Çiçek Yavuz, Haverford College This paper investigates the kind of death mentioned throughout Heidegger’s account of being-towards-death: is it a biological death, or a more existential form of death? Through an examination of Heidegger’s remarks on death as well as William Blattner’s defense of the existential account of death, I argue that the death of Dasein is marked by its utmost condition for its sheer existence: the absolute non-revivability of Dasein. This condition marks the death of Dasein as being inevitably tied to a biological bodily totality. As long as this core condition is fulfilled, the existential deaths of Dasein won’t shatter Dasein’s structure as having possibilities of being.
In Being and Time, Heidegger builds a detailed philosophy of death by developing an account of being-towards-death.1 This framework, however, surprisingly lacks a thorough discussion of death in either a purely biological or purely existential interpretation, thereby creating doubt as to what kind of death his framework refers to.2 Pieces from Heidegger’s existential analytic necessitate that being-in-the-world (and thus, being-towards-death) must avoid talk of the body as an entity, while Heidegger’s descriptions of death picture it as primarily grounded upon one’s biology.3 This paper attempts to solve this ambivalence by arguing that Dasein’s death is characterised by its non-revivability: the only condition in which Dasein can maintain all of its properties is that Dasein must not contain, but still be
Heidegger understands time in terms of possibilities, and accordingly, death is for humans a possibility. According to Heidegger, confrontation with death is the most profound factor in the question of the meaning of being. Being-towards-death is a term delineating Dasein’s approach to the possibility of its death: Dasein comports itself to the possibility of death. Because possibilities are integral to our lived experience (and our thrownness), being-towards-death is not just expecting an event in the future to happen, but it is a way of being. 1
Possibly due to Heidegger’s aversion to the involvement of the body in the death of Dasein, there has been an ongoing debate in Heidegger scholarship about how death in the context of Dasein’s no-longer-being-able-tobe-there should be interpreted. An “existential” reading of the death of Dasein can be understood as a nontraditional interpretation of death: it is fundamentally grounded on a death that marks the end of Dasein’s possibilities of being-in-the-world, rather than the ordinary meaning of death as the end of bodily operations. 2
Heidegger uses the term “being-in-the-world” to describe Dasein’s activities in the world. Heidegger also uses this terminology to avoid talk of spatial-relatedness, such as an object or subject: Dasein is not in the world as an object is in space. Rather, the term attempts to emphasize that Dasein concernedly comports itself to the world. As being-towards-death is a possibility of Dasein, a view that inauthentically views bodies as entities spatially related to each other cannot be a part of Heidegger’s existential analytic. 58
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Death Before Dying: Developing a Multi-Layered Account of Dasein
