Wednesday’s lecture was Heidegger’s views on death. Heidegger uses the term Dasein to describe human existence or the act of existing/being. We cannot have a learned or remembered experience of death because we are dead after it happens. This leads us to question how we can fully understand Dasein, in its entirety, if we cannot experience the end of Dasein. Heidegger says that by learning about the end of Dasein in others, by this he means the death of another person, we can have a better understanding of our own Dasein and what it really means to die. Thad brought the lecture to an interesting point when he said that Heidegger wants you, the individual, to relate to yourself to death. We all know that we will die, but none of us know when or how death will come. There is really only one thing you are guaranteed in life and that is death. Everything living must die at some point. Millions of humans have died before you even existed and even after you die, millions more will die. I think a lot of people try to have this philosophy of “live today like you will die tomorrow” and I think that’s bullshit. I bet that no one is constantly thinking about their death, which inspires them to live. (I am excluding people who are sick or have a terminal illness.) However, my opinion doesn’t change the fact that I still could die at any time. Just like any other human being, I have thought about what it would be like to die. I’ve sat in boxes before, acting like they were coffins, and who hasn’t sat in bed at night randomly thinking about mortality and death? One of the questions on the power point slide asked, what does it mean to exist, and I believe that it means being aware of consciousness, being aware of nature (this earth we live on, this galaxy earth lives in, this universe our galaxy lives in), being aware of other humans, and not knowing the answers to everything which makes us strive to find those answers. We do not know what is in store for us in death, anything is possible.