Being-towards-death, even when it is not explicitly engaged in 'thinking about [255] death'. Even in average everydayness, this ownmost potentiality-for-Being, which is non-relational and not to be outstripped, is constantly an issue for Dasein. This is the case when its concern is merely in the mode of an untroubled indifference towards the uttermost possibility of existence.1
In setting forth everyday Being-towards-death, however, we are at the same time enjoined to try to secure a full existential conception of Being-towards-the-end, by a more penetrating Interpretation in which falling Being-towards-death is taken as an evasion in the face of death. That in the face of which one flees has been made visible in a way which is phenomenally adequate. Against this it must be possible to project phenomenologically the way in which evasive Dasein itself understands its death.xiii
¶ 52. Everyday Being-towards-the-end, and the Full Existential Conception of Death
In our preliminary existential sketch, Being-towards-the-end has been defined as Being towards one's ownmost potentiality-for-Being, which is non-relational and is not to be outstripped. Being towards this possibility, as a Being which exists, is brought face to face with the absolute impossibility of existence. Beyond this seemingly empty characterization of Being-towards-death, there has been revealed the concretion of this Being in the mode of everydayness. In accordance with the tendency to falling, which is essential to everydayness, Being-towards-death has turned out to be an evasion in the face of death-an evasion which conceals. While our investigation has hitherto passed from a formal sketch of the ontological structure of death to the concrete analysis of everyday Being-towards-the-end, the direction is now to be reversed, and we shall arrive at the full existential conception of death by rounding out our Interpretation of everyday Being-towards-the-end.
In explicating everyday Being-towards-death we have clung to the idle talk of the "they" to the effect that "one dies too, sometime, but not right away."2 All that we have Interpreted thus far is the 'one dies' as such. In the 'sometime, but not right away', everydayness concedes something like a certainty of death. Nobody doubts that one dies. On the other hand, this 'not doubting' need not imply that kind of Being-certain which corresponds to the way death-in the sense of the distinctive possibility characterized above-enters into Dasein. Everydayness confines itself to
1 '... wenn auch nur im Modus des Besorgens einer unbehelligten Gleichgültigkeit gegen die äusserste Möglichkeit seiner Existenz.' Ordinarily the expression 'Gleichgültigkeit gegen' means simply 'indifference towards'. But Heidegger's use of boldface type suggests that here he also has in mind that 'gegen' may mean 'against' or 'in opposition to'.
2 '... man stirbt auch einmal, aber vorläufig noch nicht.'