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PrescriptiveExistential

My death, or death?

On the axis: Death · my own death

Is my death my ownmost possibility, the one that individualizes me and returns me to myself, or an absurd limit from outside that ends my possibilities without revealing anything to me?

Philosophers' positions

Heidegger

Major
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100
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0
Justification

Division Two of opens with a problem: how can existence be grasped as a whole, when it is never complete as long as it lasts? The analysis of answers without waiting for an end, as one would wait for the end of an object. Everything turns on an ordinary phrase: "one dies". The "" speaks truly, everyone will die, but it turns death into a fact that concerns everybody and never me. Yet one can die for another, not take away another's own dying: death is the ownmost possibility, certain and indefinite as to its moment. Anxiety reveals what idle talk tranquillizes, and anticipation of this possibility, joined to the resoluteness that answers the call of conscience, lets one own one's choices, in the light of their finitude: that is existence.

Being and Time, §46-53 · Being and Time, §40 (anxiety)

Sartre

75
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10
15
Justification

Sartre explicitly rejects Heidegger's being-toward-death: far from being my ownmost possibility, which would give my life meaning, death is an absurd, external fact, the sheer suppression of my possibilities. It is neither awaited nor assumed as mine, it hands me over to the gaze of others. Meaning comes from freedom in progress, never from death, which is less to be tamed than to be kept from governing life.

Being and Nothingness, IV (My Death)

Anchors: Heidegger · Sartre