Being Towards Death (Sein-zum-Tode) stands as one of the most consequential concepts introduced into the depth-psychological conversation by Heidegger’s Being and Time, and the corpus reflects its penetrating influence across widely divergent traditions. Heidegger’s central contention — that authentic Dasein must resolutely project itself upon its ownmost, non-relational, and unsurmountable possibility — establishes death not as a terminal event but as the structural horizon that individuates existence and grounds temporality. The corpus engages this thesis from multiple angles: Heidegger’s own exhaustive phenomenological elaboration shows how everyday fallenness evades authentic Being-towards-death through the anonymous ‘they’, while anticipatory resoluteness retrieves genuine selfhood precisely by holding death open as possibility rather than annihilating it through actualization. McGilchrist appropriates the forgetting of Being as a cultural pathology, locating death-contemplation as a rare aperture through which modern consciousness might recover ontological seriousness. The Tibetan Buddhist material, via Evans-Wentz, presents a disciplined existential preparation for death that resonates structurally — though not metaphysically — with Heideggerian anticipation. Jungian and depth-psychological voices (Hillman, Yalom, Nichols) treat death as a psychic force that soul must meet on its own terms, distinct from mere biological ending. The ascetic Christian literature adds the practice of daily dying. Together these strands reveal a corpus genuinely preoccupied with whether, and how, mortality can be owned rather than evaded.
Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue.
This passage delivers Heidegger’s definitive formulation: Being-towards-death is not avoidance of an end but the authentic disclosure of Dasein’s individuation and the ground of genuine selfhood.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Factically, Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part in an inauthentic Being-towards-death. How is the ontological possibility of an authentic Being-towards-death to be characterized ‘Objectively’?
Heidegger opens the existential projection of authentic Being-towards-death by establishing the inauthenticity of ordinary Dasein’s relation to death as the problem requiring resolution.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
In Dasein, as being towards its death, its ownmost ‘not-yet’ has already been included — that ‘not-yet’ which all others lie ahead of.
Heidegger argues that death is not an outstanding event but a structural feature always already constitutive of Dasein’s being, distinguishing this from any empirical account of demise.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Anticipatory resoluteness is not a way of escape, fabricated for the ‘overcoming’ of death; it is rather that understanding which follows the call of conscience and which frees for death the possibility of acquiring power over Dasein’s existence.
This passage completes the existential argument by showing that authentic Being-towards-death is anticipatory resoluteness — not flight from death but a liberating confrontation that unifies conscience, care, and finitude.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
When one has an understanding Being-towards-death towards death as one’s ownmost possibility — one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.
Heidegger establishes that understanding Being-towards-death is the condition under which Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being-guilty is authentically grasped, linking death to conscience and resoluteness.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
In setting forth everyday Being-towards-death, however, we are at the same time enjoined to try to secure a full existential conception of Being-towards-the-end, by a more penetrating Interpretation in which falling Being-towards-death is taken as an evasion in the face of death.
Heidegger diagnoses everyday Being-towards-death as constitutive evasion, demanding a phenomenologically adequate analysis that goes beyond social tranquillization of death.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
For the most part, everyday Dasein covers up the ownmost possibility of its Being — that possibility which is non-relational and not to be outstripped.
Heidegger demonstrates that the factical tendency to cover up death confirms Dasein’s constitutive fallenness into untruth, establishing inauthenticity as the default mode of Being-towards-death.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat.
Heidegger analyzes the ‘one dies’ formulation as the linguistic vehicle of evasion, showing how the impersonal ‘they’ dissolves the ownmost character of Being-towards-death into anonymous indifference.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Being-at-an-end implies existentially Being-towards-the-end. The uttermost ‘not-yet’ has the character of something towards which Dasein comports itself.
Heidegger establishes the ontological distinction between biological ending and existential Being-towards-the-end, grounding the structural analysis of death in Dasein’s own mode of being.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
In death, Dasein has not been fulfilled nor has it simply disappeared; it has not become finished nor is it wholly at one’s disposal as something ready-to-hand.
Heidegger differentiates death from all analogous modes of ending — ripening, using up, completing — to secure its unique ontological character as Dasein’s ownmost possibility.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Being-guilty belongs to Dasein’s Being, and signifies the null Being-the-basis of a nullity. The ‘Guilty!’ which belongs to the Being of Dasein is something that can be neither augmented nor diminished.
This passage links Being-towards-death to resoluteness and Being-guilty, showing that temporality and authenticity are modalized through the encounter with death.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Dasein, so it dispels the danger that it may, by its own finite understanding of existence, fail to recognize that it is getting outstripped by the existence-possibilities of Others.
Heidegger cautions that finite Being-towards-death must not be reduced to a private calculus, as authentic anticipation opens Dasein to its own possibilities rather than projecting them onto others.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Birth and death are ‘connected’ in a manner characteristic of Dasein. As care, Dasein is the ‘between’.
Heidegger situates Being-towards-death within the full temporal arc of Dasein, where temporality as care constitutes the unity between birth and death.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
It is in dealing with death that one is most forcibly made aware of how we have yielded, hands down, to the forgetting of Being. One of the few occasions on which at last modern man might be able to grasp the enormity of existence is in the contemplation of death.
McGilchrist appropriates the Heideggerian problematic of the forgetting of Being, positioning death-contemplation as the one reliable rupture in modernity’s ontological amnesia.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
It is in dealing with death that one is most forcibly made aware of how we have yielded, hands down, to the forgetting of Being.
McGilchrist converges independently on a Heideggerian insight, arguing that the modern evasion of death is coextensive with the cultural forgetting of Being itself.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Even when one is without Illusions and ‘is ready for anything’ [“Gefasstsein auf Alles”], here too the ‘ahead-of-itself’ lies hidden.
Heidegger demonstrates that even apparent equanimity before death does not guarantee authentic Being-towards-death, since the structural ‘ahead-of-itself’ of care can remain concealed.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The dying Antony commanded his disciples to ‘live as though dying each day.’ Serving and living each day thus, we will neither sin nor desire anything, nor become angry at anyone.
The Desert Father tradition, as recorded in Sinkewicz, offers a parallel to Heideggerian Being-towards-death in its ascetic injunction to internalize mortality daily as a structuring existential orientation.
, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, 2003supporting
Death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life. Life must be understood as a kind of Being to which there belongs a Being-in-the-world.
Heidegger situates death within an ontological analysis of life, differentiating the existential approach from biological, psychological, or ethnological typologies of dying.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The soul goes through many death experiences, yet physical life goes on; and as physical life comes to a close, the soul often produces images and experiences that show continuity.
Hillman displaces the terminus of Being-towards-death from biological finality to the soul’s own processual encounters with death-imagery, suggesting that the psyche maintains an open rather than closing relation to its end.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964supporting
With the conviction that one travels through life as if it were a journey, one becomes aware that each and every stage of the journey is the ultimate in itself and should be lived with one’s entire being and effort in the expectation of death.
Spiegelman draws on Zen poetics to articulate a Japanese version of existential presence-before-death that resonates structurally with Heideggerian anticipation while rooting it in aesthetic and spiritual practice.
, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985supporting
The Bardo Thodol is addressed not only to those who see the end of their life approaching, or who are very near death, but to those who still have years of incarnate life before them, and who, for the first time, realize the full meaning of their existence as human beings.
Evans-Wentz presents Tibetan preparatory death-practice as an existential discipline directed at the living, a functional parallel to authentic Being-towards-death that treats mortality as the key to understanding existence.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
He welcomed death with song, as being natural and inevitable. After having delivered his final testamentary teachings and parting admonitions to his assembled disciples, he composed, extemporaneously, a remarkable hymn.
Milarepa’s exemplary death in Evans-Wentz illustrates a non-Western mode of owning one’s death — resolute, unconcealcd, and enacted with full presence — that parallels without duplicating Heidegger’s anticipatory resoluteness.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927aside
Such unshielded exposure to the isolation of individuation is too terrible for most of us to bear. When our belief in personal specialness and inviolability fails to provide the surcease from pain we require, we seek relief from the other major alternative denial system.
Yalom approaches Being-towards-death through the clinical lens of death-anxiety and denial-systems, mapping psychopathological evasion of individuation onto what Heidegger diagnosed as inauthentic falling.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
The deadly fear of death inherent in our psychic bones cannot be vanquished by logic and aphorisms. The things of this world can only be relinquished and death truly welcomed through the illumination of an experience which transcends all other things.
Nichols articulates a Jungian-archetypal counterpoint to Heidegger, arguing that authentic acceptance of death requires a transrational illumination rather than resolute existential projection.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside
The ‘practices of death’ that first emerged in Desert literature becomes, for the Old Men, a normative means of describing the ascetic life.
Sinkewicz documents how early Christian asceticism institutionalized practices of death-rehearsal that constitute a theological counterpart to the existential analytic, embedding Being-towards-death in communal and liturgical form.
, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, 2003aside