Being-toward-death

an extract from Being and Time (from what I could gather, Heidegger is talking about something similar to the idea of "memento mori" - awareness of death, or "the potentiality of being" to use his phrase, as something which is the key to authentic existence and also since it is the "ownmost", or most individual, potentiality, it is also the key to human identity. In the sense that no one can die for any one else. Each of us have to die our "own" deaths.)

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Being-toward-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-of-being of that being whose kind of being is anticipation itself. In the anticipatory revealing of this potentiality-of-being, Da-sein discloses itself to itself with regard to its most extreme possibility. But to project oneself upon one's ownmost potentiality of being means to be able to understand oneself in the being of the being thus revealed: to exist. Anticipation shows itself as the possibility of understanding one's ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being, that is, as the possibility of authentic existence. Its ontological constitution must be made visible by setting forth the concrete structure of anticipation of death. How is the phenomenal definition of this structure to be accomplished? Evidently by defining the characteristics of anticipatory disclosure which must belong to it so that it can become the pure understanding of the ownmost nonrelational possibility not-to-be-bypassed which is certain and, as such, indefinite. We must remember that understanding oneself in the potentiality-of-being that reveals itself in the project.

Death is the ownmost possibility of Da-sein. Being toward it discloses to Da-sein its ownmost potentiality-of-being in whic hit is concerned about the being of Da-sein absolutely. Here the fact can become evident to Da-sein that in the eminent possibility of itself it is torn away from the they, that is, anticipation can always already have torn itself away from the they. The understanding of this "ability," however, first reveals its factical lostness in the everydayness of the they-self.