Recognizing death’s contingency actually frees us from its alleged constraint.

Evidence

Thus we must conclude in opposition to Heidegger that death, far from being my peculiar possibility, is a contingent fact which as such on principle escapes me and originally belongs to my facticity. I can neither discover my death nor wait for it nor adopt an attitude toward it, for it is that which is revealed as undiscoverable, that which disarms all waiting, that which slips into all attitudes (and particularly into those which are assumed with respect to death) so as to transform them into externalized and fixed conducts whose meaning is forever entrusted to others and not to ourselves, Death is a pure fact as is birth; it comes to us from outside and it transforms us into the outside. At bottom it is in no way distinguished from birth, and it is the identity of birth and death that we call facticity. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1268 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The human body remains contingent and superfluous even in decomposition.; Death belongs to facticity, not to freedom, and transforms us into the outside. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1268; Being-free for death compresses Dasein into the simplicity of its chosen fate

Broader Connections

• Death belongs to facticity, not to freedom, and transforms us into the outside. #contradicts (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1268