Skeptical of metaphysical approaches that seek some Being outside time, Heidegger begins with a phenomenology of the way we experience things in everyday life. But does beginning with everydayness avoid metaphysics, or is there a metaphysics already embedded in our 'commonsense' understanding? For Buddhism, there is a metaphysics implicit in everydayness and it is dangerously deluded, because it causes us to suffer. The danger with Heidegger's approach is that it may conclude by reinstating and formalizing those metaphysically-conditioned intuitions, and will therefore reflect not Being but just another historically-determined understanding of Being.

　　 Heidegger's analysis of everydayness determines that our being is care (Sorge). We are always ahead of ourselves, planning and projecting future possibilities. Then how can we ever be whole? Only if we can exist in a way that unifies our past, present and future. Such a 'self-gathering' occurs in the resolute anticipation of my own death. Since my death is the one event I can never 'gather', the meaning of death is found not in its actuality but in its possibility: not in being-at-an-end but in being-towards-the-end. The usual inauthentic or 'fallen' view perverts death into a public event that 'one' encounters. More authentic openness to death reveals it as my uttermost possibility, which individuates me: knowing that my death cannot be evaded, that even the longest life is brief, can pull me together out of my dispersal in idle talk and chance possibilities. This resolute anticipation of my death frees me to be myself. For this to happen death must be grasped, cultivated and endured 'as possibility'. Such 'being-towards-death is essentially anxiety,' because anxiety is the state of mind that keeps the constant threat of death before us, in contrast with the tranquillization of the usual inauthentic attitude, which 'does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death' (Heidegger 1927/1962: 298-311). Heidegger does not consider whether such anxious awareness might be a stage leading to something else: that I might actually 'die before I die,' to use the Sufi phrase.

　　 The key terms so far are resoluteness and authenticity (Eigentlichkeit, literally 'ownedness' or 'self-possessedness' [3]). What is important is to possess oneself: to bind one's inclinations into a unity, so one isn't at the mercy of chance possibilities and casual distractions. This need to 'pull oneself together' out of the dispersion of everyday, inauthentic existence is the key metaphor in Being and Time. The voluntaristic simile persists into the analysis of temporality, where resoluteness pulls the present out of dispersal on objects of immediate concern and binds it firmly with the future and past. But this image needs to be complemented by another: the person so driven by his life-project that he never is where he is because he is always busy going somewhere else -- usually clawing up the ladder of success. (Heidegger is careful not to dilute his ontological analysis with ethical recommendations, so he leaves open the question of where to direct one's resoluteness.) Today, at least, such people are as familiar to us as the dispersed people Heidegger finds inauthentic, and as a solution to the problem of life this is just as one-sided.

　　 Here the theory of repression adds something that Being and Time misses: the 'return of the repressed' in symbolic form. Usually death repression manifests as a deep need for security and that 'psychopathology of the everyday' called normality, but it can also appear in the compulsiveness of the person who must become wealthy, famous, etc. The psychoanalyst Irvin Yalom proposes a dual paradigm of death-denial: fusion and individuation. Fusion is hiding in the crowd and expecting to be taken care of; individuation seeks the specialness of heroism that tries to qualify for a better fate by becoming better than others (Yalom 1980, 112ff). But how 'authentic' can such resoluteness be if it involves an attempt to escape death through an 'immortality project'? If it tries to fill up one's sense of lack with some symbolic reality such as money or fame? Section one argued that preoccupation with the future can be a reflex of death-terror, an unconscious and therefore compulsive attempt to transcend death and nothingness symbolically. That trap Heidegger fails to warn us against and may himself have fallen into. Becker and Yalom, among others, have argued convincingly that Freud never analyzed his own death-fear; therefore the psychoanalytic movement became his own immortality project, one reason he reacted so strongly against any perceived threat to his patriarchy (Becker 1973: 93-124, Yalom 1980: 59-76). Recent biographies of Heidegger provide evidence to support similar conclusions: for example, his predilection to belittle other philosophers, especially contemporaries; deep reluctance to admit he was ever wrong, philosophically or politically; and, the most revealing, his obvious desire to be 'a world-historical thinker' (Ott: 1988). One senses that Heidegger hoped to fill up his own sense of lack by becoming the philosopher who finally reveals the nature of Being to a grateful posterity. [4] If there is something inauthentic about both of Heidegger's alternatives, is there another possibility that is more authentic?