Still, I should mention that Sartre’s discussion of “death” distin-
guished him sharply from Heidegger. If he has been distancing himself
from Heidegger throughout the book, here the contrast is clearest.
Whereas Heidegger famously spoke ofDasein’s individuating being-
unto-death and urged us to embrace our mortal temporality resolutely,
Sartre claims, in Epicurean fashion,^32 that death is beyond Dasein
(Human Reality). “My death” belongs to the class of what he calls
unrealizables along with other aspects of my objectification
(“alienation”) in the eyes of Others such as my “vulgarity,” my “guilty
conscience,” before the infinite Other, and my “being a Jew,” as we shall
see inChapter 9. Unlike the imaginary, which is not real (“irreal,” as he
explained inThe Imaginary), the unrealizables are real features of my
situation: “they represent the reverse side of the situation.” They are its
limits, not in the sense of something I can transcend but in the sense that
marks the futile and irresistible tendency to see oneself “from outside”
of one’s situation. Thus when we think of our death, we adopt the
viewpoint on ourselves that we have assumed before the corpses of
others. But this is to conflate our dying with their death. The latter,
again in Sartre’s neo-Epicurean stance, is an impossibility but one
predicated on our real situation – our finitude and bodily limit. “Free-
dom is total and infinite,” Sartre reminds us, “which does not mean that
it has no limits but that itnever encounters them”(BN 351 ).
And yet, unlike the other limits, death is aboundary,aJanus bifrons.
Like the final chord of a melody, it points to the silence beyond itself.
But death becomesmineby being interiorized and humanized as my
terminus – the final term belonging to a series called “my life.” Sounding
now somewhat like Heidegger, Sartre concludes: “Hence I become
responsible formydeath as for my life. Not for the empirical and
contingent phenomenon of my decease [which Sartre considers a matter
of chance] but for this character of finitude which causes my life like my
death to bemylife” (BN 532 ).
(^32) Epicurus, “When we are there, death is not, and when death is there, we are not.”Epistola ad
Menoeceum, in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (eds.),The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols.
(Cambridge University Press, 1987 ),i: 150. For an in-depth comparison of Sartre and
Heidegger on death, see Bernard N. Schumacher,Death and Mortality in Contemporary
Philosophy(Cambridge University Press, 2011 ).
“Partiv: Having, Doing and Being” 219