Heidegger: "Being-Towards-Death," The Creative and Ethical Edge

I just read a paper called “HEIDEGGER’S ANALYSIS OF DEATH: A REFLECTION ON MODERN MAN’S ‘LOSS’ OF DEATH’S MEANING AND REFERENCE TO LIFE.” By Ssekanjakko Vincent Bonny.

I wanted to share some thoughts on how it connects to my interests.

Heidegger wasn’t interested in death as a clinical event. He wasn’t concerned with the moment your heart stops beating. He was after something more existential: the idea that our relationship to death—specifically, our awareness of it—is what allows us to live authentically. He called this orientation Being-towards-death. And for me, as an artist working at the intersection of mortality and meaning, that phrase really connected with me.

It’s not a call to be morbid. It’s not about dwelling in despair. Being-towards-death is about lucidity. It’s about seeing clearly that life is short, that it ends, and that this fact—when we allow ourselves to face it—can shape how we live, what we create, and how we treat each other.

Heidegger said that most of us live in what he called “everydayness.” We defer death. We keep it abstract. It happens to other people, over there, someday. But not now. Not to me. That denial, he argued, keeps us anesthetized. It keeps us disconnected from our own agency and freedom. We live borrowed lives, following borrowed scripts. I’ve talked and written about this a lot.

But when death stops being a distant rumor and becomes a personal horizon, everything shifts. We’re thrown back onto ourselves. We’re forced to ask: What really matters? What am I doing with the time I have?

That’s the ground of authenticity.

And that’s where art comes in.

I believe artists—at least the ones doing honest work—are already living in that space. Whether we’re aware of it or not, creativity pulls us toward the edge of things. Toward memory, toward loss, toward impermanence. Every meaningful work of art is a kind of death ritual. It involves sacrifice. Vulnerability. A confrontation with what’s been lost—or what will be. To make anything real, you have to give something up. You have to face what can’t be controlled. That’s mortality talking.

But there’s more. This isn’t just a personal or creative stance—it’s an ethical one.

If I’m truly aware of death—my own and yours—it becomes harder to objectify, to other, to harm. I start to recognize that we’re all temporary. All finite. And maybe, if I’m paying attention, I start to live with more urgency, more care, more attention to what matters and less to what doesn’t. Death becomes a mirror—and sometimes, a compass.

So no, Being-towards-death isn’t a philosophical abstraction for me. It’s a way of living. A way of creating. A refusal to go numb. A refusal to let denial have the last word. It’s not about having answers. It’s about not looking away.

And that’s where I think the work begins.

What do you think? Is any of this landing for you?

Facing the End: Heidegger, Modernity, and the Meaning We’ve Lost

We don’t really talk about death anymore—not in any meaningful way. We dress it up in ritual, drown it out with noise, and spin it into spectacle. Somewhere along the way, we stopped treating death as a mirror and started treating it like a mess to be cleaned up. But as Martin Heidegger once argued, our relationship to death isn’t just a philosophical curiosity—it’s the foundation of an authentic life.

In Being and Time, Heidegger introduced a concept that should hit all of us squarely in the gut: Being-towards-death. Unlike animals, humans are aware of their own mortality. We don’t just die—we know we’re going to die. And that knowledge, if we let it in, can radically change the way we live.

But we rarely do. Most of us live in what Heidegger calls “everydayness,” where death is something that happens to other people. We skim the obituary page. We attend the funeral. But we never fully absorb the fact that we’re next. Instead, we flee into distraction, comfort, and consumption.

This is what the author of a recent paper called the “loss of death-to-life reference.” In simpler terms: we’ve lost the thread. Death used to point us back to life, to meaning, to what matters. Now, it’s buried under carnival tents and beer stands at modern funerals, turned into an opportunity to sell trinkets, drown pain, and avoid reflection.

Heidegger believed that to live authentically, we must turn toward our own death—not in morbid fascination, but in honest acknowledgment. He said we should live with death as a “pure possibility,” always present but not yet actualized. It’s not about dwelling on death. It’s about letting it shape the urgency of our days.

And here’s the paradox: when we face death head-on, life sharpens. Viktor Frankl put it well—if we were immortal, nothing would matter. We could postpone everything forever. But because we’re finite, we’re called to act, to love, to create now.

This isn’t a plea for some stoic resignation or heroic denial of grief. Death hurts. The loss of someone we love breaks us. But the pain of death can also become a kind of teacher. It reminds us that life is not just a timeline—it’s a trembling, temporary flame. And the way we treat that flame—our own and others’—reveals everything about who we are.

There’s nothing inherently meaningful about death. But the awareness of it? That’s different. Death awareness can crack open the shell of ego and force us to ask the questions we spend our lives trying to avoid. What matters? What lasts? What have I been avoiding because I thought I had time?

Modern culture isn’t designed to help us answer those questions. It’s designed to numb them. That’s why reclaiming the existential weight of death is not just personal—it’s cultural. It’s spiritual. It’s ethical.

So here’s the real question: What would your life look like if you lived it with the constant awareness that it’s going to end?

Not someday.
Not in theory.
But for real.
Sooner than you think.

That’s not meant to depress you. It’s meant to wake you up.