Dasein is spirit in the world: reflections on death in Heidegger and Hegel

Abstract

The favorable reception of Heidegger's philosophy in the postwar period stems from its affinity with the secularization of Western culture, especially in its thematization of death as an ontological structure of existence, detached from the promises of religious transcendence. This conception resonated with intellectuals who, faced with the decline of religious authority, began to understand human finitude from the perspective of nothingness. In contrast, Hegel interprets death not as an expression of an ontological finitude, but as a necessary moment in the dialectic of the life of the spirit, in which finitude is overcome in the totality of the Absolute. Thus, while Heidegger links the experience of death to the existential horizon of being-in-the-world, Hegel inserts it into the speculative movement in which life and death reveal themselves as complementary moments in the self-constitution of the Idea. This article proposes, in this sense, to problematize the ontological pretensions of Heideggerian philosophy and confront them with Hegel's reflection on Dasein and death.