erité,” which followed the first translation of Heidegger’s lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” in the same issue of the journal Bifur. Could this coincidence have completely escaped him?15IF SARTRE DESERVES his own chapter, it is not only because of the explosive eruption of his celebrity after Liberation, but also and above all because of the decisive and very personal way in which he approached Heidegger’s thought—both criticizing it and integrating it into his own philosophical project. This approach transformed the conditions of the first reception of Heidegger. We have already noted the import of this first reception. Without denying his debt to this first reception, Sartre nonetheless eclipsed it through the sheer force of his style and problematic. However, the counterpart of this effect—which Sartre neither controlled nor perhaps even wanted—was the incontestable recognition of the Master of Freiburg, who was seen as an equal to Hegel and Husserl. As Heidegger is discussed and analyzed, his philosophical stature is definitively established. We shall determine how and at what cost this grand operation was carried out.
In February 1940, in personal notebooks we have had access to only since 1983 (three years after his death), Sartre was already producing a first account of the influence Heidegger had on him.1 An invaluable testimony due to its candor and lucidity, this posthumous publication not only sheds useful light on the genesis of Being and Nothingness,2 it also enables one to reconstruct Sartre’s recognition of Heidegger from within by highlighting both the strength of its logic and also some of its weaknesses. The following dense pages from Notebook XI deserve a close reading and a thorough analysis.3
From the outset, Sartre announced the theme that would guide his reflection: “to understand how much there is of freedom and how much of fate in what’s termed ‘being influenced,’”4 with respect to the peculiar case of his own relation to Heidegger. This, of course, meant admitting this influence, and not denying its importance. It is much more than that: it is a free appropriation of such “influence,” the history of an encounter, the conditions of which Sartre himself analyzed and reconstructed from both sides, that of fate and that of his own perspective as a free and engaged person.
Sartre acknowledged that he himself had at times considered this encounter “providential,”5 a word that ought to shock us, since one does not often find it in the writings of this unwavering atheist, for whom the human condition is absurd and contingent. Plainly, the word is not to be taken literally, but it expresses the force and the quality of Sartre’s encounter with Heidegger’s thought. “How much time I gained!”6 This sincere admission is later confirmed with respect to the grand themes of Heidegger’s “pathos”: “it arrived at just the right moment.”7
Of course, such philosophical encounters have taken place for centuries, but here we must recognize that a third protagonist was present in the background, namely history, which was absent when Malebranche, for example, was enthusiastically reading Descartes. When Sartre discovered Heidegger, it was not just one individual being inspired by and finding himself reflected in the writings of another: there were also fate and war, which established a new perspective and cast a new light on events and on humanity. Now, precisely, Sartre wrote that Heidegger’s influence “supervened to teach me authenticity and historicity just at the very moment when war was about to make these ideas indispensable to me.”8 That is what seemed “providential” to Sartre—perhaps in the Stoic sense, to which he alluded later—namely, that circumstances offered the opportunity to better face destiny, to take it on so as to affirm freedom rather than stifle it. Heidegger became the symbolic “spokesperson” for the time.9
Nonetheless, Sartre quickly considered two objections that must temper any initial enthusiasm and avoid any simplification in the quest for the proper relation between fate and freedom: he was immensely aided by the publication of Corbin’s book; he experienced some difficulties and even some serious reservations in the course of his reading of Heidegger.
This admission is important with respect to Corbin’s translation, which, by a kind of salutary reverse effect, almost required Sartre to read Sein und Zeit, although only in the spring of 1939. He had bought the book in 1934 in Berlin, but had done no more than skim through it, and finally gave up on anything more than brief attempts at reading it. An avowed and intense Husserlian, he had (quite logically) promised himself to study Husserl’s disciple Heidegger, but was put off by the difficulty of the vocabulary.
With respect to these difficulties, Sartre once again did not mince words: “The essential thing was certainly the revulsion I felt against assimilating that barbarous and so unscientific philosophy after Husserl’s brilliant, scholarly synthesis.”10 Barbaric philosophy in what sense? One might be tempted to answer: by virtue of its difficult vocabulary. Sartre would not disagree, but he added that this radical break with classical vocabulary left him with the impression that, with Heidegger, “philosophy had returned to its infancy.” But, in what sense? By virtue of the break with traditional problems (that is, in French philosophy between the two wars), such as realism, idealism, truth and error, and so on. While today we are more aware of the problems of method and the renewals that enabled Heidegger to revive the reading of metaphysics, Sartre emphasized the shock that was first produced by the existential interpretations of anxiety, authenticity, and choice. His confessed “aversion” primarily concerned Heidegger’s terminology. However, without saying it explicitly, Sartre suggested that he would appropriate some of this terminology for himself. In any case, his unflattering judgments of Heidegger’s language in no way prevented him from assimilating Heidegger’s philosophy. The difficulties seem, if anything, to have stimulated him.
Having been a Husserlian for several years, Sartre stated that he found himself at an impasse (especially with respect to the question of intersubjectivity, since Husserl’s treatment of it seemed problematic to him), and that it was Heidegger who reconnected him with the theme of historicity, providing him with the tools for understanding it.
That is not all. Sartre pushed the analysis farther, now reversing the providentialist perspective that he himself had established. He intended to show that he was not simply the pawn of fate or the beneficiary of an unbelievable stroke of luck: he himself (along with his friends and intellectual contemporaries) sparked the interest that allowed for the tremendous success of Corbin’s book as well as the impassioned reception reserved for such existential philosophy.
It must be admitted that, on this point, his reasoning might resemble a kind of historical sleight-of-hand: since he himself acknowledged his debt to Corbin’s work, he sought to show (or to convince himself) that he, Sartre, had substantially contributed to making this work possible by means of the “élan of curiosity” in which he actively participated: “Thus if Corbin translated ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ it was because I (among others) freely constituted myself as an audience awaiting that translation—and, in this, I was assuming my situation, my generation, and my epoch.”11
Sartre’s wish to resolve the tension (which he himself set up) between fate and freedom can easily be understood, and one can only admire the skill with which he made the case for his inventiveness in this situation: it is he who established the “horizon of possibilities” for Heidegger’s thought! One must of course concede that the reception of a difficult body of thought demands not only time, but also sustained and constantly renewed attention, which could not be undertaken by passive subjects receiving a flood of ideas all at once (the way an average television viewer today is bombarded by violent images). What Sartre says of his situation (the war) is entirely true, and he is also right to note that Heidegger himself had “responded” to Germany’s distress during the period between the wars. From the first war to the second, from one distress to another, between the young Sartre and his German elder, a kind of strange exchange transcending both individuals took place in which they shared the same kind of fate and the same quest for authenticity. (Sartre said nothing, however, about Heidegger’s political activity, of which he could not have been unaware in 1940.12)
Nonetheless, Sartre sensed that he was in danger of going too far by giving himself a role more important than it actually was: “I just want to show how I inserted myself as an active and responsible member into a community of interested people and scholars which designated itself spontaneously as an audience. It was for us that Corbin made his translation.”13
This invaluable and assuredly sincere testimony cannot receive, however, the unconditional approval of the historian of ideas. Sartre can defend his freedom all he wants: on that level, one can only admire his intelligent rewriting of history. However, this interpretive move took place after the fact and rested on the considerable labors of others, especially Corbin, but also on the pioneers whom we examined earlier and whom Sartre admitted having read.14 The entirety of the first reception of Heidegger took place without Sartre, even if he was present at the fringes and constituted (with others) an attentive and receptive audience. We have seen that in 1931 he even published a few pages on “Légende de la erité,” which followed the first translation of Heidegger’s lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” in the same issue of the journal Bifur. Could this coincidence have completely escaped him?15
The truth is even more complicated than Sartre imagined. By intervening explicitly and powerfully in the debate, he would attempt (with great success) to appropriate its terms and stakes for himself, but he would also contribute to the confusion concerning the basic issues. Our only goal here is to reveal the intense complexity of a “reception” that was in no way passive, and that we will investigate in Sartre’s major work.
Published in 1943, Being and Nothingness became—after Liberation—the most successful work of philosophy in France in the twentieth century, taking its place between Creative Evolution and The Order of Things. What was striking at the time was the forthright vigor and radical novelty of Sartre’s themes and style: freedom, bad faith, the absurdity of the human condition, atheism, the look of the other, the sketch of an existential psychoanalysis, engagement. The existentialist fad that took hold immediately after the war overshadowed the questions of influence or reception of Heidegger even as it reinforced his impact. The “Sartre effect” was powerful in its own right: bolstered by literary and theatrical successes, it was also achieved by undeniable pedagogical value and some brilliant pages that compensated for many overly technical passages. In one stroke, this philosopher, the virtuoso of phenomenologico-ontological obscurity, set a scene or story with great clarity, as in these lines: “It is certain that the café by itself with its patrons, its tables, its booths, its mirrors, its light, its smoky atmosphere, and the sounds of voices, rattling saucers, and footsteps which fill it—the café is a fullness of being.”16 And, voila! The ontological status of the in-itself is made accessible to anyone and everyone!
It is plain that no one, or almost no one, read this hefty tome from cover to cover: Being and Nothingness is a book that is at once unreadable and, at the same time, all too readable. People went directly to the most accessible and most sensational passages. This helped keep the question of Sartre’s debt to Heidegger in the background. There seemed to be even less reason to make this a priority since Sartre in no way denied his debt and seemed to clarify matters himself (in particular, with respect to the status of the cogito and the relation to others). As years passed and fascination with the work declined, a rumor initiated by the Heideggerians began to circulate: Sartre was said to have built his own philosophy by pillaging the carcass of a misunderstood Heidegger, like an overly literary elephant in a Saxon (or rather Swabian) china shop. Therefore, one should not take Sartre too seriously on “technical” matters, and for this reason, what he wrote on or about Heidegger in Being and Nothingness could not even be considered as an interpretation.
A serious reexamination of this question is unavoidable. In the first place, we must not forget that the book was published in occupied Paris, which means that the German censors allowed it to appear. In this situation, one was engaged in a battle of wits, and who won? Sartre could not have been unaware of the existence of this censorship—run by Gerhard Heller, a clever man closely associated with the Parisian intelligentsia—nor of the acquiescence of the great publishing houses, Gallimard in particular, to German demands.17 We must further recognize that Sartre’s main references in modern and contemporary philosophy were German (Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger). Surely, to place Husserl in a honorable position and to cite Spinoza and Kafka was commendable, but it came at the price of some silences and omissions:18 Marx was left out, and there were practically no Anglo-Saxon authors; nothing—not even an allusion—concerning Heidegger’s political engagement in 1933 and his resignation from the rectorship in 1934. These were diplomatic silences. . . . Must we see these as complicities that sacrificed the spirit of resistance to the requirements of a literary career? The question is all the more justified since it was not the result of a retrospective illusion, for it was raised at the time, rather violently, in the form of communist tracts accusing Sartre of “being a disciple of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger.”19 Furthermore, although no one is forced to write a book, as Bergson said, publishing one without delay (and under the humiliating authority of the occupiers) could have been said to be dishonorable.20 Let us limit ourselves to noting this.
What is most crucial here, from a philosophical perspective, is whether Sartre’s reading of Heidegger can be reduced to a series of misinterpretations or whether it deserves to be considered in its own interpretive coherence. We will maintain the latter position.
A systematic index would reveal that Heidegger is omnipresent in Being and Nothingness.21 Yet that is not what is most decisive: this philosophical presence is overwhelming, beginning with the very title and subtitle, the introduction, and the position of the problem of the origin of nothingness.
The very title itself is modeled after Being and Time. We can understand why nothingness replaces time by referring to the heart of the first part of the book, on “The Phenomenological Conception of Nothingness”:22 it is human freedom that introduces nothingness into the plenitude of being. The explicit reference to the lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” rests upon the central role played by the nihilation of nothingness itself: “It is toward this new conception that Heidegger is oriented.”23 Sartre thus proceeded as though the 1929 lecture marked a change from the major work of 1927. This is quite a claim, which was not entirely innocent: it allowed him to justify the anthropologization of Heidegger’s position.
The subtitle, to which one does not always pay enough attention, is no less significant: “An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology.” Reference to Husserl alone would not allow one to understand the meaning of this expression. Who undertook to “ontologize” phenomenology if not Heidegger in the first pages of Being and Time, and especially in section 7? The same must be said about the introduction—“The Pursuit of Being”—which placed Sartre literally on the same path as Heidegger, since he was in search of that “surpassing towards the ontological, of which Heidegger speaks” and since he stipulates that “the phenomenon of being requires the transphenomenality of Being.”24
Yet, as early as the introduction, and through a plethora of explicit references, borrowings, and allusions, Sartre appropriated this ontological quest to his own purposes. This appropriation would lead to a series of misunderstandings if it presented itself as a faithful interpretation, but such is not at all the case. While for Heidegger being [l’être] is always different from beings [l’étant], Sartre avoided that latter notion and as a result concerned himself much less with the ontico-ontological difference (of which, however, he appeared not to have been unaware) than with the much more directly comprehensible difference between being (in-itself) and nihilation (of the for-itself). Within the schema he established (without alerting the reader that he was breaking with Heidegger on this point), Sartre risked a great deal, since his “being” [être] is precisely what Heidegger meant by “beings” [l’étant]!
From this point on, the pursuit of being in Sartre took on an ironic, absurd, or desperate sense, which is not the case at all for Heidegger, despite the theme of anxiety. It became clear rather quickly that nothing is to be expected from the in-itself, for its fullness appears only on the basis of the nihilation of which the human being is the bearer. A “being of distances,” as Heidegger put it,25 for Sartre the human being is even more radically an exile who posits being only to find him or herself excluded from it. This is what the analyses of the notion of nihilation made all the more plain: the human being is both the locus and the agent of this nihilation. That being which Heidegger called Dasein is now taken as “for-itself,” that is to say as autonomous in a face-to-face relation with the in-itself, a problematic absent from Being and Time.
Sartre’s reading is curious: on the one hand, it is saturated with Heideggerian themes (transcendence, being-in-the-world, the difference between authenticity and inauthenticity); yet one notes, on the other hand, a firm and early stipulation that favors a dualism between the in-itself and the for-itself (a dualism Sartre will attempt to exorcize); as a result, it is a philosophy of consciousness (the philosophy of the “I think”) that reappears and reasserts itself. On this point, Sartre laid his cards on the table: “Any study of human reality must begin with the cogito.”26 Throughout the whole of Sartre’s project, reflexivity comes to the fore, on the basis of a break with Heidegger that is as avowed as it is radical.
The omnipresence of Heideggerian themes was thus paired with a constant and regulated displacement, which can be traced through the rest of the work. One notes, on the one hand, the consideration of facticity (which directly transposes Heidegger’s Faktizität), and on the other, the transformation of the “they” into “bad faith.”
Now that the omnipresence of Heidegger’s thought has been demonstrated, it is important to analyze more precisely the “differences” that Sartre purposely introduced, beginning with central notions like the consciousness of freedom in the face of facticity, the role of the “I think,” the understanding of others, and his positions on ethical engagement.
For Sartre, the center of everything is the human being; for Heidegger, it is being. This is how one might articulate a disagreement that Heidegger himself would later recognize in his “Letter on Humanism” and that is essential to grasp in its genesis. Sartre’s recapitulation of Heidegger’s analyses of nothingness and nihilation seemed at first to follow directly in the footsteps of the author of “What Is Metaphysics?” with the difference that the former sees the human being as the author of nihilation (he or she “makes nothingness emerge in the world”), while the latter places the Existent (Dasein) before a nothingness that imposes itself on him and over which it has no power.
In this connection, what is decisive is not the translation: while it is true that Sartre often reproduced the often contested translation of Dasein as “human reality” [réalité humaine], he occasionally left the word in German or simply wrote “man” [l’homme]. These variations did not affect his fundamentally humanistic position. Did he then misinterpret the meaning of Heidegger’s Dasein? There can be no doubt about it, since he ignored the radicality of the singular difference by which Dasein is not even identified as human. Yet this misunderstanding still reveals a decisive feature: transcendence with respect to any in-itself, a transcendence that Sartre vigorously emphasized. The keystone of the Sartrean edifice is to conceive of this transcendence as conscious freedom, a human privilege. Not that Sartre failed to recognize that there is such a thing as a pre-ontological understanding, as Heidegger saw. But, for Sartre, humans’ presence to themselves resides in their nihilating consciousness; Sartre will understand this as a pre-reflective cogito,27 which effectively amounts to turning on Heidegger the very weapon that was stolen from him (but is this not fair game between philosophers?). The disagreement with Heidegger indeed revolves around the role of the cogito, a divergence that is decisive for everything else. The fact that this cogito is not a substantial plenitude supported by a divine veracity changes nothing. Sartre was neither willing nor able to accept that Dasein is transcendence by virtue of its projection alone; he would not accept an “ekstasis” without consciousness. This also means that freedom has an altogether different content in each case: for Heidegger it is an openness to the disclosure of being while for Sartre it is the determination made by a consciousness that chooses (itself) and takes on a situation. Sartre clearly emphasizes this disagreement: “Heidegger endows human reality with a self-understanding which he defines as an ‘ekstatic pro-ject’ of its own possibilities. It is certainly not my intention to deny the existence of this project. But how could there be an understanding which would not in itself be the consciousness (of) being understanding?”28
On the one hand, by claiming that this project can be reduced to a “thinglike . . . in-itself,”29 Sartre exhibited a total misunderstanding of Heidegger’s project; on the other hand, he was perfectly consistent, especially from the point of view of a practical engagement that must, in his eyes, be conscious and come to terms with itself as such. In other words, Sartre’s misunderstanding nonetheless does not diminish the difficulty of Heidegger’s attempt to free himself from the constraints of the sort of deliberative choice confronted by the agency of a responsible and lucid consciousness (since the difficulties in articulating ethical concern are patent in Heidegger).30
In a translation-betrayal of Heideggerian freedom and transcendence, Sartre’s existentialism performed a brilliant transposition of these themes into the French and Cartesian horizon of thought. By reevaluating the role of the cogito and founding it on a vigorous, but very personal, reinterpretation of Cartesian freedom,31 he thus offered conceptual tools that were immediately intelligible to a broad readership and, further, much more immediately useful in the practical sphere than Heidegger’s unusual suggestions (which were nonetheless constantly employed). In this way, the conclusion of the article “La liberté cartésienne” situated Descartes and Heidegger along the same axis of “democratic” autonomy, which exposes both thinkers to misunderstandings.32
However, if Sartre had limited himself to introducing these bold moves into the sphere of classical philosophy, he would have found himself exposed to a danger to which he was extremely sensitive and which he wanted to avoid at all costs: idealism. If the consciousness of my own thought gives me from the outset a transparent certainty with respect to the world and others, then I have direct access to the truth of the essences that constitute reality. The brute weight of facticity and the irreducible struggle of consciousnesses are miraculously eliminated. Faced with two evils, Sartre must choose the lesser one: he still prefers Heidegger’s ambiguities to a pure and simple return to reflexive idealism. Consequently, he must clarify the role of consciousness in the presence to self of human transcendence. When he claimed that “the sole point of departure is the interiority of the cogito,”33 he was careful to specify that this reflective anchoring takes place in a situation, and cannot or should not be posited as an ontological sovereignty that obliterates the multiplicity of other consciousnesses; his philosophical adversary here is Hegel and his absolute idealism. As a starting-point, the cogito reveals nihilation at work in an interiority whose finite and situated character must endlessly be reiterated: neither divine veracity nor absolute knowledge can provide a basis from which this cogito could also constitute an end-point. It is in these references to the order of finitude that the “translations-betrayals” of Heidegger would prove to be invaluable to Sartre, regarding facticity, relations with others, and the moral project.
Among the themes and terms that Sartre borrowed from Heidegger, facticity is distinctive in its “advantageous” ability to directly translate the German Faktizität. From a philosophical point of view, it designates above all the actual anchoring point of existential thought, which no longer speculates about pure essences, but is committed to articulating our being-in-the-world as it is given in a situation as thrown. To be precise, Sartre showed, after and with Heidegger, that humans do not choose the being they are, that they are not the ground of their being, and thus that they must apprehend themselves in their radical finitude. But the word “facticity” conceals a trap; it may lead us to believe, at least at first, that our existence is reducible to the set of facts through which it apprehends itself: physical characteristics, age, nationality, social situation, and so on. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
Heidegger writes that “Dasein exists factically”:34 as Sartre understood, this means that Dasein is essentially transcendence, a project, or care. Facticity and transcendence cannot be separated from each other any more than the situation and the freedom that emerges from it and gives it meaning. Yet, to purely and simply equate facticity with transcendence would be to neglect the fact that transcendence is precisely not an absolute surpassing toward oneself, a pure self-identity, but an always broken and nihilated self-presence. Nothingness itself is not pure, for it is the nihilation of an in-itself. The self-presence of the for-itself is indeed conscious presence, assuming within this consciousness the ineradicable wound of contingency, that is, facticity: “This perpetually evanescent contingency of the in-itself which, without ever allowing itself to be apprehended, haunts the for-itself and reattaches it to being-in-itself—this contingency is what we shall call the facticity of the for-itself.”35
Without this ambiguous and metastatic state, we would be left with a sterile dualism between the in-itself and the for-itself. Similarly, was there not already in Heidegger a risk that the ontico-ontological difference would be reduced to a rigid opposition between being and beings? The danger, which was avoided by means of an emphasis on Dasein’s peculiar privilege—both an entity and a questioning of its being—runs the risk of shifting toward an overly schematic opposition between the “they” and the authentic Self. Sartre saw that the “they” is also a mode of being of Dasein as responsible for its own being; he drew out the consequences of this in his phenomenological description of bad faith as role-playing.
On this point, for once, he may even have surpassed his master. Indeed, though Heidegger recognized the ambiguity36 of inauthentic conduct, he described it in negative terms and with a certain heavy-handedness. Sartre, by contrast, excels at making us party to the equivocations of a hesitant woman being seduced,37 to the dance of the waiter who plays at being a waiter,38 and to the bad faith of the homosexual who refuses to admit his identity to himself, even as he plays the role.39
By renouncing the impersonal character of the Heideggerian “they” and by describing inauthenticity as a range of conducts by which human beings turn negation against themselves, Sartre relocated it in consciousness, thus giving it the phenomenality of a lie. It may lack the translucence of a lie, but it shares its outward aspects: it is a lie with respect to oneself.40 As a result, bad faith can be analyzed in both intellectual and existential terms, depending on its constant displacements and its ever-renewed ruses within “the unity of a single consciousness.”41 As flight (in the face of anxiety and responsibility), it is also conscious of what it hides from itself. Thus the woman who goes to her first rendezvous knows that she is beginning to compromise herself; she nonetheless only pretends to recognize as respectful the advances of the man who tries to seduce her: the provisional solution that she adopts is to yield her hand while feigning not to notice it. In this way, she succeeds in experiencing her first physical emotion, even as she maintains distance, both here and elsewhere: “a certain art of forming contradictory concepts,”42 Sartre noted, even as he showed correlatively that this dismantling of a contradiction would be incomprehensible without reference to the existential oscillation between facticity and transcendence: “One must affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity.”43 Analogously, the exchange of looks makes possible a conduct of evasion between being-mine and being-for-others. On these various levels of bad faith, which Sartre staged as the playwright he in fact was, it is human freedom that is acted out, with all its resources and subtleties. It is therefore not a question of criticizing these attitudes, which would allow one to believe that the phenomenologist should play the moralist by showing how to rectify these various positions through which freedom abuses its powers. Although this problem should be raised again in terms of the choice of a morality (otherwise, why speak of “bad” faith?), let us first acknowledge the author’s delight in his subject and the intellectual pleasure he affords us. Sartre knew perfectly well that all these ambiguities make up the stuff of existence and its richness; for what would freedom be, if it allowed no play or deception?
By comparison, the Heideggerian “they” conforms to simple structures, which are described externally: idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity.44 Heidegger may well claim not to give everyday discourse a negative connotation or to criticize it from a moral point of view, but his description of speech reduced to an “average” or “uprooted” communication that loses itself in the public sphere without leading to any authentic decision leaves him little opportunity to refine his analyses or linger over these phenomena so as to locate them historically or socially, or distinguish them psychologically. Similarly, his evocation of curiosity, from Augustine’s text on the concupiscence of the eyes, barely allows him to identify three constitutive characteristics of this phenomenon: restlessness, distraction, and homelessness; all these general and negative features, described all too quickly, are understood as fallen forms of authentic care and life. In the end, the equivocation gathers these negative features together in an ambiguous instability, incapable of an authentic understanding, without providing any certainty: “Everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, grasped, and spoken where basically it is not; or it does not look that way, yet basically is.”45
These pages, which are not the best in Being and Time, lack vitality and complexity; nonetheless, they were a catalyst for Sartre’s inspiration, by suggesting to him a kind of hermeneutic framework, and by implicitly presenting him with a sort of challenge: if there is ambiguity with respect to the inauthentic, must one not learn to exploit its ruses and detours? Sartre did, in fact, draw from the Heideggerian idea of a pre-ontological understanding, transforming it into a pre-reflective understanding: namely, bad faith. The inauthenticity that troubled Heidegger fascinated Sartre: since it is a phenomenon of consciousness (albeit in a pre-reflexive form), there is rich material for further intellectual analysis. Here the Parisian virtuoso turns the somewhat dull scales of the Master of Freiburg into a tour de force performance! This transformation occurs also in the case of the problem of the other.
It was with respect to the problem of the other that Sartre distinguished himself most decisively from Heidegger. In the important third part devoted to the “for-the-other,” what stands out is chapter 3, which is significantly titled, “Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger,” and in which Heidegger, while severely criticized, was nonetheless elevated to the empyrean of great classical philosophers.
What is the disagreement about? Is it profound or superficial? A hasty reader might only note the formal rejection of equating the “for-itself” with Heidegger’s “being-with” [Mitsein]. But why deny that the human being is a “being-with”? What is at stake in this refusal?
Having adopted an attitude of reflexive description and beginning from negative behavior and from the cogito, Sartre knew full well that his ontology was threatened from within by this “obstacle,” namely, solitude, which he referred to as solipsism. Why does this hypothesis, even as it is rejected as perfectly unjustifiable and gratuitous, prove so dangerous?46 Because the access to the being of the “for-itself” was immediately secured, at least at first, by the nihilation of the in-itself. Since he insisted on following the classical path of self-positing through thought, it is not surprising that Sartre repeated the logical and systematic consequence that so horrified him: idealism. Will the “for-itself” remain a pure self-relation to the end? And is its reflexive freedom not inalienable?
Sartre’s solution consisted in refusing both realism and idealism (others are not those I transcend absolutely, and they do transcend me completely), so as to discover being-for-the-other as the simultaneity of nihilation and contingency. I am a transcendence-transcended; being-for-the-other and being-for-oneself are not dissociable. In this regard, there is no ontological structure of coexistence: it is in radical contingency and conflict that this nihilating opening of the for-the-other is played out.
It is on this last point that Sartre asserted his opposition to Heidegger. The latter was criticized for having erased the multiplicity of consciousnesses, and the element of radical struggle that it entails, in the name of an ontological structure (described as “being-in” [In-sein]) that is given the same status as being-in-the-world. “In his abrupt, rather barbaric manner of cutting Gordian knots rather than trying to untie them, he [Heidegger] gives in answer to the question posited a pure and simple definition.”47 Let us be clear: the definition of Dasein as originarily coexistent and interconnected (following an ontological structure) erases or overly obscures the problem itself: the emergence of the other as other than me, a for-itself as well, or rather: as primordial as myself. A feature of Hegel’s phenomenology, the struggle for recognition, is here introduced against Heidegger, though without its totalizing and reconciliatory culmination.
Nonetheless, Sartre must concede that Heidegger’s “being-with” provided him, in a way, with what he was looking for: “a being which in its own being implies the Other’s being.”48 Nonetheless, he confessed that he was unsatisfied with the fact that the “with” is, as it were, given in advance. Proceeding pedagogically, he used the image of a crew in order to explain what he found lacking in Heidegger: “the mute existence in common of one member of the crew with his fellows,” a common basis on which the “common solitude” of being-toward-death is founded.49
Sartre pressed his criticism of Heidegger further yet, accusing him of idealism, and going so far as to claim that “Heidegger’s transcendence is a concept of bad faith.”50 Is this going too far? One suspects that he was chagrined, inasmuch as he ultimately had to admit that Heidegger—because of the sense of existence as “outside itself”—succeeded in partially overcoming this despised idealism. Above all, was it not Heidegger’s many suggestions that led Sartre down the path of a sober ontology? Certainly it never occurred to him to deny the extent of his debt: however, since he did not wish to make a final accounting of it (which ought to be our task, though it may not be possible), he demonstrated a free and even carefree attitude that continues to surprise us. Sartre’s situation remains unique, even to this day; no French philosopher has ever had a relationship to Heidegger that was at once so intimate and so free.
Sartre only partially justified his charge that Heidegger’s concept of transcendence was in “bad faith”: he would have had to show that the concept of “resoluteness” (and of a historical choice associated with a “generation”) was itself in bad faith (let us defer this investigation for the moment and return to it later from a moral perspective). By contrast, the critique of the “bastard form of idealism”51 that is discernible in Heidegger is somewhat more explicit: the fact of having understood “being-with” as a structure that is constitutive of existence constitutes, according to Sartre, a flight from the self, isolating the philosopher from the actual struggle of consciousnesses, as was already the case in Kantian transcendentalism. What is clear is that Sartre objected to the “we” as a constitutive figure of existence. Although he recognized in passing the relevance of this type of collaboration in the context of equipmentality, he was not very interested in it; for him, it was only a secondary and tenuous acquisition: “One encounters the other, one does not constitute him.”52
One question we might raise is whether Sartre weighed his criticisms of Heidegger carefully. Another is whether the conceptions he proposed were coherent and original. One may deny the first while affirming the second. As has already been said, and as one might guess, this is in fact our position.
The fact that Sartre did not develop his criticisms of Heidegger with great care is not surprising. Without accusing him of attempting to conceal the extent of his debt to Heidegger’s work, by means of a few strong criticisms, it must be stressed that Heidegger never deduced the existence of others from any sort of necessary structure; he in no way denied that actual encounters are contingent; rather, since Dasein’s self is neither substantial nor reflexive, it can never be insular, and consequently will not have to operate in terms of the tension between consciousnesses and intersubjectivity. Sartre unquestionably failed to recognize the richness of Heidegger’s analyses of equipmentality, which in no way can be reduced to the use of this or that tool, but designates an ekstatic apprenticeship in an environment (Umwelt) that is always already shared. He also failed to recognize that understanding or Verstehen (which he improperly reduced to Verstand) and discourse or Rede, are primordial “existentialia.” Finally, one might object to Sartre that he relied on Heidegger in two respects: first, on the level of empirical description, when he must return to the “we” and make the following stipulation in response to the objection that he returned to Heidegger: “We shall only remark here that we had no intention of casting doubt on the experience of the ‘we.’ We limited ourselves to showing that this experience could not be the foundation of our consciousness of the Other.”53 Second, and more importantly, on a level that he himself calls metaphysical, during a one-page digression on the existence of others54 and in a nearly Fichtean manner (but with a terminology that is still Heideggerian), Sartre presents a theory of the three ekstases of the for-itself, which ends up reintroducing a sort of ontological structure (in a way that is not clearly explicated): the first ekstasis is the nihilation of the for-itself with respect to the in-itself; the second is the reflexive transcending [arrachement] with respect to this first occurrence; the third (which particularly interests us here) is being-for-others in its conflictual dimension or its play of transcended-transcendence. In what sense can one distinguish the three ekstatic moments? What is their status? Sartre does not pause to clarify what might nonetheless have enabled him to make his relation to Heidegger explicit.
That being said, we should recognize—as we have begun to do—that Sartre’s position has its own coherence, a coherence that mainly stems from its open and fully acknowledged reintroduction of the cogito into the central position from which Heidegger had dislodged it. Since others share my privilege of being a for-itself, one must draw all the existential and intellectual consequences from this. Sartre made the field of the struggle of consciousnesses, effectively left fallow by Heidegger, abundantly fruitful with his brilliant descriptions and analyses of the look, of the body-for-others, of love, masochism, desire, hatred, and sadism. There is no point in dwelling on these specific passages from Sartre’s work, which are, moreover, intimately connected with the themes of his plays and novels. Through them, Sartre asserted his incontestable originality, which is quite distinct from Heidegger. Can one even conceive of Heidegger as a playwright or novelist? And most of all, could the profound themes of Being and Time easily be depicted?
Whatever the answer, we must draw two conclusions from all the above: the question of the other is the decisive ground on which a differend—that stems as much from differences in style and temperament as from profound disagreements—is played out. If this question is not purely theoretical, it must inevitably extend itself into the domain of morality, where nothing guarantees that its resolution (in either Heidegger or Sartre) will be satisfying.
Was Sartre in good faith when he accused Heidegger’s concept of transcendence of “bad faith”? We have begun to have doubts about this, without yet achieving any certainty on such a delicate question. Furthermore, is this concept of transcendence distinct from that of authenticity, which Sartre’s morality is far from effectively rejecting? Certainly not. These perplexities, which implicitly follow from our previous discussions, invite us to complete, in moral terms, our analysis of the complex and inextricable relation of Sartre’s originality with the considerable debt he had to Heidegger.
If one but refers to the table of contents of Being and Nothingness, one notes that only the two and a half pages at the end of the work are explicitly devoted to “ethical implications.” This brief section begins by affirming that “ontology itself cannot formulate ethical precepts”55 and ends with the pronouncement, which has become famous and, as it were, emblematic: “We shall devote to them a future work.”56 Consciously or unconsciously, Sartre pushed his imitation of Heidegger to the limit, since he managed to turn a very dense work of 722 tightly packed pages into something like the prelude to a moral treatise (that never saw the light of day), leaving the reader in suspense, just as Heidegger had announced a second part of Sein und Zeit that was never published. In fact, one cannot take Sartre’s declarations at face value: moral considerations are explicit in the fourth part of Being and Nothingness (“Having, Doing, and Being”), and they are in no way absent prior to that. It could not be otherwise, insofar as this is a philosophy of existence that is oriented toward the concrete, and above all since its overarching concept is freedom, radically reconceived. Insofar as any theological or ontological order has been rejected, the for-itself is the only origin of values; every traditional form of morality has been invalidated; freedom must assume itself as such, in its situation, and so its responsibility will be absolute: “I carry the weight of the world by myself alone.”57 One cannot appeal to a “spirit of seriousness,” which for Sartre is a bad-faith compromise between transcendent values and everyday circumstances.58
It is interesting to note that the criticism leveled against Heidegger with respect to morality can be addressed to Sartre as well. Indeed, he is not wrong—concerning the call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens)59 in the context of “fallenness” and the guilt [culpabilité] from which it emerges—to formulate the following criticism: “In truth, Heidegger’s descriptions show all too clearly his concern with establishing an ontological foundation for an Ethics with which he claims not to be concerned.”60 Was Sartre himself not in a similar situation, claiming that an ontology should not offer any moral prescriptions, but not denying himself recourse to notions as moral as those of bad faith, authenticity, and responsibility? Could this attitude be criticized as bad faith? It might be, except that Sartre fully assumed the moral project, which was not exactly the case in Heidegger. And this is probably why Sartre, for the remainder of his life, could not complete or publish the projected volume: his ethics was already more than initiated in Being and Nothingness.
Now, since we have access today to the Notebooks for an Ethics, written in 1947–48,61 can we discern in them a relation to Heidegger as intimate and intense as found in Being and Nothingness? Certainly not: not only because the direct allusions to Heidegger are few in number,62 but also and especially because the problematic treated in this work is markedly different from the themes we have just studied. Furthermore, it would be inappropriate to claim to have found a unified problematic from these fragmentary pages. There can be little doubt that they pertain to the treatise of morality Sartre wanted to write, but the fact is that he did not complete it; one can apply to these texts what Sartre himself wrote in Situations X regarding his unpublished material: “They will represent what I wanted to do at a certain point and what I decided not to finish, and in that respect they will be definitive.”63
In reading these fragments, what is in fact striking is that Sartre was already, in many ways, addressing the questions that would constitute the texture of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. There are many pages that concern the problem of history, the impossibility of drawing a unified meaning or definitive objectivity from it, the role of violence, and the emergence of the concrete universal. This means not that the questions of morality and psychology are missing, but that Sartre addressed them as a militant rather than as a phenomenologist: “Ethics today must be revolutionary, socialist ethics.”64 With this as a beginning, how could Heidegger remain useful? Sartre was not unsympathetic to the early criticisms of Heidegger by Levinas, who traced the notion of equipmentality back to the concrete, material, and sustaining conditions that precede it.65 In a moment of Hegelian enthusiasm (which would not be repeated, at least to this extent), he went so far as to demean all that followed, including Marx, adding: “Heidegger and Husserl small-time philosophers. French philosophy zero” (Notebook for an Ethics, 61).
Nonetheless, Heidegger is not completely forgotten and certainly not despised, even from the perspective of the establishment of a morality, as the following surprising passage attests: “Tough thinkers (Heidegger) and tender thinkers (Jaspers). Don’t wait for an ethics filled with hope. Man are ignoble. We have to love them for what they might be, not for what they are. Sketch out a tough ethics.”66 If it is clear that Sartre cannot stand Jaspers, whom he criticized for his “sleight of hand” in favor of Transcendence,67 it is significant that we find him still fascinated by the very toughness of Heideggerian thought, and in particular in the moral domain where the Master of Freiburg had seemed to him to have gone astray68 (and all this without the slightest allusion to Heidegger’s activity in 1933, which revealed Sartre’s almost complete lack of interest in the question).
One cannot dismiss a deep fascination so easily; but it is clear that Liberation brought about a radical shift in Sartre’s attitude toward Heidegger: he would never again read him as closely. And it must be added that—beyond his increasing political engagement with the communists and the radical left—Sartre would reassert his characteristic irony or suspension of the spirit of seriousness, which strongly distinguished him from Heidegger: “If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake, you are no longer authentic.”69 Here, it is indeed a matter of a morality in suspense, not only because it did not find its definitive expression, but because the project excluded both any objective order of values and any theory of salvation.
One can easily assess the damage caused by a bombardment; but in the present case, while suggested by the circumstances of the war, the metaphor should not be taken literally, for the effects of Being and Nothingness were deferred.
The very fact of acknowledging the great difficulty of assessing Sartre’s debt to Heidegger is by itself instructive: this debt is incalculable, and Sartre knew this well from the start, when he sensed the “providential” character of Being and Time. But to the very same extent, we must also notice how strongly Sartre resisted being completely bewitched by Heidegger, as well as how obstinately he blazed his own thematic and stylistic trails. For him, Heidegger remained an idealist, who was crypto-religious, and deeply bound to a community to which he belonged; his ethics was not clearly delineated, because it was not founded on a reflective analysis. All these criticisms did not form a systematic whole and did not get in the way of a genuine admiration or of the quasi-mimetic adaptations we have indicated.
Sartre’s early fame in 1943 and 1944 was essentially due to his first novels (Nausea, The Wall) and his plays (The Flies and No Exit), and certainly not due to Being and Nothingness, which was barely noticed.70 From the point of view of the reception of Heidegger, the “Sartre bomb” was more like a time bomb. It was only after Liberation and in the following years that it would permanently transform the philosophical landscape. Being and Nothingness, a book that became fetishized by existentialists, would carry with it, in the wake of its caravan of curiosities of the moment, a Heidegger who was as prestigious as he was mysterious, already enshrouded in the myth of the founding father, solitary among the vanquished, a misunderstood genius, and a forerunner yet to be rediscovered.