Existential

Understanding of Death
(Sakit Hanggang Kamatayan)
 Fear of Death
The 'fear of death' is a composite experience
encompassing:

• the abstract, objective, external, empirical fact of

biological death

• our personal, subjective, emotional fear of ceasing-to-

be, which arises from our awareness of our own
finitude;

• our own most ontological anxiety.

 Fear of Death

Our Existential Predicament disguised as the fear of

ceasing-to-be.
This least understood and most repressed existential dimension
"being-towards-
of death which has also been called

death" and "the anxiety of nonbeing"

 Fear of Death

Whenever "death" is mentioned, we

think first of biological death

Designed to protect us from noticing

our fear of ceasing-to-be or our even
deeper ontological anxiety.
 The five defining features of
THE FEAR OF CEASING-TO-BE

1. Definable, intelligible response to the threat to specific life-values.

2. Caused by objective dangers to our survival; specific channels of

approach; based on intellectual information.

3. Temporary—lasts only as long as the objective danger to survival.

4. The collection of our values is threatened thru one organ or

system; if that endangered organ or system can be saved, life will
continue; isolatable approach of threat.

5. Can be confronted - by working against the specific lethal threats;

death can be postponed.
 The five defining features of
ONTOLOGICAL ANXIETY

1. Free-floating, generalized feeling of total threat-to-being.

2. Uncaused; not the result of the fact of biological death;

arises from within our selves; no channels of approach;
existentially disclosed.

3. Permanent inner state-of-being; utterly constant threat.

4. Ownmost, pervasive, internal threat-to-being; arises not thru

an isolatable bodily system but from the depths of our selves;
cannot be isolated from our selves.

5. Cannot be overcome; all our efforts fail.

 Being-Towards-Death
What is death for Heidegger? How is death related to
the being of man, and what is man’s attitude towards
death? Since death is the transition of man from
Dasein to no-longer-Dasein, there is therefore the
impossibility of experiencing this transition.

No one has ever come out from death to tell us about

death. How then are we going to describe death?
What is Heidegger’s phenomenology of death?
 Being-Towards-Death
Our first experience of death is the death of others. We
see, hear, people die. If man is a being with other, will
the death of others then give us the objective
knowledge about death? But the death of another
person.

We never experience the death of another as he himself

has experienced it. Even if, granted that it is possible
for us to analyze the dying of others, we can substitute
and represent the dying of any Dasein for another.
 Being-Towards-Death
The authentic response of man: face the possibility of death as
his possibility, the possibility in which his very existence is
an issue.

Facing this possibility is not actualizing it or bring it to

happen. That would be suicide and suicide demolishes all the
potentialities of man instead of bringing them into a whole
reality.

Nor does it mean that man must brood over death, calculating
it; for death is not something one can have at his disposal.
 Being-Towards-Death

Anticipation reveals to man that death means the

measureless impossibility of existence. This
projection of his utmost possibility will provide him
with a vision of his own present existence, the latent
possibilities lying before him.
 Being-Towards-Death

In authentic being-towards-death, man realizes that

death is his own most possibility and thus the
awareness comes to him of his potentiality for being,
for fulfilling his own being. He must therefore wrench
himself away from the impersonal “they” and make
himself an individual, alone.
 Being-Towards-Death

Death individualizes man, because death does not belong to

everybody but to one’s own self. This individual by death reveals
the “there” man, his being-alongside-things (concern) and his
being-with-others (solicitude). It reveals to man that his concern
and solicitude is nothing when his ownmost potentiality for being
is itself an issue in death. This does not mean cutting himself off
from all relationships but rather projecting himself upon his
ownmost potentiality for being instead on the “they” self.
 Being-Towards-Death
The Human Person reaches his/her wholeness
in death. In death, the individual loses his/her
potentiality for being, s/he loses her/his
‘thereness.’

There is no more outstanding in man

everything is finished, settled for him. He is no
longer being there.