Essential Structures

This chapter provides the first example of an enabling frame and draws on Martin Heidegger’s seminal work on personal mortality in his writings on the concepts of Being, time and finitude. The discussion focuses particularly on his interpretation of personal mortality, or being-toward-death, as an integral part of what structures individual existence. As such, talk about existence after death becomes nonsensical because death is tightly bound to what it means to be alive. The discussion also introduces Heidegger’s understanding of finitude and its relationship to my-death. His concept of finitude will be developed in a different way in the next chapter.