MARTIN HEIDEGGER'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEATH
By Manuel B. Dy, Jr.
According to Heidegger, the being of man is a being-in-the-world. Man is primordially directed towards the
world and has the power-to-be in the world. His being in the world consists in being alongside with things,
the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, that Heidegger calls "There-being". "There-being with others,
"solicitude". The being of man is Dasein, "There-being is the There of Being among beings-it lets beings
be (manifest), thereby rendering all encounter with them possible."
By being in the world, by being involved all encounter in it, Dasein has the power to be. Once thrown into
the world, Dasein realizes its own possibilities, it constantly actualizes its potentialities of existence. As
such, man is always ahead of himself; in his being he is always ahead of himself, ahead of what he
actually is; Being thrown into the world, he discovers himself there absorbed in things and people, and
constantly realizing his own possibilities for being. This is what Heidegger calls Care', the fundamental
structure of Dasein.
The primary item in care, therefore, is the ahead-of-itself of Dasein. Dasein as project always comports
itself towards its potentiality for being. There is always something still 'outstanding' in man. As long as
man exists in the world, his potentiality for being is never exhausted. According to Heidegger, there is
always something to be settled yet in man. Man, as long as he IS, has never reached his "wholeness".
Man always has an unfinished character.
Man reaches his wholeness in death. In death, man loses his potentiality for being, he losses his 'there'.
There is no more outstanding in man, everything is finished, settled for him, He is no longer being there.
What is death for Heidegger? How is death related to the being of man, and what is man's attitude
towards death? Since death is the transition of man from Dasein to no-longer-Dasein, there is therefore
the impossibility of experiencing this transition. No one has ever come out alive from death to tell us about
death. How then are we going to describe death? What is Heidegger's phenomenology of death?
Our first experience of death is the death of others. We can see, hear, people die, If man is a being with
others, will the death of others then give us the objective knowledge about death? But the death of
another person, Heidegger argues, makes him no longer a person but a thing, a corpse, although he may
be the object of concern for those who remain behind. However, we have no way of knowing the loss of
being that the dying man "suffers". We never experience the death of another as he himself has
experienced it. Even if, granted that it is possible for us to analyze the dying of others, we can substitute
and represent the dying of any Dasein for another, will our representation be valid and justified? True,
representation is one of the possibilities of man as a being with others, but representation is always a
representation in something, with something. But in death, the totality of man is involved; it is Dasein
coming to an end. Dasein's dying is therefore not representable. "No one can take the other's dying away
from him". Death is always mine. It is a peculiar possibility of my being in which my own being is an issue.
Mineness and existence are constitutive of death.
Death is therefore the possibility of man, a 'not-yet' which will be. And what is peculiar in this possibility is
that it has the character of no-longer-Dasein, of no-longer-being-there, and belongs to the particular man,
his very own, non-representable.
We have said that as long as man exists, he lacks a totality, a wholeness; and this lack comes to its end
with death. This lack of totality of man is not the lack of togetherness of a thing which can be completed
by piecing together entities or parts. This totality and wholeness of man is a 'not-yet' of man which has to
be. This 'not-yet' of man, moreover, is something that is already accessible to him. Dasein, as long as it is,
is already its 'not-yet'. This 'not-yet' of Dasein is like the 'not-yet' of unripeness of the fruit. The ripeness of
the fruit is the end of its lack-of –ripeness, the end of the 'not-yet' of the fruit. As long as the fruit is not
ripe, it is already it is already its 'not-ripe'. There is, however a difference between the ripeness of the fruit
and the death of man. With the fruit, the ripeness is the fulfillment of its being. In the case of man, on the
other hand, in death, man may or may not arrive at his fulfillment. And here Heidegger throws a striking
remark: What is unfortunate is that " so little is it the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with
death, that Dasein may will have passed its ripeness before the end. For the most part, Dasein ends in
unfulfilment..."
Dasein therefore, as long as it exists, is already, its end. The end of Dasein is not to be understood as
being-at-an-end but as being-towards-the-end. Heidegger's phenomenology of death therefore is not a
description of death of an after-life, but of man as a being-towards-his-end, a being-towards-death. If man
is a being-towards-death, and his being in the world has the fundamental structure of care, then the end
of man must be clarified in terms of care, his basic state.
Being-towards-death and Care
Heiddeger defines care as "ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in (the world) as Being-alongside entities which
we encounter (within-the-world)." Care, in other words, has the following characteristics of Dasein's being:
existence, in the 'ahead –of-itself'; facticity, in the 'Being-already-in'; and falling, in the 'Being-alongside'.
Being-towards-death must be understood in these terms.
Man, in being ahead of himself, as project, comes to the diclosure of his extreme possibility, the possibility
that he will no longer be 'there'. Death is the uttermost 'not-yet' of man, something towards which he
comports himself. Death is not just something that happens to man; it is something impending. The
impending is not that of the coming of the storm, or the arrival of a friend, or a journey one is going to
undertake. The impending of death is distinctive, because it is the possibility which is ownmost; death is
mine, something that I have to take over myself. In death, I stand before myself in my ownmost
potentiality for being, because the issue in death is no other than my being in the world. Death is the
possibility of my no-longer-possible, of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there; the possibility that must be,
something that I cannot outstrip. My being ahead of myself in my project towards the world with all its
possibilities reveals to me my uttermost possibility, distinctively, impending, because this possibility is my
ownmost which cuts me off from others (non-relational) and which I cannot outstrip.
This possibility of my absolute impossibility is not just obtained in my rare moments. As soon as I am born
into the world, I am already thrown into this possibility. I of death. This possibility is revealed only in the
basic mood of man, anxiety, in the experience of dread wherein man comes face to face with his
potentiality for being. Anxiety is not fear, because fear is concerned with something determinate which
threatens my immediate involvement of things. Anxiety is of something indeterminate; what I dread is not
an entity, but the world itself, my being-in-the-world.
Many are indeed ignorant of death as the possibility which is ownmost, non-relational and cannot be
outstripped. They are engrossed in immediate concern with things, thus covering up their ownmost beingtowards-death, fleeing in the face of it. But the fact remains that they are being-towards-death, that man is
dying even in his 'fallenness', in his being absorbed in the everyday world of concern. Let us describe
further this fallenness of man in being-towards-death.
Everyday Being-towards-death-Inauthenticity
In the publicness of everyday concern, death is known as a mishap that frequently occurs. The self of the
public, the impersonal 'they' talks of death as 'a case of death,' an event that happens constantly. The
'they' hides death by saying, "People die...one of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it
has nothing to do with us." The 'they' realizes that death is something indefinite that must arrive ultimately,
but for the moment, the 'they' says, it has nothing to do with us. It is something not yet present-at-hand,
and therefore offers no threat. The 'they' says, "one dies", but the one is nobody, no one will claim that it is
I. In this way, the 'they' levels off death, makes it ambiguous, and hides the true aspects of this possibility,
the mineness, non-relational, and that which cannot be outstripped.
This is the inauthentic mode of man of being-towards-death. He loses himself in the 'they' and forgets his
distinctive potentiality for being. The 'they' has a very nice way of hiding the true nature of man's beingtowards-the-end. When a person is dying, the 'they' talks to him into the belief that he will not die, that he
will recover his normal state or traquilized everydayness. By traquilizing death, the neighbors console the
dying person and of course themselves. The normal carefreeness of everyday concern must not be
disturbed. To start thinking about death is considered by the 'they' as a sign of cowardice, of fear, of
insecurity. The "'they' does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death". Instead the anxiety
in the face of death is taken as a sign of weakness. According to the 'they', the attitude to the fact that one
dies is that of indifferent tranquility. For Heidegger, this indifferent tranquility of course-means the
alienation of man from his ownmost non-relational potentiality for being-towards-death.
Everyday being-towards-death is therefore a "falling", a constant fleeing in the face of death. The
everyday man is constantly evading death, hiding it and giving new explanations for it. Actually, the
everyday man even in his falling, attests to the fact that he is a being-towards-death, although he assures
himself in the inauthentic, impersonal 'they' that he is still living. Even in the mode of tranquilized
indifference towards his uttermost possibility of existence, man still has his ownmost potentiality for being
an issue.
The impersonal 'they' is also certain of death. The 'they' says, "Death certainly comes, but not right away".
The 'but...is at the same time a denial of certainty. This is the ambiguous attitude of the 'they' with regards
to the certainty of death. However, this certainty of the 'they' seems to be only an empirical certainty
derived from several cases of other people's death. As long as man remains on this level of certainty,
death can never really become certain for him.
But, though man may seem, to talk only of this empirical certainty of death in the public, he is really at
bottom aware of another higher certainty than that of the empirical, and this is the certainty of one's own
death. The inauthentic man, however, evades this higher certainty in carefreeness, in an air of superior
indifference. He stops worrying about death and busies himself in the urgency of concern, deferring death
as "sometime later." Thus, he covers up also the fact that death is possible at any moment, the
indefiniteness of death which goes with its certainty. The inauthentic man confers a kind of definiteness
upon this indefiniteness of death by intervening it with urgent matters of the everyday. However, inasmuch
as he flees from death, the everyday man actually derives his certainty of death from the fact that being
thrown into the world is being-towards-death. Death is ever present in the very being of man.
What, on the other hand, is the authentic being-towards-death?
Authentic Being-towards-death
The authentic response of man in his awareness of being-towards-death is not of evasion, of covering up
death's true implications, nor of giving new possibility in which his very existence is an issue. Facing this
possibility is not actualizing it, that is, bringing it to happen. That would be suicide, and suicide demolishes
all the potentialities of man instead of bringing them into a whole totality. Nor does it mean that man must
brood over death, calculating it; for death is not something one can have at one's disposal.
The authentic being-towards-death, man realizes that death is his ownmost possibility, and thus the
awareness comes to him of his potentiality for being, for fulfilling himself, his own being. He must
therefore wrench himself away from the impersonal 'they' and make himself an individual, alone.
Death individualizes man, because death does not belong to everybody, but to one's own self. This
individualizing by death reveals the 'there' of man, his being –alongside-things (concern) and his beingwith-others (solicitude). It reveals to man that his concern and solitude is nothing when his ownmost
potentiality for being is itself an issue in death. Authentic being-towards-death does not mean, however,
cutting oneself off from all relationships; rather it means projecting oneself upon his ownmost potentiality
for being rather that upon the possibility of the' they' self. Death is known to the authentic man as nonrelational, and with this awareness, he as it were understands and chooses his possibilities of relational,
and with this awareness, he as it were understands and chooses his possibilities of relations in the light of
the extreme possibility of death as non-relational.
The authentic man does not outstrip death. His anticipation does not evade death; rather it accepts this
possibility. In accepting death as the possibility, man frees himself. This is to mean that man, by
anticipation is free for his own death; he is delivered from becoming lost in possibilities. While before, in
the 'they-self', he was secure in the impersonal but dictated by it, now in anticipation, in accepting death
as his extreme possibility, man for the first time can understand and choose among the possibilities in the
ambiguous 'they' and he is now free to be himself, the person he himself wants to be. His possibilities are
now open before him, determined by his end and understood, thus, as finite. In anticipation of death as
non-relational, man gains an understanding of his potentiality-for-being of others. Since anticipation of this
possibility which is not to be outstripped opens to man all the possibilities for making himself, man now
comes to grip of his wholeness in advance. He is now open to the possibility of existing a whole
potentiality- for-being.
The certainty of death does not have the character of certainty, which is objective, of the present-at-hand.
The certainty of death corresponds to the certainty of being-in-the-world. Thus, when the authentic man
holds death for true, what is demanded form him is not just one definite kind of behavior, but the full
authenticity. In anticipation, man makes certain first his ownmost being in its totality.
The indefiniteness which goes with the certainty of death calls for authentic Dasein to open itself to the
constant threat arising out from its being 'there', a being in the world. The state of mind that is open to this
constant threat is anxiety. In anxiety, man comes face to face with the 'nothing' of possible impossibility of
his existence. What he is anxious about is no other than his potentiality for being. Anxiety individualizes
man, and in individualizing him, makes him become certain of the totality of his potentiality for being.
Thus, authentic being-towards-death is essentially anxiety.
Heidegger summarizes this authentic being-towards-death in the following words:
Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of
being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned
FREEDOM TOWARDS DEATH- a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the 'they', and
which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.
Karl Rahner's Notion of Death
Heidegger's freedom towards death seems to reach a theological development in Karl Rahner. For
Rahner, death is not merely something that occurs to man, an event that overtakes him, nor is it an evil
that befalls him unexpectedly. Death, for Rahner, is an act of man, an act of self-affirmation in regards to
his acceptance or refusal to be his authentic self, a self that is open to transcendence. Death, thus,
constitutes the highest act of freedom of man, the freedom to say yes or no to his openness to God.
If death constitutes the highest act of freedom of man, it is because death involves the whole man. At
death, there is no longer any concupiscence on the part off man. By concupiscence Rahner means the
evil that lessens the power of man to choose between good and evil; it is the power that prevents man
from making a total commitment either to the good or the evil. Because of concupiscence, man never
makes a total final commitment to the good or to the evil in the course of his life. It is only at death, that
his commitment reaches a climax. Death brings a kind of finality, a definity to the life-long decision of man
with regards to his destiny;
Death should not be taken as an isolated point in the life of man. Rather, it is to be taken as the
culminating point of his life, the point where he finally reaches a fulfillment, a totality. Death, in other
words, is not to be isolated from the other free acts of man; it is understood and it becomes significant
only if it is considered against the background of the totality of man's life, because in death, the very issue
is no other than man's total being, his total commitment.
As such, death should therefore be present in every free act of man. Every free act of man should carry
an awareness of his fulfillment to a commitment, a realization that this one free act helps to build a total
decision of his whole being to the good (or to the bad). The very presence of death is in the very being of
man. The anticipation of death brings man face to face with the possibility of being itself in an
impassioned freedom towards death, with the possibility of making an active consummation from within of
the totality of his own being.