1.1 Introduction: The State of the Debate

This introductory chapter seeks to answer the question of what Heidegger means by “death” (Tod) in Being and Time – and begin to justify that answer.Footnote ² I take up this weighty topic with some trepidation (if not quite fear and trembling) in part because to say that the meaning of “death” in Being and Time is controversial is to strain the limits of understatement. In addition to the emotionally freighted nature of the topic itself (to which we will return), I think four main factors contribute to and perpetuate this controversy: (1) Heidegger’s confusing terminology; (2) the centrality of the issue to the text as a whole; (3) the demanding nature of what is required to adjudicate the matter; and (4) the radically polarized scholarly literature on the subject. One of my main goals here is to suggest a way to move beyond the controversy that currently divides the field, so let me begin by saying a bit about its four main contributing factors.

The first and most obvious cause of the controversy is that those passages in Being and Time where Heidegger describes phenomenologically what he means (and does not mean) by “death” are initially quite obscure. Heidegger deliberately employs a non-commonsensical terminology, for example, when he formally defines “the full existential-ontological concept of death” in the following important but initially ambiguous terms: “death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost, non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, and non-surpassable possibility” (BT 303/SZ 258–9), and again, more notoriously, when he characterizes death “as the possibility of the impossibility of existence in general” (BT 307/SZ 262 [translations frequently emended]). Conversely, and even more confusingly (at least for unwary readers), he also misleadingly employs an only apparently commonsensical terminology, using ordinary words such as “death,” “demise,” “perishing,” “possibility,” and “existence [that is, Dasein]” in ways that turn out to have decidedly non-commonsensical meanings. We will therefore need to spend a significant amount of time clarifying some of Heidegger’s crucial philosophical terms of art in what follows.

The second source of the controversy is that a great deal turns on Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of death. John Haugeland rightly observes that “death, as Heidegger means it, is not merely relevant but in fact the fulcrum of Heidegger’s entire ontology.”Footnote ³ The main reason death plays such an important part in the overarching ontological project of Being and Time, in a nutshell, is that the experience of the phenomenon Heidegger calls “death” discloses “futurity,” which (as we will see at the end of this chapter) is itself the first horizon we encounter of originary temporality, that most fundamental structure of intelligibility that makes possible any understanding of being at all (or so the early Heidegger of Being and Time believes).Footnote ⁴ Even more to the point for us here, death is also crucial to the text’s existential ambitions because readers must understand death in order to understand authenticity (as well as such other interconnected notions as anxiety, conscience, guilt, and the solus ipse or “self alone”).Footnote ⁵ This doubly pivotal role played by Heidegger’s phenomenology of death in Being and Time means that critical readers of the text cannot indefinitely postpone the difficult task of coming to terms with Heidegger’s understanding of the phenomenon.

That brings us directly to the third reason for the controversy surrounding the meaning of death in Being and Time, which is that the phenomenological method we are supposed to use to adjudicate the matter is particularly difficult to employ in this crucial case. The problem, put simply, is that many readers seem to have trouble experiencing the phenomenon that Heidegger describes as “death” for themselves. Without such first-personal experience, however, readers can neither contest nor confirm Being and Time’s existential phenomenology of death. It is worth emphasizing that this is a general problem for critical readers of phenomenological works: Absent our own experience of the phenomenon at issue, we can neither attest to that phenomenon and its purported significance (and so confirm or develop it for ourselves) nor testify against it (and so seek to contest, refine, or redescribe it). This general phenomenological problem is greatly exacerbated in the case of death, however, because unlike phenomenological descriptions of more mundane phenomena (such as using a hammer, staring at a Gestalt figure or optical illusion, or even such unsettling experiences as being stared at by a stranger or feeling the pangs of a guilty conscience), the phenomenon by means of which we first encounter what Heidegger means by “death” – namely, the affective attunement of “‘real’ or ‘authentic’ anxiety” (“eigentliche” Angst), in which, as we will see, we experience ourselves as radically “not-at-home” in the world of our everyday projects – is both quite “rare” (BT 234/SZ 190) and extremely difficult to endure.Footnote ⁶

The requirement that we must personally undergo an anguished experience of the utter desolation of the self in order to be able to testify for or against the adequacy of Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of death thus seems excessively demanding. Indeed, Heidegger recognizes this and acknowledges that this demand “remains, from the existentiell point of view [that is, from the ordinary perspective of our individual lives and everyday concerns], a fantastically unreasonable demand [eine phantastische Zumutung]” (BT 311/SZ 266).Footnote ⁷ Nonetheless, without experiencing the phenomenon at issue for ourselves, we can at best approach Heidegger’s phenomenological descriptions of death from the outside, and so find them, for example, suggestive, impressive, or deep-sounding, or else fanciful, idiosyncratic, or even absurd – all surface-level reactions with which no true philosopher (as a literal “lover of wisdom,” that is, of practical, life-guiding knowledge) and certainly no existential phenomenologist should ever rest content.Footnote ⁸

I find it revealing to contrast those kinds of superficial evaluations – typical of but not limited to neophyte readings of Being and Time – with the critical interpretations advanced in the late 1940s by Heidegger’s first “existentialist” readers, especially Levinas but also, to a lesser degree, Sartre. As we will see (in Chapters 6 and 7), both Levinas and Sartre sought to contest and revise Heidegger’s phenomenology of death by drawing on their own experiences of the phenomenon at issue (or, in Sartre’s case, his experience of an alternative but arguably analogous phenomenon, namely, “the look of the other [person],” which is similarly supposed to result in “the death of my [lived] possibilities”).Footnote ⁹ Perhaps the commendable quest for scholarly objectivity, which has yielded important advances in clarity and argumentative precision over the last century, has also rendered us much more reluctant to inject ourselves into the discussion by testing Heidegger’s descriptions for ourselves (where that also means testing them on ourselves, that is, comparing them to our own first-personal encounters with the phenomenon at issue). Or perhaps Heidegger’s own appalling misadventure with Nazism has led interpreters to distance themselves from the fact that, as he acknowledged in Being and Time, “a definite ontic interpretation of authentic existence, a factical ideal of Dasein, underlies our ontological interpretation” (BT 358/SZ 310).Footnote ¹⁰

Yet, should not Heidegger’s admission that his phenomenological analyses derive ultimately from his own idealized personal experiences have precisely the opposite effect? That is, should not Heidegger’s demonstration of his own susceptibility to the grossest errors of judgment instead encourage us to subject his phenomenological analyses to the most careful scrutiny for ourselves, as his early existentialist readers undoubtedly sought to do, in part for this very reason?Footnote ¹¹ Because it is only by relying on such personal experience that one can develop either an internal confirmation or an immanent critique of Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, the post-existentialist interpretations of Heidegger seem to me to have made a significant step backward in this critical regard (with a few important exceptions that we will note along the way), so it will thus be worthwhile to examine those earlier interpretations in some detail.

Finally, the fourth reason for the persistent controversy about the meaning of “death” in Being and Time is that, owing to the combined effect of the aforementioned factors, the interpretive field is now radically polarized, with the secondary literature starkly divided into two diametrically opposed and seemingly incommensurable camps. In the first (and much larger) camp, most traditional scholars, critics, and readers of Being and Time adopt the straightforward view that, by “death,” Heidegger must mean the same sort of things that we normally mean when we talk about “death,” such as demise (Edwards), decease (Hoffman), or mortality (Mulhall). In the second (and significantly smaller) camp, a number of cutting-edge Heidegger scholars think that what Being and Time means by “death” has almost nothing to do with the ordinarily sense of the word (or that the two senses of “death” share a merely “metaphorical” connection, as Haugeland believes). Instead, Heidegger means something like the global collapse of significance typified by a depressive episode (Blattner), the collapse of an understanding of being exemplified by a scientific paradigm shift (Haugeland), or the end of an historical world, which allows a new historical epoch to take shape (White).Footnote ¹²

Despite the hermeneutic liberties taken by Haugeland and White (and consequent problems with their readings), I shall argue that the second camp is much closer to Heidegger’s understanding of death as an existential phenomenon that stands revealed when the practical intelligibility of our everyday worlds collapses. Still, the interpretations of death in terms of existential world-collapse advanced by this second camp leave it largely baffling why Heidegger should call the phenomenon he is interested in “death.” Indeed, his doing so only seems to muddy the waters of Being and Time, thereby encouraging the much more commonsensical misreadings of death as mortal demise that are typical of the first camp. To such a charge of misreading, moreover, those in the first camp will respond forcefully that (as Hoffman once objected to me): “One can stretch the meanings of words, but only so far: Up cannot mean down; black cannot mean white, and death cannot mean something that you can live through!”

Though the endeavor might initially seem rather unlikely, in what follows I would like to suggest a way beyond the current deadlock over the meaning of “death” in Being and Time. What I shall show is that if we understand the phenomenological method Being and Time employs, then we can see exactly how Heidegger is able to move from our relation to the event we ordinarily call death (which Being and Time calls “demise”) to that ontological phenomenon, revealed in world-collapse, which he calls “death.” To follow this path, we need to avoid conflating Heidegger’s existential conception of death with that experience of the end of our lives that he calls “demise,” as the first camp tends to do, but we also cannot treat demise and death as radically heterogeneous phenomena, as those in the second camp tend to do. Instead, we need to understand how “death” is both distinguished from and related to “demise” if we want to transcend these long-standing hermeneutic controversies and begin to grasp the full existential-ontological significance of “death” in Being and Time. That will be the main goal of this introductory chapter.

1.2 What It Means for Us to Be: Dasein (Preliminary Excursus)

Repeatedly in Being and Time, “‘death’ is defined as the end of Dasein” (BT 292, my emphasis/SZ 247). In other words, the phenomenon Heidegger calls death refers to the particular type of “end” that is distinctive to “Dasein” as the living embodiment of an intelligible world. It will thus help to briefly remind ourselves what Heidegger means by “Dasein” (so that we will then be able to understand what it means for our own Dasein to end). It has become standard practice to leave Heidegger’s German term untranslated in English, but “Dasein” is his famous term of art for our distinctive kind of “existence” (existence is the ordinary meaning of the German word Dasein), and he deliberately uses the term to characterize the nature of our existence (in a minimally question-begging way) as an intelligible world disclosing “being-here” (or “Da-sein”). As Dreyfus nicely explains, Being and Time’s “primary concern is to raise the [ontological] question of being” (that is, “to make sense of our ability to make sense of things”), and Heidegger focuses on our “being-here” as “Dasein” in order to broach “ontological questions concerning the sort of beings we [human beings] are and how our being is bound up with the intelligibility of the world.”Footnote ¹³

As Heidegger’s thought develops, he will increasingly hyphenate “Da-sein” to emphasize the significance of the two semantic elements from which the word is composed, “here-” (Da-) and “being” (Sein); as he later liked to put it, we are both the here of being and the being of the here.Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, Dasein names both (1) the existential place where being takes place (the site where intelligibility becomes an issue for itself, or metaphorically put, where being looks at itself in the mirror and tries to understand itself) and also (2) the specific way this existential place becomes intelligible to itself (for example, by subconsciously employing a set of universal existential structures, or “existentials,” the detailed articulation of which forms the main subject matter of the “existential analytic” in Being and Time’s first division, which thereby analyzes the structure of Dasein’s “being-in-the-world,” to which we will return).Footnote ¹⁵

“Dasein” is thus Heidegger’s philosophical shorthand for a detailed story in which the intelligibility of the “here” that we are (as a first-personal disclosure of an intelligible world) both helps constitute and is partly constituted by our preexisting sense of what it means to be anything at all (a prior “understanding of being” that ordinarily passes unnoticed, like the prescription on the lenses through which we see).Footnote ¹⁶ In Being and Time, the early Heidegger shows that every Dasein already embodies an answer to the question of the meaning of its own being. This largely implicit existential answer to the question of the meaning of my own being may or may not be recognized as such, but it is nevertheless embodied concretely in the ways I go about being a teacher, father, husband, friend, brother, citizen, nature-lover, bike-rider, and so on. This embodied stand each of us takes on what it means to be can of course be more or less coherent, honest, thoughtful, unique, and so on, but for the early Heidegger the crucial issue here is just whether or not we own up to being this individual stand on what it means to be, taking ownership of (and so responsibility for) who we are in transformative moments of what Being and Time calls “ownedness or authenticity [Eigentlichkeit].”

Being and Time’s “existential analytic” endeavors primarily to explicate a tripartite group of the universal “existential structures” (“existentials” or “existentialia” for short) that underlie and condition all our different, particular individual (or “existentiell”) ways of embodying living answers to this existential question of what it means for us to be.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite the enduring importance of Being and Time’s analyses of Dasein’s hidden existential structure, Heidegger originally intended their discovery and articulation to serve primarily as a stepping-stone to his grander ontological ambition.Footnote ¹⁸ Ultimately, Being and Time’s guiding hope is that uncovering the three main existential structures that condition all our specific ways of existing (and then tracing these existentials back to the even deeper “temporal horizons” that underlie and condition the existentials in turn) would “prepare” him to answer the most fundamental ontological question of “the meaning of being in general,” that is, the metaphysical question of what it means to be anything at all.

As we will see in Chapter 2, Heidegger is quite clear in Being and Time that his ultimate goal is to uncover a “fundamental ontology” that finally answers “the question of the meaning being in general.” It was only subsequently that the hermeneutic waters were muddied by the facts that (1) Heidegger never delivered that fundamental ontology he sought in Being and Time (1927), and (2) by the end of the dramatic “metaphysical decade” that followed he comes to reject Being and Time’s guiding project of fundamental ontology as unknowingly committed to an impossible metaphysical ambition – indeed, to that same metaphysical ambition which has shaped the core tradition of Western philosophy since its first beginnings.Footnote ¹⁹ (As Heidegger himself later recognizes: “The Heidegger of Being and Time … is still stuck in metaphysics, attempts ‘ontology’ and does not yet clearly see that wherein he moves” [GA102 94].) Indeed, Heidegger’s notorious “turn” revolves around his own transformative realization that such metaphysical ambitions need to be transcended and moved beyond (rather than finally vindicated, as Being and Time sought to do), thereby giving rise to the “post-metaphysical” (and literally postmodern) project that becomes the guiding mission of Heidegger’s “later” (c. post-1937) thought (as I have shown in detail elsewhere).Footnote ²⁰

Without downplaying such dramatic transformations in Heidegger’s philosophical development (as too many orthodox Heideggerians continue to do, for reasons we will explore in Chapter 5), we can say that for Heidegger, both early and late, “Dasein” designates our distinctive, ontological “existence” as beings who implicitly understand what it means to be (both the meaning of our own being and the meaning of anything that in anyway “is”). Such an ontological understanding always plays a fundamental role in constituting the intelligible worlds that we Dasein are as we go about charting our courses through time and history.Footnote ²¹ For both early and later Heidegger, then, to be a Dasein means to be a particular kind of intelligible world that makes sense of itself, its world, and others by building on its own tacit answers to ontological questions about what it means to be.Footnote ²²

Beneath the other changes in Heidegger’s thought, our being such a first-personal disclosure of an ontological world – in which we exist or “stand-out” (from the Latin ek-sistere) into “intelligibility” (BT 193/SZ 151) by relating ourselves to the “being” of all the things we encounter (that is, to their ontologically disclosive meaning, sense, or truth) – is what characterizes our distinctive being-here as “Dasein.” It should thus not be too surprising that this existential world-disclosure is precisely what “demise” and “death” both crucially interrupt and bring to an end – as we shall now go on to see by untangling and explaining he specific technical terms Heidegger uses to articulate and develop what he means by “death.”

1.3 Rethinking Death: Distinguishing Perishing, Demising, and Dying

Section 49 of Being and Time is titled “How the Existential Analysis of Death is Distinguished from other Possible Interpretations of that Phenomenon” (BT 290, my emphasis/SZ 246). Here Heidegger first introduces his “existential analysis of death” by acknowledging the need to explicitly disambiguate his own “ontological interpretation of death” from other possible interpretations of the phenomenon. Being and Time’s turn toward death starts with the obvious observations that death is something that can only happen to the living (“death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life” [ibid.]) and that, of course, Dasein is a living being too, although for Heidegger being alive cannot define Dasein, not only because lots of entities other than Dasein are alive (including the entire plant and animal kingdoms) but also because it is Dasein that defines what “being alive” means.Footnote ²³

Moving very quickly,Footnote ²⁴ Heidegger points out that all biological accounts of death necessarily presuppose some ontological understanding of what death is, simply in order for biologists to have some idea of what to focus on in their empirical investigations of the biological processes involved in “death.”Footnote ²⁵ But biologists tend to understand death merely as the cessation of life, and do not (at least not as biologists) try to explain what death itself is as a positive phenomenon, let alone begin to explain the broader meaning death holds for us Dasein, the very beings who develop such ontological conceptions of what “life” and “death” are as we go about seeking to make sense of the intelligible worlds that we are.Footnote ²⁶ Dasein must already exist (or “stand-out” into an intelligible world) in order to be able to devise or employ any concepts of life or death, and even our most culturally pervasive ways of making sense of death are much broader (and suggestively richer, as we will see) than the strictly functional accounts provided by biology. Indeed, Heidegger boldly asserts, we need to understand what death most fundamentally is for us Dasein so that future academic researchers into death’s myriad meanings can ground their broad-spectrum investigations in this clear and unambiguous ontological interpretation of death.

This missing ontological conception of death will be “formal and empty” compared to the specialized research it will ground in such subordinate academic fields as the biology, history, ethnography, psychology, and theodicy of death (subordinate fields because they will take over their guiding understanding of what death is from Heidegger’s ontological conception, which their broad-spectrum investigations will expand and explore).Footnote ²⁷ But Heidegger also warns readers that the comparative emptiness and formality of his phenomenological interpretation of what death is for Dasein “must not blind us to the rich and complicated structure of the phenomenon” (BT 292/SZ 248).Footnote ²⁸ Heidegger never comes back to address any specific questions concerning how his “superordinate” existential analysis of the being of death will ground and unify all subsequent academic research into death, but he clearly does believe that Being and Time succeeds in “defining” just such a “full existential-ontological conception of death” (BT 303/SZ 258), as we will see in detail in this chapter.Footnote ²⁹ But in order to articulate this existential interpretation of what death is (which can then ontologically ground the broader academic study of death), Heidegger points out, we first need to understand Dasein’s “basic state or fundamental condition [Grundverfassung],” so that we can understand how death (as what Karl Jaspers calls an extreme “limit situation”) disrupts, modifies, and so reveals this fundamental condition of our existential “being-here” (BT 291/SZ 247).Footnote ³⁰ To understand what death is as the end of our being, in other words, we first have to understand the nature of that being (namely, our distinctive type of existence as “Dasein” or a being-in-the-world).

The preliminary goal of Heidegger’s “existential analysis of death,” in sum, is to understand what death is (that is, to develop an “ontological interpretation” of death) by examining phenomenologically how death most fundamentally shows up and becomes intelligible for us Dasein (as the end of our distinctive being-in-the-world). Such an ontology of death should then be able to serve as the foundation for a much broader academic study of death in the future. (Being and Time contains only a few hints on that last score, but the enduring importance of the project to Heidegger is suggested by the fact that when he sketches his vision for an ontologically unified university in the mid-1930s, it includes a new academic field dedicated entirely to the study of death.)Footnote ³¹ Other than being so highly condensed, Heidegger’s ambitious preliminaries should not surprise careful readers of Being and Time, because they are perfectly in keeping with the text’s grand ambitions for the future of the phenomenological movement, the very movement the early Heidegger still hoped to inherit and helm.Footnote ³²

With these ambitious preliminaries quickly sketched and unceremoniously set aside, Being and Time’s very next sentence launches into a dense but extremely important passage on death (which I shall refer to subsequently as “D1”), in which Heidegger distinguishes between three terms we might otherwise tend to use interchangeably, namely, “perishing” (Verenden), “demising” (Ableben), and “dying” (Sterben):

My bracketed insertions begin to explain Heidegger’s deliberately chosen but idiosyncratic (and so initially confusing) philosophical terminology. But we will need to slow down and carefully unpack the phenomenological concepts at work in this dense but important passage in order to understand what exactly Being and Time says about the relations between perishing, death, and demise.

Over the last two decades of teaching and writing about this issue, I have found that the primary stumbling block to understanding Heidegger’s phenomenology of “death” in Being and Time comes from the fact that the phenomenon he is referring to (as the “way of being” in which Dasein “is toward” its own death) is not what we ordinarily mean by death.Footnote ³⁶ For Heidegger, “death” means neither the “physiological” ending of our biological lives, which he calls “perishing,” nor even our experience of that biological ending of our lives as a terminal collapse of our intelligible worlds, an experience of our lives ending which he calls “demise.” Just to make clear that he is indeed drawing this initially strange distinction between existential death and mortal demise, Heidegger almost immediately adds [and we will call this sentence “D2”]: “Dasein does not only, first, or really die [erst stirbt], nor even genuinely or authentically die [eigentlich stirbt], in and with an experience of its factical demise [Ableben]” [BT 291/SZ 247].Footnote ³⁷ Demise is Heidegger’s term for our experience of that terminal collapse of our intelligible world which (as far as we know and can tell) accompanies our physiological perishing, the final cessation of our biological functions.Footnote ³⁸ We reach the end of our lives when the organic systems that kept us alive “perish” and – if we are awake, aware that our life is coming to an end, and the event is not too sudden – we experience our intelligible worlds terminally collapsing in “demise.”

The basic premise underlying Heidegger’s strict terminological distinction between perishing and demise, then, is that we Dasein do not directly or immediately experience the failure of the physiological systems that had been keeping us alive. Instead, we experience the collapse of our sheer physiological functioning only insofar as it is “codetermined by” (mitbestimmt durch, that is, “contributes to” or gets taken up into and experienced in terms of) the intelligible worlds that we Dasein are. So, for example, we would not directly experience the capillaries in our lungs failing to adequately oxygenate our blood; what we might experience, instead, are such phenomena as “fatigue,” “light-headedness,” “shortness of breath,” or – less clinically and more aptly in terms of Dasein’s existential world – a sudden inability to breathe or sit up in bed, which we might rightly take as heralding the end of our life. In Heidegger’s terms, then, we Dasein never directly experience our own biological perishing at all; instead, we experience such perishing only indirectly (that is, as mediated through the intelligible worlds that we are) as our demise, that is, as an apparently final collapse of the intelligible worlds we are.Footnote ³⁹ Put simply, Dasein experiences its perishing only indirectly – as its demise.Footnote ⁴⁰ So much for Heidegger’s distinction between perishing and demise.

How, then, does Heidegger distinguish his “genuine or authentic” conception of “dying” (Sterben) both from “perishing” (Verenden) and from “demising” (Ableben)? First, he distinguishes dying from perishing in the same way he distinguished demising from perishing. We Dasein can demise and die (because, as we will see, terminal world-collapse and world-collapse are both phenomena we Dasein can encounter, at least to some extent, in the intelligible worlds that we are), while our perishing is not something we can experience directly, in its own sheerly physiological terms (for the reasons just explained). Hence Heidegger’s stark provocation (in D1 above): “Dasein never perishes.” Pace Derrida, “Dasein never perishes” does not mean that “I do not end, I never end” (regardless of whether this alleged inability to experience our own end is recited as a calming mantra, with Epicurus, or as a heartbroken lament, with Kierkegaard and Blanchot). Here, in fact, Derrida misses a crucial point: Even though Heidegger thinks we Dasein cannot experience our lives having come to an end in demise (because Heidegger holds that there is nothing that it is like for me to be demised, for phenomenological reasons we will soon explore), Heidegger will argue that a living Dasein can experience its own intelligible world having come to an end. Indeed, we will see that this crucial experience of my existential world being ended and yet my somehow still being here (like a living witness to the end of the practical world that I was) is the very phenomenon Heidegger designates in D1 as “genuine or authentic dying,” Dasein’s way of first or genuinely “being toward” – that is, existentially “projecting into” and thereby undergoing and phenomenologically encountering – its own death.Footnote ⁴¹

So, “Dasein never perishes” does not mean that Dasein is endless (or that I can never experience my own intelligible world having come to an end) but, instead, that to describe the distinctive type of ending that is proper to Dasein as “perishing” is to make the category mistake of trying to conceive of the distinctive end of Dasein’s existence, the end of our standing out into an intelligible world, in terms drawn from the “worldless” occurrence of objects – which can occur “in ontic isolation” (as D1 put it), that is, without entering into the ontological intelligibility of Dasein’s existential world.Footnote ⁴² Put differently, the logic behind Heidegger’s distinction between perishing, on the one hand, and both death and demise, on the other, is that objective processes such as the sheer physiological functioning of our biology can occur in us without happening for us. When such objective processes both occur in us and happen for us, moreover, that phenomenological happening, as variously inflected by the light of Dasein’s intelligible world, will always be different in kind from their sheer ontic occurrence (the very objective functioning that biologists and other natural scientists seek to isolate and study).Footnote ⁴³

For pedagogical expediency, we could thus express Heidegger’s first crucial distinction here with a simple mnemonic formula: Pear trees perish, but Daseins demise and die. The physiological systems that maintain the life of a pear tree can run their course without anyone taking any notice (say, in the case of a wild pear tree that reaches the end of its life cycle without anyone ever noticing). But when the “physiological” systems that support Dasein’s life functions perish, Dasein, as Dasein, does not perish; it demises, if this Dasein is conscious, aware of what is happening, and the event is not too sudden. Indeed, in what Heidegger treats as the paradigmatic case in which we Dasein are awake, aware, and undeceived, the way we experience the final “perishing” of our physiological systems is precisely by “demising,” undergoing the terminal collapse of our intelligible worlds (as mentioned earlier). But if a person never experiences their own perishing – for example, if they are in a dreamless sleep when their physiological systems suddenly and unexpectedly stop functioning (and they never wake up) – then this Dasein will have ceased to be without ever experiencing the terminal collapse of its world in demise.

Ironically, our culture euphemistically calls that “passing away peacefully” and presents it as an ideal way to “shuffle off this mortal coil” (without risk of any indecorous last-minute drama to inconvenience the living or embarrass the reputation of the soon-to-be-dead). From the perspective of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, however, that kind of non-demise looks more like a thief in the night who steals not just our life but also our demise, along with our ability ever to notice that theft. The wide resonance of this “passing peacefully” euphemism in our culture thus inadvertently testifies to our pervasive fear of demise, subtly reinforcing the existentially cowardly message that it would be better never to experience anything of that final foreclosure of our worlds in demise.Footnote ⁴⁴ Heidegger’s suggestion is not that it would be better to go out the way we came in (“kicking and screaming,” as it were) but, rather, that our cultural idealization of “passing quietly in your sleep” conveniently excuses many people from ever taking up the existential struggle to face up to and reconcile ourselves with a difficult fact: Our inevitable perishing will ordinarily (in the aforementioned paradigm cases) lead to our experience of demising, a final “appointment in Samarra” we certainly cannot count on sleeping through or otherwise dodging entirely (myriad cultural fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding).Footnote ⁴⁵

In sum, then, our physiological perishing is experienced as our mortal demise in the ordinary or paradigmatic case, even though Dasein can also perish without demising (as in that euphemistic ideal of “passing peacefully” while asleep). This ordinary (but contingent) connection between perishing and demise gets mirrored in the relation between demise and death: Just as one can perish without demising, one can also demise without genuinely or authentically dying (as Heidegger directly states in D1). (Thus, neither perishing nor demise is required for what Heidegger calls “death,” as we will see.) In the paradigm case, however, perishing leads to demise (that is, the break-down of our physiological functioning leads to the experience of terminal world-collapse), and demise leads toward death (that is, the experience of terminal world-collapse leads toward the experience of my intelligible world being at an end). But to understand why I deliberately emphasize “toward” here, we need to understand why Heidegger (in D1) calls demise “the intermediate phenomena” between the physiological occurrence of perishing and the experience of Dasein’s being at its own end in the existential world-collapse of death.

Put simply, Heidegger’s provocative claim is that only existential death gives phenomenology the full experience that demise seems to lead inexorably toward and yet cannot itself deliver (at least not to phenomenology), namely, the experience of the intelligible world that we are having reached its own distinctive end. Indeed, that claim is precisely what explains Heidegger’s otherwise puzzling assertion (at the end of D1): “Demising, however, is something Dasein can do only so long as it dies.” Only existential death allows phenomenology to experience that end of our distinctive kind of being, an end which demise is oriented toward and yet seemingly cannot actually reach (owing to the Epicurean paradox we will address momentarily). Only what Heidegger calls “genuine or authentic death” – “the end of Dasein, that is to say, of [our own] being-in-the-world” (BT 292/SZ 247) – can ultimately show us what it genuinely means for our first-personal existence as a world-disclosive being-here to reach its own end, by undergoing (and subsequently being able to attest to phenomenologically) the experience of its existence as a practical “being-in-the-world” having ended.

One of Being and Time’s most provocative insights, in other words, is that death and demise come apart phenomenologically. We Dasein can live through our own intelligible worlds having come to an end (in the existential phenomenon Heidegger calls genuine or authentic death) without having to undergo the experience of terminal world-collapse (in mortal demise).Footnote ⁴⁶ That proves highly fortunate for existential phenomenology since, by all appearances, we cannot live through our own demise to experience that end.Footnote ⁴⁷ With this latter point, Heidegger incorporates his understanding of Epicurus’s famous paradox – that I never experience my own demise, since “When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not” – into his discussion of “demise.” As his German nicely suggests, “an ‘experience’ of [one’s own] demise [ein “Erleben” des Ablebens]” literally (and paradoxically) means “a ‘living-through’ of [one’s own] ceasing to live” (BT 295/SZ 251), an apparent absurdity.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Heidegger, “demise” designates this ultimately paradoxical “experience” of the end of one’s own life (that is, an “experience” of the approaching cessation or absence of all experience), a final event that we seem to be able to experience as it approaches but not once it has arrived, because once demise arrives our Dasein is no longer “here” to be anything. From the phenomenological perspective, put simply (albeit provocatively), our own Dasein cannot be demised. (Dasein and its own demise are ultimately incompatible, because we cannot both “be here” and be demised; to be demised is not to “be here” at all.)Footnote ⁴⁹

This paradox means, Heidegger repeatedly points out, that if death is understood only as demise (that is, as our relation to or experience of our impending mortality), then our being-here as Dasein can never comprehend itself as a whole. For it appears that, up until we demise, our intelligible worlds will always be constituted by worldly projects that stretch into an unknown futureFootnote ⁵⁰ (so that our sense of self will never be fully “transparent to itself [durchsichtig]” in a way that enables Dasein to see through itself completely –without being stretched out into some always partly unseen future – and so grasp itself in its entirety), but then, once we demise, we will no longer be here at all (that is, we will no longer be Dasein). Being and Time’s discussion of death begins (§§46–7) by setting up this very problem at great length. In fact, this is the problem that motivates Heidegger’s phenomenological distinction between death and demise in the first place: How can Dasein – an entity whose being (or intelligible world) is constitutively organized by life-projects that stretch into an unknown future – ever comprehend itself as a whole?Footnote ⁵¹ What most readers seem to miss, however, is that Heidegger is able to solve this problem only by introducing his existential-ontological conception of death – in distinction from our ordinary understanding of death as mortal demise.

The unfortunate fact that Heidegger does not clearly distinguish existential death from demise while setting up the problem is part of what misleads most readers into conflating existential death with mortal demise. It is probably a sign of the speed with which the text was written that Heidegger gets almost halfway through his introductory treatment of death before finally acknowledging that his “analysis cannot keep clinging to an idea of death which has been devised accidentally and at random” (BT 292–3/SZ 248), and so begins to develop existential death in its relation to and difference from mortal demise. Even then, however, the fact that death and demise share the same formal structure (as we will see in Section 1.4), coupled with the strangeness and subtlety of his twofold examination of existential death and mortal demise, makes it less likely that readers who already have conflated existential death with mortal demise will understand how he eventually disambiguates the two phenomena.Footnote ⁵² (For better and for worse, Heidegger is a subtle thinker and writer, and often leaves important philosophical lessons implicit and unstated in his texts for readers to draw out for themselves – lessons and insights that his most careful readers will likely discover, excavate, and debate for years – which is part of what continues to make him such an engaging thinker, numerous problems notwithstanding.)Footnote ⁵³ Although I do think he should have been much clearer here, I shall also explain the reasons why his phenomenological method leads him deliberately to couple death and demise together so closely, as the two phenomena are indeed related closely (though not inextricably, as we have already seen).

By definition, we living beings cannot experience all our experience having ended in our mortal demise (and so cannot do any phenomenology of our own being demised). But Heidegger remains convinced that there is an end proper to (or distinctive of) our Dasein – as a primordially practical “being-in-the-world” embodied in and organized by our life-projects – which we can experience, and, moreover, that this is an experience in which Dasein can grasp itself as a whole. As he will thus put it: “In such being-toward-its-end, Dasein exists in a way which is genuinely whole, as that entity which it can be when ‘thrown into death.’ Dasein does not have an end at which it is simply stops but instead [Dasein has an end in which it] exists finitely [existiert endlich]” (BT 378/SZ 329).Footnote ⁵⁴ Dasein “exists at an end” or experiences an “end-like existence” in the strange phenomenon of existential death – in which we continue to exist and yet find ourselves radically estranged from the practical projects and identities that ordinarily allow us to make sense of our ourselves (as a practically engaged “being-in-the-world”). Existential death’s experience of radically finite existing – that is, of existing as “a whole,” as “transparent” to ourselves, because no longer projecting into worldly projects that (as “something still outstanding” [BT 276/SZ 233]) would conceal our own existence from us – is what Heidegger means when he says that existential death “delimits and determines in each case the possible wholeness of Dasein” (BT 277/SZ 234).Footnote ⁵⁵

Heidegger’s solution to the Epicurean paradox, in other words, is that in the desolate experience he calls “death,” the self – temporarily cut off from the world of practical projects in terms of which it usually understands itself – finds itself radically alone with itself (a worldless solus ipse), and so can lucidly comprehend itself in its entirety for the first time, since there is no worldly, futural component of itself to elude its self-transparent grasp.Footnote ⁵⁶ When Dasein experiences itself as desperately unable to project into the worldly projects in terms of which it normally makes sense of itself, then “the future itself is closed” for Dasein (even though objectively “time goes on”). Bereft of all its worldly projects in existential death, Dasein can fully grasp itself in its own “finitude” for the first time – and thereby come to understand itself as a “primordial existential projecting” (BT 379/SZ 330), a sheer existing (from the Latin ek-sistere, a literal “standing-out” toward a world I cannot connect to practically or project into), a desolate condition I call projectless projecting (for terminological reasons I shall explain in Section 1.4).Footnote ⁵⁷

As that suggests, Heidegger’s conviction that there is a kind of end that is distinctive of Dasein – that we can experience our intelligible world as having ended and so exist in a way that is radically “finite” (endlich) – is what leads him to distinguish this “existential conception of death [die existenziale Begriff des Sterbens]” from demise (BT 295/SZ 251). Recall his clear (if initially puzzling) statement (in D2): “Dasein does not only, first, or really die [erst stirbt], nor even genuinely or authentically die [eigentlich stirbt], in and with an experience of its factical demise [Ableben]” (BT 291/SZ 247).Footnote ⁵⁸ The main point behind this provocative assertion that we can die without demising is that neither “death” nor “dying” (nor even “genuinely or authentically dying,” a repeated enduring of existential death, to which we will return) requires us to undergo the terminal world-collapse of demise. (This is fortunate for phenomenology, because if experiencing “death” in Heidegger’s sense required us to experience the permanent foreclosure of our intelligible worlds in demise, then we would have to write our phenomenologies of death from beyond the grave, by séance or Ouija board!)Footnote ⁵⁹

Heidegger’s distinctive contribution here – that we do not need to experience our mortal demise in order to “first or really die” existentially – is so contrary to our commonsensical notions of death that most traditional readers of Being and Time seem simply to repress and ignore it; for it suggests that what Heidegger calls “death” is in fact something we can live through. Indeed, despite the forceful protestations of Hoffman and the first camp (described earlier), Heidegger himself is quite clear that existential death does not require mortal demise, our ultimately paradoxical experience of the “event” of the end of our lives (BT 284/SZ 240). Instead, as Being and Time plainly states: “Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is” (BT 289/SZ 245).Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, undergoing the phenomenon of existential “death” discloses and designates a fundamental modality of existence that is ordinarily filled-in – and so covered over – by our everyday worldly experience (as we will see in detail in Section 1.4).

To help accustom his audience to this strange use of the word “death,” Heidegger immediately quotes a famous line from the Christian mystic, Jakob Böhme (1575–1624): “As soon as a human being comes to life [zum Leben kommt], he is at once old enough to die” (BT 289/SZ 245). Stambaugh translates this important quotation as follows: “As soon as a human being is born, he is old enough to die right away” (BTS 228), but that is a bit misleading because Heidegger is not using Böhme to make the morbid suggestion that newborns can die in a way that late-term fetuses cannot. Instead of being born biologically, Böhme’s “coming to life” means entering into the life of the spirit (or becoming aware of oneself as existing before God, that is, as this particular individual). Heidegger is thus suggesting that one is capable of experiencing the collapse of one’s intelligible world as soon as one has such a world to collapse, that is, as soon as one has come to embody an existential stand on oneself and thereby become a full-fledged Dasein (which is something a newborn infant has yet to do). As this reference to Böhme indicates, Heidegger’s conception of existential death is influenced by the idea of “dying with Christ” or “dying to the world” long familiar to Pauline Christianity (in which, in the archetypal myth of spiritual conversion, Saul must die to his defining identity as a zealous persecutor of Christians in order to be reborn as Paul, the sainted evangelist of Christian faith).Footnote ⁶¹ Kierkegaard elaborates and describes this same spiritual passage through despair philosophically in The Sickness Unto Death. The basic point, The Sickness Unto Death explains, is that “in the Christian understanding, death is itself a passing into life.”Footnote ⁶² To anyone familiar with Kierkegaard’s brilliant text (as Heidegger was), it is clear that Being and Time’s phenomenology of existential death seeks to secularize the mystical Christian idea that, in order for one to be born truly into the life of the spirit, one must first die to the material world – so that one can be reborn to this world in a way that will unify the spiritual and material aspects of the self.Footnote ⁶³

Indeed, the influence of Kierkegaard on Heidegger’s thinking about death is profound and important. According to the view Kierkegaard (or, more precisely, his spiritually elevated pseudonym, “Anti-Climacus”) presents in The Sickness Unto Death, when we acknowledge and confront our own despair, we are led to abandon our familiar, everyday self, “the fully clothed self of immediacy” that is constituted by all our worldly “projects.” This seemingly disastrous loss of our “actual self” turns out to be our salvation, however, because when despair alienates us from the world of our ordinary projects, we discover that what survives this expulsion from the world is our true or “infinite” self. This infinite self, the “naked and abstract” self at our volitional core, is then able explicitly to repossess its “actual self,” the world of its immediate projects, from the perspective it discovers in that very expulsion from the world.Footnote ⁶⁴

There are significant differences between Kierkegaard’s profoundly religious and Heidegger’s rigorously phenomenological and thus thoroughly secularized versions of conversion. Grasped in their broad outlines, however, there can be no mistaking the momentous influence on Being and Time of Kierkegaard’s view that confronting the despair intrinsic to the structure of the self can allow us to pass through a kind of salvific death and rebirth to the public world. It is thus not surprising that Heidegger’s notoriously ambivalent acknowledgments of Kierkegaard in Being and Time should be so colored by (what Bloom called) “the anxiety of influence” (which leads us to overemphasize our differences from those who shape us most deeply) because Kierkegaard’s religious view provides the obvious philosophical prototype for Heidegger’s secularized conversion narrative. Kierkegaard paved the way for Heidegger’s phenomenological account of the how confronting our inescapable anxiety can allow us to turn away from the world, break its grip on us (in death), so that we can turn back to the world (in resoluteness), and thereby gain (or regain) our grip on the world – which is precisely Heidegger’s vision of how Dasein transitions from inauthenticity to authenticity (however temporarily), as we will see in Section 1.4.Footnote ⁶⁵

In other words, Kierkegaard’s view that it is necessary to confront one’s own despair and so pass through such spiritual death in order to “become oneself” clearly had a formative impact on what I shall characterize (in Chapter 4) as Heidegger’s perfectionist account of “how we become what we are.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The crucial point for us here is that recognizing Kierkegaard’s subterranean but unmistakable influence on Heidegger’s thinking helps us to see that Heidegger too conceives of death as something we can live through.Footnote ⁶⁷ So, with Böhme and Kierkegaard having primed the pump, let us delve more deeply into our main question: What exactly does Heidegger mean to designate by the phenomenon of “death” in Being and Time? In what sense can Dasein live through such death, and what role does doing so play in Being and Time? Why, specifically, does Heidegger say not only that “Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is” but, also (repeatedly, and much more famously), that: “Death is the possibility of the ultimate [in the sense of quintessential] impossibility of Dasein [schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit]” (BT 294/SZ 250) – that is, more clearly translated, “the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility par excellence”?

1.4 Death as the Possibility of Dasein’s Impossibility Par Excellence

We still need to know what exactly Heidegger means by possibility (and hence impossibility), so that we can understand what phenomenon he is designating when he calls death “the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility par excellence” (BT 294/SZ 250). How are we to understand the phenomenon – of Dasein’s being at its own distinctive end (let us recall) – that Being and Time repeatedly characterizes as the possibility of Dasein’s quintessential or defining impossibility? As Being and Time famously maintains, “Higher than actuality stands possibility” (BT 63/SZ 38). The sense of “possibility” celebrated here is not “logical possibility,” mere alternatives arrayed in a conceptual space, but rather existential possibility, “being-possible” (Möglichsein), which is for Heidegger “the most primordial and ultimately positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically” (BT 183/SZ 143–4).Footnote ⁶⁸ As the always specific and practical “way in which Dasein is in every case … what it can be” (ibid.), our existential possibilities are what we forge ahead into: the roles, identities, and commitments that shape and circumscribe our comportmental navigation of our lived environments. Dasein exists – that is, “stands out” (ek-sistere) into intelligibility in a meaningful way – through such a charting of “live options,” choices that matter and are made salient to us by these fundamental life-projects, this sense of self embodied and reflected in our practical worlds.

It is important to recognize that Heidegger subtly distinguishes between our “being-possible” (Möglichsein) and our “ability-to-be” (Seinkönnen) in order to mark a crucial difference between these life-projects, on the one hand, and our projecting ourselves into those life-projects, on the other. Dasein cannot be something the way a physical object like a chair can be a chair (in a continuous substantive identity with itself); instead, Dasein “is what it becomes” (BT 186/SZ 145). That is, we can only “be” something – a teacher, father, husband, brother, friend, environmentalist, bicyclist, citizen – by continuing to become that, repeatedly “projecting” or pressing ahead existentially into that “project” (Entwurf) or practical identity as we go about our lives.Footnote ⁶⁹ This explains why Heidegger writes that “Dasein, as being-possible [Möglichsein], is existentially that which, in its ability-to-be [Seinkönnen], it is not yet” (BT 185–6/SZ 145). For example, when I project into the project of being a teacher (by preparing for and teaching a class, meeting with students, carefully responding to their work, answering their emails, and so on), that is my way of being a teacher. In Heidegger’s terms of art, I am that teacher (as the “being-possible” of my defining life-projects) which I am thereby becoming (in the “ability-to-be” whereby I project into those roles, goals, and embodied ways of understanding my own being).Footnote ⁷⁰

Now, usually we project ourselves into our life-projects by skilfully navigating, rather than theoretically deliberating over, the live-options these projects implicitly delimit and render salient for us – except in cases when something goes wrong or breaks down, and we become explicitly aware of what we were previously trying to do. Heidegger thinks it is possible, however, for all of our projects to break down simultaneously; indeed, this is precisely what he thinks will happen to anyone who endures a true confrontation with their existential Angst. Rather than acknowledging and confronting the underlying Angst that subtly accompanies the thought of death throughout our lives, Heidegger points out, we normally flee this “anxiety” (or “dread”) by seeking to adopt das Man’s “indifferent tranquillity as to the ‘fact’ that one dies” (telling ourselves, for instance, that “everyone dies, of course, some day,” by which we really try to assure ourselves “but not me, not today”). This repression transforms the existential anxiety that continually accompanies us “into fear in the face of an oncoming event” (namely, demise), an event we thereby push off as far as possible into the distant future (BT 298/SZ 254) – as if death could thereby be safely cordoned off from our own existing world. But if we can confront and endure our existential anxiety instead of seeking to deny and tranquillize it (by adopting such common strategies as “hurrying” and “keeping busy”),Footnote ⁷¹ then it becomes possible, Being and Time suggests, for us to trace this baseline anxiety back to its source in our basic “uncanniness” (or Unheimlichkeit), the fundamental existential homelessness that follows from the fact that there is no life-project any of us can ever finally be at home in, because there is ultimately nothing about the ontological structure of the self that could tell us what specifically we should do with our lives. There is, in other words, no one correct answer about what to do when facing any of the important existential cross-roads in our lives, and insofar as we had been living with the naïve sense that we were indeed doing the right thing simply by doing “what one does” (that is, just following along with das Man, the anonymous “anyone”), then recognizing the contingency of our life-defining choices is likely to prove at least temporarily paralysing.Footnote ⁷²

As Heidegger puts it, when we confront our existential Angst (that is, when we “pursue what such moods disclose and … allow ourselves to confront what has been disclosed” through them [BT 173/SZ 135]), we can come to recognize our essential Unheimlichkeit, that is, our “not being at home” in the world, the fundamental lack of fit between our underlying existential projecting and the specific existentiell (or particular individual) worldly projects in terms of which we each flesh out our existence and so give shape to our worlds. (Here again we can see the influence of The Sickness Unto Death, which insists on the radical heterogeneity of our “naked and abstract” self before God and our “fully clothed" self of worldly immediacy.Footnote ⁷³ More generally, Heidegger’s insistence on Dasein’s essential “uncanniness” or “not-being-at-home” in the world seems to be his way of secularizing – and so preserving the core phenomenological insight contained in – the Christian idea that we are in but not of the world.) Heidegger’s basic idea here is that there can be no seamless fit between Dasein’s existing and the projects that allow us to make sense of our existing by bestowing our being-here with the shape and content of specific worldly projects (teacher, student, friend, father, brother, citizen), and thus no one right answer to the question of what we should do with our lives. (Our anxiety stems from and so can help reveal this fact that there is no one correct answer about what projects to project ourselves into, nor about how to project ourselves into whatever projects we have thereby chosen to understand ourselves in terms of.)

Our sense of uncanniness or “not-being-at-home” in the world thus derives from and testifies to this anxiety-provoking lack of a fit between Dasein and its world (between, that is, the sheer “projecting” of existence as a “standing-out” into intelligibility and the specific worldly projects that shape and circumscribe our existential worlds, rendering these worlds significant, as we will see).Footnote ⁷⁴ This means that, insofar as one has been blithely living with an unquestioned sense that one is simply doing what one should be doing with one’s life (whether by following the path of least resistance, the guidance of the authority figures in one’s life, or the various exemplars our cultures hold up as successful role models to be emulated), confronting one’s Angst will expose one’s fundamental lack of fit with one’s practical world and can thereby catalyze the temporary collapse of the life-projects one has been pursuing with a sense of naïve good conscience. Just such a scenario, in which I pursue my anxiety to the point where all my life-projects, foundering on the reef of their own contingency, forfeit their unquestioned inertia and so temporarily break down or collapse – no longer allowing me to project (or “press-ahead”) into them and so make sense of myself in their worldly terms – is what Heidegger means by “anticipation” of (or “running-out” toward) death, and it forms the first structural component of authenticity understood in its two successive moments as anticipatory resolution.Footnote ⁷⁵

To bootstrap our way into understanding why Heidegger calls death “the possibility of Dasein impossibility par excellence,” it helps to think, first, of someone whose fundamental life-project was being a teacher (or a priest, husband, son, communist, pet owner, or any other identity-defining self-understanding) but who then experiences the catastrophic collapse of this embodied life-project. What is crucial to recognize is that when such world-collapse occurs, we do not instantly forfeit the skills, capacities, and inclinations that this identity previously organized. Instead, in such a situation, we tend to continue projecting ourselves upon an absent project (for a time at least – the time it takes to mourn that project or else replace it, redirecting or abandoning the drives it organized). After that world collapses, we tend to keep pressing blindly ahead (absentmindedly moving to fill the food bowl of a recently deceased pet, for example), even though the project that previously organized this projection is no longer there for us to press-ahead into (since, in this example, one no longer has that pet). Thinking about such a paradoxical (and yet quite common) situation – in which we project ourselves toward a life-project we can no longer project ourselves into – helps us grasp what Heidegger means when he calls death “the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility par excellence” (that is, the existential impossibility that shows us both what we Dasein essentially are and what “impossibility” most fundamentally means for us, at the very structural core of our existential “being-here”). For when not just one but all of our life-projects break down in what Heidegger calls “anticipation” or “running-out” (Vorlaufen) toward death, we experience ourselves as a kind of bare existential projecting without any existentiell projects to project ourselves into (and so understand ourselves in terms of). We can thereby come to understand ourselves as, at bottom, a “primordial existential projecting” (BT 379/SZ 330), a brute projecting (or sheer ek-sisting) that is more basic than – and independent of – any of the particular projects that usually give our lives content and significance.

To grasp what Heidegger thinks the self ultimately boils down to (in this existential version of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction), it is crucial to remember that when my projects all break down or collapse, leaving me without any life-project to project myself into, projection itself does not cease. When my being-possible becomes impossible, I still am; my ability-to-be becomes insubstantial, unable to connect to the world practically, but not inert. My projects collapse, and I no longer have a concrete self I can be, but I still am this inability-to-be. Heidegger calls this paradoxical condition (of projectless projection) revealed by anticipation “the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility,” or death. In his words:

We can see the phenomenon Heidegger has in mind when we generalize from the case in which one project breaks down to the catastrophic collapse of them all. A student can explicitly encounter his computer, a carpenter her hammer, and a commuter their car as a tool with a specific role to play in an equipmental nexus organized by their self-understanding, precisely when this tool breaks down – when the hard drive crashes the night before a paper is due, the hammer breaks and cannot be fixed or replaced in the middle of a job, or the car breaks down on the way to an important meeting, leaving the commuter stranded by the side of the road. Just so, Dasein can explicitly encounter its structure as the practical embodiment of a self-understanding when its projects all break down in death. Dasein, stranded (as it were) by the global collapse of its practical projects, can come explicitly to recognize itself as, at bottom, not any particular self or life-project but, rather, as a projecting into projects, that is, as a being who fundamentally takes an engaged stand on its being and is defined by that stand. Thus, by severing all my practical relations to my world-defining projects, existential death brings the existential structure of my usually implicit and embodied being-in-the-world into focus, allowing me to understand explicitly what usually I am implicitly in my comportmental engagement with things and other people.

Now, among the relatively few who get this far in understanding Heidegger’s phenomenological depiction of existential death as a global collapse of my practical being-in-the-world, a fairly common worry is that such a situation is not just extremely rare or unrealistic but, worse, phenomenologically incoherent, since (those who advance this objection suppose) such a situation would leave me completely unable even to make sense of the objects surrounding me. Here it is illuminating to see how this objection is based on a subtle but important misreading. The total breakdown of Dasein’s being-in-the-world in existential death incapacitates Dasein’s “ready-to-hand” (or “hands-on,” zuhanden) comportmental relations to those networks of equipmental paraphernalia rendered “significant” by Dasein’s practical world (BT 231/SZ 187); it does not entail a breakdown of our “thematic” or conscious ability to comprehend what entities are as “present-at-hand” (or “on-hand,” vorhanden) objects (BT 393/SZ 343). So, for example, in the total breakdown of my life-projects in existential death, I can still understand “thematically” (that is, cognitively or representationally) what an alarm clock or an espresso machine is as a “deworlded” object (Gegenstand) merely standing there over against me. The real problem is that I cannot “press-ahead” or project into any of my usual practical life-projects – such existential possibilities as being a father or teacher – that would ordinarily make those entities part of my world by endowing them with “significance” (that is, practical relevance for the existential projects I am projecting into, like teacher, father, or homeowner).

As Being and Time famously argues (in division one), “ordinarily and usually,” the entities that implicitly populate my world have “hands-on” (zuhanden) practical “significance” as nodal points of engagement in holistically interconnected equipmental nexuses that are implicitly organized by my life-projects. For example, while implicitly projecting into the existential possibility of being a teacher, I encounter my bedroom as a quiet place full of useful paraphernalia for sleeping and waking so as to be rested from today’s teaching and ready for tomorrow’s classes, whereas the “kitchen” shows up as the place full of equipment for preparing the meals or making the coffee I bring with me to school. Deprived of such practical significance in existential death, all such entities become radically “de-worlded” objects – and so merely stand there in their “empty mercilessness” (BT 393/SZ 343), as if their sudden loss of saliency and relevance constituted a silent mockery of my existence as a being who cares about its own being. (It is this very same “care” [Sorge] that I ordinarily manifest by implicitly taking an embodied stand on what it means to be, a practical stand that discloses entities not as mere objects standing over against me but as interconnected nexuses of practical equipment implicitly playing some significant role for my projects and thereby soliciting my engagement.)Footnote ⁷⁶

Hence, qualifying his description of Dasein – radically individualized by its confrontation with “anxiety in the face of death” – as a “self alone” (or solus ipse), Heidegger distinguishes the existential reduction he is describing from the famous Cartesian reduction of the self to an isolated thing certain only of its own thinking:

That is, when our worlds collapse in death, we discover ourselves not as a worldless cogito (cast out into an empty void of cognitive uncertainty, all objects having dissolved into epistemic uncertainty) but as a “world-hungry” Dasein (as Dreyfus nicely puts it), a “world hunger” we discover explicitly when we find ourselves utterly unable to ‘eat’ anything – unable, that is, to project into any of the life-projects that ordinarily constitute our worlds (BT 231/SZ 189) – despite our desperate desire to do so.Footnote ⁷⁷ Hence Heidegger’s description of this radically individuated “self” of pure “mineness” as “a naked ‘that-it-is-and-has-to-be’” (BT 173, my emphasis/SZ 134), a being that must find a way to go on practically and yet, at least temporarily, cannot.

This strange and dreadful experience of our own being completely unable (or projectless projecting) explains the phenomenology of existential death as “the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility par excellence,” because it is only through such a collapse of the practical world that we usually are that we first come to understand (in Heidegger’s primary sense, that is, “stand-under” or encounter for ourselves) the structure of our own being as an existential projecting into worldly projects. Or, to take another example, a student does not usually experience their pen in its implicit worldly significance as an item of equipment they are writing with, in their green notebook, so as to take notes on today’s lecture on Being and Time, in order to help learn about Heidegger, for the sake of being a good student – until, say, that pen runs out of ink and cannot be replaced in the middle of an illuminating explanation of a difficult and important passage. Similarly, we only recognize that we are beings who take such engaged, worldly significance disclosing stands on the meaning of our own being by projecting into life-projects when these projects collapse in existential death.

When we find ourselves (pun intended) in this desolate condition – existing as a projectless solus ipse deprived of any world of practical life-projects (a world of projects to which we seek desperately to return) – what do we do? Here again Heidegger follows Kierkegaard (and the insight from Christian mysticism portrayed by Dante): The only way out is through. (Or as Winston Churchill famously put it: “When you are going through hell, keep going!”) By anxiously “running-out” toward death and so embodying this possibility of impossibility par excellence (an embodied existential possibility in which we discover what it truly means for our worldly existence to become impossible), “Dasein is taken back all the way to its naked uncanniness, and becomes fascinated by it. This fascination, however, not only takes Dasein back from its ‘worldly’ possibilities, but at the same time gives Dasein the possibility of an authentic ability-to-be” (BT 394/SZ 344). This idea that anxiously running-out toward death not only radically individuates Dasein but, in so doing, also gives Dasein an authentic ability-to-be brings us back to the point that, for Heidegger, death is something I can live through. (Remember that Heidegger himself stresses the paradox that Dasein lives through its death when he writes, “Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is.”) Heidegger’s point is that the pure, world-hungry projecting we experience when we are unable to connect to our projects is what is most basic about us. For, this fundamental existential projecting is implicit in all of our ordinary projecting into projects, and it also inalienably survives the nonterminal loss of Dasein’s any and every particular worldly project.

This is what explains the otherwise puzzling fact that Heidegger often refers to the projectless projecting of existential “death” as Dasein’s “ownmost ability-to-be” (eigenste Seinkönnen); this sheer existential projecting is something no Dasein can forfeit so long as it is. Remember that Heidegger distinguishes between our “being-possible” (Möglichsein) and our “ability-to-be” (Seinkönnen) to mark this crucial difference between our life-projects, on the one hand, and our projecting ourselves into those life-projects, on the other. Heidegger frequently refers to existential “death” in Being and Time by calling it Dasein’s “ownmost ability-to-be [eigenste Seinkönnen].”Footnote ⁷⁸ Why is existential death the “ability-to-be” (that is, the existential projecting or pressing-forward) that is most Dasein’s own? Because existential death phenomenologically discloses that sheer projecting or existing (ek-sisting as “standing-out” toward a world) that Dasein cannot forfeit without thereby ceasing to be Dasein. Every particular life-project that constitutes our being-possible (Möglichsein) can be lost, but this brute projecting or existing cannot (so long as we have not demised but are still here as Dasein). I thus take Heidegger’s frequent use of “Dasein’s ownmost ability-to-be” to designate death as strong evidence for my phenomenological reconstruction of existential death as projectless projecting.

But how, to return to the crucial question, can we “live through” such death? The passage through existential death (and back to the world of practical life-projects) is what Heidegger calls “resolve or resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) and it is the second part of his full phenomenological account of authenticity in its two connected structural moments as anticipatory resoluteness. Resoluteness is just as complex a phenomenon as anticipation (or “running-out” into death), and we will explore it in more detail in subsequent chapters. But at its core resolve designates Dasein’s accomplishment of a reflexive reconnection to the world of projects lost in death, a recovery made possible by the lucid encounter of the self with its own unsinkable core in existential death. On the basis of the insight gained from this radical self-encounter, it becomes possible for us to recover ourselves (from das Man’s superficial and homogenizing ways of doing what one does) and then reconnect to the practical world we are usually connected to effortlessly and unreflexively. This reconnection turns on our giving up the unreflexive, paralyzing belief that there is a single correct choice to make (about what or how to be), since recognizing that there is no such single correct choice (because there is no sufficiently substantive self to determine such a choice) is what gives us the freedom to choose among the existential possibilities (the roles, goals, and life-projects) we face as live-options (their full range ordinarily “dimmed-down” by the pervasive conformity of das Man), and also what gives us the subsequent “responsibility” for having so chosen (by making us “answerable” for the lives we have thereby made our own).

As Heidegger dramatically puts it:

“Resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) is Heidegger’s name for such free decisions, by which we recognize that the core of the self, as a projectless projecting, is more powerful than (that is, survives) death (the collapse of its projects), and so become capable of “choosing to choose,” of making a lucid or deliberate reconnection to the world of our existential projects. The freedom of such lucid or meta-decisions is “finite” because it is always constrained: by Dasein’s own facticity and thrownness (the fundamental fact that each Dasein is, and has to continue to be, as “thrown” into a world that predates and shapes us such that we “always-already” possess a variety of particular talents, cares, and predispositions, an orienting “facticity” that partly constitutes our being and can often be altered piecemeal but not simply thrown off in some Sartrean “radical choice”); by the preexisting concerns of our time and “generation” (to which we cannot but respond in one way or another); by the facts of the specific situation we confront (and which of these facts can be altered, Heidegger stresses, we cannot fully appreciate until we act and so enter into this situation concretely); as well as by that which remains unpredictable about the future (including the responses of others).Footnote ⁷⁹ Nevertheless, it is by embracing this finitude – giving up our naïve desire for either absolute freedom or a single correct choice between (and within) defining life-projects and instead accepting that our finite freedom always operates against a background of constraint (in which there is usually more than one “right” answer for us, rather than none at all) – that we are able to overcome that paralysis of projects experienced in death. It is thus important that Heidegger increasingly hyphenates “Ent-schlossenheit” (literally “un-closedness”) to emphasize that the existential “resoluteness” whereby Dasein freely chooses the existential commitments that define it does not entail deciding on a particular course of action ahead of time and obstinately sticking to one’s guns come what may but, instead, requires an “openness” whereby one continues to be responsive to the emerging solicitations of, and unpredictable elements in, the particular existential “situation,” the full reality of which only the actual decision itself discloses.

In resolve’s decisive “moment of insight,” Dasein is (like a gestalt switch) set free rather than paralyzed by the contingency and indeterminacy of its choice of projects, and so can project itself into its chosen project in a way that expresses its sense that, although this project is appropriated from a storehouse of publicly intelligible roles inherited from the tradition, it nevertheless matters that this particular role has been chosen by this particular Dasein and updated, via a “reciprocative rejoinder” (BT 438/SZ 386), so as, ideally, to develop its particular ontic and factical aptitudes and predispositions as these intersect with the pressing needs of its time and “generation,” doing so in a way that is uniquely this Dasein’s own even as it reaches back into that public world and thereby connects with the defining projects of other Dasein. (Indeed, Being and Time suggests, existential death encourages us to find our own ways of aligning our defining existential projects with the needs of a larger community, our “generation,” so that the practical projects we project into and so understand ourselves in terms of do not remain strictly individual and hence cease to be with our own eventual demise (BT 308/SZ 263–4). For, insofar as the existential projects we understand ourselves in terms of can survive our demise by living on in the existential projects of those who survive us, our own demise loses some of its fearsomeness, as we will see.)Footnote ⁸⁰

Instead of simply taking over our projects from das Man (by going with the flow, following the path of least resistance, or simply doing “what one should do”), it thus becomes possible, through resolve, to take over a project reflexively (whether lucidly or explicitly), and so to reappropriate oneself (taking or retaking ownership of our own existence), thereby “becoming what we are” by breaking the previously unnoticed grip arbitrarily exerted upon us by das Man’s ubiquitous norms of social propriety, its pre- and proscriptions on what one does and how one should do it.Footnote ⁸¹ In sum, then, “authenticity or ownedness [Eigentlichkeit],” as anticipatory resoluteness, names this double movement in which the world lost in anticipating or running-out into death is regained in resolve, a (literally) revolutionary movement by which we are involuntarily turned away from the world and then voluntarily turn back to it, in which the grip of the world upon us is broken in order that we may thereby gain (or regain) our grip on this world.

1.5 Heidegger’s Phenomenological Bridge from Demise to Death: Formal Indication

With this detailed overview in place, let us return to the specific question of how the existential phenomenon Heidegger calls “death” is both related to and distinguished from our ordinary notion of “demise.” By “death,” we have seen, Heidegger means the experience of existential world-collapse that first occurs when we confront the ineliminable anxiety that stems from the basic lack of fit between Dasein and its world, an anxiety that emerges from the uncanny fact that there is nothing about the structure of the self that can tell us what specifically to do with our lives. By “dying,” I have suggested, Heidegger means the mere projecting, disclosing, or ek-sisting (“standing-out”) that we lucidly experience when our projects collapse in death (and we encounter ourselves as a projectless projecting). By “genuinely or authentically dying,” let me now suggest, he means the explicit experience of undergoing such world-collapse and thereby coming to understand ourselves phenomenologically as, at bottom, a mere projecting, that is (“ordinarily and usually”), a projecting into projects, a fundamental existential projecting that survives even the (non-terminal) global collapse of the worldly projects that normally constitute and organize our being-here.Footnote ⁸²

If this is right, then (to come back to passage D1 for a final time) Heidegger’s claim that “Dasein can demise only as long as it is dies” must also mean that only so long as one is dying, that is, simply projecting, existing, or disclosing at all, can one demise, that is, project into, disclose, or move toward the terminal collapse of one’s world. Indeed, we can move toward that end of the being that we are in demise only so far as we are capable of experiencing that end of our own distinctive being (as a practical being-in-the-world) in the “finite existing” of death’s projectless projecting. It is thus existential death that lets us experience that distinctive end of our own being – that “being here” at an end of our being-in-the-world – which we can only move asymptotically toward in demise (at least as far as we can tell phenomenologically, confined as we are in our experience to this side of life’s “great beyond”).

We have been driven to such an initially strange view of what Heidegger means by “death” by the fact that Heidegger claims not only that we can “die” in his existential sense without having to undergo mortal demise but also, conversely, that most human beings reach their demise without ever undergoing his kind of “death.” This functional independence of death from demise (that is, the fact we can die without demising and demise without dying) justifies distinguishing the two phenomena in even a non-commonsensical way, as Blattner, Haugeland, and White have long done well to argue against numerous critics who, like Hoffman, simply cannot accept that Heidegger would be so confusing as to use the word “death” to refer to something we can live through. This is precisely what Heidegger is doing, however, thereby generating the almost inevitable confusion experienced by the legion of readers who enter his hermeneutic circle already armed with the commonsensical (and yet nonetheless false) conviction that “death” must mean demise, such that when Heidegger writes about “death,” he must surely be describing the phenomenon we colloquially (and euphemistically) call “kicking the bucket,” “taking a dirt nap,” “buying the farm” (as if finally making good on our “mort-gage,” our promise to demise), or simply “passing away.” As we have seen, however, he is not, and Heidegger is quite explicit that his “existential analysis” of such phenomena as Dasein’s death “constantly has the character of doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit]” to “the everyday way in which Dasein is interpreted” (BT 359/SZ 311). The goal of this acknowledged hermeneutic “violence” (or “forcing-open”) is to discover the constitutive ontological structures that underlie and condition our “everyday” interpretations, everyday views that cover over and obscure these structures and so close them off from our understanding. It is thus not to sound radical, different, or original that Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretations do “violence” to our ordinary ways of interpreting phenomena like death; instead, that hermeneutic violence results from Being and Time’s deeper goal of “freeing” the “undisguised” ontological truth of phenomena like death from their concealment beneath our widespread but superficial and confused ways of understanding their meaning (BT 360/SZ 313).

At the same time, however, rightly insisting on the difference between existential death and mortal demise should not lead us to err in the opposite direction (as Haugeland and White clearly do), prying death and demise so far apart that they entirely overlook the crucial interconnections linking the two phenomena together.Footnote ⁸³ For, I now want to show, demise and death remain intimately related, of methodological necessity, and these connections are what rightly generate the undeniable existential pathos that has led generations of readers to expect to find a discourse about the ontic event of demise (or kicking the bucket) in Heidegger’s ontological analysis of death as the type of end most proper to and distinctive of Dasein’s being.

We can begin to understand the crucial connection between death and demise if we notice that the six structural characteristics that “define” Heidegger’s “full existential-ontological conception of death” – namely, that “death, as [1] the end of Dasein, is [2] Dasein’s ownmost, [3] non-relational, [4] certain and [5] as such indefinite, and [6] non-surpassable possibility” (BT 303/SZ 258–9) – are all drawn from a formal analysis of demise. This, I submit, is no accident but rather the deliberate result of Heidegger’s phenomenological method. The fulcrum of Heidegger’s broader method of phenomenological attestation is what he calls “formal indication”; formal indication is the pivot that allows Heidegger to move from the ontic to the ontological level of phenomenological analysis (as he does, for example, with ontic and ontological guilt, ontic and ontological conscience, demise and death, and time and temporality). In a formal indication, Heidegger explains, “The empty content, viewed with respect to the structure of its meaning [das leer Gehaltliche in seiner Sinnstruktur], is at the same time that which indicates the direction of its fulfilling enactment [die Vollzugsrichtung]” (PIA 26/GA 61 33).Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, “formal indication” enables Heidegger to extract from the ontic phenomenon under consideration only its formal structures, which he then fleshes out in quite different senses in his analysis of the corresponding ontological phenomenon (BT 362/SZ 314–5). We then have to project ourselves into this ontological phenomenon in order to be able to understand (in this “fulfilling enactment”) both (1) the ontological phenomenon underlying our ordinary ontic and existentiell experience and (2) how that ontological phenomenon actually conditions that ontic one (which ordinarily covers it over and so obscures it from view).

When Heidegger deploys formal indication in Being and Time (as he does to describe the formal structures of our ordinary understanding of demise), doing so gives us “a non-binding formal indicator of something that, in its actual phenomenal context of being, may perhaps reveal itself [enthüllt, that is, stand fully revealed only when we encounter the phenomenon for ourselves] as being the ‘opposite’” (BT 152/SZ 116) – the opposite, that is, of what we will at first naturally assume if we fall into “the trap of starting with the givenness of Dasein and its obvious self-interpretation” (BT 151/SZ 116). Whether the phenomenon initially indicated in its formal structures is selfhood, death, or guilt, we must thus beware of simply relying on the seeming obviousness of our ordinary understanding of it and instead pay maximally unbiased attention to how the phenomenon actually discloses itself to us when we encounter it for ourselves, rather than relying on the hearsay of received wisdom, from which we must nevertheless begin (a common sense view to which the ontological interpretation does that aforementioned hermeneutic “violence” that breaks it open as it frees the deepest structures that condition it).

By providing a bridge from the ontic to the ontological in this way, formal indication allows Heidegger to present an ontological interpretation that is not simply arbitrary, groundless, or idiosyncratic. On the contrary, Heidegger’s ontological interpretations may be judged compelling only insofar as we too can experience the phenomenon in a way that enables us to recognize and personally attest that this allegedly more basic but previously unnoticed ontological phenomenon Heidegger describes does indeed condition our own experience of the everyday ontic phenomenon with which we are all familiar and from which the formal features of the more fundamental ontological phenomenon are first drawn.Footnote ⁸⁵ Like Aristotle, who thought philosophy should begin by surveying the expert wisdom of the past that is preserved in common sense, Heidegger maintains that “All ontological investigations of such phenomena as guilt, conscience, and death must start with what the everyday interpretation of Dasein ‘says’ about them” (BT 326/SZ 281).

Heidegger’s phenomenological attestation of death thus begins with an analysis of our everyday understanding of demise. After isolating and “formally indicating” the most significant structural characteristics of the ordinary ontic phenomenon of demise (formal structures which, when we project ourselves into them, we discover to have quite different meanings), Heidegger then seeks to flesh out these structural characteristics, individually and collectively, in a way that will reveal the heretofore unnoticed ontological phenomenon of “death” that conditions the phenomenon of ordinary ontic demise. I try to summarize this rather complex analysis in the following table:

Obviously, this sketch remains incomplete, but I hope it is sufficient to illustrate Heidegger’s method and so show that he does not arbitrarily choose to rechristen some unrelated phenomenon “death” and analyze it outside of any relation to what the rest of us normally mean by the word. This is important because it helps us see that, here as elsewhere, the ontic and the ontological are not heterogeneous domains (pace orthodox Heideggerians and influential critics like Habermas) but, instead, necessarily overlap and interrelate, and must, in order for the method Heidegger uses in Being and Time (which I have called phenomenological attestation) to work, that is, to be convincing. Indeed, Heidegger’s phenomenological method can only be convincing, I shall now suggest, by moving back and forth in the right (affectively and cognitively resonant) way between our own individual, everyday (existentiell and ontic) understanding of death as mortal demise and the phenomenological discovery of the ontological structure underlying and conditioning our ordinary relation to demise, as that structure is disclosed in the phenomenon of existential death.Footnote ⁸⁶

1.6 Preliminary Conclusions: Fear of Demise and Anxiety about Death

I mentioned at the beginning that a significant obstacle to checking the phenomenological evidence for Heidegger’s analysis of death comes from the fact that what he calls “death” – namely, the projectless projecting we experience in the wake of the global collapse of the inauthentic one-self each of us continually accrues – seems to be an extremely difficult experience for most people to endure. The magnitude of this difficulty is conveyed by Heidegger’s aforementioned acknowledgment that requiring his readers to undergo what he means by death in order to be able to evaluate his account of the phenomenon seems, from the ordinary perspective of our everyday concerns, to be a “fantastically unreasonable demand” (BT 311/SZ 266), as well as by Being and Time’s suggestion that the avoidance of a confrontation with our anxiety before death may be the real engine of Western history.Footnote ⁸⁷

By anxiety before death, however, it is crucial to recognize that Heidegger means anxiety about the core self revealed in the collapse of my world, not fear concerning my eventual demise. In fact, Heidegger considers such fear of demise – which “perverts anxiety into cowardly fear” (BT 311/SZ 266) – to be one of the main ways we flee from our real anxiety about death. He goes so far as to assert that even those who seek heroically to confront and overcome their fear of demise (like Spinoza, as we shall see in Chapter 8), in so doing, merely reveal their “own cowardliness in the face of anxiety” (ibid.). Heidegger’s startling claim – that our fear of our eventual demise is really just a way of fleeing our anxiety about the core self laid bare by the global collapse of worldly projects in what he calls “death” – is so strange that, as far as I know, no interpreter has explicitly thematized and addressed it. Instead, it is most often miscognized: existential death is misunderstood as mortal demise, and Heidegger’s view is thereby reduced to that of Ernest Becker (a later sociologist who taught that we human beings are driven to construct all our systems of meaning in order to deny the demise we nevertheless cannot escape).Footnote ⁸⁸ Upon grasping Heidegger’s strange claim, moreover, many readers will suspect the very opposite, namely, that Heidegger himself has just reinterpreted “death” so as to transform it into an experience that can be survived, thereby inadvertently exposing his own fear of demise. Further evidence that Heidegger is indeed making the initially strange claim I am attributing to him can thus be found in the fact that he anticipates that table-turning suspicion and goes out of his way to deny it as one of “the grossest perversions,” explicitly asserting that: “Anticipatory resoluteness [that is, “authenticity” understood as existential death and rebirth to the world through resolve] is not a way of escape, fabricated for the ‘overcoming’ of death” (BT 357/SZ 310). Instead, Heidegger thinks, we usually live superficially with an uneasy sense that we are doing the right thing with our lives simply by doing what one should do, and if we dare to endure a genuine confrontation with that underlying existential Angst, rather than fleeing it back into das Man’s “indifferent tranquillity as to the ‘fact’ that one dies” – a flight by which we displace “this anxiety into fear in the face of an oncoming event” (BT 298/SZ 254) – then we will end up experiencing a global collapse of our identity-defining life-projects in existential “death.”

In my view, then, what will ultimately be decisive in evaluating Heidegger’s phenomenological attestation of death is that we be able to recognize the phenomenon he calls death as ontologically conditioning, and so explaining at a deep experiential level, the main features of our relationship to ordinary demise, including not only the six formal features they share (in the way outlined in the table above) but also, and perhaps most saliently, the widespread fear of demise from which, he recognizes, we habitually flee into diversions that keep us busy or otherwise tranquillize that fear and the anxiety beneath it. Accordingly, I want to suggest that the strange provocations on the subject of the relation between death and demise just rehearsed are best understood as Heidegger’s attempt to show that our anxiety in the face of what he calls “death” is what really drives our fear of demise, and thus that fleeing demise is really just a distorted way of repressing death. But what exactly does this mean?

We might think that Heidegger is suggesting that what scares us about demise is the fact that, insofar as we experience demise, we will experience a world-collapse without any subsequent reconnection to the world. In this case, we would fear and so flee demise because in it we will suffer an irreversible world-collapse, undergoing the apparently permanent foreclosure of our worlds. If this were what Heidegger meant, then he would be suggesting that our fear of such demise is ultimately a cover for our deeper Angst about running-out into death and then failing subsequently to reconnect to the world in resolve. In other words, Heidegger might seem to be suggesting that what drives our fear of demise is our underlying anxiety that (much like the legendary shark that must keep swimming to stay alive) should we ever lose that unquestioned existential inertia driving us through our daily lives, should we ever stop and step back from our worlds in a radical way, we might lose our worlds never again to regain them.Footnote ⁸⁹

I do not want to deny that this is a real worry (perhaps even one to which Heidegger’s own anxious and depressive nature might have inclined him). But I think it cannot be correct as an attempt to reconstruct Heidegger’s analysis of the ultimate motivations behind our own fear of demise. For, if it were correct, then this would actually be an argument in favor of the interpretation Heidegger dismissed as “the grossest of perversions,” namely, the view that Heidegger’s call for us confront our Angst before death is really just his way of repressing his fear of demise. Because demise looks like terminal world-collapse, any dread we might feel about permanently losing our unquestioned existential inertia seems to stem from our fear of demise, that is, our fear of our intelligible world coming to an irreversible end, never to return again. (This haunting fear of demise as eternal nothingness – “faintly … tapping at my chamber door… / here I opened wide the door; / —Darkness there and nothing more” – is what Edgar Allan Poe captures so brilliantly in his famous poem’s discomfiting refrain: “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’” Poe’s portentous “nevermore” succinctly expresses our mortal fear that demise will indeed turn out to be absolutely nothing, just like it appears to be from here.)Footnote ⁹⁰ That, however, is to derive Angst in the face of death from our fear of demise, which is exactly the reverse of what Heidegger seeks to do.

For Heidegger to make his case that our fear of demise is ultimately motivated by our anxiety in the face of death, then, his view must be that what we are really afraid of about demise is what he calls death, namely, losing our world and still being here to experience that loss. In other words, Heidegger is suggesting that what we fear about demise is the same thing that suicidal people desperately hope to gain from it, namely, that in demise we will be rid of ourselves, as it were. Yet, as Epicurus pointed out long ago (and as Heidegger repeatedly stresses in Being and Time), we will not be rid of ourselves in demise because, once we demise, we will not be at all.Footnote ⁹¹ If Heidegger is right, in other words, our fear of demise is really our fear of a paradoxical state in which we are not – or, more precisely, in which we are not and yet somehow are in order to be aware that we are not. Our fear of demise is thus a misplaced fear, but it is not (pace Nagel) an unfounded one.Footnote ⁹² For there is an experience in which what we are afraid of about demise – namely, not being, or, more precisely, being our own not being – can actually happen to us. As we have seen, this strange experience of being in a way in which we are not able to be anything worldly is precisely what Heidegger calls death. When all our worldly projects collapse in existential death, leaving a projectless projecting as the sole survivor of the shipwreck of the self, we do indeed experience the paradoxical “possibility of an impossibility of existence – that is to say, the utter nullity [Nichtigkeit] of Dasein” (BT 354/SZ 306), as Heidegger provocatively puts it – that is, the sheer nullification of all the defining life-projects which Dasein suddenly finds itself unable to project into in existential death.Footnote ⁹³

In order to confirm Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis for ourselves, then, we would need to be able to attest to the fact that death conditions demise; that is, we would need to recognize that what we are really afraid of about demise is not just losing our world but also being here to experience that loss. So, is Heidegger right about this? I have suggested that this is a phenomenological matter and, as such, one that we must each decide for ourselves on the basis of our own experience, but here are some leading questions that I think help make Heidegger’s case. In our fear of demise, do we not torture ourselves precisely by paradoxically imagining, that is, trying to project ourselves into, our own non-existence (for example, by imagining what the world will be like after we are gone from it)? Is this paradoxical projection into our own non-existence, perhaps, also what is ultimately so unsettling about the very idea of a world in which we no longer exist? (Indeed, so unsettling that, as films like Bay’s “Armageddon” [1998] and von Trier’s “Melancholia” [2011] suggest, it sometimes seems easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than to imagine others’ living on after we are gone – an undeniably disturbing fact but one that unfortunately only begins to suggest the dangerous thanatological forces unleashed by our failure to confront our anxiety in the face of existential death.)Footnote ⁹⁴ And, finally, does not this phenomenological notion of projectless projecting also help explain what is so dreadful about various forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease, which present us with the terrible possibility of being here to experience the gradual disintegration of our being-here, the slow-motion implosion of our worlds?Footnote ⁹⁵ If we answer “Yes” to such questions, this suggests that the phenomenon Heidegger calls death is not only related to but actually conditions our ordinary relation to demise. Indeed, it suggests that projectless projecting, not terminal world-collapse, is what we are really afraid of about demise.

I think the best confirmation of Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, moreover, would come if this existential recognition that death conditions demise can help us no longer to fear demise – which it should do, because in demise our own Dasein will not be here not to be here. Interestingly, I have repeatedly been told (after presenting earlier versions of this chapter as a talk) that those wracked by terrible fear on their deathbeds can often be helped by hospice workers, therapists, or others who guide them in visualizing their own demise; when the terminally ill imaginatively project themselves into such projectlessness, they reportedly experience a cathartic release of their mortal fear, which can thus turn into a wondrous openness to the unknown. This is very strong evidence in favor of Heidegger’s initially strange but, I think, ultimately quite compelling view. For, part of what Heidegger’s phenomenology of death and demise in Being and Time seeks to show us here is that, if we want to shed the mortal fear of demise that will otherwise pursue us throughout our lives, then we need to muster the courage to confront our anxiety about death, thereby learning calmly and simply to be here – instead of continuing to rush blindly toward the very thing we fear in our desperate attempts to evade it (BT 477/SZ 425). When we learn to be here in the finite disclosure of existential death, moreover, what we thereby encounter turns out to be those wondrous phenomena Heidegger will call futurity and the nothing (as we will now go on to see), potentially transformative phenomena that can help us learn to turn our anxiety about demising into a creative embrace of the inexhaustible source of phenomenological intelligibility – or so I shall seek to show in the chapters that follow.

1.7 Ontological Futurity: Situating Being and Time’s Phenomenology of Death

Now, revisiting an influential work as we approach the centenary of its publication should perhaps encourage us to take a step back and situate the part of the work we have been focusing on within the larger context of the text’s overarching architectonic, understanding not just the pivotal role existential death plays therein (which we have already begun to address) but also existential death’s connections to the loftiest philosophical ambitions of the work (which we have only mentioned briefly thus far), thereby examining some of the most provocative insights to which it helped give rise – all before going on to examine the subsequent influence of Heidegger’s rethinking of death on some other important philosophers (to whom we will turn in Chapters 5 through 7). That kind of “big picture” portrait can be quite daunting (especially when it requires us to step back from and simplify a complex work we have been rereading and teaching for decades). But it can also help us “not to lose the forest for the trees,” an old hermeneutic warning that rings true when one has primarily been focused on a single important issue within a text that ultimately leverages that issue for larger purposes that go well beyond both that issue and that text. So let me briefly situate Being and Time’s phenomenology of death within the context of this text’s ultimate philosophical ambitions, thereby venturing beyond what I have said about its philosophical context thus far, before turning to examine these larger purposes and issues branching off from death in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3. Doing so will also encourage us to briefly explore two other difficult issues – namely, nothingness and futurity – which can be found at or beneath the very roots (to stay with the metaphor) of the fascinating tree we have been focusing on thus far.

Viewed in terms of Being and Time’s largest and most ambitious goals, Heidegger is primarily concerned to understand death ontologically. Put simply, he hopes to phenomenologically convince us of two interconnected ontological claims: First, that the phenomenon of existential death can help us uncover the deepest existential structures that ultimately condition our shared way of being (“existence”), namely, the “temporal horizons or ecstasies.” (The main reason Heidegger thinks this is that “futurity,” the “primary” aspect of this tripartite temporal structure, first becomes visible in the phenomenon of existential death, as I shall show momentarily.) The second, even bigger claim is that understanding these temporal structures that ultimately condition all phenomenological intelligibility can, in turn, enable us to discover “a fundamental ontology,” that is, a single answer to “the question of the meaning of being in general” (BT 61/SZ 37). As Chapter 2 will show, that second and most ambitious hope – Being and Time’s ultimate goal of discovering “a fundamental ontology” that will finally answer “the question of being” – fails dramatically, and the later Heidegger will abandon it as an “errant” and unwitting last gasp of the very “metaphysical” tradition he characterizes as ontotheology.Footnote ⁹⁶ Fortunately, the phenomenology of existential death originally yoked into the service of Being and Time’s failed metaphysical ambition to discover a fundamental ontology survives this death of metaphysics – a profound existential death through which Heidegger himself lives and thinks – and continues to be developed in important ways by the later Heidegger himself (as Chapter 3 shows), while also fascinating, befuddling, infuriating, and inspiring some of Being and Time’s most serious and creative readers for generations.Footnote ⁹⁷ Before examining at least a few important details from those readings (in Chapters 5, 6, and 7), let me very briefly explain these two big ontological claims.

The “and” in the title of Being and Time does not designate mere succession, as if Heidegger were naming two separate items in a very short list. It is, instead, the “and” of conjunction, designating the intersection between Being and Time, an intersection the text will name and describe successively as Dasein, existence, being-in-the-world, and, finally, temporality. “Temporality” is Heidegger’s name for time as it enters into being by becoming intelligible, and also for being as it enters into time and so gets disclosed.Footnote ⁹⁸ Indeed, one of Being and Time’s guiding insights is that temporality is the most primordial structure of Dasein’s being-here that phenomenology can access. As Being and Time claims: “Ecstatical temporality primordially clears the ‘here’” (BT 402/SZ 351). That is, the “ecstatico-horizonal” structure of temporality – or the way temporality opens and orients our intelligible worlds – is what most deeply discloses that practical understanding of being that originally structures and shapes Dasein’s existential “being-here.” (How exactly does temporality condition and shape our most basic understanding of being? We turn to that fraught question in Chapter 2.) Being and Time thus describes temporality as “the fundamental existential constitution of Dasein in the ultimate foundations of its own ontological intelligibility” (BT 351/SZ 304).

At this primordial layer of Dasein’s intelligibility in which being and time most fundamentally intersect, moreover, Heidegger thinks that this Ur-phenomenon metaphysics dichotomizes into mind and world, spirit and matter, the mental and the physical, subjects and objects, etc., still remains fundamentally interconnected. Heidegger’s thinking of temporality as the allegedly primordial unity of being and time is that deepest insight from which he thinks even “Kant shrank back” (BT 45/SZ 23) when he revised his Critique of Pure Reason in a way that effaced the role originally played there (in the first, “A edition”) by the faculty of the imagination. In doing so (in his second, “B edition”), Kant abandoned his own earlier attempt to articulate the constitutive role that the imagination’s temporal “schematism” plays in joining the faculties of understanding and sensibility, uniting the deliverances of “mind” and “world” in a way that (Heidegger suggests) might have undercut modern Cartesian dualism. Heidegger’s goal of undermining the modern ontological dualism of mind and world may be the most ambitious project that Being and Time successfully accomplished (as Dreyfus influentially argues), but it is not the most ambitious project the famous text pursues.Footnote ⁹⁹ That honor (or dishonor, as it turns out) goes to Heidegger’s ill-fated quest for a “fundamental ontology,” in the vain pursuit of which he presents his phenomenology of death.

The main reason Heidegger’s phenomenology of death plays that pivotal role in the text (as briefly suggested at the outset) is because, after all the other independently important twists and turns already examined, the phenomenon of death ultimately discloses the temporal horizon of “futurity,” that is, the constitutive openness of our intelligible worlds to the perpetual arriving of what is not yet fully intelligible.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Such futurity is itself so important, moreover, because its discovery enables Heidegger to discern all three of the interconnected temporal structures that most deeply shape Dasein’s being, and Being and Time’s ultimate hope is to show how this understanding of temporality’s fundamental, constitutive role in shaping the intelligible worlds that we Dasein are will subsequently enable him to discover that “fundamental ontology” (or understanding of the meaning of being in general) for which he is searching during this early, pro-metaphysical period of his work. We will explore this attempt in detail in Chapter 2, but let us not skip over “futurity” too quickly, since Heidegger’s way of conceptualizing this phenomenon can only be understood through its connection to existential death. Moreover, reconstructing the phenomenological connection between death and futurity is also important because it will help us to better understand the origins of Heidegger’s initially strange and provocative insistence on the great philosophical importance of “the nothing,” which first opens and begins to anticipate the later Heidegger’s central phenomenological insight into being’s apparently inexhaustible meaningfulness, as insight utterly at odds with Being and Time’s quest for a fundamental ontology (as Chapters 2 and 3 will explain in detail).Footnote ¹⁰¹

In Being and Time, temporal “futurity” – or the “to-come” (Zu-kunft), that is, futurity in its sheer coming toward us – is first disclosed only by enduring the phenomenon of existential death. (“Enduring” such death in order to recognize the full depths of its disclosure requires phenomenologists neither to inauthentically rush back into reactionary conformity to escape anxiety in the face of death, nor to immediately find a way back to worldly projects in resolve by taking lucid ownership of themselves in authenticity.) By enduring such death phenomenologically, Heidegger suggests, we can uncover not only the bare existential structure of the understanding (as a projectless projecting) but also a deeper temporal horizon that is discernible beneath that core existential structure, conditioning it. Being and Time’s basic insight here is that, in enduring the desolate phenomenon of existential death, the “solus ipse” of projectless projecting finds itself rebounding back off the world of projects it cannot project into and so thereby coming back toward itself, a return from the world empty-handed or “naked” (that is, bereft of the clothing of worldly projects), which renders Dasein’s own core structure perspicuous in its sheer “existing” (or ek-sistere). As Heidegger puts it (and we should now be better equipped to understand his philosophical terminology):

Enduring existential death discloses to Dasein itself the brute fact that it “exists” or stands-out into the “nothingness of the world,” a looming world of indifferent objects, rendered insignificant by Dasein’s inability to project practically into any of the worldly projects that ordinarily disclose the significance and salience of those entities as practical equipment.Footnote ¹⁰² In other words, Dasein’s being-bestowing rebound – off of the world it cannot project into and back toward itself – is rendered perspicuous by enduring existential death, that desolate situation in which I find myself utterly unable to be (that is, to project into and so implicitly understand myself in terms of) any worldly self at all.

When entirely unable to project into its practical, worldly projects, Dasein can phenomenologically encounter the way doing so ordinarily discloses the significance of its existence. That much should already be familiar. The new twist, however, is the deeper, temporal insight that Heidegger seeks to convey here – namely, that, in order for existential death to be able to show Dasein the structure of its own naked existing phenomenologically, Dasein’s projecting must rebound off its failed projecting into worldly projects and so come back toward itself. In discerning this phenomenologically, Dasein can thereby encounter and recognize the fact that its experience of this (ordinarily) being-bestowing arrival of meaning is made possible by an even deeper structure conditioning its being, which Heidegger calls the temporal horizon of futurity. In his words:

Enduring death, in other words, discloses not only my naked existence, standing out into the nothingness of a world I cannot project into; in so doing, it allows the phenomenologist who endures existential death to recognize an even deeper structure built into its own being, the temporal horizon of “futurity” (as sheer coming toward me) that enables my projecting into projects to rebound back upon me and bestow my existence with significance (or, in death, the lack thereof).

That explains why Heidegger sets up his (admittedly abstract) descriptions of futurity by reminding us that: “The meaning of Dasein’s being – is the self-understanding Dasein itself” (BT 372/SZ 325). As we saw earlier, Dasein “understands” (or, better, takes a stand on) the meaning of its own being by projecting into practical projects (namely, its embodied, existential “possibilities”). Ordinarily, we press-ahead or project into the practical world of our projects and the meaning of our being implicitly comes back to us as the meaningful world that we Dasein are.Footnote ¹⁰³ In existential death, however, we can explicitly encounter this “coming back to” us, precisely because it is rendered perspicuous by its emptiness. In existential death (as a global collapse of Dasein’s embodied “understanding” as a projecting into projects), Dasein rebounds off the world of projects it can no longer project into, yet its being still comes back to it (as a sheer existing in the face of that utterly insignificant nothingness of the world). No longer covered over (or filled in) by such worldly meaning, Dasein can recognize the deep “temporal” horizon conditioning this existential rebound, whereby the meaning of our being comes back to us. As Heidegger expresses the crucial insight:

By experiencing our own being-bestowing existential rebound back onto ourselves in its emptiest form (in death), we can discern the temporal horizon underlying the existential structure of our “understanding” as a projecting into projects that, in return, discloses the significance of things and renders us meaningful to ourselves.

To sum up this difficult point, enduring a phenomenological encounter with death discloses the structural rebound whereby the meaning of Dasein’s being comes toward its existence, and this ontological arrival (by which Dasein’s being comes toward it) is made possible by the deeper temporal horizon Heidegger calls “futurity.” As Heidegger explicitly defines the term: “Here ‘futural’ [‘Zu-kunft’] means … the coming [Kunft] in which Dasein, in its ownmost ability-to-be [death], comes toward itself” (BT 373/SZ 325). The basic idea, then, is that Dasein’s reflexive return from the world (by which the projects we project into implicitly come back to bestow our existence with the meaning of our being) is itself made possible by a temporal horizon Heidegger calls “futurity” as this “coming toward” (Zu-kunft), that is, Dasein’s constitutive openness to the coming toward itself of the meaning of being (the meaning of its own being, implicitly bestowed back upon it or disclosed for it by its projecting into worldly projects, as we have seen, but thereby also – according to the hopeful architectonic we can see Heidegger beginning to sketch out here – the meaning of being in general, as we will see in Chapter 2).

For the early Heidegger, the three temporal horizons come together to constitute the deepest substrate of Dasein’s being that phenomenology can reach, and temporality’s three horizons are just as inextricably interconnected as the three main existential structures that they underlie and condition. As a result, there can be no phenomenological encounter with “futurity” that does not also involve Dasein’s “having beenness” and “making present” (BT 373–4/SZ 373–4) – just as there is no “understanding” without its “affective attunement” (Befindlichkeit) and “conversance” (Rede), and hence no death without anxiety and conscience.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The temporal horizons intertwine, for example, in that what I am becoming (in the projects I project into) comes back to shape how I am making sense of who I have been (or, more precisely, of how I continue to become what I have been).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ If a student resolutely chooses to become a philosophy major, to take a simple example, then their felt sense of who they are, as they throw themselves into particularly challenging reading assignment, might tend to be informed by half-forgotten stories they heard about their insatiable childhood curiosity and drive to understand, say, rather than about their prodigious business acumen or athletic talent.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In general, as we project into the practical world of projects that make (and remake) us who we are (in our repeated becoming), our future projects shape (and reshape) the way our past continues to shape us. This is what Heidegger has in mind when he sums up his view of Dasein’s temporality:

According to this unified account of the three interlocking temporal horizons, Heidegger’s vision of the way “futurity releases the present from itself” suggests that, after futurity has been disclosed in death (as the naked existence of the solus ipse rebounds off the practical world it cannot connect to and comes toward itself perspicuously), it also gets disclosed, second, through the multiplicitous arriving of those self-world “possibilities” coming toward the solus ipse as the different selves we can be henceforth, coming toward us as largely inchoate live-options that require us to “open” (or “un-close,” ent-schlossen) ourselves to and so let ourselves become just one of them as resolve (Entschlossenheit) thereby “releases the present [die Gegenwart] from itself,” letting that originary present it is (literally) “waiting-toward [Gegen-wart]” arrive, letting-go of all inchoate others (BT 374/SZ 326).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the desolate perspective first disclosed by the projectless projecting of existential death, then, we experience the multiplicitous and inchoate arriving of those futural selves and their partly glimpsed worlds in a maximally open and unmediated way. “Futurity” comes to describe this futural horizon whereby we phenomenologically encounter this sheer coming toward us in death (and then its repeated, momentous arriving in resolve, which “allows an unconcealed encounter with that [specific situation] which is seized upon in taking action”), rather than the usual (and “fallen”) way in which one usually conceives of the future, as a distant “not yet” somewhere out ahead of us.

It is thus important to notice that, in these two different ways of thinking about the future – namely, as standing out there somewhere ahead of us, on the one hand, and as “always-already” arriving, on the other – we can now recognize the temporal conditions that underlie Heidegger’s two different ways of relating to the phenomena of our own demise and death, respectively. In light of that first thinking of the future (as standing off somewhere ahead of us), recall the “inauthentic” understanding that “flees” death, vainly trying to radically separate existential death from the self by placing it far off in the distant future as mortal demise. This is the very same conflation of existential death with mortal demise that typifies our “falling” into the leveled-down intelligibility of the public world and so, unsurprisingly, shapes those same commonsensical expectations we initially bring to Being and Time (as we have seen). Then, in light of that second thinking of futurity (as the “coming” of the future in its perpetual arriving), consider the “authentic” existential view which owns the phenomenon of death by recognizing that existential death helps disclose the most basic structures definitive of our very selfhood by uncovering the radical existential solitude (or “solus ipse”) of projectless projecting. This sheer structural “existing” is disclosed by Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death as the most ineliminable, individuating, certain, constant, and unsurpassable core of Dasein’s intelligible world, a discovery that helps enable the authentic self-recovery accomplished in resolve. In Heidegger’s terms, these different ways of “temporalizing” temporality thus “make possible the multiplicity of Dasein’s modes of being, above all the fundamental possibility of authentic or inauthentic existence” (BT 377/SZ 328)

Futurity thus names the being of the future as it is disclosed to existential phenomenology, the deep temporal-horizonal orientation whereby our intelligible worlds are fundamentally open to what is continually coming toward us (always arriving from partly beyond what is as already “having-been” and currently “making-itself-present”). Indeed, this phenomenon of futurity – as the temporal horizon conditioning our being’s “coming toward” us (Zu-kunft) – discloses an otherwise overwhelming “coming toward presence” that our practical identities usually (1) enable us to navigate and orient ourselves within (with the help of our mooded attunements and embodied skills), but thereby also (2) dim-down and so eclipse futurity’s perpetual arriving from sight in our ordinary lives.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ By uncovering such ontological futurity from beneath its ordinary existential taming (into those public roles and established ways of doing things that thereby accomplish “a dimming down of the possible as such” [BT 239/SZ 195]), Being and Time’s phenomenology of existential death first grants Heidegger access to the most primordial structures of our Dasein, the temporal structures that delve as deeply into our being as Heidegger then believed phenomenology could reach, precisely because “futurity” is just the first of the three interlocking horizons of originary temporality, each of which directly underlies one of the three core existential structures (or existentials) set out in Division One (BT 479/SZ 426–7).

As that suggests, the three interconnected existential structures, working in concert, are what ordinarily allow Dasein to tame and navigate the broader openness of the temporal horizons beneath them, since these temporal “ecstasies” would otherwise bombard us with too much unorganized phenomenological information for us to cope with successfully.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Understanding, as the practical identities we “stand under,” enables us to orient ourselves within futurity by charting a meaningful course through the continual and manifold arriving of what is coming into presence. Befindlichkeit, or our affective attunement, describes how our embodied sense of what has been continues to shape and circumscribe our intelligible worlds, helping us maintain a grip on what matters to us.Footnote ¹¹⁰ And Rede, or our skilful conversance with things, articulates the embodied and linguistic ways we skilfully navigate the manifold significations of all that makes itself present in our intelligible worlds.

Among these three interlocking temporal “ecstasies,” Heidegger thinks futurity is “primary” (BT 378/SZ 329). This is not because his existential phenomenology discovers it first but, rather, because “the present arises from futurity” (BT 479/SZ 427), in the sense that our life-projects orient and circumscribe what shows up for us while also helping attune us to what matters most from the having-been that we continue to be, as we repeatedly reshape that living past we always carry with us (a “having-beenness” that tunes us in variously, as Wrathall and Londen suggest, and so helps filter what is salient to and so discernible by us).Footnote ¹¹¹ But we should not let this relative priority of futurity in orienting our existential odysseys through time lead us to forget that the three interconnected temporal horizons always work together as a whole (just like the three existentials they underlie and condition). Hence Heidegger’s notoriously recondite formula, which does not describe the linear passage of time (as a future that slips through the present into the past) but, instead, the underlying horizons of primordial temporality that condition all our experiences in time (as we have seen): “Temporality temporalizes itself as a coming-toward that makes present in the process of having been [Zeitlichkeit zeitigt sich als gewesende-gegenwärtigende Zukunft]” (BT 401/SZ 350).Footnote ¹¹² The fact that the three temporal horizons underlie the three main existential structures that Being and Time primarily focuses on explains why Heidegger mainly develops just these three essential existentials (Befindlichkeit, Rede, and Verstehen), even while frequently mentioning and partly describing numerous other existential structures. He does not think Being and Time’s three main existentials are exhaustive (or a complete list of all the constitutive structures universally conditioning Dasein’s existential world) but, instead, that these three existential structures of Dasein play a crucial role precisely as the three “essential existentials” that directly emerge from and so help disclose the three primordial temporal horizons underlying them. Those three existentials are nothing more nor less than "the main structures of the most importance in the framework of this problematic" (viz., the pursuit of fundamental ontology) because they help disclose the temporal “horizon within which the concept of being in general becomes intelligible” [BT 133/SZ 100], or so the early Heidegger hopes.Footnote ¹¹³

Such big picture sketches inevitably require us to proceed too quickly (tormenting our scholarly and pedagogical consciences, which rightly want to qualify and explain such fascinating issues in detail), but the biggest of several deep problems here is that, in Being and Time (and all the way through 1929’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), Heidegger also believes that the temporal horizons constitutively condition what shows up through the existential structures. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 2, it is the early Heidegger’s neo-Kantian view – that the three temporal horizons fix some of the fundamental terms for any ontology we disclose through the three existential structures – that (temporarily) props up his false and politically disastrous belief that he will be able to disclose “a [einer] fundamental ontology” (a single “understanding of the meaning of being in general”), which will answer the question of being in a way that will enable Heidegger to reunify the university and, behind it, Germany itself (by answering the very question of what it means to be German).Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is to the philosophical foundations of this large problem that we shall now turn; for, doing so will also enable us to understand how the most important transformation in the development of Heidegger’s own thinking required him to find his way through a prolonged and profound philosophical instance of such existential death and rebirth.