Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole.

Taking its point of departure in an enigmatic passage from the Analects, in which the interlocutor is likened by the master to a sacrificial vase, the essay explores how this teaching can be read as a indirect commentary on the proper way of inhabiting and communicating tradition. The relation to the ancestors and the proper way of handling the rites for the dead is shown to reveal a more basic hermeneutic argument in Confucian thinking, opening the text to its own future transformation.

The chapter presents the topic of “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit) as a core concern for phenomenological thinking in the intersection with hermeneutics. It is first coined as a philosophical term by Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg as a way to capture the unique way in which humans exist historically and belong to history. Through their correspondence published posthumously in 1923 it enters the orbit of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, as he quotes extensively from these letters in Being in Time. For Heidegger, historicity was the key to transforming Husserlian phenomenology into hermeneutical ontology. In his reappraisal of hermeneutic thinking, Gadamer also locates historicity at the center of his magnum opus Truth and Method. The chapter also shows how Husserl was a thinker of historicity. This is brought out in particular in Derrida’s early interpretations of Husserl, where the deconstructive approach emerges literally from the problem of the historicity of ideal objects.

Abstract: The article explores the topic of Gelassenheit (releasement) in Heidegger, through the lense of the ambiguous role of Christian mysticism in general and Eckhart in particular in and for his thinking. In an analysis of how mysticism appears in his early lectures on religion, it explains why he is critical of this concept and of how it is commonly understood. It also gives reasons for why we too should be cautious in using it to describe his position in his later writings where he explicitly reconnects to themes and concepts from Eckhart. The text provides a critical rehearsal of Eckhart's understanding of both “Abgeschiedenheit” (detachment) and "Gelassenheit" and how Heidegger relates to it both in his early lectures and in his later essays. Ultimately it outlines a phenomenological understanding of what is commonly referred to as a “mystical” comportment more along the lines of a heightened openness and awareness, in Heidegger’s words as a “releasement toward things and an openness to the secret”. Thus, instead of seeing Heidegger’s later writings as a sort of crypto-mysticism, the text seeks to show how his critical appropriation of Eckhart explicitly points beyond a standard dichotomy between the rational and the mystical, in an effort to develop a comportment of thinking than can respond to the demand of modern technological predicament.