Being-toward-death is
not an orientation that brings
Dasein closer to its end, in terms of clinical death, but is rather
a way of being.
[4] Being-toward-death refers to a process of growing through the world where a certain foresight guides the
Dasein towards gaining an authentic perspective. It is provided by
dread or death. In the analysis of time, it is revealed as a threefold condition of
Being. Time, the present, and the notion of the "eternal", are modes of temporality. Temporality is the way we see time. For Heidegger, it is very different from the mistaken view of time as being a linear series of past, present and future. Instead he sees it as being an
ecstasy, an outside-of-itself, of futural projections (possibilities) and one's place in history as a part of one's generation. Possibilities, then, are integral to our understanding of time; our projects, or thrown projection in-the-world, are what absorb and direct us. Futurity, as a direction toward the future that always contains the past—the has-been—is a primary mode of
Dasein's temporality.
Death is that possibility which is the absolute impossibility of
Dasein. As such, it cannot be compared to any other kind of ending or "running out" of something. For example, one's death is not an
empirical event. For Heidegger, death is
Dasein's ownmost (it is what makes
Dasein individual), it is non-relational (nobody can take one's death away from one, or die in one's place, and we can not understand our own death through the death of other
Dasein), and it is not to be outstripped. The "not-yet" of life is always already a part of
Dasein: "as soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die." The threefold condition of death is thus simultaneously one's
"ownmost potentiality-for-being, non-relational, and not to be out-stripped". Death is determinate in its inevitability, but an authentic Being-toward-death understands the indeterminate nature of one's own inevitable death — one never knows when or how it is going to come. However, this indeterminacy does not put death in some distant, futural "not-yet"; authentic Being-toward-death understands one's individual death as always already a part of one.
[5]
With average, everyday (normal) discussion of death, all this is concealed. The "they-self" talks about it in a fugitive manner, passes it off as something that occurs at some time but is not yet "present-at-hand" as an
actuality, and hides its character as one's ownmost possibility, presenting it as belonging to no one in particular. It becomes devalued — redefined as a neutral and mundane aspect of existence that merits no authentic consideration. "One dies" is interpreted as a
fact, and comes to mean "nobody dies".
[6]
On the other hand,
authenticity takes
Dasein out of the "They," in part by revealing its place as a part of the They. Heidegger states that
Authentic being-toward-death calls
Dasein's individual self out of its "they-self", and frees it to re-evaluate life from the standpoint of finitude. In so doing,
Dasein opens itself up for "
angst," translated alternately as "dread" or as "anxiety." Angst, as opposed to fear, does not have any distinct object for its dread; it is rather anxious in the face of Being-in-the-world in general — that is, it is anxious in the face of
Dasein's own self. Angst is a shocking individuation of
Dasein, when it realizes that it is not at home in the world, or when it comes face to face with its own "
uncanny" (German
Unheimlich "not homelike"). In
Dasein's individuation, it is open to hearing the "call of conscience" (German
Gewissensruf), which comes from
Dasein's own Self when it wants to be its Self. This Self is then open to truth, understood as unconcealment (Greek
aletheia). In this moment of vision,
Dasein understands what is hidden as well as hiddenness itself, indicating Heidegger's regular uniting of opposites; in this case, truth and untruth.
[7]
death and dying:
'Death' is Tod, 'to die' is sterben. Sterben is distinct from abieben, (das) Ableben, '(to) demise', biological death or dying which 'as an event that occurs is "only" empirically certain' (BT, 257). Scheler, who anticipated several Heideggerian ideas (such as our tendency, intensified by modern capitalism, to conceal deadi), argued that one's non-empirical certainty of one's own deadi stems from the observation that the range of possibilities open to one narrows as one's life advances and seems to converge on the limit of a single possibility, if not to vanish altogether (Scheler (1979), 18ff.). The progressive contraction of my range of options is inferred (it might be objected) from empirical observation, and it depends on my mortality. If eternal youth were granted to me, I could become a general or an actor - options which are now denied to me by die ageing and mortality known to me in other ways. Heidegger presents no such arguments for the non-empirical certainty of death. He assumes that an endless life would be unmanageable and care-less, with no way of deciding what to do or when to do it. He focuses almost exclusively on one's own deadi; even time ends with one's own death (BT, 33Of.), a claim hard to reconcile with our essential being-with others - who are unlikely 44 DEATH AND DYING all to die at the same time as oneself. It is, he says, certain diat I shall die. It is uncertain when I shall die. I may die at any moment. I cannot do anytiiing after my deadi. No-one else can die for me. I shall die alone. This is not to deny the soldierly comradeship induced by imminent deadi: 'The very death, which each individual man must die for himself, which reduces each individual to his own uttermost individuality, this very deadi and readiness for the sacrifice it demands creates first of all die preliminary communal space from which comradeship springs'. Comradeship springs from Angst, from 'the metaphysical nearness to the unconditioned granted only to the highest self-reliance and readiness' (XXXIX, 73). This is a case of authentic 'being towards death', Sein zum Tode, an expression formed by analogy witii Wille zum Tode, 'will to death', but covering any attitude one might have to one's own death, inauthentic (e.g. denying, forgetting, fearing, dwelling on it, suicide, etc.) as well as authentic.
'But death is, as pertaining to Dasein, only in an existentiell being towards death' (BT, 234). Heidegger calls this 'dying': 'Let Sterben be die term for the mode of being [Seinsweise] in which Dasein is towards its deadi [...] Dasein does not first die, or does not really die at all, with and in die experience of factical demise' (BT, 247). What matters is not physical demise, but one's attitude to one's death during life. The 'authentic' attitude is 'running ahead [Vorlaufen]': this 'reveals to Dasein its lostness in the They-self [Man-selbst] and confronts it with the possibility - not primarily supported by concernful solicitude - of being itself, but itself in impassioned freedom towards death [Freiheit zum Tode], released from the illusions of the They, factical, certain of itself and anxious [sich ängstenden]' (BT, 266). Freiheit zum Tode is freedom to die one's own death, uninfluenced by what others say, do or Üiink. The idea appears in Rilke: 'O Lord, give to each his own death, / The dying that comes from the life, / In which he had love, sense and want/ For we are just the husk and the leaf./ The great death that each has in himself, / That is die fruit, around which all revolves' (quoted by Rose, 56). Vorlaufen frees one not only for death, but also for possibilities before death, my own possibilities, not everyday trivia or die menu offered to me by the They (BT, 264). It makes one a complete, self-contained person.
Heidegger's preoccupation with death does not survive the BT period (cf. XX, 403ff; XXI, 361f. and K, 93/63f. on the interpretation of a deadiitesk). He corrects misinterpretations of BT's account of death and tries to show its continuing relevance. BT did not advocate obsession with d eath (XXIX, 425ff.). It treats deadi not 'anthropologically' or in terms °f a 'world-view', but 'fundamental-ontologically'. It does not affirm nihilism or die senselessness of being. Running ahead to deadi opens us up to being: 'death is the highest and uttermost testimony of beyng' (LXV, 284). BT tried 'to draw death into Dasein, in order to master Dasein in its fathomless range and so to fully measure die ground of the possibility of the truth of beyng'. But 'not everyone need perform Ulis beyng towards death and assume the Self of Dasein in this authenticity; this performance is necessary only in connection with the task of laying die ground for die question about beyng, a task which is of course not confined to philosophy. The performance of being towards death is a duty only for the thinkers of the other beginning, but every essential man among the future creators can know of it' (LXV, 285). In BT running ahead to deaüi primarily secures die integrity and self-constancy of individual Dasein, pertaining only indirecdy to the question about being. Later, it reveals being, but only philosophers and others involved in the preparation of a 'new beginning' need bother about it. Botii in BT and later, it is clear that philosophers need the detachment from 'everydayness' and the They induced by Vorlaufen. It is less clear how it reveals being. Heidegger suggests a 'correspondence' between death and being: 'To the extraordinariness of beyng tiiere corresponds, in the realm in which its truth is grounded, i.e. in Da-sein, the uniqueness of death. [.. .] Only man "has" the distinction of standing before death, since man is insistent [inständig] in beyng' (LXV, 230). Many things besides death are, however, peculiar to man. But 'being towards deaüi [. ..] harbours two basic features of die Assuring [of beyng into earth, world, etc.] and is its mosdy unrecognized reflection in the There': 1. negation, 'the Not [Nicht] essentially belongs to being as such'; 2. the 'unfathomable fullbodied "necessity"' of death mirrors the necessity of the Assuring of being (LXV, 282; cf. 324). Death has lost its close link widi time: Heidegger is now more interested in long historical time-spans tiian in die time of the individual (cf. LXV, 324f.). In a later seminar he and Fink gave thought to die significance of death in Heraclitus (XV, 92f./64f, etc.).
A Heidegger Dictionary, by Michael Inwood, Blackwell, 1999, pp. 44-46
