The Possibility of Being-towards-death – Part 1 (BT 260/261) (2025) Pittura da Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT 260/261

Dasein is constituted by disclosedness – that is, by an understanding with a state-of-mind. Authentic Being-towards-death can not evade its own-most non-relational possibility, or cover up this possibility by thus fleeing from it, or give a new explanation for it to accord with the common sense of the “they”. In our existential projection of an authentic Being-towards-death, therefore, we must set forth those items in such a Being which are constitutive for it as an understanding of death – and as such an understanding in the sense of Being towards this possibility without either fleeing it or covering it up.
In the first instance, we must characterize Being-towards-death as a Being towards a possibility – indeed, towards a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself. “Being towards” a possibility – that is to say, towards something possible – may signify “Being out for” something possible, as in concerning ourselves with its actualization. Such possibilities are constantly encountered in the field of what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand – what is attainable, controllable, practicable, and the like. In concernfully Being out for something possible, there is a tendency to annihilate the possibility of the possible by making it available to us. But the concernful actualization of equipment which is ready-to-hand (as in producing it, getting it ready, readjusting it, and so on) is always merely relative, since even that which has been actualized is still characterized in terms of some involvements – indeed this is precisely what characterizes its being. Even though actualized, it remains, as actual, something possible for doing something; it is characterized by an “in-order-to”. What our analysis is to make plain is simply how Being out for something concernfully, comports itself towards the possible: it does so not by the theoretico-thematical consideration of the possible as possible, and by having regard for its possibility as such, but rather by looking circumspectively away from the possible and looking at that for which it is possible [das Wofür-möglich].
Manifestly Being-towards-death, which is now in question, cannot have the character of concernfully Being out to get itself actualized. For one thing, death as possible is not something possible which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand, but a possibility of Dasein's Being. So to concern oneself with actualizing what is thus possible would have to signify, “bringing about one's demise”. But if this were done, Dasein would deprive itself of the very ground for an existing Being-towards-death.

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

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