BEING TOWARDS

DEATH
Session 4
I. Objectives:

At the end of the topic, students are expected to:

1. Discuss death from a phenomenological lens;
2. Distinguish authentic from inauthentic living;
3. Appreciate the value of life from the perspective of death.
II. Prelectio

1. Homework/Assignment
Read being-towards-death. Focus only on
pages 163 167.
2. Nexus/Review
Recall from ones experience the passing away of a
loved one. How does the experience strike you?
What are the overwhelming emotions dominate that
time?
 Everybody Dies but Everybody Lives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja-n5qUNRi8
 Man comes face to face with the
nothingness of his existence in the reality of
death.
What do you think is the meaning of this?
Denying the Denial of Death
The basic idea is that death as a human reality comes to our awareness first in terms of the
death of other people.
Death is never seen as a near or an impending possibility it begins as the reality of
otherness, something that is not yet mine to experience.
What is the cause of denying death?
It is actually a result of our being immersed in a crowd.
Outside, there exists a crowd, a crowd that tempts every person towards an inauthentic
mode of existence.
What kind of inauthentic life is this?
The kind of inauthentic life offered by the crowd is that of a life lived in terms of its
momentary or lousy states.
It is lived in the everydayness of existence without a sense of what makes it whole or
truly meaningful. So death as a real possibility is simply pushed away.
I am busy, I have no time to think about death.
The human person as a not yet
Martin Heidegger tells us that by being-in-the-world, the human being, however, realizes that he
or she is a not yet.
The person, in living a life, is still to realize the fullest potential as a human being.
For Heidegger, in death the person faces the ultimate test. It is, according to Manuel Dy, Jr., the
fruition of mans being in the world.
The not yet: nothingness of human existence.
The nothing here, however, is not the nothing of non-being. This nothingness in us refers to our
utmost possibilities.
Think of a man, for instance, like a seed with a potential of becoming a big plant. Like a seed,
man is pregnant with potentials. The seed is not yet a plant, but it contains the being, the
coming forth of the plant.
 As long as the person man is, Heidegger says that he or she is not yet finished. Our finality, our
completion, only comes to us in death, where we would no longer be.
In death, the human being loses his power to be, and as such, he no longer is.
Indeed, he comes to grip into the impossibility of his existence, of losing the reality of his being-in-
the-world.
Death Revealed in Anxiety
Thus, in dying, what is at issue is man himself, for man alone stands, dreads, and
confronts the reality of his being.
Man is anxious about the reality of death not because he fears what will happen in
the after-life but because he dreads his being-in-the-world. What he dreads, what he
is anxious about, are the possibilities that will be lost forever.
Synthesis:

How come that denying deaths existence

leads us to inauthentic living?

What is being realized when we face death?

Activity: Life, Me, and Death
Instruction: Complete the table below with honesty and
insightful words