1. ‘The “deceased”, as distinct from the dead body, has been torn away from “those remaining behind”, and is the object of “being taken care of” in funeral rites, the burial, and the cult of graves. And that is so because he is “still more” in his kind of being than an innerworldly thing at hand to be taken care of. In lingering together with him in mourning and commemorating, those remaining behind are with him, in a mode of concern which honours him. Thus the relation of being to the dead must not be grasped as a being together with something at hand which takes care of it.’ (Being and Time: 238)
   

Upon reading Heidegger’s account of death, of which the above paragraph forms a part, I was struck by the similarity between the way that we talk about death and dying — what Wittgenstein would call the ‘grammar’ of our language — and widespread religious beliefs about the the soul’s ability to survive bodily death in some form of afterlife. Perhaps such parallels are only to be expected given that our language has itself emerged out of a culture and way of life that deals with such things. Even if the majority of people no longer literally believe in the immortality of the soul, the forms of language that we use to talk about it survive as a kind of ‘living fossil’, embedded in our ways of talking and describing what happens when someone that once ‘was’ becomes a mere thing — a body or corpse that no longer coincides with the person that once ‘inhabited’ it. This change in state, as Heidegger points out, has enormous significance for us, not least because we ourselves will inevitably end in such a transition:

1. ‘In the dying of others that remarkable phenomenon of being can be experienced that can be defined as the transition of a being from the kind of being of Da-sein (or of life) to no-longer-being-there. The end of the being qua Da-sein is the beginning of this being qua something objectively present.’ (ibid.)
   

(Da-sein is Heidegger’s word for the kind of beings that we are — determinate or human beings — and may be literally translated as ‘there-being’ or, as he sometimes calls it, ‘the being of the there’.)

Heidegger’s characterisation of this transition seems absolutely correct and yet, as he goes on to point out, even a lifeless body is experienced as something more than a mere thing. It is something lifeless; that is, something that was once living, but is no longer, and not just an inanimate object like a rock or manmade artefact.

However, what is most striking is the way that we talk about the deceased — the person that was but is no longer. In the transition between life and death we talk (quite rightly) of something (someone) that has gone and something (a body) that remains. However, even the person that is no longer there exerts a strange hold upon us and seems to continue to have a kind of existence, albeit in somewhat ghostly form. ‘In such being-with with the dead’, Heidegger continues, ‘the deceased himself is no longer factically “there”. However, being-with always means being-with-one-another in the same world. The deceased has abandoned our “world” and left it behind. It is in terms of this world that those remaining can still be with him.’

Thus Da-sein ceases to be ‘there’ but for us, the ones ‘left behind’, he is still real. We talk of the person; use their name; say things about them such as what they would have liked, what sort of a person they were; miss them and grieve for them, all the while acknowledging that they are no longer there and yet the physical form that they took is still here, but it is not them. It is an object, a thing, not Da-sein. Where then, are they? It takes only a small leap of the imagination to envisage that they have taken on some other kind of existence. Divorced from their body, both in action and in our forms of language, they continue to exist — otherwise how could we talk of them, miss them, continue to ‘be with them’, even after their death?

It is a strange thought that our very language might be both a source and the consequence of our beliefs about the soul. Of course, to the devout, this might be taken as confirmation of the truth of such beliefs; as disclosing some aspect of reality that is otherwise hidden from us. To the philosopher of language — or should that be ‘linguistic archaeologist’? — these grammatical forms are as much a result of our beliefs as a confirmation of them and should not necessarily be taken at face value. Even so, they may still shed light upon the nature of our concepts and, in the case of Heidegger, the very structure of ‘being’, which is distinctly more complex than a naïve correspondence theory would suggest. Either way, it’s a remarkable thought that the infamous ‘mind-body problem’ not only infects our philosophical ways of thinking, but also our forms of language, which, of course, may be more closely linked than might first appear.