Dervish Is...

as Dervish does...

"For Heidegger, 'death lays claim to [Dasein] as an individual' and 'individualizes Dasein down to itself'. What others say I should do or think I should do is, in the face of death, revealed as irrelevant. This is the non-relationality of death--in it, my relations to other people around me are thus severed, and I am revealed as not ultimately dependent on the others around me. In anticipating death, I take responsibility for myself. I become authentic, my own person, meaning that I accept that my decisions are not required or essential, because there is no right way to be a human being. As a consequence of my anxiety in the face of death, I am set free to live my life as my own rather than doing things merely because others expect me to do them.

Because it makes it possible to be authentic, Heidegger believes that death is not in and of itself to be resented and avoided. Indeed, far from interfering with life, anxiety in the face of death beings 'an unshakable joy' (Being and Time, p. 358). After all, the fact that our lives will end only gives that much more weight and significance to the particular choices that we make in life."

--Mark Wrathall, How To Read Heidegger, 70.