Heidegger and Sartre

HeideggerDasein's condition is thrownness (Geworfenheit): it lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place it never chose, with no before and no outside from which to consent. L12 · 31:33

SartreSartre shifts Heidegger's thrownness toward abandonment: we find ourselves dumped in a world without God, forlorn, with nothing either inside us or outside us to rely on. L13 · 29:13

Keeps thrownness but stresses abandonment: cast into the world with nothing to lean on

HeideggerFear always takes an object: snakes, spiders, planes. Angst takes none; what it faces is precisely nothing, the nothingness every existence is inevitably headed toward. L12 · 41:22

SartreNothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves. L13 · 33:22

Nothingness stops meaning death and comes to mean the open space of freedom

HeideggerInauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one. L12 · 32:39

SartreIn its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object. L13 · 40:55

Bad faith parallels flight into das Man, recast as a lie one tells oneself about one's freedom.Our inference

HeideggerDasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. L12 · 24:14

SartreIn his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it. L13 · 19:10

Takes Heidegger's always-already-in-the-world to its anti-Husserlian conclusion: no reduction is possible.