- Trace the emergence of twentieth-century existentialism and identify the historical importance assigned to Heidegger and Sartre.
- Contrast the Cartesian separation of consciousness and world with being in the world.
- Explain Heidegger's descriptive approach to existence, including thrownness, death, anxiety, and alienation.
- Describe Heidegger's later turn toward technology, poetry, and openness to truth.
- Compare Sartre's doctrine of total freedom with Heidegger's account of fundamental freedom and identify existentialism's broader contribution.
Emergence and Major Figures
Twentieth-century existentialism began in Germany during the period following the First World War. After the Second World War, it became fashionable in continental Europe largely in response to the experience of Nazi occupation.
Jean-Paul Sartre was the most famous name associated with the postwar French development of existentialism. The program nevertheless presents Martin Heidegger, rather than Sartre, as modern existentialism's most significant figure.
Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927.
When and where did twentieth-century existentialism begin, and who was the most famous name associated with its postwar French development?
It began in Germany during the period following the First World War. Jean-Paul Sartre was the most famous name associated with its postwar French development.
Cartesian Dualism and Being in the World
The Cartesian framework separates consciousness from the external world. Barrett identifies Descartes as the point at which this subject-object split formally entered philosophy and states that it was unknown to Greek and medieval philosophers.
Barrett says that nearly all philosophy during the two centuries following Descartes accommodated itself to the Cartesian framework. At the beginning of the twentieth century, anti-Cartesian movements appeared in England, continental Europe, and American pragmatism; Heidegger was among the philosophers who rebelled against Cartesianism.
Proposing an epistemological question already presupposes that the questioner is in the world. Knowledge is one mode among the various ways human beings exist in the world.
Contrast the Cartesian framework with being in the world by stating what the former separates and what the latter makes fundamental.
The Cartesian framework separates consciousness from the external world. Being in the world is the fundamental starting concept in Barrett's introduction to Heidegger.
Description and Lived Experience
Once human beings are understood as being in the world, philosophy's primary task becomes describing their modes of existence. Heidegger centers the question of what it is to exist rather than the problem of knowledge.
Human existence is a given to be coped with rather than something inferred. Barrett says Heidegger's ideas stand or fall by how adequately they describe actual experience.
Heidegger's analysis emphasizes both familiar everyday life and extraordinary experience.
Barrett contrasts Heidegger with Moore and Wittgenstein, who begin from specific problems of knowledge and perception. Barrett interprets later Wittgenstein as allowing that philosophy's problems could disappear if the confusions of ordinary language were unraveled.
By what test does Barrett say Heidegger's ideas stand or fall, and what can an adequate description reveal?
They stand or fall by how adequately they describe actual experience. Barrett argues that adequate description can reveal familiar features of experience that people ordinarily overlook.
Thrownness, Finitude, and Alienation
Parents, historical birth time, and genetic structure are unchosen conditions from which an individual must fashion a life. Human existence is an ongoing task of creating oneself from a contingent factual base.
For Heidegger, the future is the predominant temporal dimension because the present has meaning only as it opens toward a possible future.
A person's own death cannot be an experienced event within that person's life. Heidegger treats death as the present possibility of not being that cancels all of an individual's other possibilities.
- Barrett describes anxiety as the contingency of human existence coming to consciousness.
- At one level of Heidegger's account, alienation occurs when a person loses the self in an impersonal social identity or role.
How do unchosen starting conditions relate to the ongoing task of human existence?
Parents, historical birth time, and genetic structure are unchosen conditions from which an individual must fashion a life; human existence is an ongoing task of creating oneself from that contingent factual base.
The Turn, Technology, and Poetry
Being and Time was presented as the first volume of a two-volume work, but the planned second volume did not appear. Heidegger scholars call his later philosophical turn die Kehre.
Heidegger came to believe that Being and Time had focused too exclusively on humanity. He holds that modern culture has lost its sense of connection with being as a whole.
Barrett links modern humanity's detachment from cosmic rootedness to increasingly intricate technical and human-made surroundings. The later Heidegger is centrally concerned with poetry, art, and technology.
- Barrett says the atomic bomb made humanity broadly conscious that technology could enable human self-destruction.
- Treating language as a manipulable formal calculus extends technical thinking into the domain of language.
- In Heidegger's view, a poet cannot produce a poem merely by willing it.
What is die Kehre, and which three concerns are central to the later Heidegger?
Die Kehre is the name Heidegger scholars give his later philosophical turn. Poetry, art, and technology are central concerns of the later Heidegger.
Sartre and Existentialism's Legacy
Sartre's major philosophical work is titled Being and Nothingness. Barrett judges some of Sartre's novels and plays more important than any of Sartre's philosophical writings.
Barrett characterizes Being and Nothingness as a conflict between two Cartesian consciousnesses that repeatedly misunderstand each other.
| Thinker | Account |
|---|---|
| Sartre | His best-known positive doctrine holds that human beings possess absolute and total freedom. |
| Heidegger | His fundamental freedom is the capacity, when achievable, to become open and let truth happen. |
Sartre maintains that pretending not to be free falsifies the reality of one's situation. He characterizes total freedom as dizzying because a person remains able to make precipitous and dangerous choices.
Barrett says existentialism brought about a revaluation of nineteenth-century thought. Existentialism helped establish Kierkegaard as a major nineteenth-century thinker in English-speaking countries.
Barrett argues that modern society tends to depersonalize people to a certain extent as it grows larger and more intricately organized. Existentialism powerfully emphasizes that a unique individual cannot be completely assimilated into a bureaucratic, conceptual, or systematic framework.
Distinguish Sartre's best-known positive doctrine of freedom from Heidegger's fundamental freedom.
Sartre's doctrine holds that human beings possess absolute and total freedom. Heidegger's fundamental freedom is the capacity, when achievable, to become open and let truth happen.
Common misconceptions
Watch out: Knowledge stands outside human existence in the world.
Instead: Knowledge is one mode among the various ways human beings exist in the world.
Watch out: A person's own death can be an experienced event within that person's life.
Instead: A person's own death cannot be an experienced event within that person's life.
Watch out: Heidegger's position is simply to be against technology.
Instead: Heidegger argues that simply being for or against technology makes no sense because modern existence is already committed to it.
Watch out: The program presents Sartre as modern existentialism's most significant figure.
Instead: The program presents Heidegger, rather than Sartre, as modern existentialism's most significant figure.
Lesson recap
Twentieth-century existentialism began in Germany after the First World War and became fashionable in continental Europe after the Second World War largely in response to the experience of Nazi occupation.
Being in the world is the fundamental starting concept in Barrett's introduction to Heidegger, and knowledge is one mode among the ways human beings exist in the world.
Heidegger centers what it is to exist, and Barrett says his ideas stand or fall by how adequately they describe actual experience.
Thrownness names finding oneself thrown into the world, while existence remains an ongoing task of creating oneself from a contingent factual base.
The later Heidegger is centrally concerned with poetry, art, and technology; his fundamental freedom is the capacity, when achievable, to become open and let truth happen.
Sartre's best-known positive doctrine holds that human beings possess absolute and total freedom. Existentialism powerfully emphasizes that a unique individual cannot be completely assimilated into a bureaucratic, conceptual, or systematic framework.