ABSTRACT

This chapter explores Heideggers reflections in Being and Time on that he termed being-toward-death. It is a reflection under the rubric of ontology and existential analysis rather than metaphysics of death. Being-toward-death, as Heidegger spoke of it, comprises four aspects: death is certainty, indeterminate, insuperable and non-relational. Underlying Heidegger's conception of being-toward-death is ontology of temporality according to which the present moment is experienced as arising from the past and as having an orientation to the future. Authenticity is not a permanent state, Heidegger insisted, but a way of being that one may rise to in certain moments. The transformation from an inauthentic to an authentic way of life begins with a certain kind of guiltnot in the usual moral connotation of the word but again in an ontological sense. Heidegger's concept of thrownness: the human being finds itself cast into a lifeworld and in the midst of relations and concerns that provide it with a fundamental orientation.