Sartre on Heidegger

Jean-Paul Sartre's voluminous correspondence with his friend Simone de Beauvoir offers us a glimpse both into his intellectual life and into his personal life. Although we do not gain a detailed understanding of his reading of Heidegger in these letters, we do see how central Heidegger was to Sartre's development.

In July of 1939, he wrote to her that he was happy that

you've finally read Heidegger, it's worth your while and we'll talk about it.

Later the same year, he records his impressions of Paris in its last pre-war late summer. Even Sartre's mundane ruminations on travel are affected by his reading of Heidegger:

Paris was very strange. Everything was closed, restaurants, theaters, stores, because it's August, and the neighborhoods had lost their individual character. There was only one totality left, Paris itself. A totality which, for me, was already a thing of the past and, as Heidegger says, retained and upheld by nothingness.

His reference to Paris as 'a thing of the past' may be because he's getting ready to leave, or because his sense that soon war will change it. In either case, once he has left (to resume his military service), he writes to Simone de Beauvoir about his fellow officers, even describing one's personality in Heideggerian categories, in a letter dated 6 September 1939. A few weeks later, he explains how he departs from Heidegger in his own thinking:

All of man's acts, being accomplished by means of the body, are registered finitely on a double infinity - of immensity and minuteness. And from that fact, all consideration of objects as implements brings human reality to the consciousness of its own disregard. For what Heidegger did not see is that the infiniteness of the world surpasses its implementicity in every direction.

He continues:

If the vast distances to the stars produce a stupor akin to Pascal's terror, that is because it comes from the transcendent infinite of the transcendental consciousness - and, at the same time, the perception of the stars necessarily includes an attempt at their implementation which conflicts with their “out-of-reach” quality. Heidegger didn't see that his world for man - which is indeed immediately and pre-ontologically an implement - is coincidental with man and not wtih the transcendental consciousness, and that it is completely surpassed and disarmed by the world for consciousness, which isn't capable of receiving implementicity, across which implementicity slips without being able to grab hold.

In October of 1939, he writes that

I'm mulling over a central idea that will finally allow me to eliminate the unconscious, to reconcile Heidegger and Husserl.

Later, he reports that

I attempted a reconciliation of Heidegger and Husserl. It didn't pan out, but I stuck to it doggedly, and I feel quite woozy after six hours' effort. The whole thing must be done over. There is still this entirely circular idea and I don't know where to pick it up, so I grab at it, and it slips through my fingers like a ball of grease. You'll see, it makes for odd little notebooks.

In November, he complains in a letter that one of his fellow officers didn't understand a Heidegger book which Sartre had lent to him; presumably most of Sartre's fellow officers would have been in that situation, although Sartre seems to think that after weeks of trying, they've begun to understand a bit of Heidegger. These were the long weeks after war had been declared in the autumn of 1939, but before actual fighting began in early 1940. Such officers had lots of time for conversation, but with an ominous or foreboding sense about the future. Sartre notes that

Human reality is of a particular existential type, as constituted by its existence in the form of value to be realized through its freedom. This is what Heidegger expresses when he says that man is a being of distances.

Even as Heidegger's influence on Sartre makes itself ever more felt, Sartre discovers Kierkegaard's influence on Heidegger. He writes in another letter to Simone de Beauvoir about Kierkegaard's book

The Concept of Dread, in which there are countless things within theologic terms that are obviously a bit forbidding. His influence on Heidegger is undeniable.

In another letter, dated December 1939, Sartre continues, telling her that he's continuing to study

The Concept of Dread, which I'll send or bring back to you, and which you'll read with the greatest of interest, if only to understand Kierkegaard's influence on Heidegger and on Kafka (you know that Kafka feathered his nest through that book).

It becomes clear, through these letters, that 1939 was a pivotal year for Sartre's intellectual development, and that Heidegger influenced him greatly during this time.

Heidegger on Logic

Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, if one wishes to be kind, is a most difficult system to understand, complicated by his technical terminology, including new words which he coined, e.g., ‘thrownness,’ which is meant to indicate the human phenomenological experience of being confronted with, or by, the world of sense-data and experience. If one wishes to be less than kind, one may pose the blunt question whether or not Heidegger makes any sense at all, and whether his thoughts and writings are actually rational.

It is then perhaps an odd juxtaposition that we would turn precisely to Heidegger for words about that subdivision of philosophy to which he seems least attached: logic. Yet, as every philosopher must, he busied himself, at least for some fraction of his time, with logic. In his lecture notes for the 1925/1926 academic year, he wrote:

If we desire a more vital concept of “logic,” we have to ask a more penetrating question: what is the subject matter of the science of logic? In doing so, we leave aside any consideration of logic as one discipline among others - viz., the science of speaking and therefore of language - and focus instead on what it is about.

Heidegger here uses the word ‘science’ in the philosophical sense: in ordinary life, we think of ‘science’ as biology and chemistry, as geology and astronomy. The philosophical sense is broader, including those, but including also anything which can be made into a systematic body of knowledge, or an academic discipline. Not only is the philosophical sense of the word broader, but it carries a different emphasis: it is not the content of biology or astronomy (frogs and stars, respectively) which interests the philosopher, but rather the systematic arrangement of that content - that it can be categorized according to a taxonomy, or its events analyzed in terms of cause and effect. It was a philosopher, Aristotle, who organized not only a taxonomy for biology, but for political science and other fields as well.

It is in this sense, then, that Heidgger speaks of ‘the science of logic’ - and here also he is following a philosophical tradition; the very phrase ‘science of logic’ (die Wissenschaft der Logik) has a long and venerable history among philosophers.

Seen historically, Heidegger proposes that logic arose from the study of language (grammar), and the study of language arose from the study of speaking. After sketching his somewhat obscure distinction between ‘language’ and ‘speaking’ - the latter being the most literal study of making sounds with the mouth, and the former a somewhat more abstract study of meaning and grammar - he goes on to explain logic as an extrapolation from speaking and language: what the speaking is about, or what the language is about:

the basic achievement of speech consists in showing or revealing what one is speaking about, what one is discussing. Indeed, making vocal sounds was quite secondary to that.

As one abstracts from speech and language to logic, we see that grammar is to language as logic is to thought: and it is in thougt that the content of the “science” at hand will be defined and revealed:

In such acts of revealing, whatever one is speaking about shows up, becomes perceivable, and, as something perceived, get defined in and by the discussion about it. This revelatory defining of what is experienced and perceived is the very same thing that we generally call “thought” and “reflection”.

To speak of a process of ‘revealing’ is typically Heideggerian, for which he is alternately loved and hated. Heidegger’s concept of ‘truth’ is a notion of uncovering or disclosing, which stands in contrast to a competing concept, truth as corresponding. In a correspondence view of truth, symbols - be they spoken or written, be they mathematic, scientific, or ordinary words - are true if they are arranged in a patterns which corresponds to reality. Heidegger, to the contrary, embraces his own view of truth, that it consists in, not corresponding to reality, but rather revealing or disclosing it. Heidegger goes on:

In summary: in our primary, natural experience of how human beings live together with each other, we understand speech as the revealing of something by speaking about it, and as a thinking that determines and orders it. Language, speaking, thinking: they coincide as the human way of being. They are the way we reveal and illumine (both for ourselves and for others) the world and our won human existence, so that in this luminosity we gain sight: human insight into ourselves and an outlook on, and a practical insight into, the world. Logic as the science of speaking, studies speech in terms of what it properly is: the revealing of something. The subject matter of logic is speech viewed with regard to its basic meaning, namely, allowing the world, human existence, and things in general to be seen.

The subject matter of logic is not merely speech, but speech viewed viewed with regard to its basic meaning. Grammar, philology, and related disciplines are the study of speech; logic is the study of speech’s meaning. Phrased another way, logic is ‘deep grammar’, while the ordinary study of phonemes and morphemes is ‘surface grammar’. Because deep grammar is deep, it needs to be uncovered, discovered, and revealed:

The fact that existence has and understands and strives for this basic form of revealing implies that, for the most part, much of the world stands in need of ‘revelation’, of being uncovered and made known. In other words, much of the world and much of human existence is by and large not un-covered. So beings can be drawn out of their not-un-covered-ness, their hiddenness. They can be un-covered or un-hidden. This uncoveredness or unhiddenness of beings is what we call truth.

Following Aristotle (who followed Socrates), Heidegger sees definitions as central to logic:

Logic investigates speaking - the thinking that defines things - inasmuch as speaking uncovers things. The topic of logic is speech, specifically with regard to truth.

Observational sciences, natural sciences, like chemistry or biology, are also concerned with truth. Likewise, social sciences like sociology or political sciences seek truths. So what makes logic different, or even distinct, from them? Those other sciences seek to identify truths, or to sort out which statements are true and which are false. Logic, according to Heidegger, takes true statements and asks why they are true and how they are true.

Our definition of logic as the science of truth could be misunderstood. One might object that every science deals with truth, that truth is what all scientific knowledge is after. Yes, except that there is a misleading ambiguity here in how the word truth is being used. In a strict sense, no individual science other than logic deals with truth. The natural sciences, on the other hand, deal only and always with the true, i.e., what-is-true; and they do so within the arena of the knowledge of nature. Or outside of the natural sciences, one inquires into what-is-true for human action, or about the true that faith gives.

Logic deals with truths; the concrete individual sciences deal with truths. There are biological truths, spiritual truths, geological truths, ethical truths; but logic deals with truth itself, truth seen as truth, not seen in relation to the content of a particular science. Astronomy gives us truths; faith gives us truths; chemistry gives us truths; morals give us truths; but logic examines truth itself - what it is to be true.

But logic does not ask about the what-is-true in just any sense. Rather, it inquires primarily and properly into the truth of what-is-true. It asks: What makes this or that true thing be true in a given case? and what makes it be this true thing? The only way to make any grounded sense out of the truth of theoretical-scientific knowledge, practical reflection, or religious truth is to get to the foundation that lets us understand what truth means at all. Only from that foundation can we decide which kind of truth is most original, and whether the ideal of truth is to be found in theoretical-scientific truth or practical insight or religious faith. In other words, it is not easily decided which form of the true is primary and most basic. Even in today’s philosophy, this question has not yet been settled.

Heidegger indicates that we should seek which form of truth is most ‘primary’ and ‘basic’ - this will be a daunting task, for it is not clear which standards will allow us to judge in this case, and it is perhaps a bit too optimistic to assume that philosophers as a community will ever agree to any potential answer.

The Basis of Modern Science

Although we might sometimes think of science and philosophy as two rather different academic subjects, they are in many ways related. We can see this in, for example, some of the words used in a current science textbook (An Introduction to Physical Science, a commonly-used college freshman text, 2009, Houghton Mifflin). Early in the introduction, it offers us this quote from the Lutheran pastor and philosopher, Johannes Kepler:

Theory guides, experiment decides.

Kepler, often known today for his discovery that planetary orbits are elliptical and not circular, spent most of his life thinking about theology, having studied at the seminary in Tübingen in Germany.

The textbook goes on to state in its own words that

Based on the assumption that the universe is orderly enough to be understood, a method of observation and rules for reasoning and making predictions have been formulated.

The clear philosophical import of this text is the “assumption” that the universe is rational, that it follows the laws of algebra and geometry, and eventually, the laws of chemistry and physics. The universe, then, has been designed around a set of principles - according, at least, to the current thinking in physics departments at the nation’s universities. Further, there are “rules” for reasoning.

The idea that there are rules for reasoning, in physics at least, goes back as far as the theologian Isaac Newton. Outside of physics, in pure mathematics and logic, the idea is even older. This is the foundation of observational and empirical science as we now know it. Isaac Newton, because of his discovery of mathematical truths like the theorems and principles of calculus, and because of his discovery of physical laws like gravitation, spent most of his scholarly effort analyzing, and wrote most of his publications about, the Bible.

We see, from the works of men like Kepler and Newton, that there is a thick tangle where philosophy, mathematics, natural observational sciences, and theology meet. Assumptions about the possibility of phenomena in the universe being subject to mathematical modeling come very near to expressing certain aspects or properties of God.

Anaximenes: Is the Universe a Machine?

Philosophers and scientists have long wrestled with notion of a mechanistic universe: it is attractive, to the extent that it reflects both the formalized assumptions and intuitive concepts of physics and chemistry, both of which can be modeled mathematically. On the other hand, it fails to correspond to our ideas of imagination, creativity, and chance. We can see clearly that some aspects of the cosmos are mechanistic - gravitational forces can be calculated and reliably predicted. But is there a decision process which would have allowed us to predict, after Beethoven finished his eighth symphony, which form and content would comprise his ninth symphony?

Anaximenes was perhaps the first to advance a strictly mechanistic cosmology. Even though Thales and Anaximander had rejected mythological “psyche” into their systems of physics, attributing something like a capability for arbitrary decisions to objects. Modern physics would like to tell us that even in a situation like the flipping of a coin, the results are, if not actually calculable, still in principle calculable. Anaximenes would agree. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes that Anaximenes

discovered that nature can be explained mechanically. Anaximenes thought that all changes were the result of changes in density brought about by the condensation and rarefaction of one underlying form of matter.

And this, in fact, is not far from current twenty-first century natural observational science. The vast majority of what is around us consists of three rather generic forms: electron, proton, neutron.

The great virtue of this new idea was that it gave the scientist experiments, models, and clear-cut physical explanations of changes and their causes. This is still our own way of thinking.

If we review the first three philosophers in succession - Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes - then we can see their cumulative progress:

To recognize the magnitude and importance of the Milesian achievement, with its three progressive insights into the materiality, uniformity, and mechanical causality of nature, the modern reader must realize that here we have the ancestors of contemporary physics and astronomy.

These first three philosophers lived in the town of Miletus, and are thus called Milesian; their lifespans overlapped and so they almost certainly knew each other. Anaximenes additionally proposed the notion of rotation as central to the universe, and so it is: planets rotate on their axes, orbit their stars, and a grouped into larger galaxies which also rotate and orbit. This notion of rotation fits well with his primary notion of density:

Modern astrophysics can trace the life histories of starts in terms of alternate increases and decreases in their density.

And so, Anaximenes has made a persuasive case for a mechanistic universe. Yet the counterexamples remain: artistic creativity among humans, the uncertainty principle in physics, and the question of the origin of the universe. Anaximenes is persuasive, but not conclusive.

Anaximander

It’s frustrating to come in second - most Americans know that George Washington was the first president, but far fewer can name the second president; John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, but the name of second American to orbit the earth is not so well known; Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic, but who was the second? Edmund Hillary was the first man to climb Mount Everest, but who was the second?

So it is with Anaximander: Thales was the first philosopher, and many textbooks begin with his name. But less often do philosophy classes dwell on the work of his successor.

Anaximander began where Thales left off: the quest for a grand unified theory, to borrow a phrase from modern physics, or, in older phrasing, cosmology. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

Leaping beyond the brilliant yet simple notion that all things are made of the same stuff, Anaximander showed how deep an objective analysis of the real world must penetrate. He made four distinct and significant contributions to human understanding:

1. He realized that neither water nor, indeed, any such ordinary material could be the fundamental form of matter. He saw the basic stuff as a more sophisticated though somewhat obscure boundless something. This theory was to serve science well for twenty-five centuries.

2. He extended the concept of law from human society to the physical world - a clean break with the older view of a capricious, anarchic nature.

3. He invented the use of models to make complex natural phenomena easier to understand.

4. He deduced, in a rudimentary way, that the earth had changed over the ages.

Quite a list of intellectual accomplishments! His understanding of matter is a direct ancestor of both modern chemistry and modern atomic physics. His understanding of the laws of nature - which amounts to saying that the universe is rationally constructed using algebra and geometry - is the necessary precondition for the development of chemistry and physics. The skill of modeling, which follows from the fact that the universe is assembled using the laws of algebra, is the basis for the understanding of natural processes: they can be mathematically modeled, which allows us to predict where the planet Neptune will be at this time next year, or describe how continental drift has slowed from miles per day to per to inches per year. A fossil hunter himself, Anaximander reasoned that even the highest mountains must have at one time been covered by water, a massive world-wide flood.

Agreeing with Thales that there must be one common principle underlying all matter, he disagreed with Thales on what it was. Rejecting the first philosopher’s hypothesis of water, Anaximander noted that this proto-material must be able to manifest itself in nearly endless qualities and properties we see in different objects:

If everything real is a matter with definite qualities, it must be possible for this matter to be hot in some cases, cold in others, sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Anaximander thought of qualities as always being contrary pairs. If one identifies matter with one quality of such a pair, as in Thales’ “all things are water,” how can one explain the existence of the contrary quality? If “to be is to be material,” and “matter is water,” then it would seem to follow that “to be is to be moist.” All right: what happens when things become dry? If the matter they are made of its always wet, drying would destroy the matter of things: they would become immaterial and cease to be. In the same way, matter cannot be identified with any one quality to the exclusion of its opposite. From this, the concept of matter as the boundless, a neutral and indeterminate something, follows. From this reservoir, the opposite qualities “separate out”: from the boundless all specific things arise, and to it they return when they cease to be.

Although we don’t think of neutrons, protons, and electrons as “boundless”, they are in some sense “neutral” and, until they are placed into atoms and molecules, indeterminate. Anaximander was realizing that, in order to express all possible qualities and properties, the basic building blocks of matter would have none of those qualities or properties, and would be capable of being configured in many, perhaps infinitely many, different patterns to yield the different properties we experience in actual bits of matter.

Thales - the First!

It is widely-known, of course, that nearly every book on the history of philosophy lists Thales as the first philosopher. It is even more widely-known that this statement can be contested. Aren’t there other people who could claim the title of first philosopher? For example, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, which probably pre-dates Thales by several centuries?

And yet Thales endures, and clings to his title of “first” philosopher, despite the fact that we have only a few small textual fragments from him, and they reveal a cosmology which is naive and overly-simplistic. He retains his title of “first” for reasons best described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s defense of him - and thereby also set the trend for several centuries of pre-Socratic philosophy. As Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes,

Thales could, with some right, have claimed the ideas of matter, of physics, of science, and of philosophy as his inventions. However strange this may seem, all of these ideas had to be discovered. And to be discovered, mythology had to be abandoned. To state - as Thales did - that “all things are water” may seem an unpromising beginning for science and philosophy as we know them today; but, against the background of mythology from which it rose, it was revolutionary. The break was not complete; it could not have been. Thales still had no abstract idea of matter, as opposed to an imaginative picture of a fluid sea; the two were mixed together. And his idea of change was still based on a feeling that “all things are full of soul.” But he had asked a new kind of question. His question has given distinctive shape to Western thought.

The question posed by Thales, if perhaps tacitly, is the question of cosmology: what is the nature and structure of the universe? what is its origin and design? His answer, if laughably wrong, is understandable in the sense that water is 75% of the earth’s surface, is 75% of every human being and most other living creatures, is necessary for all forms of life, is the only substance commonly seen in all three states (solid, liquid, gas), and is found everywhere except in the vacuum of deep space between planets.

The rejection of mythology by Thales led to other pre-Socratic philosophers, but perhaps most of all to Xenophanes, who would reject anthropomorphic deities of polytheistic mythologies, and instead move forward to a rational conception of God: invisible, eternal, and monotheistic.

To seek to provide an answer to the question, What are all things?, required tremendous insight and imagination. For the question assumes that everything forms a part of some single world of being, and that all things have some common property. It raises the question of what being is, as opposed to less general questions about what these or those particular being are. And prior to answering the question, Thales had assumed that there is enough system among the infinite variety of things in the world to permit some sort of single answer. This assumption marks the beginning of philosophy.

In Thales, then, we see already the notion of system, the notion that the world is rational and understandable - that the universe is constructed with axioms and principles. This is the foundational assumption of physics and chemistry. Thales has indeed earned his title as “first” philosopher.

Parmenides

Parmenides is pivotal in the history of philosophy - in order to understand Anaxagoras, Empedocles, or Zeno of Elea, one must first understand Parmenides, because those later thinkers were writing in reference to him. Yale’s Professor Robert Brumbaugh writes:

Parmenides was greatly influenced by the Pythagoreans. He invented formal logic by applying their mathematical methods of proof to the philosophical problem of the natures of being and not-being. Presenting his argument in the form of an epic poem, he used logic to show that being is unchanging and uncreated. This conclusion denied the possibility of any appearance of variety or change. A corollary to this positive, if mystical, conclusion was that human reason has the power to understand reality.

He is, then, not only foundational for understanding later generations of Greek philosophers, but also many modern philosophers, starting with Descartes: the philosophical admiration for the strength of mathematical reasoning has led a diverse set of people - from Spinoza to Hegel, from Wittgenstein to Quine - to model various branches of philosophy on the patterns of proof and theorem found in mathematics. Parmenides touches on another central point in philosophy: he poses a question about the strength and abilities of human reason. To be sure, he also answers that question - and thereby finds for himself both a number of allies and opponents. It is the question that is the beginning-point for Kant’s philosophy: which questions can human reason answer, and which ones can it not answer? Such a question is properly prior to any philosophizing, because before we can try to answer any further philosophical questions, we should first know whether or not those questions can be answered at all, and whether it is human reason, or some other faculty, which might be able to answer them.

Interestingly enough, Parmenides also wrote about astronomy, biology, and other sciences. Yet if his main insight was sound, the many changing things these sciences study could not be real. Vividly aware of change and the individuality in the world they observed about them

later Greek philosophers would try

to find ways to keep Parmenides’ logical method but to avoid his mystical conclusion.

It doesn’t bother Parmenides that the natural sciences must be, on his terms, dealing with what are illusions. He is content to deal with the parade of images presented by, as, or through sense-data, while realizing that they are merely images, that there is no underlying change behind the image of change, no underlying coming-to-be behind the image of coming-to-be, and no underlying passing-away behind the image of passing-away. Again, one sees here the seeds of Kant and phenomenology: the seeds of the former, inasmuch as the logic of causal relations in the phenomenal world does not apply to, or even entail the existence of, the noumenal world; the seeds of the latter, inasmuch as Parmenides brackets, even if he has already answered, the questions about the existence and nature of the noumenal world. Parmenides (as synopsized by the Brumbaugh) sets up his argument:

Suppose someone assumes that being is divided into many separate beings. Then what is it that separates them and holds them apart? It cannot be being, for then all of the parts would still all be together in one totality, and it not be distinct. On the other hand, if one says things are separated by not-being this leads to absurdity. For not-being, if it is the opposite of being, can only be a void, a kind of pure nothing: if one says that non-being is a separator, he is treating it as being, which by definition it is not. If one says that though it is nothing, it still separates the parts of being, this is the same as saying that “nothing separates being into parts,” which in fact is a statement denying that the parts are separated. How can nothing do something positive? The idea is self-contradictory.

Parmenides is both making a specific metaphysical statement here, and also laying down a principle for argumentation in general:

In explicitly recognizing that noncontradiction is a fundamental property of existence, as well as of thought, Parmenides hit a upon a most important principle. Once it is recognized that only consistent entities can exist, the truth of generalizations can be tested by examining their consistency.

It is worthwhile to sharpen the notion “that noncontradiction is a fundamental property ... of thought.” One might more specifically say “ ... of rational thought” or “ ... of logical thought” or even “ ... of significant thought,” for a self-contradictory sentence, and the proposition which is represents, cannot signify, i.e., cannot have a referent. The net impact on philosophy

was to reinforce philosophical formalism by showing that there is a close connection between reality and abstract logical form, and to make philosophers more conscious of the methods by which they arrived at their conclusions.

Future philosophers would appreciate “the value of precise logical form,” an impact which places Parmenides into the category of very important philosophers!