Essay - Martin Heidegger and Jean-paul Sartre on Existentialism and Humanism Introduction:...

Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre on Existentialism and Humanism

Introduction: The Essentials of Essentialism

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

Heidegger, like all modern philosophers (and possibly the ancient ones as *****), incorporated the work of a num*****r ***** earlier thinkers into his own formulation of existentialism and his understanding ***** the nature of reality of the place ***** humans in the world. As an existentialist, Heidegger believed in a philosophy th*****t was relatively concrete, that is concerned with addressing ***** ***** of people in the world, dealing with concrete, real problems. This is a cornerstone of existentialism, this insistence upon the reality of existence in a real world, and an existence *****over that is marked by no Cartesian dualism. Heidegger (along with Sartre and other existentialists) would soundly reject the k*****ds of ideas about consciousness that were promulgated by Descartes, a form of human ***** that hovers somewhere outside of consciousness and that is used to intuit or to infer the existence of o*****r things in the world.

For the existentialist, the ********** ***** the world was *****t such a difficult proposition. Heidegger ***** that ***** world exists and ***** it in many ways governs our actions and that the nature of human life is one that ***** affected in fundamental ways by the real nature of the ***** that we encounter in the *****. One ***** the major impetuses of existentialism, in fact *****s core, can thus be said ***** ***** concerned not with "know*****g" but with "being." ***** was not so much concerned with how one knows that there are things in the world o*****r than oneself ***** with one's own state of being ***** existence in conjunction with those real things in the world. In more technical terms, one can summarize the position of Heidegger to be that phenomenology (which is the study ***** the nature of things and their existence) is the ***** as on*****logy (which is the study of the nature of beingness - to coin a word - for sentient creatures ***** ourselves).

It should be clear from the above description ***** Heidegger could not escape (although, given ***** turn that his life took, he might *****ll have wanted to) responsibility ***** only ***** t***** ac*****ions that one takes but for the decisions behind them. The great claim that existentialism makes on behalf ***** all of us is ***** *****s are essenti*****y free, and th***** *****at all decisions that we make must be judged in that context if we ***** to understand a per*****n's ch*****racter,