Having identified a number of factors likely to have facilitated Heidegger’s rise to importance within the French philosophical discussion, we now need to consider how Heidegger’s rise to prominence in fact occurred.
This will be the first of three chapters dealing with the role of humanism in Heidegger’s emergence as the master thinker of recent French philosophy. In examining aspects of the humanist misreading of Heidegger’s thought, as well as the broader theme of humanism in French philosophy and Heidegger’s theory, the intention is to identify a link between the traditional French concern with humanism and the French Heidegger reception. This chapter will show how the revival of the French interest in humanism naturally led toward Heidegger. The next chapter will consider the effect of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” on the French reception of his thought. Finally, a third chapter will examine the relation between Heidegger’s political involvement and humanism. We shall see that many French philosophers turned to Heidegger in the mistaken belief that he shared their humanist concern.
There is a difference between the specifically philosophical concerns that dominate a given philosophical position, those that lead to its initial formulation and later reformulation, and those often quite different concerns, which may or may not be philosophical in nature, that lead to its rise to prominence in the discussion. Attention to Heidegger’s theory in Germany after the publication of Being and Time (1927) was independent of any capacity to awaken a widespread interest in his claim, underlying his initial position, that the problem of being had been forgotten. With the possible exception of a few philosophical colleagues, almost no one in the immediate discussion was clearly awaré of, or even prepared to deal with, this assertion. On the contrary, Heidegger’s theory become prominent in contemporary German cultural life because of his remarkable ability to capture widespread contemporary concerns in philosophical language that appealed widely to his philosophical colleagues.1
In the particular historical situation, dominated by the decline of the Weimar Republic, the deepening of a worldwide economic depression, the search for a third way between a liberalism commonly thought to have failed and a Bolshevism so widely feared, and the rise of National Socialism, Heidegger was able to translate his technical ideas into language that expressed the contemporary Zeitgeist. Examples include themes of authenticity, resoluteness, being with others, anxiety, and so on, all existential themes in a Germany struggling to preserve self-respect and to assert individuality in a difficult period between two world wars. Heidegger’s enormous rhetorical capacity to capture in philosophical language the spirit of the times is above all on display in the famous rectorial address delivered in May 1933 when Heidegger, who had just publically joined the Nazi party, solemnly assumed office as the rector of the University of Freiburg.2
Heidegger’s thought attracted attention in France as early as the late 1920s and early 1930s, but it was only later that it suddenly became central to the French discussion. This did not happen when Hegel became an important factor in French philosophy, in large part through Heidegger’s influence on the French appropriation of Hegel’s thought. Nor did it happen as soon as Heidegger’s writings began to be available in French translation in the early 1930s. Nor again did it happen when writers such as Sartre made use of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in the formulation of their own positions. It only finally happened when, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the problem of humanism was raised again in the French philosophical context. The ensuing debate led to a turn toward Heidegger’s theory that has since become one of the few relatively stable points in the volatile French cultural context.3
Humanism is an unclear concept, used in many, often incompatible ways.4 It apparently has no natural or non-normative meaning. Philosophers have often rejected the association between philosophy and humanism on the grounds that humanism is incompatible with rigorous philosophical thought.5 But it is compatible with philosophy, or at least some forms of philosophy. In the “Letter on Humanism,” the same text in which he attempts to drive a wedge between philosophy and humanism, Heidegger insists on the humanist character of his own theory.6
There is a long, but still not clarified link between philosophy and humanism. European humanism did not spring into being in a particular theory or in a particular text, but has emerged only gradually over a long period. A concern with humanism is already present in the Roman tradition. Cicero and Varro distinguish between humanitarianism, or the love of humanity in general, and humanism (humanitas),understood in the sense of the Greek paideia,meaning education. Following Cicero and Varro, Benda distinguishes two senses of “humanism”: the desire to know human being animating Kant, Goethe and other Enlightenment figures; and the more general concern with knowledge.7 In the latter sense, humanism is associated with the discovery of the idea of human being in the Renaissance,8 and the emergence of various kinds of individuality9 in the second part of the fourteenth century. The idea of human being is an idea that later spread throughout Europe, and that is often taken to mark the end of the Middle Ages. Yet as the older view of classical studies did not disappear when the conception of human being emerged, this whole period is marked by a continual oscillation between the revival of the humanist tradition and the emergence of a philosophy of human being.10
“Humanism” is notoriously difficult to define since it means different things to different observers. For example, Höffding writes: “Humanism denotes, then, not only a literary tendency, a school of philologists, but also a tendency of life, characterized by interest for the human, both as a subject of observation and as the foundation of action.” 11 Höffding’s definition usefully evokes the return to classical studies as well as the novel Christian conception of human being that emerges in the wake of Augustine’s attention to the notion of personal responsibility. Yet it omits a central philosophical element of humanism: the self-congratulatory, broadly humanist understanding of philosophy as indispensable for the good life.
Discussion of humanism often tends to equate the genus with one of its species.12 For present purposes, three forms of “humanism” can be distinguished: the revival of classical letters; the stress on human being; and a claim for the social relevance of philosophy.
Understood as the revival of classical letters, humanism is the effort to develop the rational faculties without regard to discipline. This conception is manifest in the educational reform undertaken in Bavaria by Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, Hegel’s friend and sometime patron, who was appointed as Central School Counselor in 1808. Niethammer represented a so-called new humanism (Neuhumanismus) that aimed to provide a general development of human faculties through the study of the ancient world, in particular through the revival of classical letters.13 When Hegel became rector of the Egidium Gymnasium in Nuremberg, no less than 13 of the 27 weekly class hours were devoted to Greek and Latin materials.14
Understood as the concern with human being, humanism is specifically influential in a long line of philosophical positions. This view of humanism, which can be illustrated in the writings of Pico della Mirandola and Ludovicus Vives, naturally ranges widely over such themes as freedom, naturalism, historical perspective, religion, and science. In a famous passage, Pico della Mirandola stresses the idea of human freedom:
I have given you, Adam, neither a predetermined place nor a particular aspect nor any special prerogatives in order that you may take and possess these through your own decision and choice. The limitations on the nature of other creatures are contained within my prescribed laws. You shall determine your own nature without constraint from any barrier, by means of the freedom to whose power I have entrusted you. I have placed you at the center of the world so that from that point you might see better what is in the world. I have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal so that, like a free and sovereign artificer, you might mold and fashion yourself into that form you yourself shall have chosen.15
Humanism is often regarded as central to the Enlightenment. Pope’s famous couplet is frequently taken as a motto of Enlightenment interest in the study of man: “Presume not then the ways of God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man.” Yet treatment of the Enlightenment in terms of humanism is by no means a universal tendency. Foucault, for instance, usefully distinguishes between the Enlightenment as an event and humanism as the decision to focus on a theme or given set of themes.16 Observers differ widely in the importance they attach to humanism as a theme in the Enlightenment period. As knowledgeable a writer as Ernst Cassirer managed to compose a detailed discussion of the period in which he scarcely even mentions humanism other than to refer to Pope;17 on the contrary, in Peter Gay’s books on this topic, humanism figures prominently.18
Philosophy, which is only one of the many strands in the growth of culture during the Enlightenment period, tends to stress an anthropological approach. This tendency is particularly evident in Hume’s writings. In A Treatise of Human Nature,David Hume writes: “Human Nature is the only science of man; and has been hitherto the most neglected.” 19 Clearly anticipating Marx’s famous claim that all the sciences are sciences of man, Hume asserts: “’Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature.”20 He further writes:
He straightforwardly holds that all scientific questions are finally questions about man: There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they stand with any certainty.21
It is precisely this science of man that Hume intends to construct through empirical observation: “As the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.”22
Hume’s anthropological approach to philosophy is further strengthened in modern German philosophy. Here the Enlightenment stress on reason is accompanied by an increasingly secular, even Promethean view of human being as central to the world and as the master of human fate. Thinkers like the Danish writer Kierkegaard, who understand human being as authentic only through a particular relation to God, are an exception to this tendency. Although Kant famously seeks to limit knowledge to make room for faith,23 his position throughout is rigorously secular. He continually stresses reason as the main, in fact the only admissible, component in his analyses of various types of experience. Even his discussion of reason is conducted within the bounds set by reason that, from his very rationalist viewpoint, cannot be rationally transgressed.
The anthropological element in Kant’s critical philosophy is partly traceable to Hume’s well known influence in awakening him from his self-described dogmatic slumber.24 In his theory of ethics, Kant insists on freedom as the necessary but indemonstrable presupposition for ethics through a conception of human being as wholly free from external influences, hence able to determine the principles of action in an entirely rational fashion. He stresses a similar concept in his famous definition of the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.”25 In his writings on history, Kant emphasizes that human being matures through history in the progressive internalization of the moral law.
A closely Kantian insistence on human being as rational and free is a main theme in later German idealism. Although Kant develops a theory of history in his minor writings, he is never able to integrate it into his view of reason, which remains resolutely ahistorical.26 With respect to the critical philosophy, post-Kantian German idealism differs mainly in an ever increasing awareness of the historical character of reason. Here Kant’s Copernican turn, invoked for strictly epistemological reasons in order to account for the possibility of knowledge in general, is given a historical, even a historicized reading. Fichte’s view of striving (Streben),Hegel’s idea of freedom as the goal of history, and Marx’s conception of the emergence of genuine individuality at the beginning of human history are different versions of the way in which human being expands the range of human activity in social, cultural, political, and historical surroundings.
After Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff, modern German philosophy grows increasingly secular, as reflected in the importance of secular humanism. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were all deeply influenced by Protestantism; there is a strongly religious element in each of their positions, especially in Fichte’s after the celebrated controversy on atheism (Atheismusstreit) that cost him his teaching position. Unlike Schelling’s thought, which cannot be understood from a secular perspective, the views of Fichte and Hegel can be read in an entirely secular manner.27 This is further the case for Marx’s theory where a disinterest in religion — which in Marxism has often taken the rather different form of a frank attack on religion — is combined with a secular stress on human action as the mode of human development through a secular idea of salvation.
Philosophy itself can be regarded as broadly humanist in inspiration due to its claims for intrinsic social relevance. Socrates’ idea that the unexamined life is not worth living is transformed by Plato into the double claim that only philosophy yields knowledge and that philosophical knowledge is socially indispensable. The latter idea has often met with resistance. Aristotle’s view that philosophy satisfies wonder only, Hegel’s insistence that philosophy always comes too late, the Marxist contention that philosophy is ideology, or false consciousness, inadequate to resolve the problems that are solved by Marxist science, and Wittgenstein’s effort to show that philosophical problems arise from the misuse of language are only some of the manifestations of a widespread philosophical uneasiness about this claim. Nonetheless, many philosophers support the broadly humanist view of the philosophical discipline as not only useful but essential for the good life initially formulated by Plato.
A broadly Platonic conception of the social utility of philosophy echoes through the modern philosophical tradition. Kant, the apostle of pure reason, comprehends philosophy, or reason’s highest form, not only as the condition of ethics understood as a pure science28 but as a conception of the world intrinsically concerned with the ends of human being. Kant’s disarmingly simple but also simplistic depiction of philosophy as “the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae)”29 and of the philosopher as “the lawgiver of human reason”30 is widely followed. Any short list of variations on the Kantian conviction of the intrinsic social utility of philosophy would include Husserl’s notion of transcendental phenomenology as the concealed secret of all modern times31 as well as Heidegger’s conviction that human being depends on the problem of being.
With important exceptions, French philosophy is basically humanist. The most varied aspects of French thought routinely lay claim to the humanist label. Recent examples include Hyppolite’s study of Hegel’s view of human being,32 Mikel Dufrenne’s defense of the concept of human being33 and Roger Garaudy’s humanist dialogue with such distinct tendencies as existentialism, Catholic thought, structuralism, and Marxism.34
The emergence of a secular philosophical approach in German philosophy is often seen as the result of Luther’s influence.35 In France, where there has been no Lutheran Reformation, where the natural tie between theology and philosophy remains strong, the situation regarding humanism is more complex. In other countries and literatures, the dissociation of the temporal and the eternal, the rational and the religious, is often incomplete. Perhaps this separation has never been fully carried out. Philosophy and religion are strongly interrelated in the positions of later German idealists. In our own time, no one has gone further toward the elaboration of an atheistic philosophy than Sartre, although even he understands human being through a conception of an absent God.36
In the United States, which broke away from Great Britain in part to secure religious freedom, reason has never been strongly associated with religious faith. In France, where the tendency to dissociate reason and faith has been relatively weak, certainly weaker than in Germany, there is a permanent tension stretching over centuries between competing secular and religious conceptions of humanism. This tension can be regarded as an opposition on many levels between an understanding of the world centered on a view of human being, and a view of the world and of human being centered on a religious commitment, hence as a difference between essentially irreligious, or pagan,37 and religious, or antipagan conceptions of man. In the French discussion, the antireligious thrust of secular humanism is often rejected from the point of view of religious humanism as a negation of human being and as anti-Christian. In a typical passage, Henri de Lubac writes:
Positivistic humanism, Marxist humanism, Nietzschean humanism: much more than atheism in the strict sense, the negation of what is at the base of each of them is an antitheism, and more precisely an antiChristianism. As opposed as they are to each other, their implications, hidden or manifest, are numerous, and although they share a foundation in their rejection of God, they also have the same consequences, above all the crushing of the human person.38
In French thought, the well known opposition between competing forms of humanism is sometimes regarded as a struggle pitting the views of the Encyclopedists, as well as all free thinkers of the rights of man, and the enthusiasts of universal reason against those of the spiritualists, often of Christian inspiration.39 The competition between incompatible humanist conceptions results in a struggle between secular humanists, who regard Christianity, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, as a major obstacle to the new doctrine and as a source of obscurantism,40 and the Church, which has always sought to combat secular humanism as representing a fall away from true Christian doctrine.
It has been claimed that the Enlightenment was only possible because at the time Christianity was moribund.41 In reality the situation has always been more complex, since even those strongly committed to organized religion are often equally committed to the Enlightenment view of human being. For instance, Pierre Gassendi, who today is chiefly known as the author of the fifth set of objections to Descartes’s Meditations,a Catholic priest whose orthodoxy is not suspect, shared a commitment to humanism, as indicated in Diderot’s remark: “Never was a philosopher a better humanist, nor humanist such a good philosopher.”42
The French humanist tradition follows rather than precedes the Italian Renaissance.43 The revival of classical letters is emphasized by Rabelais in 1532 in Pantagruel. Gargantua’s famous letter to his son Pantagruel mentions the restoration of humanistic studies, the importance of learning the ancient languages, especially Greek, the role of the art of printing, and so on.44 At least as much as in Italy, humanism in France was associated with the philosophy of human being.
Philosophical humanism begins in France as early as Montaigne who, rather than Descartes, is sometimes regarded as the founder of modern philosophy.45 Montaigne is renowned as a sceptic, above all for the ideas expressed in his famous “Apologie de Raymond Sebonde.” Yet he is centrally concerned with human being. His work can be read from different perspectives: as a theory of knowledge, suggested by his concern with scepticism, or as a philosophy of life.46 The main theme of his celebrated Essays is himself, a theme that has evoked widely different attitudes from his readers.47 He says in the preface: “Thus, reader, I am myself the content of my book [Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moy mesme la matière de mon livre] ”.48 The third book of his essays is concerned with his ego, his thoughts, his moods, and so on. It has been suggested that in his writings, “humanism” takes on a new meaning concerning what is fully human.49 Even his scepticism has been read as leading to the view that truth must be founded on the subject, on himself.50
In the same way, Descartes’s theory can also be read from epistemological or humanistic angles of vision. In the Anglo-Saxon discussion, Descartes is mainly studied as the prototype of the modern epistemologist, as the founder of foundationalism,51 as the discoverer of a method to secure knowledge against scepticism. Yet the French tradition, while preserving an epistemological emphasis, links it to a reading of the Cartesian theory as the basis of modern philosophical humanism, even as anticipating later existentialism.52 In France, emphasis is often placed on the link in the Cartesian theory between science and human being, between knowledge and the human mastery over the world, on the thinker who substitutes reason for prejudice. French discussions emphasize a humanist view of Descartes as the thinker who answered Montaigne’s question of “what can I know? [que sais-je?]” by demonstrating the limitless possibilities for progress of the human spirit.53 In French circles, Descartes is understood less as an epistemologist than as a humanist whose idea of reason dominates the later Enlightenment debate culminating in Kant’s critical philosophy and continuing to our own time.
If we acknowledge the humanist aspects of Montaigne’s and Descartes’s theories, we must also acknowledge the continuity between them. Montaigne’s scepticism requires a turn to the self in order to found knowledge. His Pyrrhonian scepticism profoundly influences Descartes’s later effort to overcome scepticism of all kinds through the cogito. There are echoes of Montaigne’s thought throughout the Cartesian corpus, especially in the “Discourse on Method.” His celebrated conception of human being as the spectator of a1154 and his resolve to make himself the subject of study55 both continue Montaigne’s similar concerns.
Descartes’s interest in humanism is clear in the title of his first text, “The Treatise on Man”, which was completed in 1633 and immediately suppressed. His more famous “Discourse on Method” from 1637 depends on a turn to the subject that is only reinforced in his refusal of the analogy between human beings and machines,56 an analogy later exploited by the philosophical materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie. The “Meditations on First Philosophy” were originally meant to be called “Project of a Universal Science Able to Bring Our Mind to Its Highest Point of Development [Projet d’une science universelle qui puisse éléver notre esprit à son plus haut degré de perfection].” Descartes’s humanist impulse is still present in his last work, the “Passions of the Soul [Les passions de l’âme]” written in 1645–1646, where he stresses that, with respect to the free will, a person is similar to God.57
Descartes’s influence was immediate and profound on both the secular and the religious strands of French humanism. The secular strand of French humanism is already present in the Cartesian emphasis on the idea of progress that follows his stress on the supremacy of reason and the invariability of the laws of nature.58 His emphasis on reason as distinguished from faith set the tone for the later discussion. The Enlightenment grouped together such widely disparate thinkers as the mechanist Bernard Fontenelle, the theist Voltaire, the materialist Claude Adrien Helvétius, and others, all thinkers who, within the climate of Cartesian reason, shared the Cartesian commitment to reason, to the scientific method, and to evidence.59 It was further developed in the Encyclopedia,whose tone was set by Diderot’s statement in the article “Encyclopedia” that everything begins and ends with man. Confident of reason as the only guide, Diderot writes:
for this reason we have decided to seek in man’s principal faculties the main divisions within which our work will fall. Another method might be equally satisfactory, provided it did not put a cold, insensitive, silent being in the place of man. For man is the unique starting point, and the end to which everything must finally be related if one wishes to please, to instruct, to move to sympathy, even in the most arid matters and in the driest details. Take away my own existence and that of my fellow men and what does the rest of nature signify.60
The idea of limitless human progress, of the perfectability of human being initially mentioned by Rousseau,61 inspired Kant. It was given a gigantic helping hand in the practical sphere by the French Revolution which sought to realize the famous ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, as well as democracy and progress. It was worked out in much greater detail in Condorcet’s writings, in his related ideas of human being as indefinitely perfectible and of human perfection as basically limitless. Taking a stance against Rousseau, in his famous study of human progress Condorcet emphasizes “destruction of the inequality between nations, the progress towards equality in a single people, finally the real perfection of man.”62
The secular humanism represented by Condorcet and others is in permanent tension with religious humanism. This tension is certainly not confined to the French context. It can be illustrated by two philosophers writing in reaction to Hegel: Ludwig Feuerbach and Kierkegaard. Feuerbach, a leftwing Hegelian, privileges the anthropological over the religious aspect in Hegel’s thought. Kierkegaard, who insists on existence against Hegelian idealism, can be located, through his insistence on the religious dimension, within rightwing Hegelianism. Secular humanism tends to deny God in order to make room for human being, for instance in Feuerbach’s inversion of the usual conception of the dependence of human being on God in favor of a dependence of God on human being.63 Human being seeks its salvation through its own works. Religious humanism takes the contrary view, expressed by Kierkegaard, that human salvation must be sought in the return to God.64
The tension between starkly opposed, mutually exclusive forms of humanism runs through French thought and society on many different levels. It is present, for instance, in the struggle between innovation and tradition, between those who favor the maintenance of a strong centralized state closely tied to the Roman Catholic Church and those who oppose it. The same French Revolution that attempted to realize the social contract theory by proclaiming the rights of man before violating them in the terror that followed, abolished the privileges of the nobility and restricted the Church. The effort to found government on the will of the governed aimed at equality before the law against hierarchy and liberty against the traditionally divine right of kings. The predictable result was a tension that has lasted over more than two hundred years. It features irreconcilable views, opposing those who regard the French Revolution as a permanent contribution to the development of human freedom, bought at the price of loosening the ties between Church and state; and those who regard it as a betrayal of the human rights it invoked,65 a view represented ouside the French discussion by Edmund Burke.66
The desire for autonomy that fueled the French Revolution was only partially realized in an event that eventually substituted one form of autocratic centralism for another through Napoleon’s rise to power. Since that time, the problem has remained unresolved as France has continued to maintain a strong central state with centralized institutions. In practice, French political centralization has given rise to a resistance to central direction that occasionally verges on anarchism. Not surprisingly, anarchism is a political doctrine that has long been popular in France.67 Like so many other institutions, French education is highly centralized, rigid, and autocratic. It is, then, not surprising that the 1968 French student revolution has been regarded as merely a further attempt to gain autonomy, as symbolized by a systematic questioning of traditional educational methods, of the relations between students and teachers, and so on.68
Both sides in the tense struggle between proponents of secular and religious humanism rely on the same Cartesian theory that can be read either as supporting or as challenging the link between religion and philosophy.69 It is not by chance that Descartes’s writings were quickly placed on the Index. For as he was aware, notwithstanding his efforts to disarm possible religious opposition, the very attempt “to build anew from the foundation”70 in order to secure scientific knowledge presupposes a radical break with authority and tradition in the name of self-subsistent reason. Despite his explicit disclaimer, his very concern to study questions about God and the Soul — as he puts it in an inopportune statement from the dedication preceding the Meditations intended to still possible disquiet — “by philosophical rather than theological argument”71 does not comfort, but rather threatens revealed theology.
The dispute between secular and religious humanists frequently concerns the proper attitude toward tradition. Traditionalists like Heidegger or, following him, Gadamer frequently resist the effort to separate tradition from reason, bending their efforts to preserve tradition. On the contrary, Descartes and others like him regard the break with tradition as a necessary condition for the beginning of science, as a necessary prerequisite to the liberation of human being through reason and the domination of nature.72
The tension between the modern commitment to reason that mandates a break with tradition and the traditional commitment to authority, often to religious authority, separates thinkers into different, incompatible camps. This complex tension is present on occasion in the thought of an individual writer, such as Pascal,73 a writer who, in that respect, is divided against himself. Pons has perceptively noted an unresolved conflict between Pascal the man of science and Pascal the believer. This is a tension between Pascal who accepts the Enlightenment idea of infinite progress, including the Baconian idea of the perfection of human being over time, and the same Pascal who deplores the illusion of human progress since, despite the apparent changes, human being remains inalterably the same.74 This is the Pascal whose commitment to reason leads to his acceptance of Pyrrhonian scepticism that in turn leads him back to his religious faith.75 And this is the same Pascal, who, despite his important contributions to mathematics, insists, following Augustine and Aquinas, on the separation between the objects of sense, or reason, and of faith, the three principles of our knowledge.76
If Heidegger is a humanist at all, he is not a humanist in any ordinary sense of the term. For he rejects many usual humanist ideas, such as the ideas of progress and human perfectibility as well as the so-called metaphysical conception of humanism. Yet Heidegger does not break, but rather reforges, the philosophical link to humanism from the perspective of his concern with being.77
Both the initial interest in Heidegger’s position at the beginning of the 1930s and the broad turn to his theory immediately after the war were fueled by its perceived relevance to humanist themes. Beyond the traditional French interest in humanism, broadly conceived, at least five further factors called attention to Heidegger’s thought from a humanist perspective at this time. First, there was the worldwide economic collapse that affected the social and political structure throughout Europe, including France. This difficult economic situation drew attention to existential factors of all kinds in a way that some saw as corresponding to Heidegger’s “existentialism.”
Second, there was traditional French Roman Catholicism, including philosophical interests in Thomism and spiritualism of various kinds, as well as an incipient personalism associated with Emmanuel Mounier. Heidegger’s political conservatism attracted support to his position by those concerned to refute other, more liberal views of a philosophical or political nature.
Third, there was a lengthy French socialist tradition. Thinkers in this tradition have long been interested in the full development of the human individual. French socialism has long taken a variety of forms, including, after the Russian Revolution, the emergence of a powerful French Communist Party. In France as in Germany and elsewhere, the concern to resist Bolshevism was a strong motivating factor in the turn toward rightwing theories, including conservative philosophical views.
Fourth, there was the renewed attention to Hegel, including the emergence of a leftwing form of Hegelianism.78 Although all these factors played a role in the French appropriation of Heidegger’s thought under the sign of humanism, the precipitating factor was undoubtedly the leftwing form of Hegelian interpretation elaborated by Kojève.
Fifth, there was the ambiguity in Heidegger’s own texts that permitted, in fact even suggested, an anthropological misreading of his theory. In §10 of Being and Time,he explicitly distinguishes his analysis of Dasein from any form of human science. Yet as will emerge in the discussion below, this same paragraph inconsistently leaves open the possibility of an anthropological misreading of his thought.
Being and Time,Heidegger’s first major publication brought him to the attention of German philosophers in 1927. Until around 1930, Heidegger’s theory was known at most to only a few French scholars. It started to become better known in France in the early 1930s in various ways, directly through articles on Heidegger’s thought and through translation of some of his writings, indirectly through the influence of his theory on the renewed French interest in Hegel’s thought.
Translations have always been particularly important for French philosophers. Unlike Germans, who are often fluent in English, although less often in French, French philosophers share the Anglo-Saxon lack of language background. Except for the views of Wittgenstein and Frege, Anglo-American analytic thinkers are by and large uninterested in other cultures and tradition. French philosophy, as already noted, developed a deep interest in German thought early in the nineteenth century. At the present time, the French discussion of German thought has a strongly philological perspective. Yet until relatively recently, since the French philosophical command of German tended to lag well behind the interest in German philosophy, French philosophers were highly dependent on translations into French.
Heidegger’s thought first appeared in French translation in a rendering of his celebrated lecture, “What Is Metaphysics?,” delivered on assuming Husserl’s chair in Freiburg in 1929. As early as the same year, Henry Corbin, who later attended Kojève’s famous Hegel seminar and made a name for himself as a leading French Islamist, offered a translation to the NRF.79 Corbin’s translation, which was initially rejected, finally appeared in the journal Bifur with a short preface by Alexandre Koyré. This was quickly followed by a rendering of “Vom Wesen des Grundes” under the title “De la nature de la cause” in April 1931 in the first issue of a new journal, cofounded by Alexandre Koyré, Recherches philosophiques.80
Koyré’s preface set the tone for the initial Heidegger reception in France. Koyré begins by describing Heidegger as “one of the great metaphysical geniuses whose thought determines that of an entire period.”81 For Koyré “the philosophy of existence” will not only determine a new philosophical stage but constitute the beginning of an entirely new part of the discussion.82 Heidegger’s theory, which is important as the first one after the war to have spoken to us of ourselves, is concerned with a double theme: consciousness of oneself, and the revelation of one’s own being to oneself.83 Heidegger’s most important contribution is to insist, against those who are religiously or mystically inclined, that nothing comes from nothing. In this way, he acknowledges “the solitary grandeur of human finitude thrown and plunged into nothingness.”84
Although Heidegger consistently maintains that his thought is solely concerned with the problem of being, Koyré neglects this problem in order to concentrate on Heidegger’s conception of human being understood solely through itself. Koyré thus anticipates the view of Heidegger’s theory as philosophical anthropology that dominates the early French Heidegger reception. Koyré’s identification of Heidegger’s thought as a philosophy of existence further anticipates Sartre’s effort immediately after the war to identify his own brand of existentialism and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as both humanist.
Koyré only returned to Heidegger in an article that appeared some fifteen years later.85 Yet his brief introduction to Corbin’s translation was immediately influential. Jean Wahl followed Koyré’s claim for the importance of Heidegger’s thought in Vers le concret (1932) that provided a detailed discussion of Heidegger’s relation to Kierkegaard’s position.86 Meanwhile, in 1938 Corbin offered a volume of Heidegger translations, including a preface by Heidegger.87 Hence, as early as the late 1930s, there was a growing literature on Heidegger in French and his thought was beginning to be made available to the French public.
Many of the earliest publications in French concerning Heidegger were due to émigrés to France with access to the German texts. Koyré, a Russian emigrant, studied in Germany before emigrating to France. Other publications on Heidegger by foreign-born scholars include a book by Georges Gurvitch who also spent time in Germany before emigrating to France;88 a detailed article by Emmanuel Lévinas89 who, after his emigration to France, studied with both Husserl and Heidegger in 1928–1929, and finished his dissertation on Husserl’s thought;90 and a number of reviews by Kojève of books directly or indirectly about Heidegger.91
Kojève’s often caustic reviews invariably give the impression that he knows the material better than the author. An example is his remark that Alois Fischer’s study of Heidegger’s conception of being neglects the concept of time, basic for fundamental ontology, resulting in a critique of a position that has no common link with Heidegger’s.92
To rely on the publication of translations of Heidegger’s texts and articles on his thought would produce an inaccurate reading of Heidegger’s initial French reception; for it would fail to reveal the widespread tendency to approach Heidegger’s thought as a form of anthropological humanism. For instance, in a survey of recent German philosophy, Georges Gurvitch typifies the emerging anthropological reading of fundamental ontology, as well as later tendencies to seek an ethics in this view or to conflate it with existentialism: “Heidegger’s moralism offers itself in precisely this manner, leading to a cult of humanity as the basis of the being of existence.”93
This anthropological approach is already present in Lévinas’s study of Heidegger’s ontology, one of the first to appear in French.94 Lévinas provides an excellent discussion of Heidegger’s ontology keyed to his conception of human being as Dasein. He maintains that the modern analysis of the subject—object relation resulting in the idealist destruction of time for a subject is not surpassed in Heidegger’s posing of the question of being in relation to time. Heidegger inverts the familiar starting point in consciousness since human being is essentially its existence; and for Dasein to be is to understand being. Instead of the usual intellectual effort to achieve the unity of the subject, Heidegger describes the unity of human being within existence.
In a later article on Heidegger’s temporal ontology, Lévinas correctly notes that Heidegger’s understanding of human being through being yields a tragic vision of finite human being devoid of support in the eternal.95 His focus on the Heideggerian conception of human being is typical in the early French debate, unusual only in the depth and precision of his discussion. Although Lévinas avoids a conflation between Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as existence and an anthropological form of philosophy, he focuses attention on the conception of human being following from Heidegger’s concern with being.
The anthropological reading of Heidegger is further underscored in the French revival of Hegel studies. Now this is clearly ironic since, despite repeated efforts, Heidegger never comes to grips with Hegel’s dialectical position, basically different from his own nondialectical theory.96 In § 82, the penultimate section of Being and Time,Heidegger compares Hegel’s supposedly radical version of the ordinary conception of time with his own view.97 Heidegger’s discussion of the Hegelian concept of time reads like an invitation to dialogue between two major thinkers that never took place, in fact could not occur since Heidegger was neither well versed in nor sympathetic to Hegel’s position.98 Although never uninteresting, Heidegger’s later texts on Hegel’s thought reflect an embarrassing inability to comment on more than isolated aspects of the Hegelian system.
In the French context, the anthropological approach to Heidegger was greatly reinforced through Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenologyof Spirit. Except for the reference to Hegel, Kojève agrees with Lévinas in understanding Heideggerian Dasein as a conception of man without God, finally as an atheistic conception of human being. Like other leftwing interpreters of Hegel’s theory, Kojève emphasizes human being at the expense of the Absolute. We have already noted Kojève’s claim that Heidegger’s “remarkable authentically philosophical” philosophical anthropology “finally adds nothing new to the anthropology of the Phenomenology of Spirit.”99 Through Kojève’s influential Hegel seminar, his anthropological reading of Heidegger’s thought was indirectly transmitted to numerous students who later figured prominently in French culture.
Kojève’s anthropological reading further directly affected the translation of Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger contends that through translation, through the transposition of thought from one language to another, it is inevitably transformed.100 This view can be illustrated by the French translation of the term “Dasein,” a key concept in Heidegger’s early thought. The word “Dasein,” based on the adverb “da”, meaning “there,” and the verb “Sein”, meaning “to be,” occurs often in German philosophy, for instance in Kant’s discussion of God’s existence (Dasein Gottes),where it means “existence.” 101 But this word is difficult to translate into other languages, including French.102
In his initial Heidegger translation, Corbin, following precedent, translates “Dasein” as “existence.” In his volume of Heidegger translations that appeared in 1938 and that served as the fundamental source of Heidegger’s writings in French translation for the first phase of the French Heidegger discussion,103 he replaces the earlier rendering of “Dasein” as “existence” by the neologism “réalité — humaine.” The result was to deepen the typically French, anthropological misreading of Heidegger’s thought.
Corbin was a student in Kojève’s seminar. His revised translation of “Dasein” as “réalité-humaine” can be traced to the influence of Kojève’s view of Heidegger. On the first page and thereafter throughout his book, Kojève writes of “human reality”, for instance in the second paragraph when he remarks, in support of Hegel and in criticism of alternative theories, that an analysis of thought, of reason, and so on, “never discovers the why or the how of the origin of the word “me” and, following it, self-consciousness, that is to say human reality [la réalité humaine].” 104
Corbin, who added a hyphen but otherwise followed Kojève on this point, justifies this particular rendering in some detail in the preface to his volume of translations. In Being and Time,Heidegger distinguishes between the fundamental, or existential, structures of human existence that concern its existentiality, and the particular, or existentiell, ways in which human being exists.105 In a remark presumably directed against his own earlier translation practice, Corbin contends that the result of translating “Dasein” as “existence” is to conflate Heidegger’s distinction between the existential and the existentiell although Heidegger’s Existenzphilosophie (philosophy of existence) does not intend to return to the old debate between essence and existence. In substituting “réalité-humaine” for “existence” as the proper translation of “Dasein,” Corbin intends to provide the basic technical vocabulary needed to translate Heidegger’s texts into French.106 He further reinforces the anthropological reading of Heidegger’s theory when, at the close of his preface, he speaks of the “hommage” to an author arising from a genuine “understanding that grounds human reality, which makes human coexistence possible.” 107
Corbin’s influential translation of this key Heideggerian term and his classification of Heidegger’s thought were singularly important in the context of a French discussion largely dependent on translations for access to Heidegger’s thought. His classification of Heidegger’s view as a philosophy of existence was later influential in French existentialism. It pointed toward the conflation between the views of Heidegger and Sartre that the latter exploited immediately after the Second World War in his depiction of existentialism, in response to his critics, as a humanism.108
Sartre’s reading of Heidegger was always overly generous. He consistently attributes to Heidegger’s theory doctrines that were his own, on occasion doctrines even incompatible with Heidegger’s. An example among many is his classification of Heidegger’s position as existentialist, a description which Heidegger later pointedly rejected in his “Letter on Humanism” in a determined effort to distance himself from Sartre’s thought,
The tendency to classify Heidegger as an existentialist affected other, more critical writers, including Jean Beaufret, who was to become Heidegger’s main spokesman in the second phase of the French Heidegger debate. Following Heidegger’s lead, Beaufret later rejected any perception of a positive link between Heidegger’s philosophical thought and a modern philosophical theory. Yet in an early article he had no hesitation in analyzing Heidegger’s theory as one of the forms of existentialism.109
Corbin’s rendering of “Dasein” as “human reality,” his claim that “the being of man” is precisely “the human reality in man,” 110 reinforced the emerging anthropological reading of Heidegger’s thought that dominates the first phase of the French Heidegger discussion. This led to the evident conflation that Heidegger had been at pains to anticipate in Being and Time between the subject of phenomenological ontology and the very different subject of the human sciences.
In principle, Heidegger’s insistence on a radical distinction between phenomenological ontology and the sciences of human being — be they anthropology, psychology, or biology — excluded this identification. Yet the introduction of the French term “réalité-humaine” for “Dasein” was regarded as authorizing an anthropological conception of subjectivity within philosophy and science. In his Esquisse d’ une théorie des émotions (1939),Sartre follows Corbin’s suggestion when he writes:
Now man is a being of the same type as the world. It is even possible that, as Heidegger, thinks, the concepts of world and of “human-reality” [“réalité-humaine”] (Dasein) are inseparable. Precisely for this reason psychology must resign itself to missing human-reality, if at least this human-reality exists.111
This same tendency also infected French sociology. In his summary of a paper by Michel Leiris, Jean Wahl evokes the future constitution of “a science of human realities”.112 The use of the term was still current as late as 1960,when Beauvoir employed it.113
In the French humanist misreading of Heidegger, Jean Wahl played an important role. An early, enthusiastic, but critical student of Heidegger’s thought, Wahl taught and wrote on Heidegger over many years. In a paper delivered in 1937 before the French Philosophical Society, he suggested that the relation of Heidegger’s and Jaspers’s views to Kierkegaard’s is similar. 114 At the time, he saw important parallels between the views of Heidegger and Jaspers.115 Later he became more critical of Heidegger’s thought. In a book from the early 1950s,he suggested that it is incorrect to regard Heidegger as a philosopher of existence.116 Still later, he came to the conclusion that Heidegger’s meditation on being is fundamentally sterile.117
Wahl’s role as one of the best French Heidegger scholars is recognized, for instance, by Pöggeler, one of the best German Heidegger specialists. According to Pöggeler, although Wahl makes a real effort to understand Heidegger, he finally fails to grasp how Heidegger interprets the problem of being.118 This view was further shared by Heidegger himself. In a letter to the French Philosophical Society (Société française de philosophie) in 1937, following Wahl’s paper, Heidegger protests against the existentialist reading of his thought.119
Sartre did not invent the familiar existentialist misreading of Heidegger’s thought. Yet he played a decisive role in helping to propagate it. Sartre, who followed Kant in stressing absolute freedom as absolute responsibility, acquired great intellectual fame, exceedingly rare for a philosopher, after the publication of Being and Nothingness in 1943, in then occupied France, through his insistence that we are always utterly and irrevocably free to choose. He maintains this view not only on the theoretical but also on the practical level. In a typical passage about the lot of the French during the German occupation, Sartre writes:
Never have we been as free as during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the one of speaking; we were insulted everyday and we had to shut up; we were deported en masse, as workers, Jews, political prisoners; everywhere on walls, in newspapers, on the screen we found that bland and repulsive face which our oppressors wanted us to have of ourselves: because of all that we were free. Since the Nazi venom snuck even into our thoughts, every correct thought was a conquest; since an all-powerful police tried to keep us silent, every word become precious like the weight of commitment…. The choice that each one of us made was authentic since it was made in the presence of death, since it could always be expressed in the form of ‘Rather death than ….120
Had Sartre been unknown, had he remained simply an obscure writer fascinated with words, someone whose verbal virtuosity was equally manifest in his philosophical fiction and his philosophy, his influence would have been minimal. In virtue of his enormous prestige, the captivating effect his writings had on so many readers, his dependence on Heidegger’s theory, and his misreading of it, Sartre played a decisive role in the initial phase of the French Heidegger reception. This connection was only magnified in Sartre’s famous lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism when, immediately after the War, he again drew attention to Heidegger’s conception of human reality in a discussion of atheistic existentialism, freedom, commitment, and responsibility.
Sartre’s influence, his status as a master thinker, even as a kind of intellectual guru, weighs heavily in the French interest in three major philosophers that continues to this day: Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. In the French context, it is fair to say that Sartre reinforced the rising interest in Hegel, that he provided an important impetus to the concern with Husser1,121 and that — in virtue of the overwhelming importance of Heidegger’s theory for Being and Nothingness — he offered an even more influential, basically incorrect reading of Heidegger.
From this angle of vision, Sartre’s influence in French philosophy has proved surprisingly durable. French philosophy has long since turned away from Sartre’s thought. With the exception of Merleau-Ponty, who was extremely critical of his existentialist colleague, Sartre has no major follower in later French philosophy. But French philosophy has yet to escape from Sartre’s influence in its continued fascination with the “three Hs” that remain dominant, above all as concerns Heidegger.122
Although an original thinker, often unjustly demeaned in the swing away from his thought beginning with the rise of French structuralism, Sartre was also heavily dependent on others. His early position is heavily indebted to the views of Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel, and his later thought is equally beholden to the theories of Marx and Marxism. After the appearance of Being and Nothingness,his first major work, Sartre’s prestige was a factor in calling attention to Husserl, Hegel, and above all Heidegger as thinkers in the background of his position. Beaufret, the French Heideggerian most responsible for the shape of the second phase of the French Heidegger discussion, is typical of many others in having initially been drawn to Heidegger through Sartre: “[F]or a long period I thought of Heidegger only as the background of what seemed to me to be of major importance: Sartre. And when I made the trip to Freiburg, I was still motivated by my curiosity about what could have made Being and Nothingness possible.”123
Sartre’s intellectual dependence on prior thinkers is paradoxical since he rarely read anyone else with care, rarely studied the texts, preferring either to assimilate ideas that were in the air or through haphazard readings. Even if we acknowledge that Sartre is an original thinker without scholarly pretentions, we must concede that his careless use of others’ ideas inevitably results in distortion, even radical distortion. His relation to Hegel’s thought is a case in point.124 For Juliette Simont, Sartre had not read Hegel when he wrote Being and Nothingness,although he later studied the Phenomenology of Spirit with care.125 Christopher Fry, who has provided a detailed examination of Sartre’s relation to Hegel, contends that the former never read the latter in a more than desultory manner. He says that Sartre’s view is an “"alchemical caput mortuum"” of Hegel’s and that there is no name for Sartre’s use of Hegel.126
Sartre devoted considerable study to the works of Husserl and Heidegger. Yet he persistently misunderstood Heidegger’s thought, or rather always grasped it through the lens of his own preoccupations. Heidegger stresses the links between his position and the pre-Socratics, whereas Heidegger scholars point to the influences deriving from his reading of texts by Aristotle, the neoKantians, and so on. Sartre viewed things rather differently. According to Beauvoir, he drew a connection between Heidegger and the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.l27
Like French philosophy since Descartes, Sartre’s thought is dominated by the problem of humanism. His main concern from beginning to end, including both his earlier existentialism and his later Marxist period, is the concept of the human subject, including human freedom. His early study of the Husserlian idea of the subject in the Transcendence of the Ego,his analysis of the For-itself (Pour-soi) in Being and Nothingness,his offer of the existential concept of human being to prevent the collapse of Marxism in Search for a Method,the popularized version of his view he presented in Existentialism is a Humanism,his study of human praxis in the Critique of Dialectical Reason,and his enormous study of Flaubert in The Family Idiot are all aspects of Sartre’s continuing interest in human being as his central philosophical theme.
Sartre was not only interested in human being; he further desired to ground his philosophical theory in philosophical anthropology. An indication among many of Sartre’s concern to base his philosophy on a conception of human being is provided by a passage from his Marxist period. In a discussion of the Marxist concept of praxis, after a remark on Heidegger, he states that “any philosophy that subordinates the human to the other than human, be it an idealist existentialism or Marxist, is based on and leads to the hatred of human being.” 128
Sartre’s position, certainly in its earlier existentialist period, presupposes a fundamental conflation, even an amalgamation, between two philosophers of freedom at the antipodes of the intellectual universe: Descartes and Heidegger. We can illustrate this point through the ruminations of Sartre, the intellectual soldier in search of himself. While others were engaged in fighting a war to the death with fascism, he was busy keeping a diary,129 writing plays, and preparing his philosophical magnum opus. Raising the problem of humanism in November 1939, Sartre rejects the idea of human being as a species as no more than an abasement of human nature. Since Heidegger’s position offers a unitary conception of the subject that is not essentialist, it can be said to surpass the Cartesian theory to reach a common goal. In a passage that refers backward to his realist criticism of Husserl’s transcendental ego and forward to his own conception of human being as free, Sartre writes:
Nothing shows better the urgency of an effort like Heidegger’s and its political importance: determine human nature as a synthetic structure, as a totality devoid of essence. Certainly, it was urgent at the time of Descartes to define spirit through methods inherent to spirit itself. In that way it was isolated. And all the later efforts to constitute the whole man by adding something to spirit were destined to fail because they were only additions. Heidegger’s method and those [of the thinkers] that can come after him are at the bottom the same as Descartes’: study human nature with the methods inherent to human nature itself; know that human nature is already defined by the way in which it questions itself.130
Sartre consistently sought to comprehend human being through the theme of freedom that Kant regarded as the indemonstrable presupposition of morality.131 Sartre’s famous account of freedom in Being and Nothingness, the longest single section in the book, develops a view of human consciousness as independent of its surroundings,132 and of human being as possessing a freedom that forces the individual to choose.133 According to Sartre, one can only be wholly determined or wholly free, and human being is wholly free.134 As in his account of human being, so in his view of human freedom Sartre brings together Descartes and the anti-Cartesian Heidegger. In a letter to Simone de Beauvoir, written during his captivity, he typically writes that he has “read Heidegger and never felt so free.”135
Sartre’s feeling of freedom derived from Heidegger had little to do with Heidegger’s own view. For Heidegger, freedom is essentially a conservative notion whose authentic expression requires the repetition of the past in the future in order to conserve rather than to depart from tradition.136 Here and later, Sartre regards freedom, not from a traditional angle of vision, but rather as the entirely unencumbered choice of oneself and others. For Sartre, freedom entails a responsibility to choose and authentic choice accepts this responsibility.
The idea that one can assume responsibility for oneself and everyone has always attracted two groups of equally unrealistic supporters: young people who are not yet enmeshed in such social relationships as commitments to spouses and children, and philosophers who typically consider philosophical thought as wholly independent. Arthur Danto, who in this regard is typical, was sufficiently charmed by Sartre’s idea to suggest that Sartre led an exemplary life and perhaps achieved authenticity.137 Although Sartre later modified his understanding of freedom to take account of circumstances,138 he regarded his view of total human freedom as the recuperation of Descartes’s view and as the essential basis of humanism. In an important essay on “Cartesian Freedom” he writes: “Two centuries of crisis will be necessary — spiritual crises, scientific crises — for human being to recuperate the creative freedom that Descartes gave to God and to suspect this truth, the essential basis of humanism, human being and being whose appearance causes a world to exist.”139
Important theories can never be reduced to those of their predecessors. Since Sartre is an important thinker, it is a mistake to overestimate the dependence of his own theory on Heidegger’s. Early on, Sartre was aware of and annoyed by this dependence.140 Yet Sartre’s position cannot simply be understood as a variant of Heidegger’s, or indeed of any other predecessor’s, but needs to stand on its own. Yet the perception of that dependence popularized a misapprehension of Heidegger’s thought dominant in the first phase of the French Heidegger reception.
Even in France, the wider public does not read philosophy, certainly not such technical philosophical treatises as Being and Nothingness. Sartre had an enormous capacity to attract attention to his writings and, through them, to himself. The link between Heidegger’s and Sartre’s thought present in that work was considerably strengthened in the latter’s famous public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism,where he publicly enlisted Heidegger in the cause of his own existentialism, now characterized as humanism.141
Although Sartre follows the early Heidegger in his focus on human being, they comprehend it in basically different ways. Heidegger focuses on human being in terms of the problem of being that was never a Sartrian concern. Heidegger’s interest in being is certainly one of the reasons behind his turn to Nazism, for instance, in the “Rectorial address” where he straightforwardly insists on the need to found National Socialism in fundamental ontology, not only for its own sake, but ultimately for the sake of being.142 He understands responsibility in the first instance as leading to an authentic repetition of the past and then as the realization of the German people as the heirs to authentic metaphysics in order to know being. On the contrary, Sartre insists on political commitment conjoined to the choice, not only of oneself, but, distantly following Kant, of all human beings, for each of us is responsible for the whole world, so to speak. Heidegger is an anti-Cartesian whose rejection of Cartesianism deepens in his later thought, above all in his effort to decenter the subject. Sartre begins as and finally remains a Cartesian143 whose effort to understand human being in situation, even in his Marxist phase, never abandons its Cartesian roots.144
There is, then, a deep and finally unbridgeable chasm between Heidegger’s and Sartre’s conceptions of human being. Unquestionably Sartre’s thought was influenced by Heidegger’s, and for a time Sartre seems genuinely to have thought that Heidegger had anticipated some aspects of his own humanism. Yet if Heidegger is a humanist, his humanism is very different from Sartre’s. And although Sartre discerned a close relation between his conception of the human individual and Heidegger’s, he in fact offers a different, or at least basically revised notion of subjectivity.