Abstract

After a summary review of the history of the idea of nothingness over a period extending from Parmenides to Sartre, the author notes that in Heidegger existence is conceived as a mode of human continued being, and consequently is viewed as »being tending to death«, in the sense that it is a process of continual dying. Death is a formal annihilation of existence conceived phenomenologically, that is to say, as it appears from the point of view of temporality. Of this, the fear of death is the proof. In the later development of this thought, however Heidegger cosiders nothingness as showing the way to the conception of transcendental being, and even of a being divine.