…

Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time. By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it “is” at all. And indeed death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in which the very being of one’s own Dasein is an issue. In dying, it is shown that mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for death. (BT 284)

This is, of course, the much-quoted passage in which Heidegger’s existentialism appears rather similar in outlook to Sartre’s subsequent writings in that both authors stress the solitary qualities of human existence, culminating in the mantra that in the end everybody dies alone. However, in Heidegger’s case, the present quotation from § 47 stands in stark contrast to the statement we found in § 74.

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In § 47, Heidegger presents death unmistakably as an individual phenomenon.

dying” (Sterben) is described as something each of us has to face alone: “By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it ‘is’ at all” (Der Tod ist, sofern er “ist,” wesensmäßig je der meine). The possessive pronoun at the end of the sentence leaves each reader no choice but to think of death in terms of “my” mortality.

the continuation of § 74 points in a different direction, when Heidegger engages a theme we previously discerned in the Origin essay, in “Why Poets?,” and in the Letter on Humanism, namely the idea of a people’s world-historical mission as the “historizing of the community, of a people” (das Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes), which is “already guided in advance” (im vorhinein schon geleitet) as he puts it here. Using the bridge term of “fate” thus allows Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric to keep sliding

between nihilistic gestures, which link the significance of death to spectacles of self-referential sacrifice, and alternate gestures that link the significance of death to epochal belonging. Death in the former sense cannot be shared (§ 47), whereas death in the latter sense can (§ 74).

that § 74 in Being and Time relates death to modes of social interaction framed by historical destiny, whereas § 47 relates death to modes of solipsistic action framed by individual mortality.

Iain Thomson

Thomson introduces his alternative as a balancing act of sorts, which is meant to keep the commonsense notion of death as “demise” (loss of life) and the philosophically intricate notion of death as world collapse (total loss of meaning) both in play