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§184 [151–152]

Adoption. By consigning the truth of beyng to the essence of the human being, the event adopts this being in the essence thereby awakened, insofar as the event allows historical humans to pertain to the claim which, in the arrogation, touches them essentially. The adoption directs human beings to the expropriation and disposes them for the belongingness to the departure. Here is concealed the necessity preserved in the inceptual essence of beyng, namely, that humans, specifically as historial, comport themselves in a unique way to death, such that death is in every case the death of the historial human being, in that a departure with respect to beings eventuates within beings. The event-related adoption (claim) of steadfast humans for the expropriation of the event into the downgoing of the beginning, i.e., into the abyssal inceptuality, contains what is distinctive of human death (strictly taken, only human death can be thought of as death). This unique death reaches into the “extreme possibility” of beyng itself. This death “is” never an ending, because it constantly belongs already to the beginning. Neither theological nor metaphysical considerations and explanations of death ever reach into the domain of its essence as that essence is understood with respect to the history of beyng. In a first attempt (Being and Time) to think the truth of being, the essence of death was thought, and the reason for that lies not in an “existentiell” “anthropology” or in a peculiar and wayward conception of death. On the contrary, it arises from an unsaid— but at that time also hardly grasped—glimpse into the event-related essence of the truth of beyng. The misgivings over the “conception” of death in Being and Time may be correct within metaphysical and anthropological discussions. Yet we can lay to rest these misgivings along with their correctness, for, in the uniquely mandatory domain of questioning in Being and Time, i.e., in the thinking of the truth of beyng, they of themselves come to naught and do so with such decisiveness that they are unable in the least to penetrate into

Martin Heidegger (GA 71) The Event