Sartre and Heidegger on our actions

For, in the first instance, Heidegger has indicated an essence for action.  Such an indication was not suggested by Sartre as he merely assumes we know what he means by the term.  If we will recall, the latter stated that ‘existence precedes essence’, and that what we are is established by what we do, by our action, by our deeds.  Yet, Heidegger has already taken a step back from such a routine and facile characterisation of action by asking after the ‘essence’ of action.  In other words, if, for Sartre, our essence is determined by our actions or deeds, but if, for Heidegger, the essence of action has not been ‘pondered decisively enough’, then our essence cannot be determined by actions or deeds, if that is, we have not yet thought clearly about action and its essence.  Or, on the contrary, we will be forced to state that our essence, which follows our existence is determined by an act or event, the essence (Wesen) of which precedes our essence (essentia) and our existence (existentalia).

Heidegger begins his “Letter on Humanism” by noting that our notion of action is too often narrowly thought in terms of cause and effect. Consequently, the human being is conceived as only an acting agent.  By action or activity one simply means the power to cause an effect—i.e., a causality.  As such, the value we attach to any being or activity is construed only in terms of utility, that is to say, what an act does or can do for a particular end or purpose.  Action in this  sense is merely a means toward the actualization of mechanical, utilitarian ends.  According to Heidegger, we are in the habit of thinking of action within the heteronomy of means-ends, a habit whose genealogy can be traced in the evolution of the idea of making-actual from ενεργεια (energeia) to actualitas to Wirklichkeit, and so forth.  One recalls here Hegel’s famous dictum:  “Action is the clearest revelation of the individual, of his temperament as well as his aims—what a man is at bottom and in his inmost being comes into actuality only by his action” (See Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol 1, p. 219).

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As we shall see, this for Heidegger is the wrong way of understanding the human.  In “Letter on Humanism” (1946, published as Brief über den Humanismus, citations here are from Pathmarks, Cambridge University Press, 1998), Heidegger sets out to articulate a humanism that is proper to the truth of Being understood as Da-sein.  He does so by establishing a higher, non-instrumental sense of thinking that would be adequate to a philosophy of Da-sein.  With this task in mind, Heidegger levels a critique against a certain tradition of philosophical humanism, whose basis in Western metaphysics has led to a pre-ontological misinterpretation of Being, which as a result has generated a severely narrow understanding of action, the human, and with it the true philosophical import of humanism.  Yet, it is important to underline at the outset that although Heidegger’s “Letter” constitutes a critique of philosophical humanism, it is in the end an effort to reground metaphysics in a more originary, hence, more supreme form of humanism.  Heidegger’s critique of philosophical humanism does not therefore amount to abolishing metaphysics once and for all.  As in Kant, who, in writing a transcendental or critical philosophy, did not deny the possibility of metaphysics but was himself in search of a properly scientific metaphysics, Heidegger elucidates the limits of traditional philosophical humanism in order to reground metaphysics in a manner that would be adequate to what he calls “the proper dignity of man” (die eigentliche Wurde des Menschen).  Thus, we can say that at the moment the Heideggerian criticism makes it assault on philosophical humanism, a higher form is posited as philosophy’s essential aim.  This is because for Heidegger the principal task of a genuine philosophical humanism is to return to the essence of man and thereby preserve the humanitas of the homo humanus.  We will see that this philosophical project to restore man’s humanity to a prior essence hinges on a reconceptualize of thinking (Denken) as “action” and thematized as a return of man to his proper home.

How to think Being?  This question will guide us in our summary and reconstruction of Heidegger’s arguments in “Letter on Humanism.”  But we must first ask what is called “thinking” and by virtue of what do we think Being?  These questions contain a paradox, for when one thinks, when one engages in the activity of thinking, does not one, in principle, always already presuppose a category of being?  Or to put it another way, when we think, do we not cling to, and in some sense only think of, beings?  For even to think of the idea of nonbeing implies the beingness of such an idea.  The paradox concerning the thinking of Being can be stated in the following way:  although Being is always the being of a being, it is different from beings, for Being belongs to something other and more originary than the simple objective presence of beings.  In short, Being is not itself a being.  According to Heidegger, the question of Being, not only being as being but the Being of beings, the nature of Being as such, has not been properly thought.  Metaphysics has in fact failed to account for the ontological ground of Being because it has not sufficiently understood what is meant by thinking, that is, it has not arrived at a proper mode of thinking the Being of beings.  “The thinking of being,” Heidegger remarks, “makes itself unrecognizable to us” (“Letter,” 275).  In many of his lectures, Heidegger demonstrates how in the history of Western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, to subsequent thinkers from Aquinas, Kant, Hegel down to Nietzsche and on, the question of being has been inadequately formulated.  Whether they conceived of being as soul, substance, ενεργεια (energeia), Οὐσία (ousia), spirit, matter, force, consciousness, becoming, life, representation, will, or the eternal occurence of the same and so forth, philosophers have merely grasped beings as beings, without properly comprehending the manner in which beings “be.”  For Heidegger, the first and last, most essential, because most basic, question of philosophy must be the question of the meaning of being in general:  “What does being signify?  Whence can something like being in general be understood?  How is understanding of being at all possible?” (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 15).

It is the task of philosophy to lay the ground (Grundlegung) for the proper thinking of being.  With this task in mind, Heidegger will want “thinking” (Denken) to mean something fundamentally different from our everyday understanding of the term.  Thinking for Heidegger is a kind of action, but it is not action in terms of a simple causality.  Thinking is presupposed in all action and production, but it is something that surpasses all praxis.  In other words, thinking is not reducible to τέχνη (techné), or technical reasoning.  Heidegger elevates thinking into a higher sense in order to think Being not in terms of factual existence (i.e., the Was-sein or whatness of beings, its essentia), but in terms of ek-sistence (we will say more about the concept of ek-sistence below).  Heidegger thus proposes a different understanding of thinking that will enable a more originary, more profound, view of being.  It seems to me that what Heidegger has in mind in his aim to reconceptualize thinking is to attain this more profound view of being, and with it a higher meaning of the world.  If we may quote once again from Heidegger’s earlier The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, we can sense what is at stake for Heidegger in developing a mode of thinking that would be prior to all factual (empirical) experiences of beings:

We are able to grasp beings as such, as beings, only if we understand something like being.  If we did not understand, even though at first roughly and without conceptual comprehension, what actuality signifies, then the actual would remain hidden from us.  If we did not understand what reality means, then the real would remain inaccessible.  If we did not understand what life and vitality signify, then we would not be able to comport ourselves toward living beings.  If we did not understand what existence and existentiality signify, then we ourselves would not be able to exist as Dasein.  If we did not understand what permanence and constancy signify, then constant geometric relations or numerical proportions would remain a secret to us.  We must understand actuality, reality, vitality, existentiality, constancy in order to be able to comport ourselves positively toward specifically actual, real, living, existing, constant beings.  We must understand being so that we may be able to be given over to a world that is, so that we can exist in it and be our own Dasein itself as a being.  We must be able to understand actuality before all experience of actual beings. (§ 2 The concept of philosophy: Philosophy and World-View)

Everything thus depends on this higher sense of thinking, without which the truth of the world will remain “hidden,” a “secret.”  What, then, is thinking?  For Heidegger, thinking is described in the “Letter” as the awaiting for “the advent of Being, to Being as advent” (“Letter,” 275).  Thinking accomplishes this.  It accomplishes this what-arrives (the “advent”) of Being as the very destiny of thinking itself.  It is the bringing or sending forth of man to the fullness of the essence of Being: a kind of self-affectation of one’s sense of be-ing, something not unlike the “I think” of Kant’s transcendental apperception.  Now, in Heidegger, the question “What is thinking?” is necessarily tied to the question “What is Man?,” which is pursued in terms of what is proper to man. As Derrida elsewhere suggests, “for in this question [“What is Man?”] it is man himself who is determining himself by questioning about himself, about his being, discovering himself in this way to be of a questioning essence in the Fragen” (see The Beast and the Sovereign, 264).  Hence, again, thinking as self-affecting.  Before anything else, thinking sends man over to discover and dwell in the essence of his Being as ek-sistence.  What is important to note in Heidegger is that this more originary thinking is always prior to a mode of thinking that is representational or a giving-form, in the manner of Aristotle. Thinking does not make or cause a relation—it is not a simple.