Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) — An existential structure of Dasein in Martin Heidegger: the human being’s relation to its own death as its ownmost possibility, which individualizes it. In Being and Time (1927), the analysis occupies Division II, chapter 1 (§§46–53). Heidegger distinguishes dying (Sterben), lived by Dasein, from perishing (Verenden), proper to living things, and from demise (Ableben), the biological end considered from outside (§49). Death is not a future event among others but an ever-imminent possibility, which §§50–52 characterize as ownmost, non-relational, not to be outstripped, certain, and indefinite as to when. No one can die in another’s place (§47). In everyday life Dasein covers it over in the “they” (das Man): “one dies” is a death that belongs to no one (§51), and anguish discloses what this concealment evades. Authentic being-toward-death is neither brooding on the end nor wishing for it, but anticipation (Vorlaufen, §53): taking finitude on as a possibility, which opens up the potentiality-for-being-oneself and “anticipatory resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit, §§60 and 62), and grounds Dasein’s temporality in Division II. Criticisms: Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), denies that death gives life meaning or individualizes, seeing it instead as a fact that undoes projects; Emmanuel Levinas, in God, Death, and Time (lectures of 1975–1976), shifts priority from one’s own death to the death of the other. It has also been objected that Heidegger’s analysis of an “ownmost” death fits poorly with concrete experiences of mourning. See existentialism, being, and the article Heidegger: being and time, Dasein, and the question of being.
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