Death as the Basis of an Existential Philosophy: Heidegger’s Being-Towards-Death

Last updated: October 21, 2026

“Death is the most certain possibility” is a popular compression of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time (1927), and the words on the meme do not appear in the book in that form. In section 52 (page 303 of the standard Macquarrie and Robinson translation), Heidegger defines death as Dasein’s ownmost possibility, “non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped”. Dasein is his term for the kind of being we are. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes his more paradoxical version: death is “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein”. Certain that it comes, uncertain when, and impossible to hand to someone else: that is the doctrine Heidegger called Being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode), and the thinkers who came after him kept returning to it: Iain Thomson traces its critical afterlives in Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas, Agamben and Derrida.

The meme does the compressing for us. It shows a pale cigarette packet, “Gold Cigarettes, Original”, where the black-bordered health warning would normally sit, and the warning reads: “Death is the most certain possibility (M. Heidegger)”. It is a good joke because cigarette warnings deal in probabilities, and Heidegger’s point is that statistics cannot make your own death personal.

The Warning Label Heidegger Never Printed

Heidegger calls death certain and possible at the same time, and he insists that the kind of certainty people usually have in mind is the wrong kind.

Everyone “knows” they will die. Heidegger’s complaint, on page 301 of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation, is how they know it. “They say, ‘Death is certain’”, he writes, and the certainty is borrowed from watching other people die, which makes it “‘only’ empirical”, a very high probability. That is the certainty of the cigarette pack: smokers die younger, on average. Heidegger wants a different certainty, the one you have about your own death before any statistics arrive, and he pairs it with total indefiniteness about when. Death, he adds on page 307, gives Dasein “nothing to be ‘actualized’”: you never experience it as an event, because when it happens, you are gone. So it can only be lived as a possibility, and in the SEP’s reading, the one that shows the finitude of all the others. Read that way, “most certain possibility” is a decent paraphrase, provided you hear “certain” in Heidegger’s sense and not the actuary’s.

Everyone Dies, Which Is to Say Nobody Does

Heidegger argues that everyday talk about death is a way of not facing it: “one dies”, which means it happens to people in general and never quite to me.

His name for the anonymous public self of everyday life is das Man, “the they” in Macquarrie and Robinson, or “the anyone” in the SEP’s preferred rendering. The they has a stock line on death. Nobody doubts that one dies, Heidegger observes, but the “one” in that sentence turns out to be “the ‘nobody’” (Macquarrie and Robinson, page 297), and the talk adds a reassuring rider: “sometime, but not right away” (page 296). He then describes a scene anyone who has sat at a deathbed may recognise: the neighbours keep reassuring the dying person that he will soon be back to his normal life. Readers of Tolstoy will know the scene from The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), where the dying man is tormented by exactly this lie. Heidegger acknowledged the novella in a single footnote, and the Tolstoy scholar Inessa Medzhibovskaya argues that his debt to Tolstoy runs deeper than that one note admits.

Running Ahead Without Brooding

Being-towards-death, done properly, means what Heidegger calls anticipation (Vorlaufen): living with your death as your own possibility, without either fleeing it or brooding over it.

The SEP stresses that anticipation is neither brooding nor speculating about when death will come (Being and Time, German pagination 261). What it does, according to Heidegger, is individualise: it “individualizes Dasein down to itself” (263), because the they can tell you what to wear and how to grieve, and it still cannot do your dying for you. Once that sinks in, the crowd’s ready-made possibilities lose their grip, and you can choose your actual options as your own. That is Heidegger’s “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit, literally “ownness”), and the SEP entry on existentialism quotes the phrase he uses for the result: “an impassioned freedom towards death”, released from the illusions of the they. The mood that brings all this home is anxiety (Angst), in which, as the SEP puts it, I experience the finitude of my future possibilities directly. Heidegger’s word for the way the they handles death is “a constant tranquillization” (Macquarrie and Robinson, page 298), which is also a fair description of reading a health warning and lighting up anyway.

Scholars disagree about what “death” even refers to here. Heidegger separates perishing, the biological end of living things, from demise (Ableben), the end of a human life, and from death proper. One school, the “existential death interpretation” defended by William Blattner and Iain Thomson, reads death as the collapse of the projects and commitments that make up a person’s identity, something you can live through. Others, like Stephen Mulhall, take death and demise as two aspects of one ending. Herman Philipse dismissed the whole distinction as “a mesmerizing play with words”. The SEP lays out all three readings without declaring a winner.

Sartre Said Death Belongs to Other People

Jean-Paul Sartre took over much of Heidegger’s vocabulary and rejected his account of death: for Sartre, death is a brute fact that arrives from outside, and it cannot be my ownmost possibility.

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre calls it “perfectly gratuitous” to claim that dying is the one thing nobody can do for me, as quoted from Hazel Barnes’ translation by the monk-philosopher Ñāṇavīra Thera, who notes in the margin that Heidegger never claimed it was the only thing. Sartre’s deeper point is that death is no possibility I can project myself towards at all. Death, in Barnes’ translation, “comes to us from the outside and transforms us into the outside”, a contingent fact that belongs, like my birth, to the brute givens of my situation. And it hands me over to others. “To be dead is to be a prey for the living”, Sartre writes (as quoted by Brian Lightbody in the journal Minerva): once I die, other people get the last word on what my life meant.

The philosopher Iain Thomson, in a 2024 chapter for Cambridge University Press, argues that Sartre’s account is an alternative to Heidegger’s rather than an extension of it, and that Sartre’s analysis of the look of the other ends up describing his own version of existential death, the death of my possibilities, which I live through. Our post on Sartre and the true self picks up what that means for who you are.

A Sermon at a Graveside and a Closed Door

Kierkegaard described the certain and uncertain death about eighty years before Heidegger, and Camus, a generation later, refused to let it point anywhere beyond this life.

In “At a Graveside” (1845), one of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Søren Kierkegaard asks the reader to think about death earnestly: certain to come, uncertain in its hour, and therefore a reason to use the time you have. Earnestness, as Sophie Höfer and Adam Buben (co-editor of the volume Kierkegaard and Death) summarise it in an essay for the ISSEP, means letting death change how you live now. In the Hong translation he asks you to think “that you are and death also is”. Rick Anthony Furtak, reviewing Kierkegaard and Death for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, notes that Kierkegaard’s thinking about death bears “a close resemblance” to Heidegger’s being-towards-death, and the SEP records that Heidegger borrowed Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition.

Albert Camus, who denied being an existentialist, wrote The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) partly against Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Heidegger, whom he faulted for escaping into something transcendent, according to the SEP entry on Camus. The essay opens with suicide as the one really serious philosophical question, and the young Camus had already written that death, for him, is “a closed door” with no other life behind it. His answer was lucid revolt, keeping the absurd in view without consolation, and the famous last line: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Whether Sisyphus can really be happy gets its own post.

What Being-Towards-Death Leaves Open

Heidegger’s account is rich in diagnosis and sparse in instructions, and that is where its critics tend to start.

Being-towards-death tells you to own your choices, and it says almost nothing about which choices are good. On the modal reading the SEP describes, that is deliberate: no way of living is objectively valid, so each of us is responsible for deciding how to go on. Critics find that too thin, and Heidegger’s own biography does not reassure them. Six years after Being and Time, in April 1933, he was elected rector of Freiburg University and joined the Nazi Party that May, remaining a member, the SEP notes, until the end of the regime.

The oldest objection comes from Epicurus, more than two thousand years earlier. He argued that death is nothing to us, because where death is, we are not, which would make fear of death a category mistake. Our post on Epicurus on death sets out that argument. Heidegger had already split the two: anxiety in the face of death is his subject, and the they, he writes, busies itself with “transforming this anxiety into fear” of an oncoming event (Macquarrie and Robinson, page 298), which is exactly how it dodges the anxiety. Epicurus has a good answer to fear of the event. Heidegger would say he is talking about demise, while Being and Time is about how a finite life is lived from the inside, and on that point the two talk past each other.

If Camus left you wondering how absurdism differs from the rest of this crowd, read Is absurdism just existentialism with good vibes?