Being-towards-death and Owning One's Judgment

Heidegger’s discussion of ‘Being-towards-death’ occupies a prominent position in his reflections on authenticity. But this discussion has been the target of some of his fiercest critics, 1 and poses his sympathetic readers some of their greatest challenges. This paper will offer a novel interpretation of the discussion as contributing to the articulation of a notimplausible account of self-knowledge and self-acknowledgement. It has often been noted that the term typically translated as ‘authenticity’—Eigentlichkeit—could be translated more literally as ‘ownness’ or ‘ownedness’; and my reading reveals Eigentlichkeit to be the ‘owning’ of one’s own judgment, an ‘owning’ that manifests itself in a distinctive relationship to one’s death. The reading builds on a comparison of Heidegger’s discussion with an examination in his lectures of St Paul and, in particular, of his remarks on the Last Judgment in the letters to the Thessalonians. Others have suggested a connection might be found there; 2 and what I offer here is a suggestion of my own about just what that connection might be. I propose that Heidegger sees in St Paul’s remarks an understanding of what it is to be willing to stand before God, and that this provides a model for Heidegger of an understanding of what it is to be willing to stand before oneself. The (confused) desire to escape God’s judgment is a desire to avoid what one takes to be the facts about oneself and manifests itself in a distinctive relationship to the Last Judgment; alienation from one’s own judgment is the avoidance of the same facts and can be identified, I argue, with Heideggerian inauthenticity and its distinctive mode of Being-towards-death. Sec. 1 sets out some of the principal puzzling features of Heidegger’s discussion of Being-towards-death; Sec. 2 presents my reading of Heidegger’s discussion of St Paul; and