Martin Heidegger Being And Time Analysis

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Martin Heidegger in his book Being and Time addresses issues related to death including his work towards exploring mortality. This fact is very important I believe for understanding Heidegger on the subject of the death and the importance it has in his Philosophy. For Heidegger, the human being cannot achieve a complete or meaningful life, or any kind of "authentic existence," unless he or she comes to terms with what he described as his or her ‘temporality’ which involves the act of coming to terms with the fact that a human being is a finite and temporal being. For Heidegger the awareness of a death is a central theme for understanding his ideas on the temporary nature of human beings (Kaufmann, pge 211, 1988). While we know death as being without life and marking the end of a life, Heidegger thought death was also a different interpretation of what death is. Heidegger presents a radically different interpretation of death because in Being and Time, death is not just about the end of existence. Recognizing the inevitable certainty of one’s death also reveals something which is more important than this simple fact. Heidegger’s aims in the first part of Being and Time is to discuss and discover the deeper aspect of death in regards to its relation to life. Heidegger did not accept that death was simply not the end of life as the final end of everything (for life, at least).
To help understand the significance of death to Heidegger it is important to look at his original work on being or existence. Firstly Heidegger states the objective of his existentialist work in Being and Time is ‘to work out the question of the sense of being and do so concretely’ (Being and Time, pge 1, 1978). Heidegger made this so as a response to contemp...

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...ording to Heidegger, become fearful of the prospect of death. He argues the correct response to death in one’s life is a form of ‘brave anxiety’ (Heidegger, pge 310, 1978). There is a distinction between this anxiety and outright fear towards death, where fear is attached to some object, person or idea (in this case the prospect of death). Anxiety involves what Heidegger describes as an ‘impassioned freedom towards death’ (Heidegger, pge 310, 1978) due to the fact anxiety is concerned with human freedom or lack thereof regarding choices we cannot make. As pointed out earlier death is out of our control and therefore should be regarded with anxiety rather than outright fear of something we cannot control. Heidegger seeks to explain death in these ways because he wishes to explore how the anxiety of death is related to being, not due to some kind of morbid curiosity.

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