Possibility Tout Court

Abstract

A leitmotif of Being and Time is the attempt to reverse the classical priority of actuality over possibility: instead of understanding the possible in terms of the actual – as “arising out of the actual and returning to it” – Heidegger insists on grasping possibility as the primordial notion. Nowhere is it more evident than in his complex treatment of death and dying. Death is exactly that possibility which offers nothing actual in terms of which to grasp it; death only is in our ever being-toward it. I focus on Heidegger’s characterization of being-toward-death as rooted in, and a concretion of, Dasein’s being-toward-itself. This approach yields an interpretation of the notorious “possibility of impossibility” formulation that is diametrically opposed to the so-called “world-collapse” interpretations. I then explore why, and in what sense, Dasein’s being-toward-itself needs a concretion and draw conclusions about the organization of Being and Time as whole.