Death as an Existential and Finitude of Possibility in Being and Time

Unlike the ordinary thought on death that describes it in terms of the event at the end of life and thus object-loss, and ignores the specificity of one's own death, Heidegger develops his ontological theory of death as one's "ownmost" and non-relational possibility which is in each case uniquely mine and is never to be taken over and experienced by anyone else For Heidegger, death must be considered existentially, in its relation to man's existence as concern and as "the there of Being" Unlike perishing as a biological event or demise as the factual interpretation of the fact, dying is Dasein's structural lace of possibility of its own, in the sense that Dasein in always already thrown in the world It is not epistemic condition (ie the knowledge that it will die), but its ontological structure (the fact that it is temporally finite) The significant feature of dying is that Dasein in fact progressing towards its end In his analysis of such related themes with death as "conscience," "guilt," and "anticipatory resoluteness," Heidegger shows that Dasein can assume the foundation of its own Being by understanding its original being indebtedness The call of conscience, which comes from the resources of Dasein itself to recall Dasein itself, forces the collapse of the they The call further reveals Dasein's Being-guilty and its groundlessness in that Dasein has in every case already been thrown and abandoned to as particular set of possibilities Anticipatory resoluteness finally brings Dasein face to face with its groundlessness and nothingness, shattering the bondage of the they to a fixation with actuality that closes off genuine possibilities