Supplements:118-119 – Tod - Death

If in accord with the basic character of its being factical life is not   a process, so death is not a cessation in the sense of the termination of this process that will turn up at one time or another. Death is imminenter factical life, standing before it as an inevitability. Life is in such a way that its death is always in one way or another there for it, i.e., there as seen in one way or another, even if this takes the form of pushing away and suppressing “the thought of death.” Death is given as an object of care precisely in the fact that in the obstinacy of its imminence, it is [119] encountered as a how of life. The forced absence of worry about death in the caring of life actualizes itself in a flight into worldly concerns and apprehensions. However, this looking away from death is so little a seizing upon life that it rather turns out to be an evasion of the life standing before it and of the authentic character of its being. Whether in the form of ones worldly concerns and apprehensions fleeing death, or in that of worrying oneself about it and laying hold of it, having death imminendy before one is a basic constitutive characteristic of facticity. When one has death before one as certain and lays hold of it as such, one’s life becomes visible in itself. When death is in this manner, it gives to life a certain way of seeing itself and constantly leads it before its ownmost present and past, a past that, burgeoning within life itself, comes toward it from behind it.

When time and again the attempt is made to define the basic characteristics of the object, factical life, and of its being without having also taken death and “having death imminently before one” as a fundamental starting point to guide one’s approach to this problem, such an omission cannot be rectified merely by a subsequent addition of these themes. The above-sketched problem of the basic characteristics of the being of death, a problem absolutely constitutive for ontology, has nothing to do with a metaphysics of immortality and its treatment of the question of “what comes after death.” Since death as imminently before one characteristically makes the present and past of ones life visible, it is as such a constituent moment of facticity at the same time the key phenomenon in which the specific kind of “temporality” belonging to human Dasein   is to be brought into relief and explicated. It is on the basis of the sense of this temporality and not at all through a formal   analysis of concept-formation in historic)graphy that the basic sense of the historical needs to be defined. (BUREN  , John van (ed.). Supplements. New York: SUNY, 2002, p. 118-119)