The paper “Phenomenology of Death” analyzes the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘temporality’ as it explains the notion of Heidegger. The general approach of this paper is to present ‘temporality’ in terms of ‘finitude’ and to define and examine the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ modes of selfhood.
Heidegger argues that ‘das man’ is ‘being towards death’ and is inauthentic as a result. Those who do not ‘act’ like ‘das man’ are in some sense authentic? This latter point will be taken up in the later half of the following analysis, and it is going to be argued that ‘determining what qualifies as ‘everydayness’ is a very seriously ambiguous notion. This paper will begin with the general discussion of ‘being’ and its opposite, namely, non-being, proceed to a discussion of ‘finitude’ in relation to inauthenticity, and discuss the relationship between an authentic and inauthentic self in relation to the temporality.
According to Heidegger, the external world of ‘extension’ or as he states the world of the “senses” is largely understood as “quantitative modifications of the modes of extensio itself”. By contrast, the world can be characterized in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. By quantitative, he is implying the basic units of scientific measurement. However, these discrete units of measurement and the application of these as a means of both understanding extension along with distinguishing it from the subject are forms of abstraction.