Being-Toward-Death

Definition

Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) is heidegger-martin's term for Dasein's relationship to its ownmost, non-relational, and not-to-be-outstripped possibility. Death is "ownmost" because no one can die for me; "non-relational" because it strips away all relations to others and the world; "not to be outstripped" because it is certain and inevitable. "Death is Dasein's ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue" (Being and Time, §53, H. 263). Authentic Being-toward-death is anticipation (Vorlaufen)—wrenching oneself from the they and taking up one's ownmost possibility. The they evades death by saying "one dies"—transforming death into a public event that happens to "no one in particular."

Key Thinkers

• heidegger-martin — developed the concept in Being and Time (1927) as the pathway to authenticity; anticipation of death individualizes Dasein and reveals care as a whole.
• arendt-hannah — critiques Heidegger's mortality-centered ontology; positions natality (the capacity to begin) as the central political category. "Natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought" (The Human Condition, p. 9).
• (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — stages of grief model; engages with the psychology of dying. No author page yet — see log.md.)

Related Concepts

• dasein — the entity that is toward death.
• care — being-toward-death reveals care as a whole.
• temporality — being-toward-death is the future-oriented ecstasis of temporality.
• arendt-hannah — natality vs. mortality debate.
• uncanny — being-toward-death reveals uncanniness.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss being-toward-death:

• source-notes/heidegger-1927-being-and-time — the foundational analysis (§46-53, §62); death as ownmost possibility, anticipation, the they's evasion.
• source-notes/arendt-1958-the-human-condition — natality vs. mortality; the political category against Heidegger's metaphysical emphasis.
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the death one cannot picture, housed in an interior: "it is finally impossible to visualize our own deaths, for 'whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators'" (Freud, SE 14: 289, quoted p. 119); "For Freud, every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double" (p. 118); and the mirror's double office — "The mirror that memorializes also reincarnates, reconstituting us as phantom spectators, witnesses to our own irreplaceability… helping us, in effect, to survive our own deaths" (p. 119) — with the Etruscan mirrors in Freud's collection, "originally buried in tombs," as the interior's device for "passing through… deaths: the Etruscan mirror opened a window onto immortality" (p. 119). Where Heidegger's anticipation (Vorlaufen) faces death resolutely, Freud's mirrored interior dissolves it into spectatorship. See the-double, mirror, uncanny.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — death's reversibility (ch. 2 on Symbolic Exchange and Death): death not at the end of life but its ground — "It is life that reaches the end and death that is immortal, never-ending"; "Death – the impossible exchange between life and death – doubles life" (SE, 133–40); 'Death in Samarkand' as the folk-figure of the same structure — "It is our very attempt to escape fate that is our fate" (p. 103); and Freud's Eros/Thanatos, Mauss's potlatch and Saussure's anagrams as the three repressed intuitions of this reversibility, each thinker getting "close to the discovery… of the fundamental reversibility of the world" and systematizing it away (pp. 99–100). See reversibility, the-double, ceremonial-and-linear-time.

Open Questions

• How does being-toward-death relate to dwelling? Is dwelling a form of being-toward-death?
• Can architecture engage mortality without becoming morbid or nostalgic?
• What is the relationship between being-toward-death and spectacle? Does spectacular culture evade death? mortality authenticity temporality Sein-zum-Tode