ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger, who was born in Germany, is the twentieth century’s most influential philosopher. This chapter concerns Heidegger’s philosophy of death in Being and Time, his magnum opus. In Being and Time, Heidegger advances the idea that authentic being toward death enables the person to experience genuine freedom and resolve. In Being and Time, Heidegger deliberately avoids terms like self, subject, consciousness, and even human being. Heidegger wants to dissolve the Cartesian-Kantian starting point of the human being, which views the subject as the source of what is rational and logical. Moods, according to Heidegger, are not simply emotions or feelings in one’s head, but are the person’s antennae, which attune her and dispose her toward beings and others. Heidegger thinks anxiety is the most revelatory mood because anxiety is triggered in the face of death. Like boredom, anxiety is a fundamental mood, and is not anxiety about any single worldly thing, but a mood concerning being-in-the-world as such.
