Heidegger and Sartre: Existentialism, Being, and Humanism

The Essentials of Heidegger's Existentialism

Martin Heidegger's philosophical opus is both deep and complex, and a comprehensive examination of it here would be impossible. However, it is possible to provide an overview of his essential teachings — of the essential aspects of his existentialism. Doing so will allow us, in later sections, to explore his criticisms of Jean-Paul Sartre's far more famous version of existentialism, as well as to examine the ways in which — despite Heidegger's criticism of Sartre — the two thinkers are, in many respects, alike.

Heidegger, like all modern philosophers (and possibly the ancient ones as well), incorporated the work of a number of earlier thinkers into his own formulation of existentialism and his understanding of the nature of reality and of the place of humans in the world. As an existentialist, Heidegger believed in a philosophy that was relatively concrete — one concerned with addressing the place of people in the world and with dealing with concrete, real problems. This is a cornerstone of existentialism: its insistence upon the reality of existence in a real world, an existence moreover that is unmarked by any Cartesian dualism. Heidegger, along with Sartre and other existentialists, would soundly reject the kinds of ideas about consciousness promulgated by Descartes — a form of human consciousness that hovers somewhere outside of embodied experience and is used to intuit or to infer the existence of other things in the world.

For the existentialist, the reality of the world was not such a difficult proposition. Heidegger believed that the world exists, that it governs our actions in many ways, and that the nature of human life is affected in fundamental ways by the real nature of the things we encounter in the world. One of the major impetuses of existentialism — in fact its core — can thus be said to be concerned not with "knowing" but with "being." Heidegger was not so much concerned with how one knows that there are things in the world other than oneself, but with one's own state of being or existence in conjunction with those real things in the world. In more technical terms, one can summarize Heidegger's position as the claim that phenomenology (the study of the nature of things and their existence) is the same as ontology (the study of the nature of beingness for sentient creatures like ourselves).

It should be clear from this description that Heidegger could not escape — although, given the turn that his life took, he might well have wanted to — responsibility not only for the actions one takes but for the decisions behind them. The great claim that existentialism makes on behalf of all of us is that humans are essentially free, and thus that all decisions we make must be judged in that context if we are to understand a person's character and his or her chosen way of being in the world. Heidegger argued that while other entities that have their undeniable existence in the world — from trees to slabs of marble to dragonflies — have no choice about their mode of being, humans are different. We have no such fixed "essential" nature. We are each, as individuals, free to choose and to act. And because we are free, we are defined by the choices we make.

References

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Heidegger, M. (1997). Being and time. New York: SUNY.

Manser, A. (1966). Sartre: A philosophic study. London: Athlone Press.

Murdoch, I. (1953). Sartre: Romantic rationalist. New Haven: Yale University.

Sartre, J.-P. (1967). Existentialism and humanism. London: Eyre Methuen.

Sartre, J.-P. (1946). (Stuart Gilbert, trans.) No Exit. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Sartre, J.-P. (1956). (Hazel Barnes, trans.) Being and nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library.

Sartre, J.-P. (1959). (Lloyd Alexander, trans.) Nausea. New York: New Directions.

Sartre, J.-P. (1962). (Forrest Williams, trans.) Imagination: A psychological critique. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.