Recent Western Philosophy III: Phenomenology and Existentialism (Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty)

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Husserl's student, opened Being and Time (1927) by reviving "the question of the meaning of Being", which he said the tradition had forgotten by treating Being as if it were a being, the highest or most general thing. The ontological difference separates Being from beings. The way into the question is through the one being for whom its own Being is an issue: Dasein ("being-there"), Heidegger's term for the human mode of existence. Dasein's essence lies in its existence: it is always its possibilities, not a thing with fixed properties.

• Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein): Dasein is not a subject inside a box looking out at objects; it is always already involved in a world of meaningful equipment. Things are first encountered as ready-to-hand (zuhanden), like a hammer in use, and only when they break or we stand back as present-at-hand (vorhanden), objects with properties. The structure of Dasein's being is care (Sorge).
• Thrownness, falling and authenticity: Dasein finds itself thrown into a world it did not choose, and for the most part it lives inauthentically, absorbed in "the they" (das Man), doing what one does. Anxiety and being-towards-death, facing death as one's ownmost, non-relational and certain possibility, call Dasein back to an authentic existence in which it chooses itself.
• Critique of technological civilisation ("The Question Concerning Technology", 1954): the essence of modern technology is nothing technological but a way of revealing, Gestell (enframing), which challenges nature to deliver energy and discloses everything, human beings included, as standing-reserve (Bestand) to be ordered and used. A hydroelectric plant sets the Rhine up as a water-power supplier. The danger is that this becomes the only way things show up; Heidegger quotes Hölderlin, "where danger is, grows the saving power also", and later speaks of releasement (Gelassenheit) toward things.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), writing largely under pseudonyms against Hegel's system and the complacent Christianity of Denmark, is regarded as the father of existentialism. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), under the name Johannes Climacus, he contrasts objective truth, where attention goes to what is believed, with subjective truth, where it goes to how it is believed. "Subjectivity is truth": for an existing individual, the truth that matters is "an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness". Faith is exactly this, and a system of objective proofs would only destroy it.

• The leap: one does not reach faith by a gradual quantitative approach through evidence and reasoning; it requires a qualitative "leap", a decision of the whole person in the face of the absurd (for Kierkegaard, that the eternal God became a man in time). The phrase "leap of faith" is the usual summary, though Kierkegaard speaks of "the leap" and "the leap into faith".
• Fear and Trembling (1843, by "Johannes de silentio") uses Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac to pose the "teleological suspension of the ethical": the knight of faith stands in an absolute relation to God above the universal ethical, which the tragic hero, such as Agamemnon, never leaves.
• Stages on life's way: the aesthetic (life for pleasure and the interesting, ending in boredom and despair), the ethical (commitment to duty and choice of oneself, as in the judge of Either/Or, 1843) and the religious (the individual before God). One moves between them not by argument but by choice.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) set out his ontology in Being and Nothingness (1943). Being-in-itself (en-soi) is the being of things: full, solid, simply what it is. Being-for-itself (pour-soi) is consciousness: it is a nothingness, a gap in being, always beyond what it is towards what it is not yet. Because consciousness is not a thing with a fixed nature, human beings are free: "man is condemned to be free", condemned because he did not create himself, yet free because once thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does. For human beings "existence precedes essence": we first exist and then define ourselves by our choices.

• Bad faith (mauvaise foi): lying to oneself to escape the anguish of freedom, by pretending to be a thing with a fixed nature or by denying one's facticity. Sartre's examples: the café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, playing at being a waiter as if that were his essence; and the woman who lets her hand be taken while pretending not to notice, treating her hand as a mere thing.
• Humanism: in the lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1945), Sartre answers critics: since there is no God to define human nature, man is nothing but what he makes of himself. In choosing for myself I choose an image of what man ought to be, so I am responsible for all humanity; hence anguish, abandonment (no God, no given values) and despair (relying only on what depends on my will).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) argued in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) for the primacy of perception: perception is not the reception of sense-data by a mind nor a physiological process, but the original, pre-reflective contact of an embodied subject with the world. Consciousness is embodied: "I am my body", not a mind that owns one. The lived body (le corps propre) has its own "motor intentionality" and bodily know-how, shown in habits such as typing and in cases like the phantom limb, where a lost arm is still lived as available for action. Against both empiricism and intellectualism, meaning is found already in the body's engagement with its surroundings; his late work speaks of "the flesh" (la chair) of the world.