatology. Heidegger develops an eschatology of human finitude characterized by anxiety and affliction which makes Death and Nothing the eschatological horizon, replacing God. In the end, Heidegger advances an “eschatology without eschaton.”[27]
In this thanatological eschatology, Dasein is revealed to be Nothing, a nullity. Heidegger makes it clear that nullity does not mean privation but rather radical finitude.[28] Nevertheless, Dasein’s being is Nothing, grounded in the Nothing.[29] In this way, Being is equated with Nothing. This is an instance of the logic of nihilism, the nothing as something. In shocking language, Heidegger declares that “Death is the shrine of the Nothing,”[30] which highlights the radical finitude of humanity. When understood in a medical-scientific, ontotheological sense, human beings are merely living animals. Instead, to be their essence, human beings must be understood in light of Death and their Nothingness. For Heidegger, death is the “shelter of Being” and presences the “mystery of Being.”[31] In other words, Death and Nothing lie at the very core of the mystery of human beings.
A medical ethics example of the thantological eschatology is the logic of euthanasia. The two main reasons that proponents of euthanasia give are patient autonomy and relief from suffering. Underlying both reasons is the assumption that suffering in the face of radical finitude is personally meaningless and thus should be eliminated. The technology of the lethal drug (the Greek pharmakon means both remedy and poison) is the means by which the thantalogical eschatology is ushered in. Death into the Nothingness of existence becomes a welcome eschatology in the face of meaninglessness.[32]
Despite Heidegger’s profound diagnosis of the nihilism of modern medicine and medical technology, by turning to Death and the Nothing, Heidegger is instead overcome by nihilism.
Overcoming Nihilism: Incarnational Life in Death
In attempting to overcome the nihilism of Nietzsche’s ontotheology, Heidegger turns to a metaphysics of death that is essentially an ontology of Nothing. The turn to the indeterminate Nothing is his attempt to escape the totalization of the Enframing and humans as standing-reserve. Heidegger seeks to recover and to protect the wonder of beings; indeed, he turns to art and poetry in his later thought. Yet, his answer with Death and Nothing evoke fear and anxiety, not wonder or desire. Contra Heidegger, the way to overcome the double nihilism of the metaphysics of death is through an alternative Christian theological metaphysics that turns Death and Nothing on their heads. But how should one approach such an alternative? Heidegger’s logic of nihilism (nothing as something) of Death and Nothing as constitutive for human existence provides the key clue. If one rejects Heidegger’s rejection of theology, the logic of nihilism is properly realized. In creation ex nihilo, God makes nothing creative. In the Incarnation of Christ, life is revealed through death. Theology can indeed save medicine.
Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein is helpful insofar that it recovers the importance of temporal finitude for the meaning of human existence. However, because Heidegger rules out creation ex nihilo from his philosophy, he has nowhere else to turn except the Nothing. In Christianity, humans are finite because they exhibit creatureliness, created from non-being as a gift from God’s fullness. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) develops such a creaturely metaphysics. For Maximus, creaturely, finite being is essentially motion. Maximus’s concept of motion is founded on time and the becoming of creaturely existence and counters Heidegger’s thanatological eschatology, mood of anxiety, and ground of nothingness with beauty, desire, and fullness in the Incarnation.
The basic structure of Maximus’s creaturely metaphysics is the triad of coming to be, movement, and rest. Created existence is in motion toward its ultimate object of desire.[33] Created beings indeed come from the nothing of non-being, but are brought into existence by the unmoved divine. Creatures, then, are in motion in their becoming toward that which they desire as their end. Creatures come from nothing and move toward the fullness of their desire. Heidegger’s being-toward-death is also a motion, but it is from nothing to nothing.
Having established that motion is essential to created existence, Maximus goes on to show that the telos of rest is not intrinsic to the thing itself because it is not self-caused. Only that which is self-caused, namely God, transcends motion because He exists for the sake of nothing outside of Himself. Thus, all created things are in motion until they find rest in the ultimately desirable who is God the Beautiful.[34] With God as the beginning and the end of a creature’s motion, being moved appropriately towards the ultimate beauty results not only in the embrace of the beautiful but also being filled with beauty from the Beautiful.[35] The contrast between Heidegger and Maximus cannot be clearer. For Heidegger, anxiety manifests the Nothing for Dasein. For Maximus, desire moves humanity towards the fullness of God’s beauty.
While Death is Nothing, God is no-thing, since He is not a mere object among other objects for thought. For Maximus, God is beyond thought because He is beyond being.[36] God, who is no-thing, became nothing by taking on flesh in the divine kenosis and, in Heidegger’s ultimate Nothing, by dying. As John Behr points out, the chief way to know God is through Christ’s death on the Cross and His resurrection. The death and exaltation of Christ reveal the same power that He is the sustainer of all creation, in a sort of metaphysics of the Cross. The cosmos itself takes on a cruciform structure: “Christian cosmology…sees the Cross as impregnated in the very structure of creation.”[37] Insofar that Christ’s death reveals knowledge of Himself to humanity, death is indeed a transcendental but only as part of the larger narrative of Christ’s embodied life. For Maximus, the purpose of all divine action, including Christ’s death, is to reveal Christ’s Incarnation: “For the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”[38] The mystery of the Incarnation thus becomes the key for understanding all of reality.[39] The meaning of death is revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection. Thus, contra Heidegger, death is not the end that reveals the Nothingness of one’s existence, but rather death is the means by which the true life of humanity is revealed, Christ incarnate, who is the Truth and the Life. In this way, Bishop’s metaphysical diagnosis of modern medicine of “death is medicine’s transcendental” still rings true but now with an ironic twist. Death is no longer the epistemological norm of modern medicine. Rather, death – the death of Christ – is the means by which true life and healing are known.
In summary, I have attempted to show that “death is medicine’s transcendental” through Heidegger’s critique of medical technology as ontotheology that seeks to overcome death and his own solution of Death and Nothing, which results in a double nihilism of medicine. Yet, paradoxically, in light of creation ex nihilo and the Incarnation, even for Christianity, death is still medicine’s transcendental. Only through the death of Christ can one know the meaning of our being and the fullness of Christ’s Life. Thus, death becomes the very means unto life and health.
Kimbell Kornu (M.A.R. Westminster Theological Seminary) is assistant professor of medicine and health care ethics at Saint Louis University and is a practicing Palliative Care physician. He holds an MD from the University of Texas Southwestern and a PhD in Theology from the University of Nottingham (UK). His teaching commitments include palliative medicine to housestaff, health care ethics to undergraduates and medical students, and theology and bioethics to graduate students. His research focuses on the historical, social, philosophical, and theological determinants that shape the metaphysics and practices of modern medicine. He has published widely in the philosophy and theology of medicine. He is currently working on a book that traces the philosophical history of medical knowing back to the origins of Western medicine through the lens of anatomical dissection.
[1] The 2018 Ken Burns documentary about the history of the Mayo Clinic plays on the theological virtues, which is is entitled “The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science.” See here: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-mayo-clinic/.
[2] Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 53.
[3] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 7–37.
[4] Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse, 313.
[5] Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).
[6] When “Nothing” and “Death” are capitalized throughout the essay, I do not mean to deify these concepts as substitute gods. Rather, capitalization reflects Heidegger’s convention in his writings. Whether it is Heidegger’s intention to deify Nothing and Death is another question entirely and will not be addressed in this essay.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 2.
[8] Ibid., 22.
[9] Ibid., 14.
[10] Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12.
[11] Martin Heidegger, “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Ted E. Klein, Jr. and William E. Pohl (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 340.
[12] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume IV: Nihilism, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 4–5.
[13] Ibid., 8–9.
[14] Ibid., 116.
[15] Ibid., 131.
[16] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 224.
[17] Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 83.
[18] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 4.
[19] This example is drawn from Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 23–27.
[20] It should be noted that using the term “fetus” already creates a medicalized objectification of the unborn made possible by the visual objectification of the ultrasound.
[21] Ibid., 17.
[22] Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology, 22.
[23] Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Death, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” Journal of the American Medical Association 205, no. 6 (1968): 85–88.
[24] The language of “gift of life” and “donate life” pervade public campaigns to increase organ donation.
[25] Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 318.
[26] Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, 2013), 118.
[27] Ibid., 5, 45, 133.
[28] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, ed. Taylor Carman, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 331.
[29] Ibid., 330-331.
[30] Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 178.
[31] Ibid., 178–79.
[32] It should be noted, however, that Heidegger did not appear to approve of suicide as a proper way of being-towards-death.
[33] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 77-79 [PG 91:1069B].
[34] Ibid., 79, 91 [PG 91:1069C-D, 1076C-D].
[35] Ibid., 87-89 [PG 91:1073C-1076A].
[36] Maximus the Confessor, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 143–44.
[37] John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 90.
[38] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, 107 [PG 91:1084C-D].
[39] Maximus the Confessor, Maximus Confessor, 139–40.
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