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Death and Demise in Being and Time

Mortals die their death in life.

Martin Heidegger1

1.1 Introduction: The State of the Debate

This introductory chapter seeks to answer the question of what Heidegger
means by “death” (Tod) in Being and Time – and begin to justify that answer.2
I take up this weighty topic with some trepidation (if not quite fear and
trembling) in part because to say that the meaning of “death” in Being and
Time is controversial is to strain the limits of understatement. In addition to the
emotionally freighted nature of the topic itself (to which we will return), I think
four main factors contribute to and perpetuate this controversy: (1) Heidegger’s
confusing terminology; (2) the centrality of the issue to the text as a whole; (3)
the demanding nature of what is required to adjudicate the matter; and (4) the
radically polarized scholarly literature on the subject. One of my main goals here
is to suggest a way to move beyond the controversy that currently divides the
ûeld, so let me begin by saying a bit about its four main contributing factors.
The ûrst and most obvious cause of the controversy is that those passages in
Being and Time where Heidegger describes phenomenologically what he means
(and does not mean) by “death” are initially quite obscure. Heidegger deliber-
ately employs a non-commonsensical terminology, for example, when he
formally deûnes “the full existential-ontological concept of death” in the
following important but initially ambiguous terms: “death, as the end of
Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost, non-relational, certain and as such indeûnite, and
non-surpassable possibility” (BT 303/SZ 258–9), and again, more notoriously,

1
“Die Sterblichen sterben den Tod im Leben.” Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin’s Earth and
Heaven [1959]” (EHP 190/GA4 165).
2
I say “begin” because I think some of the best evidence for the reading advanced here is the
revealing light it casts on the interconnected issues taken up in subsequent chapters, which
develop and extend aspects of this analysis while also focusing on details and implications
of the view not addressed here (as well as addressing some critical responses to it).

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when he characterizes death “as the possibility of the impossibility of existence in

general” (BT 307/SZ 262 [translations frequently emended]). Conversely, and
even more confusingly (at least for unwary readers), he also misleadingly
employs an only apparently commonsensical terminology, using ordinary words
such as “death,” “demise,” “perishing,” “possibility,” and “existence [that is,
Dasein]” in ways that turn out to have decidedly non-commonsensical mean-
ings. We will therefore need to spend a signiûcant amount of time clarifying
some of Heidegger’s crucial philosophical terms of art in what follows.
The second source of the controversy is that a great deal turns on
Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of death. John Haugeland rightly
observes that “death, as Heidegger means it, is not merely relevant but in fact
the fulcrum of Heidegger’s entire ontology.”3 The main reason death plays
such an important part in the overarching ontological project of Being and
Time, in a nutshell, is that the experience of the phenomenon Heidegger calls
“death” discloses “futurity,” which (as we will see at the end of this chapter) is
itself the ûrst horizon we encounter of originary temporality, that most
fundamental structure of intelligibility that makes possible any understanding
of being at all (or so the early Heidegger of Being and Time believes).4 Even
more to the point for us here, death is also crucial to the text’s existential
ambitions because readers must understand death in order to understand
authenticity (as well as such other interconnected notions as anxiety, con-
science, guilt, and the solus ipse or “self alone”).5 This doubly pivotal role
played by Heidegger’s phenomenology of death in Being and Time means that

3
See John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism,” in
Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 1,
ed. by Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000), 44.
4
Temporality is the most fundamental structure of intelligibility accessible to phenomen-
ology, in the early Heidegger’s view. (See also William Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal
Idealism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999].) As we will see later, in “genuine
anxiety,” our being is, or becomes, sheer becoming; we exist as a pure or empty existing,
deprived of the practical world. (“As we will see later” – as a phrase by which something
still to come enters into and makes itself felt in our present – is not itself a bad indication
of what “futurity” means.)
5
Such “understanding” is not meant by Heidegger to be merely cognitive or intellectual but,
rather, primarily something we personally instantiate or stand-under (such that our
intelligible worlds are implicitly organized in its terms). Indeed (at the risk of being too
provocative at the outset), Being and Time repeatedly contends that each of us must pass
through existential death in order to reach authenticity. (But because this is a death of the
lived possibilities that organize our worldly selves rather than a mortal demise, Heidegger
does not thereby presuppose any kind of metaphysical afterlife.) What is more, I show
below (and would try to demonstrate thoroughly, were I offering a broader interpretation
of Being and Time here) that the multifaceted phenomenon disclosed by death turns out to
be absolutely central to almost all of the subsequent phenomenological analyses in
Division II of Being and Time, many of which disclose interconnected aspects of the same
phenomenon (see n. 6) or trace its roots and subsequent implications.

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ö.ö. ÿÿ÷÷ÿ÷÷÷÷ÿÿÿ: ÷ÿ÷ ÷÷÷÷÷ ÿ÷ ÷ÿ÷ ÷÷÷÷÷÷ þ

critical readers of the text cannot indeûnitely postpone the difûcult task of
coming to terms with Heidegger’s understanding of the phenomenon.
That brings us directly to the third reason for the controversy surrounding
the meaning of death in Being and Time, which is that the phenomenological
method we are supposed to use to adjudicate the matter is particularly difûcult
to employ in this crucial case. The problem, put simply, is that many readers
seem to have trouble experiencing the phenomenon that Heidegger describes as
“death” for themselves. Without such ûrst-personal experience, however,
readers can neither contest nor conûrm Being and Time’s existential
phenomenology of death. It is worth emphasizing that this is a general problem
for critical readers of phenomenological works: Absent our own experience of
the phenomenon at issue, we can neither attest to that phenomenon and its
purported signiûcance (and so conûrm or develop it for ourselves) nor testify
against it (and so seek to contest, reûne, or redescribe it). This general phenom-
enological problem is greatly exacerbated in the case of death, however, because
unlike phenomenological descriptions of more mundane phenomena (such as
using a hammer, staring at a Gestalt ûgure or optical illusion, or even such
unsettling experiences as being stared at by a stranger or feeling the pangs of a
guilty conscience), the phenomenon by means of which we ûrst encounter what
Heidegger means by “death” – namely, the affective attunement of “‘real’ or
‘authentic’ anxiety” (“eigentliche” Angst), in which, as we will see, we experience
ourselves as radically “not-at-home” in the world of our everyday projects – is
both quite “rare” (BT 234/SZ 190) and extremely difûcult to endure.6
The requirement that we must personally undergo an anguished experience
of the utter desolation of the self in order to be able to testify for or against the
adequacy of Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of death thus seems

6
As Heidegger puts it, “this primordial anxiety . . . clears away everything covering over the
fact that Dasein has been abandoned to itself. The ‘nothing’ with which anxiety brings us
face to face unveils the nullity [or “emptiness,” Nichtigkeit] by which Dasein, in its very
basis, is deûned; and this basis itself is as thrownness into death” (BT 356/SZ 308). Hence:
“Being-toward-death is essentially anxiety” (BT 310/SZ 266; see also BT 295/SZ 251).
Blattner nicely articulates this connection in terms of Heidegger’s three inextricably
interconnected existentials (that is, structures that condition all existence): “Death is the
self-understanding that belongs to this experience, anxiety is the mood, and conscience its
discourse” (see William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide [London:
Continuum, 2006], 140). By “primordial” (ursprüngliche) or “real or authentic anxiety,”
Heidegger means anxiety that stems not from individual physiological peculiarities or
unrelated neurochemical imbalances but, instead, from the ontological structure of the
self, speciûcally, from what I shall explain as the “uncanny” lack of ût between the empty
self at our volitional and intentional, existential core, on the one hand, and the practical
world of particular ontic and existentiell choices by which we give this self concrete,
worldly meaning, on the other (see also n. 74). This lack of any perfect ût between self and
world is common to everyone whether we realize it or not, Heidegger suggests (we will
see), and so the source of an ineliminable undercurrent of existential anxiety in all our
everyday lives.

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excessively demanding. Indeed, Heidegger recognizes this and acknowledges

that this demand “remains, from the existentiell point of view [that is, from the
ordinary perspective of our individual lives and everyday concerns], a fantas-
tically unreasonable demand [eine phantastische Zumutung]” (BT 311/SZ
266).7 Nonetheless, without experiencing the phenomenon at issue for our-
selves, we can at best approach Heidegger’s phenomenological descriptions of
death from the outside, and so ûnd them, for example, suggestive, impressive,
or deep-sounding, or else fanciful, idiosyncratic, or even absurd – all surface-
level reactions with which no true philosopher (as a literal “lover of wisdom,”
that is, of practical, life-guiding knowledge) and certainly no existential phe-
nomenologist should ever rest content.8
I ûnd it revealing to contrast those kinds of superûcial evaluations – typical
of but not limited to neophyte readings of Being and Time – with the critical
interpretations advanced in the late 1940s by Heidegger’s ûrst “existentialist”
readers, especially Levinas but also, to a lesser degree, Sartre. As we will see (in
Chapters 6 and 7), both Levinas and Sartre sought to contest and revise
Heidegger’s phenomenology of death by drawing on their own experiences
of the phenomenon at issue (or, in Sartre’s case, his experience of an alterna-
tive but arguably analogous phenomenon, namely, “the look of the other
[person],” which is similarly supposed to result in “the death of my [lived]
possibilities”).9 Perhaps the commendable quest for scholarly objectivity,
which has yielded important advances in clarity and argumentative precision

7
Heidegger’s use of this term has faint Kierkegaardian echoes, since a Zumutung is the
kind of completely “unreasonable demand” that the Judeo-Christian God legendarily
requires of Abraham by commanding him to sacriûce his only son (who is still a child)
after having promised the now elderly Abraham that his descendants would one day be as
plentiful as grains of sand on the beach or stars in the sky ( that is, a demand that goes
against the rationality of our preexisting worldly cares and concerns).
8
For the Heidegger of Being and Time, philosophy must be phenomenological: “Ontology
and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These
terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that
object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology” (BT 62/SZ 38). (We return to
this point in the Concluding Recapitulations.) As we will see in Chapter 2, Heidegger will
later abandon this project of fundamental ontology (the attempt to understand “the
meaning of being in general”) and, with it, “philosophy” itself (which he will then identify
with the pursuit of the very “metaphysics” he later tries to help us think beyond).
9
(See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology,
trans. by H. E. Barnes [New York: Philosophical Library, 1956 [original 1943]], 271, 288;
and Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. by R. A. Cohen [Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1987].) When a stranger stares at me, Sartre will argue (using
his famous phenomenological example of being caught looking through a keyhole), my
subjectivity temporarily becomes objectiûed by this stranger’s gaze; that is, I implicitly
experience myself not as stretching out into a world of practical projects that implicitly
deûne me but, instead, as caught and frozen by this stranger’s stare like a bug on a pin,
transformed by a subjectivity outside myself into one (for me inaccessible and so

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over the last century, has also rendered us much more reluctant to inject
ourselves into the discussion by testing Heidegger’s descriptions for ourselves
(where that also means testing them on ourselves, that is, comparing them to
our own ûrst-personal encounters with the phenomenon at issue). Or perhaps
Heidegger’s own appalling misadventure with Nazism has led interpreters to
distance themselves from the fact that, as he acknowledged in Being and Time,
“a deûnite ontic interpretation of authentic existence, a factical ideal of Dasein,
underlies our ontological interpretation” (BT 358/SZ 310).10

unknowable) objective moment, my lived possibilities suddenly reduced to nothing but

an actuality from which I remain alienated. (“In the look, the death of my possibilities
makes me experience the other’s freedom; . . . and I am myself, inaccessible to myself and
yet myself, thrown and abandoned within the other’s freedom.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being
and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by Sarah Richmond
[New York: Washington Square, 2021[original 1943]], 369.) Levinas, for his part, still
explicitly discusses “anguish” and “death” in terms very close to Heidegger’s – indeed,
much closer than is usually recognized.
10
This important and often overlooked passage runs, in full (with my explanatory gloss in
brackets): “Is there not, however, a deûnite ontic way of taking authentic existence, a
factical ideal of Dasein, underlying our ontological interpretation of Dasein’s existence?
That is in fact the case. [Here Heidegger is acknowledging that Being and Time’s descrip-
tion of the ontological structure of authentic existence is in fact an idealized portrayal
drawn from his own particular way of experiencing such a transformation from
inauthenticity to authenticity himself.] But this fact is not only one which must not be
denied and which we are forced to concede; it must also be conceived in its positive
necessity, in terms of the object that we have taken as the theme of our investigation. [In
other words, phenomenology always draws on our own individual experiences of things.
Just as we can only work to uncover the fundamental ontological “meaning of being in
general” by ûrst drawing on the unthematized, “pre-ontological” understanding of what
things are that remains implicit in our own practical knowledge, so, he is suggesting here,
we can only develop a formal description of authenticity as a possible existential structure
by drawing on our own individual ways of experiencing such a transition to authenticity
for ourselves.] Philosophy will never seek to deny its ‘presuppositions’ [that is, phenom-
enology should never deny that its insights emerge from the phenomenologist’s own
individual life and hence particular way of experiencing things], but neither may phil-
osophy simply admit them [in that individual form, because that would risk introducing
merely idiosyncratic elements into phenomenology. Rejecting both those options,
Heidegger’s phenomenology instead pursues the following third path.] Philosophy con-
ceives these presuppositions themselves [that is, phenomenology seeks to rigorously
conceptualize the basic structures that underlie and condition the phenomena it exam-
ines, “ontological” structures that make possible our most common ways of experiencing
and describing these everyday “ontic” phenomena] and it unfolds these [ontological
structural] presuppositions with increasing vividness together with that for which they
are presuppositions [namely, the ordinary, ontic phenomena that these structures pur-
portedly condition]. This is the function that the methodological considerations
demanded of us now have” (BT 358/SZ 31. See also BT 360/SZ 312: “Unless we have
an existentiell [or particular individual] understanding, all analysis of existentiality will
remain groundless.”) As a result, there is a (self-enriching) feedback loop between
individual life and phenomenology (so that everyday life informs phenomenology, which

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Yet, should not Heidegger’s admission that his phenomenological analyses

derive ultimately from his own idealized personal experiences have precisely the
opposite effect? That is, should not Heidegger’s demonstration of his own
susceptibility to the grossest errors of judgment instead encourage us to subject
his phenomenological analyses to the most careful scrutiny for ourselves, as his
early existentialist readers undoubtedly sought to do, in part for this very
reason?11 Because it is only by relying on such personal experience that one
can develop either an internal conûrmation or an immanent critique of
Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, the post-existentialist interpretations of
Heidegger seem to me to have made a signiûcant step backward in this critical
regard (with a few important exceptions that we will note along the way), so it
will thus be worthwhile to examine those earlier interpretations in some detail.
Finally, the fourth reason for the persistent controversy about the meaning
of “death” in Being and Time is that, owing to the combined effect of the
aforementioned factors, the interpretive ûeld is now radically polarized, with
the secondary literature starkly divided into two diametrically opposed and
seemingly incommensurable camps. In the ûrst (and much larger) camp, most
traditional scholars, critics, and readers of Being and Time adopt the straight-
forward view that, by “death,” Heidegger must mean the same sort of things
that we normally mean when we talk about “death,” such as demise (Edwards),
decease (Hoffman), or mortality (Mulhall). In the second (and signiûcantly
smaller) camp, a number of cutting-edge Heidegger scholars think that what
Being and Time means by “death” has almost nothing to do with the ordinarily
sense of the word (or that the two senses of “death” share a merely “meta-
phorical” connection, as Haugeland believes). Instead, Heidegger means some-
thing like the global collapse of signiûcance typiûed by a depressive episode
(Blattner), the collapse of an understanding of being exempliûed by a scientiûc
paradigm shift (Haugeland), or the end of an historical world, which allows a
new historical epoch to take shape (White).12

then conceptualizes its conditioning structures in ways that should deepen, enrich, and
transform life). Thus, part of the test of any phenomenological analysis will be how well it
deepens, enriches, or transforms our everyday experience of the phenomenon whose
underlying structures it seeks to conceptualize (as we shall see in the case of death here,
and as I showed in the case of art in Iain Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011], chs. 3–4).
11
On the relation of Heidegger’s Nazism to his philosophy, see esp. Iain Thomson,
Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), chs. 3–4, and “Heidegger’s Nazism in the Light of
His Early Black Notebooks: A View from America,” in Zur Hermeneutik der ‘Schwarzen
Hefte’: Heidegger Jahrbuch 10, ed. by Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg:
Karl Alber, 2017). (Some of these issues will come back in Chapters 6–8.)
12
See Paul Edwards, Heidegger’s Confusions (New York: Prometheus, 2004) (which reprints
Edward’s incredibly confused articles from 1975 and 1976); Piotr Hoffman, “Death,
Time, History: Division II of Being and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to

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Despite the hermeneutic liberties taken by Haugeland and White (and

consequent problems with their readings), I shall argue that the second
camp is much closer to Heidegger’s understanding of death as an existen-
tial phenomenon that stands revealed when the practical intelligibility of
our everyday worlds collapses. Still, the interpretations of death in
terms of existential world-collapse advanced by this second camp leave it
largely bafûing why Heidegger should call the phenomenon he is inter-
ested in “death.” Indeed, his doing so only seems to muddy the waters of
Being and Time, thereby encouraging the much more commonsensical
misreadings of death as mortal demise that are typical of the ûrst camp.
To such a charge of misreading, moreover, those in the ûrst camp will
respond forcefully that (as Hoffman once objected to me): “One can
stretch the meanings of words, but only so far: Up cannot mean down;
black cannot mean white, and death cannot mean something that you can
live through!”
Though the endeavor might initially seem rather unlikely, in what
follows I would like to suggest a way beyond the current deadlock over
the meaning of “death” in Being and Time. What I shall show is that if we
understand the phenomenological method Being and Time employs, then
we can see exactly how Heidegger is able to move from our relation to the
event we ordinarily call death (which Being and Time calls “demise”) to
that ontological phenomenon, revealed in world-collapse, which he calls
“death.” To follow this path, we need to avoid conûating Heidegger’s
existential conception of death with that experience of the end of our lives
that he calls “demise,” as the ûrst camp tends to do, but we also cannot treat
demise and death as radically heterogeneous phenomena, as those in the
second camp tend to do. Instead, we need to understand how “death” is
both distinguished from and related to “demise” if we want to transcend
these long-standing hermeneutic controversies and begin to grasp the full
existential-ontological signiûcance of “death” in Being and Time. That will
be the main goal of this introductory chapter.

Heidegger, ed. by Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),

195–214; Stephen Mulhall, “Human Mortality: Heidegger on How to Portray the
Impossible Possibility of Dasein,” in Dreyfus and Wrathall, A Companion to Heidegger
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 297–310; William Blattner, “The Concept of Death in Being
and Time,” Man and World, 27:1 (1994), 49–70 (Blattner’s 1994 article is the seminal
work for this way of reading Heidegger); Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude”; and Carol
J. White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, ed. by Mark Ralkowski
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). With the exception of Edwards’s confused polemics, these
are all serious and informed scholars, and a detailed response to their views (which I am
simplifying here) would be a worthy but massive undertaking. But for a detailed critique
of White’s interpretation, see Chapter 5.

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1.2 What It Means for Us to Be: Dasein (Preliminary Excursus)

Repeatedly in Being and Time, “‘death’ is deûned as the end of Dasein” (BT
292, my emphasis/SZ 247). In other words, the phenomenon Heidegger calls
death refers to the particular type of “end” that is distinctive to “Dasein” as the
living embodiment of an intelligible world. It will thus help to brieûy remind
ourselves what Heidegger means by “Dasein” (so that we will then be able to
understand what it means for our own Dasein to end). It has become standard
practice to leave Heidegger’s German term untranslated in English, but
“Dasein” is his famous term of art for our distinctive kind of “existence”
(existence is the ordinary meaning of the German word Dasein), and he
deliberately uses the term to characterize the nature of our existence (in a
minimally question-begging way) as an intelligible world disclosing “being-
here” (or “Da-sein”). As Dreyfus nicely explains, Being and Time’s “primary
concern is to raise the [ontological] question of being” (that is, “to make sense
of our ability to make sense of things”), and Heidegger focuses on our “being-
here” as “Dasein” in order to broach “ontological questions concerning the
sort of beings we [human beings] are and how our being is bound up with the
intelligibility of the world.”13
As Heidegger’s thought develops, he will increasingly hyphenate “Da-sein”
to emphasize the signiûcance of the two semantic elements from which the
word is composed, “here-” (Da-) and “being” (Sein); as he later liked to put it,
we are both the here of being and the being of the here.14 In other words, Dasein
names both (1) the existential place where being takes place (the site where
intelligibility becomes an issue for itself, or metaphorically put, where being looks
at itself in the mirror and tries to understand itself ) and also (2) the speciûc way

13
(Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time,
Division I [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990], 3, 10.) As Dreyfus suggests, the
English “human being” (which can designate both a way of being and an individual)
comes closest to Heidegger’s use of “Dasein” and “a Dasein” in Being and Time (ibid., 14).
As is well known, however, Heidegger vociferously rejected “anthropological” misunder-
standings of Being and Time (which would reduce his work to an attempt to understand
“the being of the human,” an effort that Heidegger – insofar as he did indeed engage in
it – always meant to serve the larger ambition of “fundamental ontology,” viz., the
attempt to understand “the meaning of being in general,” as we will see in Chapter 2).
But for this and other reasons, it has now become common to misunderstand Heidegger
in almost the opposite terms, as an “anti-humanist.” In truth, however, from beginning to
end, “Heidegger is an afûrmative thinker of the ontological essence of the human being,
that is, an ontological humanist dedicated to disclosively thinking the being deûnitive of
the human being” (as I show in Chapter 4 and in Iain Thomson, “Hearing the Pro-
Vocation within the Provocation: Heidegger on the Way to Post-Metaphysical
Humanism,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, XII [2022], 187).
14
“To characterize with a single term both the involvement of being in human nature and
the essential relation of humanity to the openness (‘here’ [Da]) of being as such, the name
‘being-here’ [Dasein] was chosen” (WBGM 270).

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ö.÷. ÷ÿ÷÷ ÷÷÷÷ÿÿ ÿ÷÷ÿ÷ öö

this existential place becomes intelligible to itself (for example, by subconsciously

employing a set of universal existential structures, or “existentials,” the detailed
articulation of which forms the main subject matter of the “existential analytic”
in Being and Time’s ûrst division, which thereby analyzes the structure of
Dasein’s “being-in-the-world,” to which we will return).15
“Dasein” is thus Heidegger’s philosophical shorthand for a detailed story in
which the intelligibility of the “here” that we are (as a ûrst-personal disclosure
of an intelligible world) both helps constitute and is partly constituted by our
preexisting sense of what it means to be anything at all (a prior “understanding
of being” that ordinarily passes unnoticed, like the prescription on the lenses
through which we see).16 In Being and Time, the early Heidegger shows that

15
(“Division I” makes up roughly the ûrst half of Being and Time as it was published, albeit
not as it was planned – an important proviso I will explain in Chapter 2.) Heidegger
clearly employs the tools of conceptual analysis in Being and Time. He does so, however,
not to try to deûne some new philosophical position into existence out of the logical space
of possible options but, instead, to help analyze and develop the larger signiûcance of a
momentous phenomenon he has experienced in his own life, since Heidegger’s version of
existential phenomenology is empty and pointless without such ûrst-personal experience,
as we will see repeatedly (see also n. 10).
16
In fact, Heidegger’s account of the relation of mutual conditioning between Dasein and
being will turn out to be considerably more complex than he initially recognized in Being
and Time (though we can bracket most of these complications until Chapters 2 and 4).
Put simply, the (more idealistic) early Heidegger of Being and Time thinks of our
understanding of being as something we unknowingly constitute by subconsciously
employing temporal structures as necessary and sufûcient transcendental conditions that
most deeply shape our intelligible worlds (thus Heidegger describes Being and Time’s goal
to “expose primordial time . . . as the condition which makes the everyday experience of
time both possible and necessary” [BT 381, my emphasis/SZ 333], although this ambitious
goal fails, as we shall see in Chapter 2), whereas the (more realistic) later Heidegger thinks
of our understanding of being as shaped by historically changing ontotheological struc-
tures that are largely inherited from our historical tradition. But Being and Time already
begins to recognize that we Dasein are entities whose existence as embodied ways of being
implicitly answer the question of what it means for us to be, and also that these particular
existential answers always borrow (in multiple ways) from our preexisting answer to the
larger ontological question of what it means to be anything at all. Most importantly, for
example, Being and Time argues (in Division One) that our taken-for-granted modern
answer to the ontological question (in which we understand ourselves as “subjects”
ontologically separated from and so standing-over against “objects” [Gegenstand]) “dis-
astrously” misunderstands (BT 46/SZ 25) and so obscures our deeper nature as Dasein
(that is, entities whose “usual and ordinary” practical ways of disclosing being in time
“always-already” bridge and so undermine the supposed ontological gulf that post-
Cartesian modernity posits between subjects and objects). In Being and Time, however,
this “disaster” seems to be primarily for our philosophical self-understanding, whereas for
the later Heidegger, the broader (and ever more pervasively embodied) ramiûcations of
this philosophical disaster of modern “subjectivism” take on increasingly world-historical
proportions, especially as such modern “subjectivism” continues to evolve historically
into the late-modern epoch of technological “enframing” in which we now ûnd ourselves

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978-1-009-48008-6 — Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger
Iain D. Thomson
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every Dasein already embodies an answer to the question of the meaning of its
own being. This largely implicit existential answer to the question of the
meaning of my own being may or may not be recognized as such, but it is
nevertheless embodied concretely in the ways I go about being a teacher,
father, husband, friend, brother, citizen, nature-lover, bike-rider, and so on.
This embodied stand each of us takes on what it means to be can of course be
more or less coherent, honest, thoughtful, unique, and so on, but for the early
Heidegger the crucial issue here is just whether or not we own up to being this

trapped (see Iain Thomson, “Post/Modernity? How to Separate the Stereo from the
Styrofoam,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, XI [2021], 183–97). As a result,
for the later Heidegger (beginning in the late-1930s), Dasein increasingly becomes a
prescriptive existential achievement (and eventually even a literally “postmodern” way
of being-in-the-world) rather than just an unbiased phenomenological description of our
distinctive way of being. In other words, as we will begin to see in Chapter 4 (and I argue
in Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity), Dasein becomes something we need to
understand ourselves in terms of – and so progressively transform ourselves into – in
order to ûnd our way beyond the historical “epochs” of modern “subjectivism” and late-
modern “enframing,” in whose reductive and nihilistic ontologies we all tend initially to
understand ourselves, owing to our current place in the “history of being”
(Seinsgeschichte), the historical succession of different ways of understanding “the being
of entities” that the later Heidegger discovers at the metaphysical core of the West.
(Heidegger’s later history of being designates the succession of historical epochs that take
shape around the different answers metaphysics gives us to the question of what it means
to be anything at all. These typically taken-for-granted, metaphysical answers to the
question of what it means to be profoundly shape the history of the West, in which, put
simply, to be an entity means, successively, to be a presocratic “whooshing-up” [phusis], a
medieval “creature” of God, a modern “object” for a subject to master and control, a late-
modern “resource” [“Bestand”] on standby for efûcient ordering and enhancement, or
even a postmodern, polysemic world-discloser, in tune with being’s inexhaustibility and
so seeking poetically to compose its polysemic disclosures meaningfully.) In Being and
Time, Heidegger has not yet situated his existential analysis “ontohistorically” (that is, in
terms of that later “history of being”), so his most famous early work suggests that all
typical adult humans are basically already Dasein (and just need to recognize that to
correct the philosophical errors that follow from modern subject/object dualism). The
early Heidegger thus lacks most of his later story about the transformative power of
metaphysics to reshape entire epochs of intelligibility (as I show in ch. 1 of Thomson,
Heidegger on Ontotheology). But for Heidegger, both early and late, there is still a sense in
which we need to doubly realize that we are Dasein (that is, both recognize what that
means and also embody that truth in our lives, so that we transformatively “become what
we are”), though the difûculties for and consequences of that double realization continue
to ramify dramatically as his thinking develops. In the end, however, these two views of
what it means to be “Dasein” (that is, his earlier, more descriptive view and his later, more
prescriptive one) are largely compatible, since the later view dramatically builds on and
complicates the earlier one. (If that were all the orthodox Heideggerians meant when they
asserted that the early and later Heidegger were just saying identical things in different
ways, then I would partly agree with them. They go much further, however, and assert
that Heidegger never changed his mind about what “being” [Sein] means, which is not
only false but deeply misleading, as we will see in Chapters 2 and 5.)

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