16000-21

Further, “history” signifies the totality of those entities which change ‘in time’, and indeed the transformations and vicissitudes of men, of human groupings and their ‘cultures’, as distinguished from Nature, which likewise operates ‘in time’. Here what one has in view is not so much a kind of Being-historizing-as it is that realm of entities which one distinguishes from Nature by having regard for the way in which man’s existence is essentially determined by ‘spirit’ and ‘culture’, even though in a certain manner Nature too belongs to “history” as thus understood. Finally, whatever has been handed down to us is held to be ‘historical’, whether it is something that we know histologically or something has taken over as self-evident, with its derivation hidden.

16000-20

If we take these four significations together, the upshot is that history is that specific historizing of existent Dasein which comes to pass in time. In the following considerations, the ‘variations’ in which we are chiefly interested are those of end and totality; these are ways in which Dasein gets a definite character ontologically. As such, they should lead to a primordial Interpretation of this entity. Keeping constantly in view the existential constitution of Dasein already set forth, we must decide how wrong to Dasein ontologically are those conceptions of end and totality that first thrust themselves to the fore, no matter how categorially indefinite they may remain. The rejection of such concepts must be developed into a positive assignment of them to their specific realms. In this way, our understanding of end and totality in their variant forms as existential will be strengthened, and this will guarantee the possibility of an ontological Interpretation of death.

16000-19

Nevertheless, even if the analysis of Dasein’s end and totality takes on so broad an orientation, this cannot mean that the existential concepts of end and totality are to be obtained by “bay of a deduction. On the contrary, the existential meaning of Dasein’s coming-to-an-end must be taken from Dasein itself, and we must show how such ‘ending’ can constitute Being-a-whole for the entity exists.