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Being and Time

existential understanding of anticipation itself. Hitherto this could amount to no more than an ontological projection. We have now shown that anticipation is not just a fictitious possibility which we have forced upon Dasein; it is a mode of an existentiell potentiality-for-Being that is attested in Dasein—a mode which Dasein exacts of itself, if indeed it authentically understands itself as resolute. Anticipation 'is' not some kind of free-floating behaviour, but must be conceived as the possibility of the authenticity of that resoluteness which has been attested in an existentiell way—a possibility hidden in such resoluteness, and thus attested therewith. Authentic 'thinking about death' is a wanting-to-have-a-conscience, which has become transparent to itself in an existentiell manner. If resoluteness, as authentic, tends towards the mode delimited by anticipation, and if anticipation goes to make up Dasein's authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole, then in the resoluteness which is attested in an existentiell manner, there is attested with it an authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole which belongs to Dasein. The question of the potentiality-for-Being-a-whole is one which is factical and existentiell. It is answered by Dasein as resolute. The question of Dasein's potentiality-for-Being-a-whole has now fully sloughed off the character indicated at the beginning,iii when we treated it as it if were just a theoretical or methodological question of the analytic of Dasein, arising from the endeavour to have the whole of Dasein completely 'given'. The question of Dasein's totality, which at the beginning we discussed only with regard to ontological method, has its justification, but only because the ground for that justification goes back to an ontical possibility of Dasein.

By thus casting light upon the 'connection' between anticipation and resoluteness in the sense of the possible modalization of the latter by the former, we have exhibited as a phenomenon an authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole which belongs to Dasein. If with this phenomenon we have reached a way of Being of Dasein in which it brings itself to itself and face to face with itself, then this phenomenon must, both ontically and ontologically, remain unintelligible to the everyday common-sense manner in which Dasein has been interpreted by the "they". It would be a misunderstanding to shove this existentiell possibility aside as [310] 'unproved' or to want to 'prove' it theoretically. Yet the phenomenon needs to be protected against the grossest perversions.

Anticipatory resoluteness is not a way of escape, fabricated for the 'overcoming' of death; it is rather that understanding which follows the call of conscience and which frees for death the possibility of acquiring power over Dasein's existence and of basically dispersing all fugitive Self-concealments. Nor does wanting-to-have-a-conscience, which has been made determinate as Being-towards-death, signify a kind of seclusion in


Being and Time (M&R) by Martin Heidegger