There is a perfectly obvious and banal sense in which death is a possibility for each of us, because dying or demise are events which, at any given moment, have a probability of occurring that is greater than 0%. But death is a special possibility--not just because we all die, or because, 'on a long enough time line', the probability of dying rises to 100%. It is because death is the possibility which makes us what we are, it is our 'ownmost' possibility. Let's briefly contrast Heidegger's views with another philosophical account of death. Around 300 BC, Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism, argued that death, 'that most frightful of evils...is nothing to us, seeing that when we exist death is not present, and when death is present we do not exist'. As a consequence, Epicurus believed that it was incoherent to have anything but a stance of indifference towards our own deaths. For Heidegger, by contrast, death is not 'nothing to us', but our ownmost possibility. And for Heidegger, anxiety in the face of death is the right way to respond to it.

Epicurus's argument follows something like these steps:

1 Something can matter to us only if we can experience it.
2 We can experience something if and only if we exist when it is present.
3 We do not exist when (our) death is present.
4 Therefore, we cannot experience death (2, 3).
5 Therefore, death cannot matter to us (1, 4).

This argument seems to work to the extent that we think of death as an ordinary physical entity or event. It seems true that I can't experience particular objects or events -- say, this picture of my wife on my desk -- unless I exist when it is present. At the same time, Epicurus's conclusion seems absurd: of course my death matters to me. Heidegger's view of death helps us understand where Epicurus's argument goes wrong.

For Epicurus, 'being present to' means something like 'being in (the right kind of) causal contact with...' But 'being present' doesn't always require actual causal contact. Some things are present to us even when they are not exercising a causal impact on us. Consider, for example, a condition like blindness. Blindness can be 'present to me' without my being in causal contact with any particular object or event. Blindness is present to me' when I lack the ability to interact with objects in a visual way. So the class of things that are present to me needs to include not just objects that are causally acting on me, but also conditions like blindness -- conditions that need to be understood as a mode of access to or receptivity to objects. Blindness is a way of being that shapes to possibilities that are open to me -- it excludes me from the possibility of visually experiencing the world (although it may open up possibilities for hearing or smelling or feeling the world that are not normally available to people with sight). A particular way of being receptive to things is 'present to me' when it shapes my possibilities for relating to objects.

Of course death is not like blindness in the sense that death is not something I can experience while in that condition (see Epicurus's premise 3). But we've learned an important lesson all the same: something can matter to me not simply when it is an object that is physically impacting me, but also when it shapes and affects the way I exist in the world.

The next question is whether something can shape and affect my experience of the world, even when it is not something actual (like blindness), but something possible. The answer is 'yes': when we 'have possibilities', they shape our experience of the world. Suppose I know that there is a possibility that friend will pay me a visit this afternoon. Having this possibility makes me keenly aware of the disarray in my home and the lack of anything suitable to serve a visiting guest. Things of which I would otherwise have been oblivious are made suddenly prominent. The fact that we don't exist when death is actual is thus irrelevant. We do exist when death is possible, and this possibility changes not just our awareness of certain things in the world, but the significance of those things. So Heidegger agrees with Epicurus's premise three: 'Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be "actualized", nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be.' But our death is present to us as a possibility nonetheless, and it matters to us that we might not be able to comport ourselves towards things, any more, even if we can't experience being unable to do so. If this is true, then Epicurus is wrong -- death is not nothing to us.

P. 65-68

¶ 8:46 PM