So I'm new here. Hi :)

For Heidegger death functions like a hinge between division one's everydayness and division two's temporality. What seems clear within the context of the whole book is that death must be a formal ontological structure of dasein rather than an ontic way of taking up that structure. His extremely difficult and confusing phenomenology of death shows that he is using this everyday word in a very unusual way. Thus, in using death in his ontological-existential way he is excluding a lot from it; he formalises the everyday concept until the everyday meanings drop out. So for example, he does not mean death as the end of biological life (perishing) nor the way we are towards that end; he does not mean our end as dasein (demise) nor our being toward our demise; he doesn't mean the death of other dasein; he probably doesn't mean death as a major existential crisis (depression) since this is maybe too ontic and not ontological and formal enough. Whatever death is it is clear that one can be toward death it in an owned (authentic) or an unowned (inauthentic) way. Angst has an important role to play also as death's attunement. It's also clear that death is an existential limit-situation. Most problematic is that death has to be a phenomenon.

While eating a hot curry today my mouth was on fire and I was thinking how the existential-ontological kernel that Heidegger formalises out of the everyday ontic understanding of death is probably most clearly understood as unintelligiblity. Once he has fully formalised death he says that "death is the possibility of impossibility". I think that what he is getting at with 'impossibility' is again most clearly and easily understood as unintelligibility because after-all existential possibility is what gives one's own dasein intelligibility. An owned being-toward-death would be open to a new understanding of being, i.e. open to making the unintelligible intelligible, or as Dreyfus would say, open to the unique situation. Unowned being-toward-death on this interpretation would the tranquilised falling back upon dasman’s everyday familiar intelligibility and thereby becoming closed off to the unique situation and the angst it requires. An owned being-toward-death requires an attuned-understanding: the angst (attunement) that goes with being a world discloser (understanding). It is angst because you're projecting on the basis of your owned groundless uncanniness (unhomeliness). And it is uncanny because it is unintelligible.

Death is also described as a limit-situation (Jasper's concept that Heidegger takes over). But death is the existential limit of what? The limit of intelligibility. I was also thinking about death as the concealment of being and an owned being-toward-death as the unconcealment of being. I particularly like this last thought!

Maybe I'm wrong in thinking of death as unintelligibility. My perspective on this topic is a synthesis of my slow readings of Being and Time and also some very helpful commentaries from Bert Dreyfus, William Blattner, Carol White and Kate Withy. Carol White's treatment of death is the most eye opening.

Does anyone have a different perspective on death in Being and Time?

Cheers!