“Dasein” is a concept that cannot be ignored in the understanding of Martin Heidegger’s thoughts system. This is a German word, which leads to a discussion on the translation and interpretation that consist of many years till now. In English, the most common translation is “being”. The significance of Dasein as innovation is it’s trying to bring the “feeling” and “humanist” back to the discussion of philosophy, after a long journey of German’s “academism” modern philosophy, it is a breakthrough that makes Heidegger became popular at that time, which needed to be understanding under the context of the German philosophy research after WWI. Martin Heidegger, as an “existentialism” philosopher, also heavily influenced by Husserl‘s phenomenology and inspired by Brentano’s thoughts about the existence (Wikipedia).
The concept of death as the ending of existence in common sense cannot be avoided in the discussion of “Dasein” and ontology exploration. Heidegger mentioned death in division two of Being and time and fully discussed it in chapter 2, which is less on the completeness in the comparison with division one. Thus, it is crucial to aware of this incompleteness of Heidegger’s theory system about death and the relation with Dasein: his thoughts about death were based on the concept of Dasein.
“Being-towards-death” is the main definition and “attitude” used by Heidegger to describe the concept of death in the latter part of Being and Time, in an ontological way. This composition word sufficiently shows that “death is not an event”, but a character that included in Dasein. At the beginning of part 47 in the Being and Time of Heidegger, he wrote: “When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the being of the there.” This can be interpreted as at the moment that Dasein (the being) is finally facing its end and also its fully self, it’ll lose itself and also the death including in itself at the same time. In a more physical way, people like Dasein haven’t truly reach death before and cannot reach it, no matter by themselves or by others. The only way that one can experience but still not reaches death, is to settle aside the “objective” death of others. In another word, death is unavoidable for any being, being-towards-death.
Moreover, Heidegger distinguishes the concept “death (Sterben)” from the biological perspective from the concept “demise (Ableben)”, the end of Dasein.
“Thus we can say that Dasein never perishes. Dasein can only demise as long as it dies. (Heidegger)”
We can understand that death in the psychological aspects is another status of Dasein, a status or even proposition that can face demise. “Because the biological “death” does correlate with Dasein because the life has relation with Dasein. Thus, as Heidegger said: “The full existential and ontological concept of death can now be defined as follows: as the end of Dasein, death is the own most, nonrelational, certain, and, as such, indefinite and insuperable possibility of Dasein. As the end of Dasein, death is in the being [Sein] of this being [Seienden] toward its end (Heidegger)”, death now has two ontological characteristics, certainty (in Dasein) and indeterminacy (base on the time).
To face death with certainty and indeterminacy, Heidegger sees that it is covered by the action of “fleeting”, which is an escape from death. He then comes up with a possible way that we can do anticipation [Vorlaufen]: “The nearest nearness of being-toward-death as a possibility is as far removed as possible from anything real. The more clearly this possibility is understood, the more purely does understanding penetrate to it as the possibility of the impossibility of existence [Existenz] in general. (…) As the anticipation of possibility, being-toward-death first makes this possibility possible and sets it free as a possibility (Heidegger).” For best understanding, the “anticipation” here also has a great translation in Chinese, which is “先行”, “go ahead beforehand” into the demise of Dasein. This translation including the structure of space metaphor and time metaphor of the concept (Vorlaufen) can explain its importance toward the “Da-” part, which means “there”, in the concept of Da-sein.
Then, if apply Heidegger’s analysis of death into the context of daily life, what inspirations can we get? In my summarization, it will be: Instead of seeing physical death as the end of one’s own existence, the appearance, and the possibilities of the demise of one’s own existence is expected and learned: the previously hidden possibility of death is once again brought back into every moment of life and action. The hidden or coverage of the death is not only showing in the attitude that people always avoided talking about it, but also in the narration of it: people always use the third person perspective or even past tense to describe the death, which is a good way to raise the distance between themselves and the death. Heidegger reveals that the best status of being, Dasein, can be reached partially from facing the identity and be the identity of being-towards-death.
