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Existentialism: Martin Heidegger
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Existentialism is a philosophical movement that became associated with the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (who rejected the name as too confining) and whose roots extend to the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. Sartre, like most of his existentialist colleagues, was too much the individualist to accept the idea of being part of a movement, no matter how exclusive. Both Heidegger and the writer Albert Camus rejected the label, offended by being so linked to Sartre. But the name stuck, and Sartre, at least, accepted it with reservations. And so existentialism came to name one of the most powerful intellectual and literary movements of the last century and a half.
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Existentialism is a philosophical movement characterized by an emphasis on individuality, individual freedom, and subjectivity. It was inspired by the works of S�ren Kierkegaard and the German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and was particularly popular around the mid-20th century with the work of the French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and others, including the novelist, essayist and playwright Albert Camus.
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Existentialism differentiates itself from the modern Western rationalist tradition of philosophers such as Descartes in rejecting the idea that the most certain and primary reality is rational consciousness. Descartes believed humans could doubt all existence, but could not will away or doubt the thinking consciousness, whose reality is therefore more certain than any other reality. Existentialism decisively rejects this argument, asserting instead that as conscious beings, humans would always find themselves already in a world, a prior context and a history that is given to consciousness, and that humans cannot think away that world. It is inherent and indubitably linked to consciousness. In other words, the ultimate and unquestionable reality is not thinking consciousness but, according to Heidegger, "being in the world". This is a radicalization of the notion of intentionality that comes from Brentano and Husserl, which asserts that, even in its barest form, consciousness is always conscious of something.
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Existentialism, Second Edition concentrates on the "big four" existentialists - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre - while providing a strong sense of the breadth and variety of existentialist thought. In this edition, Solomon provides new translations of Kierkegaard, even more extensive Heidegger and Sartre selections, and a bit more Nietzsche. He retains a sense of the rich variety of existentialist thought and writing by adding such world figures as Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Marie Rilke, Luis Borges, Gabriel Marquez, Keiji Nishitani, Milan Kundera, and a scene from one particularly existentialist film screenplay, Casablanca. In addition, there are new selections from Hazel Barnes, Colin Wilson, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. The resulting volume is an excellent introduction to the richness of existentialist thought and an outstanding sourcebook for the classic existentialist thought and an outstanding sourcebook for the classic existentialist texts.
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The Marxism of Sartre and the Naziism of Heidegger are sufficient to prove that Existentialism, which already denies any reality to moral principles, can randomly be associated with any sort of politics. Oddly, what it seems less conspicuously to be associated with is liberal and free market politics, which were despised, not just by Sartre and Heidegger, but by most other Existentialist figures and their spiritual descendants. One might think that this is because intellectuals find private life and hard work boring; but then, after the "Myth of Sisyphus," one might think that any mundane task could be valorized into the most important thing ever. The truth seems to be that Existentialists never really believed that life was as meaningless as the task of Sisyphus. They actually demanded a real world of meaning vast beyond the confines of ordinary life. Thus, Marxism probably appealed to Sartre because of its pretence that it was scientific and about facts, and, as it happens, Heidegger did not really have the classical Existentialist belief in the meaninglessness of the world.
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Existentialism, Second Edition concentrates on the "big four" existentialists - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre - while providing a strong sense of the breadth and variety of existentialist thought. In this edition, Solomon provides new translations of Kierkgaard, even more extensive Heidegger and Sartre selections, and bit more Nietzsche, as well as updated selections from a wide range of world authors. The resulting volume is an excellent introduction to
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Martin Heidegger