Heidegger’s use of the ancient creation fable at the end of Division One ensures that his readers begin the second division of Being and Time knowing that its analysis of Dasein’s underlying ontological structure will aim to connect the concept of care and that of time. It soon becomes clear that he wishes to forge that connection through a process of methodological self-reflection. He claims that his inter- pretation of the Being of Dasein hitherto – or, more precisely, its underlying fore-having or fore-sight – has been doubly restricted. First, by concentrating on Dasein’s average everydayness, he has focused upon inauthentic modes of Dasein’s Being to the detriment of its capacity for existentiell authenticity. And, second, by concen- trating on the existential structure of specific moods and states of mind, he has downplayed the general structure of Dasein’s life understood as a whole or a unity. Division Two makes good these omissions, and in a way which contributes to his overarching attempt to demonstrate the fundamentality of time to Dasein’s Being. In
effect, the tripartite thematic concern of Division Two is: authen- ticity, totality and temporality. This chapter follows Heidegger’s initial development of the first two themes; the two following chapters examine his treatment of the third.
Given Heidegger’s emphasis on the circular hermeneutic struc- ture of understanding, it is natural to envisage Division Two as deepening our understanding of the claims made in Division One by drawing out their implications. The relevant image of their rela- tion would be that of two turns around a spiral: each turn returns us to our starting point, but at a deeper level of ontological under- standing, and each return opens the possibility of a new turn at a deeper level. Thus, Division One begins from a provisional concep- tion of Dasein as the being who questions, and, by unfolding the articulated unity of the worldly existential structure implicit in that conception, it returns us to a deepened understanding of Dasein in terms of care; this is the first turn around the spiral. Division Two begins from that deepened conception of Dasein as care, and unfolds the articulated unity of temporality implicit in it, thus revealing that the care-structure presupposes an internal relation between the Being of Dasein and time; this is the second turn. The image of a spiral further incorporates Heidegger’s rejection of the idea of absolute starting points and termini in human inquiry; for it implies that each new turn of ontological discovery presupposes its prede- cessors (and ultimately an initial leap into the circling process), and that the results of each turn will engender another turn.
Such an image of the book’s progress is not exactly wrong; but it becomes clear by the end of the first two chapters of Division Two that it does not capture the full complexity of its internal struc- ture. For the results of Heidegger’s study of mortality, guilt and conscience do not simply deepen our understanding of the claims advanced in Division One and summarized in the characterization of Dasein’s Being as care; by providing an uncanny background or horizon against which to re-articulate them, they also destabilize and even in a sense subvert them. It will be an important part of this chapter’s business to try to understand the deep, but creative and even revelatory tension that this creates between the two Divisions of Being and Time.
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1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 31 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7111DEATH AND MORTALITY (§§46–53)
Any philosophical attempt to grasp Dasein’s existence as a totality or whole faces the problem that, in so far as Dasein exists, it is ori- ented towards the next moment of its existence and so is incomplete; but, once its existence has been brought to an end, once its life as a whole is over and so available for examination, Dasein itself is no longer there to prosecute that examination. In more existential terminology: Dasein always already projects upon possibilities, and so is oriented towards the not-yet-actual; so that structural incom- pletion is overcome only when Dasein becomes no-longer-Being- there. Thus, the idea of Dasein grasping its existence as a totality seems to be a contradiction in terms: for Dasein to be a whole is for Dasein to be no longer, and so to be no longer capable of relating to itself as a whole.
The problem is death. Death brings human existence to an end, and so completes it, but no one can experience her own death. As Wittgenstein put it, unlike dying, one’s death is not an event in one’s life – not even the last one.1It seems, therefore, that no Dasein
can grasp its own existence as a whole. But this is not just a stum- bling block for every human individual trying to make sense of her existence; it is a profound challenge to Heidegger’s sense of what he has achieved in Division One, and of what he can achieve with his phenomenological method. For, remember, his concluding char- acterization of Dasein’s Being as care in Division One was meant to allow us to grasp Dasein’s Being as a whole, and thus provide a stable, even if provisional, resting-place for his existential analytic. But one aspect of the care-structure is Being-ahead-of-itself; and it is precisely this articulation – that is, Dasein’s orientation towards the not-yet-actual – that hides within it the problematic of death, and hence conceals an essential incompleteness in the analysis. And the prospects of filling that analytical gap do not look at all promising, if one further recalls that Heidegger’s phenomenolog- ical method relies upon Dasein’s capacity to allow phenomena to disclose themselves as they are in themselves in its encounters with them. But we have just seen that no Dasein ever encounters its own death; so how, even in principle, could there be a genuinely
phenomenological understanding of death, and so a genuinely complete existential analytic of Dasein?
Dasein can, of course, relate to the death of others, whether as dying or as dead. But this does not mean that we can grasp another’s life as a totality, and thereby gain a proper understanding of the Being of Dasein in its wholeness. We can experience the transition from another Dasein’s Being (-as-dying) to their no-longer-Being; we relate to their corpse as more than just a body – it is, rather, a body from which life has departed; and, as we can continue to relate to the dead person as dead – through funerals, rites of commemo- ration and the cult of graves – our lives after their death can involve modes of Being-with them (as dead, or no longer with us). But these are aspects of the significance of this person’s dying and death to those of us still living; they are modes of our continued existence, not of theirs. To grasp the life of the dead person as a whole, we must grasp the ontological meaning of her dying and death to her; it is the totality or wholeness of her life that is at issue. Our access to the loss and suffering that this person’s dying signifies for others brings us no closer to the loss-of-Being that she suffers, and so no closer to what it is for an individual Dasein’s existence to attain wholeness or completion.
Nevertheless, this false trail carries an implication that will turn out to be crucial for our purposes, namely that no one can repre- sent another with respect to her dying and death, that death is in every case ineliminably mine, unavoidably that of one particular individual. But before pursuing this, we must gain a more detailed understanding of the phenomenon of death and its role in the life of Dasein – uncover its existential significance. Death is the end of a person’s life – but what sort of ‘end’? Presumably, that in which Dasein’s distinctive lack of totality finds its completion – but what sort of totality is that?
Death for Dasein is not a limit in the way that a frame is the limit of a picture or a kerbstone the limit of a road. The picture ends at the frame, but it is not annihilated by it in the way that death annihilates Dasein; the kerbstone marks the end of the road and the beginning of a new environment into which one can step from the road, whereas the death of the body is not another mode
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1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 31 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7111of its life. Such disanalogies demonstrate the futility of modelling any aspect of Dasein’s existence on present-at-hand things; and ready-to-hand things are equally inappropriate. We might, for example, think of a human life as the accumulation of elements (moments, events, experiences) into a whole – as a sum of money is an accumulation of the coins and notes that make it up. Death then appears as the final element, the piece that completes the jigsaw. But, of course, when death comes to Dasein, Dasein is no longer there; life is no almost-complete edifice to which death can provide the coping stone.
The life of vegetable matter, of plants or fruit, might prove a better analogy: death would then signify the natural culmination of Dasein’s existence in just the way that the mature state of a plant or the ripened state of a fruit completes its life cycle. But maturity is the fulfilment of the growing plant, just as ripeness is the end towards which the unripe fruit tends; whereas death is not the fulfil- ment of Dasein – Dasein may, and often does, die unfulfilled, with many of its distinctive possibilities unexplored, its telos unattained. The same is true of non-human animals: dogs and cats live and die, and they can often die without having actualized many of the possibilities that their nature leaves open to them. But Heidegger distinguishes sharply between the death of animals (which he calls their ‘perishing’) and that of Dasein. He acknowledges that Dasein is vulnerable to death in just the way that any living creature is so vulnerable, so that its biological or organic end (what Heidegger calls Dasein’s ‘demise’ – cf. BT, 49: 291) is open to medical study. Even its demise, however, is not identical with the perishing of non- human animals, because Dasein’s biological or organic identity is necessarily inflected by its distinctively existential mode of Being – in other words, by the fact that its life can be imbued with a know- ledge of its own inevitable end, that it can relate to death as such. Dogs and cats must die, but that fact is only coded into their lives at the level of their species-identity. They strive to avoid death by obtaining nourishment and avoiding predators, and they contribute to the survival of their species by reproducing themselves. But these are not decisions that they take as individual creatures, but rather patterns of behaviour that they inherit and enact with as little
consideration or awareness, as little scope for individual choice, as they have with respect to their bodily form.
In short, an animal’s relation to death is as different from Dasein’s relation to death as animal existence is different from human exist- ence. Dasein has a life to lead, it exists – it must make decisions about which existentiell possibilities will be actualized and which will not. Death’s true significance as the end of Dasein, as its comple- tion or totalization, thus depends upon the significance of Dasein’s existence as thrown projection, as a being whose Being is care. Hence, to understand death, we must attempt to undertand it existentially – that is, as one possibility of Dasein’s Being. Since no Dasein can directly apprehend its own death, we must shift our analytical focus from death understood as an actuality to death understood as a possibility; only then can we intelligibly talk of death as something towards which any existing Dasein can stand in any kind of substan- tial, comprehending relationship. In other words, we must reconceive our relation to our death not as something that is realized when we die, but, rather, as something that we realize (or fail to) in our life. What, then, is the distinctive character of this possibility of our Being, as opposed to any other (such as eating a meal, or playing football, or reading philosophy)? Heidegger gives us the following succinct summary:
Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped. As such, death is something distinctivelyimpending.
(BT, 50: 294) Death impends, it stands before us as something that is not yet; but, unlike any other possibility of Dasein’s Being, it can only stand before us. A storm or a friend’s arrival can impend; but they can also arrive, be made actual. By contrast we cannot relate to our death as anything other than an impending possibility – for, when that possibility is actualized, we are necessarily no-longer-Dasein; death makes any Dasein’s existence absolutely impossible. Hence, we can comport ourselves towards death only as a possibility; and,
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1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 31 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7111further, it stands before us as a possibility throughout our exist- ence. A storm or a friend’s arrival does not impend at every moment of our existence; but there is no moment at which our death is not possible – no moment of our existence that might not be our last. Hence, death – unlike any other possibility of Dasein’s Being – is always and only a possibility; our fatedness to this purely impending threat makes concrete the articulated unity of our existence as thrown projection, our being always already delivered over to being ahead of ourselves.
Since what impends is Dasein’s utter non-existence, and since Dasein must take over that possibility in every moment of its exist- ence, Heidegger claims that, in relation to death, Dasein stands before its ownmost potentiality-for-Being – that possibility in which what is at issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Since Dasein is certain to die at some point, he further claims that death is a possibility that is not to be outstripped. And to complete his characterization, Heidegger (recalling his earlier claim that no one can take another’s death away from her) also claims that, in Dasein’s comportment towards its death, ‘all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone’ (BT, 50: 294) – in other words, that death is a non-relational possibility.
Of course, the non-relationality of death is hardly unique to it among our existential possibilities; if no one else can die my death, it is also true that no one else can sneeze my sneezes. However, sneezing fails to exemplify the other two elements in Heidegger’s tripartite existential characterization of death (our very existence as Being-in-the-world is not at issue when we catch a cold, and at the very least it makes sense to imagine a human being who never sneezed). But, in another sense, it is precisely Heidegger’s point that the non-relational nature of death highlights an aspect of Dasein’s comportment to any and all of its existential possibilities; for, in making concrete Dasein’s Being-ahead-of-itself, the fact that no one can die our death for us merely recalls us to the fact that our life is ours alone to live.
But, before examining this implication of Heidegger’s analysis more closely, it is important to see that we have so far passed over a critical complication in Heidegger’s approach to death. It may seem
that, by treating death from an existential point of view – that is, as a possibility of Dasein’s Being to which it must relate from within its existence – Heidegger has overcome death’s obdurate resistance to any phenomenological grasp of its being. But such a conclusion would involve overlooking one remarkable feature of death under- stood as an existential possibility – the fact that it is not really an existential possibility at all. For any genuine existential possibility is one that might be made actual by the Dasein whose possibility it is: I might eat the meal I’m cooking, or play the game for which I’m training. But our own death cannot be realized in our existence; if our death becomes actual, we are no longer there to experience it. In other words, death is not just the possibility of our own non- existence, of our own absolute impossibility; it is an impossible possibility – or, more frankly, an existential impossibility. But, if it amounts to a contradiction in terms to think of death as an exis- tential possibility, of however distinctive a kind, then it would seem that Heidegger must be wrong to think that he can gain phenom-