when it perverts anxiety into cowardly fear and, in surmounting this fear, only makes known its own cowardliness in the face of anxiety.
We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death- a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the "they", and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious .
All the relationships which belong to Being-towards-death, up to the full content of Dasein's uttermost possibility, as we have characterized it, constitute an anticipation which they combine in revealing, unfolding, and holding fast, as that which makes this possibility possible. The existential projection in which anticipation has been delimited, has made visible the ontological possibility of an existentiell Being-towards-death which is authentic. Therewith, however, the possibility of Dasein's having an authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole emerges, but only as an ontological possibility. In our existential projection of anticipation, we have of course clung to those structures of Dasein which we have arrived at earlier, and we have, as it were, let Dasein itself project itself upon this possibility, without holding up to Dasein an ideal of existence with any special 'content', or forcing any such ideal upon it 'from outside'. Nevertheless, this existentially 'possible' Being-towards-death remains, from the existentiell point of view, a fantastical exaction. The fact that an authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole is ontologically possible for Dasein, signifies nothing, so long as a corresponding ontical potentiality-for-Being has not been demonstrated in Dasein itself. Does Dasein ever factically throw itself into such a Being-towards-death? Does Dasein demand, even by reason of its ownmostBeing, an authentic potentiality-for-Being determined by anticipation?
Before answering these questions, we must investigate whether to any [267] extent and in anyway Dasein gives testimony, from its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, as to a possible authenticity of its existence, so that it not only makes known that in an existentiell manner such authenticity is possible, but demands this of itself
The question of Dasein's authentic Being-a-whole and of its existential constitution still hangs in mid-air. It can be put on a phenomenal basis which will stand the test only if it can cling to a possible authenticity of its Being which is attested by Dasein itself. If we succeed in uncovering that attestation phenomenologically, together with what it attests, then the problem will arise anew as to whether the anticipation of [zum] death, which we have hitherto projected only in its ontological possibility, has an essential connection with that authentic potentiality-for-Being which has been attested.