questioning related to the wholeness of Dasein possesses a genuinely [373] unequivocal character ontologically. The question itself may even have been answered with regard to being-toward-the-end. However, death is, after all, only the "end" of Dasein, and formally speaking, it is just one of the ends that embraces the totality of Dasein. But the other "end" is the "beginning," "birth." Only the being ''between" birth and death presents the whole we are looking for. Accordingly, the previous orientation of our analytic would remain "one-sided," despite all its tendencies toward a consideration of existing being-whole and in spite of the genuineness with which authentic and inauthentic being-toward-death have been explicated. Dasein has been our theme only as to how it exists, more or less, "forward" and leaves everything that has been "behind." Not only did being-toward-the-beginning remain unnoticed, but so did, above all, the way Dasein stretches along between birth and death. Precisely the "connection of life," in which, after all, Dasein constantly somehow holds itself, was overlooked in our analysis of being-whole.
Must we not take back our point of departure of temporality as the meaning of being of the totality of Dasein, even though what we addressed as the "connection" between birth and death is ontologically completely obscure? Or does temporality, as we set it forth, first give the foundation [Boden] on which to provide an unequivocal direction for the existential and ontological question of that "connection"? Perhaps it is already a gain in the field of this inquiry if we learn not to take these problems too lightly.
What seems "more simple" than the nature of the "connection of life" between birth and death? It consists of a succession of experiences "in time." If we pursue this characterization of the connection in question and above all of the ontological assumption behind it in a more penetrating way, something remarkable happens. In this succession of experiences only the experience that is present "in the actual now" is "really" ["eigentlich"] "real" ["wirklich"]. The experiences past and just coming, on the other hand, are no longer or not yet "real." Dasein traverses the time-span allotted to it between the two boundaries in such a way that it is "real" only in the now and hops, so to speak, through the succession of nows of its "time." For this reason one says that Dasein is "temporal." The self maintains itself in a certain sameness throughout this constant change of experiences. Opinions diverge as to how this persistent self is to be defined and how one is to determine what relation it may possibly have to the changing experiences. The being of this persistently changing connection of experiences remains undetermined. At bottom., however, and whether one admits it or not, something objectively present-"in time," but of course "unthinglike," has been posited in this characterization of the connection of life.