Every now and again a serious philosophy
sweeps belatedly into intellectual fashion, usually as a result of some particular set
of circumstances. Between the two World Wars this happened to Marxism, mainly
as a result of the Russian Revolution. After the Second World War it happened
to existentialism, the fashion for which began on the continent of Europe in response
largely to the experience of Nazi occupation. When I talk of a philosophy being fashionable,
I'm speaking of its catching on not only with a lot of academics, but with writers of all kinds --
novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists -- so that it begins to pervade the whole cultural
atmosphere of the time. In postwar-France, there seemed to be existential novels, films,
plays, and even conversation on all sides. The most famous name associated with
that development, both then and now, is that's of Jean Paul Sartre, but
the existentialism of this century really began not in France, but in Germany, and
in the period following the First World War. And, in serious terms, the most significant figure
of the movement is not Sartre but Heidegger. That's to say, there's virtual unanimity among
students of modern existentialism that Heidegger, as well as preceding Sartre in time, is the
more profound and more original thinker. So in this program we're going to approach
modern existentialism chiefly through the work of Heidegger. Though later on we shall have a bit to
say about Sartre and how he fits into the picture. Martin Heidegger was born
in southern Germany in 1889 and lived in the same small area of Europe for
virtually the whole of his life. He studied under the famous philosopher Husserl before himself
becoming a professional teacher of philosophy. In 1927, at the age of 38. He published
his most important book called Being and Time. He was to live for getting on
for another half century after that, and he wrote a great deal more,
some of it very interesting. But nothing else of his was ever to be as big,
or as good, or as influential, as Being and Time. It's not and easy book to read, but we have here
to talk about it the author of what I think is the best of all introductions to existentialism
for the general reader -- William Barrett, professor of philosophy at New York University,
and author of that excellent book Irrational Man. Professor Barrett, if you can imagine for
the moment that I'm somebody who knows absolutely nothing at all about the philosophy
of Martin Heidegger, and you were going to start setting about giving me some
basic idea, how would you begin? I think I would try to locate the man
in his historical context to begin with. It would be a little bigger context than
the one you indicate. Mainly, it wouldn't be measured in terms of decades but centuries.
I'd try to locate him first in relation to the whole epoch of modern philosophy, which begins
with Descartes. It's rather interesting to place him in that context, because it relates him and
differentiates him from other philosophers in the 20th century. Now, as you know, Descartes was
one of the founders of the new science -- that is, of modern physics. And part of his scheme for
launching this science depended upon a certain kind of split between consciousness and the
external world. The mind schematized nature for quantitative measures, for calculation, for the
purpose of manipulating nature, and, at the same time, the human subject -- the consciousness doing
that was set off against it. What came out it was a certain kind of dualism between mind and the
external world. Now, most philosophy -- nearly all philosophy in the subsequent two centuries
accommodated itself to the Cartesian framework. At the beginning of this century, a
number of philosophers began to feel that, in some sense, it was uncomfortable. And we
find that the kind of revolt or rebellion against Cartesianism takes place among
different schools, both in England, and on the continent -- as a matter of
fact, with the American pragmatists, too. Now Heidegger is one of those rebels against
Descartes. And if you stop to think of it, in this rebellion against Descartes, I think, we
would get the key idea of Heidegger's philosophy, with which I would want to start
educating somebody in the philosophy. Let me make sure that, so to speak,
we're together up to this point. What you're saying in effect is this:
that with the development of science, which really began in the 16th century, we get
the development of the assumption that there is somehow a split in reality between subject and
object. There are humans observing the world, and there is the world which they
are observing. And this dualism, this assumption, that there is a division
in reality between subject and object goes all the way throughout science and all
the way throughout philosophy. Though in fact, contrary to what probably most Western
men and women suppose, it's really a view of reality which is peculiar to the west and
peculiar to the last four or five centuries. Right. Now, it's an uncomfortable view, because, in
some sense, we don't live with this view. I don't consider you as a mind attached
to a body, or I don't consider that I'm conscious of you there, but I infer
your existence. Your existence is doubtful. In ordinary life, we move back and forth between
mind and body in a perfectly recognizable fashion. Without proposing to ourselves any
particular philosophical puzzles in these transactions. So it becomes somehow
contrary to our ordinary feel of things to proceed in this way, as if the mind and the external
world was set off against each other in this way. And this revolt against dualism,
I think, is one the features of 20th century philosophy. And Heidegger
has his own mode of dealing with it. I think you and I are together in the same world.
I mean, you're not a mind attached to a body, and I'm not a mind attached to a body. Primarily,
we're two human beings within the same world. So you asked me, how would you start introducing
someone to Heidegger's philosophy. I would say you start with this fundamental concept of being
in the world. That we are beings in the world. Of course now, the word "being" makes us recoil, because
it sounds very far-fetched and highfalutin. But in the primary cases, in this case, we have to
understand in the most mundane, factual, ordinary, everyday sense the way in which average,
ordinary, or extraordinary human beings are concretely in their world. That's where we start
from. And that's where we begin to philosophize. May I say that I find this is very congenial
starting point, because the notion that reality is split between observer and observed, or
subject and object, isn't something that ever presented itself naturally to me? It was
something I had to learn, so to speak, in school, or as a student. And at first I thought it a
very strange idea. I think that the experience of the individual accords much more with you
are now saying. That is to say, we emerge from the unconscious of early baby-hoods, so to speak,
to find ourselves as beings in a world, which is the phrase you just used. We just find ourselves
here in this world, and that's where we start. Well, the split between subject and object
doesn't appear in philosophy until you get, really, formally, into Descartes. It's unknown
to the Greeks and the medieval philosophers. But now having established the difference
between Heidegger and the tradition, how does Heidegger then proceed? How
does he proceed to formulate his problem? Well, you see, once you're planted
in the world -- we are beings in the world -- then the task of philosophy becomes
primarily one of description. The philosopher then aims to describe the various modes, or
ways, in which we exist within this world. Now, in this respect, you see, Heidegger's
approach was a little different from some of the anti-Cartesian rebels in British philosophy
-- let's say Moore or Wittgenstein, who start with very definite problems of knowledge and perception
-- how do we know the external world, and so on. Now, what I would like to
say is that, in this respect, when you propose an epistemological question,
you are already in the world to propose it. Your ticket of admission to the ordinary world
is not contingent upon your solving that puzzle. When you say "epistemological," you
mean anything to do with the theory of knowledge -- Knowledge,
belief, perception, and so on. So that knowledge is simply one
other mode of our being in the world, and the various modes in which we are
in the world. I mean some of them are much more urgent and less theoretical
than knowledge. We are in the world in various fashions. We are anxiety-ridden
sometimes. We're worried. We're concerned. But does the name "existentialism" imply that the existentialist philosophers
see existence as a problem? It's a problem since we have to cope
with it, but it's the given, in any case. I mean, it's not inferred. But the problem
is then to characterize it descriptively. I think it's quite important to
emphasize that apropros of Heidegger-- that his aim is descriptive. He is not
a speculative metaphysician. He's not erecting any abstract, speculative theory about
what ultimate reality is. If his ideas stand or fall, they stand or fall in terms of whether
they adequately describe our actual experience. Would you agree with this formulation, that
throughout the history of Western philosophy, the central problem of our whole philosophical
tradition has been the problem of knowledge? What is it to know? What do how? How do we know that
we know? How can we be sure, etc? That is the key problem all the way through. But Heidegger
isn't concerned with that problem centrally. He's concerned with the problem of what
it is to be. What it is to exist. How is it that anything exists at all? What is
this existence that we find ourselves in? And that's a quite different kind of problem,
isn't it, which fascinates some people, but I think it's hard for other people to get
hold of, because it's unusual, in a sense -- It is unusual. -- in our tradition? But I'd like to point out that the preempting
of this central roll in philosophy, the problem of knowledge, is really something
which has characterized philosophy more or less since Descartes. I mean, it was discussed
earlier philosophers but it didn't have quite that absolutely central place that it had after
Descartes. So, in some sense, it's a return. Heidegger thinks of himself in some sense
as a follower of the Greeks, in this way. You say that what Heidegger is trying to
do is to give a description of the reality in which we find ourselves -- a description
of being, and existence, of what there is. Human existence. Human existence. But, I mean, a layman might
ask, well, what's the point of this? I mean, we have this existence. Here we are.
We're living it. It's, in a sense, all we have. What is the point of describing that
which we already having, or that with which we are already utterly familiar? What can a description
of this give us that we haven't already got? Well, it's the familiar that usually eludes in
life. I mean, what's before our nose is what we see last. It's true that the features
of human existence which he describes are, in many ways, commonplace, when you get through
with his analysis. But you haven't seen them quite in this way before. And I think it's the
case that people don't see what's before them. They look past it or look through it in one way or
another. And an adequate description of experience would in some sense enlighten our eyes to what
there is, which is not easy to see in all cases. Now, does this mean that there is throughout
Heidegger an emphasis on the everyday, on the ordinary, on the familiar? Yes. And it's familiar things, but there's
also an emphasis on the extraordinary, the unusual. You see, if I compare Heidegger in this
respect with another philosophy of the everyday, using that term in a general sense,
let's say, the later Wittgenstein. The comparison is rather interesting in one
respect, because Wittgenstein envisages the task of philosophy to be unraveling the snarls of our
ordinary language, so that then we can continue functioning on the same plane -- a sort of level
plane of efficient communication within the world. Now, in this sense, we almost envision
with Wittgenstein the possibility if we unravelled all the snarls in language,
philosophy would disappear. Or the problems or questions which set us into philosophy would
disappear. But now, you see, in Heidegger's case we move along that plane of ordinary
reality, and there are suddenly extraordinary gaps -- abrupt kinds of
experiences which are very extraordinary. Now I think we are getting Heidegger
in our sights, so to speak. Yes. But I think people watching this discussion
will be beginning to ask themselves, well, yes, but what does he actually say? What did he talk about? What are his
doctrines? Now, what are some of the central themes with which he's concerned, and let's
start going into what he has to say about them. Well, for example, one characteristic of human
existence, and we've talked a little bit about, you and I, --this notion of what he calls the
thrownness of human existence. The word in German looks very imposing, Geworfenheit, literally
thrownness, but it's a rather simple notion. We're thrown into the world. And this is a
case where what is most ordinary and banal is nevertheless a quite extraordinary
fact about our individual human destiny. Well, do we simply find ourselves here,
without, as it were -- a by your leave or? We didn't pick our parents. We are born of those
parents. We are born at this particular time. We are born with whatever genetic structure's
given to us, and this is the load we take upon us in order to fashion a life. In this
sense, we are thrown or projected into a world, so that human life starts at the very beginning
as a cast of the dice. Its contingency is rooted in the very fact -- the inescapable fact of your
individual birth, and parentage, your individual time in history -- we were born in the 20th
century, and not in some other particular -- And what does Heidegger have to say about that? Well, we begin our existence as a task, in the
sense of something we take upon themselves, because, you see, existence is not a neutral
fact. When you're concerned with human existence, existence is ongoing. It has to be. We
are always involved, thus, in the task of, as it were, creating ourselves. Always
from this contingent, factual base. Moving into an open future all the time? Right. The future is the predominant
tense in Heidegger, because -- What he sees, man is
essentially an ongoing creature? Right. And as a matter of fact, we construct
the notion of clock time. We make watches and other chronometers because
we're planning to use our time. So we're projecting ourselves into the future, and
on that basis we can calculate time. So the dimension of time that is most compelling
for him is the future, in the sense that the present has meaning only insofar as
far as it opens toward a possible future. You were saying just now that Heidegger -- in
his attempts to give an illuminating description of our actual everyday experience of life --
is aware, you said, of the sudden holes in it. Yes. What were you thinking? I mean, were you
thinking of death? What were you thinking of? Death, yes, would be one case. What would be others? Now, death, anxiety, he gives
an analysis of conscience. But if we stop for moment on death, I
think that's -- because you asked me. How does this description give us
something which we don't already know? I find it interesting then, the description of
death he gives is something which rather turns over our usual notions, because our usual notions
try very much to escape from the fact of death. Now, there's something very peculiar about
death. We usually think of death as a fact in the world. We read about people dying. We read
obituaries, and so on. It happens to other people. To be sure, it will happen to me, but not yet.
So it's something out there in the world as yet external to me. But the curious thing
is, if I start to think of it as my death, my death will never be a fact in the world
for me. I will never read my obituary, which is, I think, a very significant little fact. So it
can never be a public event in the world for me. Well, as a Wittgenstein says, death is not an
experience in my life, because we don't live to experience death. It's not something we live
through, and therefore not an experience we have. It's not -- my death is as
essentially mine as something which cannot be an event in the world for me, but is
a compelling possibility for me now. I mean the meaning of death is that it is a present
possibility. I may not be at any time. The meaning of death is that it's the possibility of
not being. Or, as he puts it, it's the possibility which cancels all my possibilities. Now, in this
sense it's the most extreme of possibilities, but his point is once you realize that
this particular possibility inhabits your existence -- it's sort of the warp and woof of it
in some way -- that you can either collapse and scurry away from it in fear, or you can face up
to it. And then you ask yourself the question-- there is that possibility. In the face of that
possibility, what meaning does my life have? I think for Heidegger, he would agree with
Tolstoy that the fundamental -- or at least, at this stage of Heidegger's thinking he would
agree with Tolstoy -- that the fundamental question a philosopher, as well as every man,
has to put is this -- since there is death, what meaning does my life have? And that, I
think, is where -- suddenly if you think of it, death, as this interior possibility -- it takes
a new dimension from what it ordinarily carries. You see, when we refer to,
so and so died, and so on. I must say again this is something that I find
deeply congenial. Although I was trained in philosophy, in an entirely different tradition
from this, everything you're saying makes very much sense to me. I have very strongly this
feeling -- and I suppose large numbers of people must have it -- that our everyday life
is at one and the same time sort of banal, and over-familiar, and platitudinous, and yet at
the same time mysterious and extraordinary. I have that double-feeling about life. And I certainly
hold very strongly the feeling that in the face of death, one wants to seek some meaning in one's
existence. Now, having reached this point, does Heidegger called in aid a traditional religious
explanation of existence, or what does he do? No, he has no answer. All he's pointing out is
the structure of human existence or the framework within which one has to pose these questions.
He's showing that this is a dimension of human existence which has to be faced. What answer
you give to the question what meaning do I have, will depend upon the particular individual. I
mean, Heidegger has no ethics in this sense. One feature of human life which he does draw a
great deal of attention to, in addition to this, what you called, Geworfenheit -- the fact that
we are flung into it and find ourselves in the middle of it -- is the finitude of it, isn't
it? I mean, not only do we just kind of wake up in the world and find ourselves here, but
the whole situation lasts a very short time. I mean, we've scarcely got used to finding
ourselves here, and then it all stops again. And the fact that it all stops again is for
the most human beings, as you were just saying, very frightening and very alarming. How does
he recommend that we proceed from there? No recipes. The point is -- he points
out that whatever decision you take to give your life meaning or to encounter death,
it is the human condition that must be faced in one form or another. And that's -- I mean he
doesn't say this but -- the suggestion of Tolstoy and others -- perhaps all philosophy is
the response to this question of death. There's Socrates who remarked that all
philosophy is a meditation on death, which we might interpret liberally in the fashion
that man wouldn't philosophize if he didn't have to face the fact of death. If we were all
Adam living eternally in the Garden of Eden, we'd just saunter along and ruminate about this
or that, but not any serious philosophical issue. One thing that Heidegger and the existentialists
faced, which I think previous philosophers didn't face, is the fact that our knowledge of
death induces anxiety. It's terrifying. We're frightened when we try to look in
the eye the fact that we are going to die. And so anxiety, in the face of own
finitude, or mortality, becomes one of the central themes of
existentialist philosophy, doesn't it? Yes, and I think it's important to see that this place is a -- what I consider
fundamentally a sound and healthy assessment on the fact of anxiety. Anxiety has
sort of led a checkered career in modern culture. I mean, it became fashionable a few decades
ago. Remember when Auden wrote his book The Age of Anxiety? Well, it seemed to be the
thing that was fashionable. It was the in thing. People went around cultivating their
anxiety, and so on, which is rather silly, because if we followed our previous description
of death, we realize that anxiety is there anyway. As a matter of fact, anxiety is simply
our human existence, in its contingency, coming to the level of consciousness. It is the
sheer contingency of human existence sort of vibrating there through it. On the other hand,
you see the other modern attitude, which is partly the result of being a technical society,
which commands certain instruments. We have a command of drugs or remedies
of various kinds. We imagine that there should be some instrument or means
by which we can simply press a button and get rid of our anxieties -- that they're not
something which have to faced and lived through. And I think either extreme unfortunate. It is
simply a part of the condition of being human. And, in a certain sense, at one point Heidegger
says there are all sorts of modes of anxiety, and in some forms it has the kind of
peacefulness of a creative yearning. If we weren't anxious, we
would never create anything. But man's attempt to evade, so to speak -- run
away from his own anxiety -- to evade the reality of his own immortality leads, doesn't it, to the
next existentialist theme, namely, alienation -- that we avert our eyes from the stark reality
of our own existence, and, in a sense, cease to participate in the realities of our own existence?
Now this is something that existentialist philosopher have a great deal to say about too,
and another term, like the term anxiety, which has become much misused by sort of fashionable
and trendy writers. Would you agree with that? Yes. As a matter of fact, alienation is
unfortunately one of the terms that's been tossed around so that if the word is used people would
say, oh, that boring subject. But it does happen nevertheless to be one of the deepest things of
modern culture. And it preoccupied Hegel, Marx, and I think has been a main item in contemporary
literature -- literature of the 20th century. Heidegger's point, you see, was perfectly valid.
The mere fact that we have a civilization which has a great deal of means of information at its
disposal, so people know what's in or what's out, what's going, so the word alienation is tossed
around. And the mere fact that we make it into an empty banality in a sense promotes our
alienation. It's one of the causes of it. One way of escaping anxiety is not to take
it seriously, to make it frivolous or trendy. But...see, alienation occurs for Heidegger on
several levels. One is this level which we may lose our self in the impersonal social self. A man
buries himself in his persona, his social role, and so on. As a matter of fact, Sartre
took that from him and developed... It's like the old Wordsworth poem -- "the world
is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers," etc. But you see alienation is really quite
a real problem. In a sense, I must say, I have a feeling very acutely for the moment
-- I'm putting this slightly humorously, but I think you will understand this.
I descended from the skies into London, and I haven't quite found myself,
and it seems rather strange. You feel slightly detached from reality? Yes, and as I walk the streets, these
are strange people, in certain ways. A couple of more days and I
would probably feel at home. Fundamentally the word alienation, of
course, means something is strange. We all feel like that in strange cities, but some people feel like that in
the world, don't they, permanently? Yes, they inhabit their own skins as strangers. Now I want to move on. We've been talking so far
about the basic themes of being and time. And I think it will strike people listening to this
discussion straight away that this is a book which deals with very fundamental themes, which do
exercise people at a very deep level. And even if there are no answers, I think that the fact that
it illuminates the questions -- which it certainly does, or at least it certainly has for me --
is a bit in itself something of enormous value. But, like so many other philosophers, having
worked out a big philosophy young, he then moved on, and in some sense away, didn't he,
from his early concerns? For example, Being and Time is the first -- it's presented as being the
first volume of what is to be a two volume work, but the second volume never came out. So all we
ever have is this first half of a book. Why didn't he finish that initial program, and why did he
then go on to do unexpected and unforeseen things? This is the subject of both
discussion and speculation. It turns out from recent information I've had
just a month or so ago in the United States that Heidegger has left the manuscript
of this second part, which he himself... So it does exist, and it will be published? It will be published as a kind of nachlass
of something he's left behind. But I don't think it was publishable. I myself
tend to think that I'd know what he was going to say in that. He said it in this
book on Kant and in a few essays since. But then comes this thing which the Heideggerian
scholars call die Kehre, the turn. He felt in some sense that in Being and Time he had riveted
his attention to exclusively on man, and that's this philosophy was a powerful form
humanism, but there was no systematic grasp of what the human being is rooted in. The world of nature, you
mean -- the material world? The cosmos. You see, in a sense, Heidegger,
I would say, is a follower of Parmenides, this Greek sage who had this
electrifying idea -- the all is one. For the first time in human history the notion
of the totality of being as one thing to which we have to relate ourselves in our thinking. And
Heidegger's written about Parmenides, but in this sense he feels that precisely what has happened
with modern culture is we've lost those cosmic roots, in a way. That we've been detached from the
sense of a connection with the whole or the all. Why should this have happened specifically in modern culture? Isn't it part
of the human condition as such? It is part of it in the sense that man is a being
that flies away from truth even as he pursues it. But I think that one of the reasons it happens
specifically in modern cultures -- we build up a much more intricate, technical
society. We're more encased in the sheer human framework of
things than people were at one time. Simply because we live in a much more
complex, complicated surrounding. We live in an air-conditioned nightmare, to
borrow the term from Henry Miller. But we live more and more in a man-created environment,
if we consider it all down the line from our air conditioning to everything else. Urban
complexes -- I mean, I can't help but think, coming to London, that London is a very different
city from Shakespeare's London, which existed that much closer to the countryside, you could
probably very shortly walk out, and so on. What are the main themes, then, of the later
Heidegger as distinct from the earlier? Yes, well, you see the later Heidegger
is not systematic, or not even systematic in the way in which he attempts to be in Being
in Time. The later Heidegger is not primarily, but very centrally concerned with the problem of
poetry and art, and in some sense, you see -- and the problem of technology. Heidegger feels that --
or felt, since he's dead now -- one of the tasks of philosophy in this period is to try to think
through what technology evolves. Modern thinking is either too superficial, too inauthentic
with regard to the subject of technology. On one hand you find people very flippant attitude
-- they're against machines. Or they're for technology. It makes no sense, he said, for a man
at this particular juncture of history be for or against technology. We are obviously committed
to technology. I mean, if you removed it, the whole thing would collapse. That's part of the
stake of our existence. It's part of our gamble. On the other hand, you see, there is
a point, which I think the atomic bomb has brought for human consciousness generally,
that technology has drastic possibilities. Hitherto people have protested against it as local
nuisances or causing unemployment -- sabotage, and so on. But the notion that suddenly mankind
could self-destruct suddenly shows us the fearful possibilities within
the technical complex. Now Heidegger was concerned with the thinking
through where in the historical destiny of man the roots of a technical being lies, and
where it may possibly be carrying it. But how does his concern with poetry
relate to his concern with technology? Unless he sees these as two
opposite sides of the same card. They are opposite, because, the thing --
well, you well know from other branches of contemporary philosophy, there's a certain
disposition on the part of some philosophers when they are examining language to treat
it as a calculus. It's an instrument which can be manipulated and controlled. It's a
formal calculus. And, in this sense, this represents an extension of technical
thinking even to the domain of language. Now the thing about a poem, in
Heidegger's view, is that it eludes the demands of our will. The poet cannot will
to write a poem. He cannot will it. It comes. And, actually, we as his readers can't will
our response. We have to submit into it and be passive to it. You see a lot of what
Heidegger connects the technological center of this civilization is with its Faustian will, which
becomes eventually the Nietzchean will to power. This goes right back again to man's determination
to master nature, which is the basis of our whole modern culture, modern technology, modern science,
and so on, which he is in rebellion against. I think the key quotation here would be Francis
Bacon. We must learn -- who is really a profit of the new science, in this respect. I always think
of Bacon in this respect as being a publicity man for the new science, but a publicity man of
genius. "We must put nature to the rack to compel it to answer our questions," which is a very
dramatic way of endorsing the experimental method. But now you've stop to think, you
know, even if we could put poor nature to the rack -- poor,
tortured nature -- we have to listen to her responses. We have in some sense, to
give ourselves and be receptive. There's a point at which our twisting has to submit
to whatever is there to be absorbed. This really does represent a basic break with the
tradition, doesn't it? Because even, as it were, revolutionary philosophies within the
tradition like Marxism, for example, take it for granted that the conquest of nature
is man's business. It's what human life is all and what social life is all about. I must say
that -- speaking just purely personally for a moment -- that in all the preparation that
this television series has involved me in, the preparation I've done for this discussion
and this program has taught me most, because I found in Heidegger -- who I knew
very little about before -- all kinds of illuminating insights in these very
fundamental themes we've been discussing. And that being so -- this is leading me to
the point I want to put to you -- I can't help wondering why it is that other philosophers --
including very able and prestigious ones like A.J. Ayer or Karl Popper or Rudolph Carnap, all sorts
of people -- pour scorn on Heidegger and the kind of philosophy that he's trying to do. They
dismiss it. They dismissed it in their published writings as nonsense, rubbish, garbage -- it's
a lot of rhetoric. It's all a lot of words. Seems to me you've only got to read the
stuff for five minutes to see that it isn't just all a lot of words. Now why has it been so
derisively dismissed by so many such able people? Well I don't want to make an invidious remark
about a philosophy in a state of flux. But there is a certain kind of professional deformation. A
man has a certain vision, and he carries with this sort of blinders to somebody else's vision.
I think one of the things is that Heidegger's vocabulary is initially rather jarring. But I
think if you read him in Germany, he writes a fairly straightforward German. And certainly if
you compare his German prose with that of Hegel, it seems to me Heidegger is lucidity itself. But I think what we do find in philosophy
is that certain prejudice for certain chosen vocabularies. Now you mentioned Carnap I was a
student of Carnap for several years, you see. I got an interested partly in Heidegger to find out
what the fuss was. Could it be as bad as they say? But you came time to Heidegger
through Carnap's attacks on Heidegger? Right. And when you read Heidegger you discovered
that it wasn't as bad as they said. I got interested. Yes. Professor Barrett, when I was introducing this
program I promised our viewers that we would say something about Sartre, and I think that
before we come to an end I really do want to ask you if we can move onto him just for
a moment? Although Sartre has become, as it were, the most famous existentialist
-- his is the name that most people associate with existentialism -- he's not as original a
thinker as Heidegger, is he? But nevertheless he has made a contribution. What would you
characterize as being Sartre's main contribution? Well, there are a number of ways in which
you could characterize that, but I'd like to contrast them first. Let's point the direction
which his contributions come. You see, Sartre's big book is mainly a philosophical work. I
personally think, by the way, some of his novels and plays are more important than any of
his philosophical writing. But I think he is still a philosopher of considerable brilliance. But
his major work is called Being and Nothingness. It's a gigantic misnomer. It's not about
being, and it's not about nothingness. And Sartre doesn't have much of a feeling for
being. Whatever one may object to in Heidegger, one has to acknowledge that man is really
saturated with the sense of being in some sense. What Sartre's book is about is really
the kind of melodrama of two Cartesian consciousnesses. And naturally
they're Cartesian because he's French. Every Frenchman is a Cartesian, I think, when he's
pushed far enough. And these two consciousnesses never understand each other. That is, they are two
subjectivistic minds who misinterpret each other. I, as subject, impose upon you and convert you
into an object, and so on. And you reciprocate. And so this fiendish dialogue of misrepresentation
goes on, and misunderstanding, and so forth. In the end, it becomes impossible for us to
communicate sincerely. This big book of Sartre's is really a book on the problem of sincerity,
which is the staple, I think, French literature, from Montaigne right through
Moliere and Proust, and so on. But to come to-- you see Sartre's then
most famous positive doctrine is this notion of liberty. And it's the doctrine which actually,
I think, caught on most in the public eye. That as human beings we have an absolute
and total freedom. Nothing prevents us at a certain moment from doing some
very precipitous and dangerous thing. That I am, in the literal sense, free now to
take all my clothes off or go and jump out of the window or I can actually do the things.
And one thing Sartre keep stressing is that by pretending that I'm not free to do them, I'm
falsifying the reality of my own situation. So I stand on the precipice at any
moment, and I can hurl myself off it. And in this sense the characteristic of this total
freedom is that it's vertiginous or dizzying. And he carries through this metaphor
of standing on a cliff and having this dizzy sense of being able to crash
yourself down. Nothing prevents you. But isn't he right? Isn't he right to
dramatize in this way the fact that the realities of choice which we have in life,
and realities of freedom that we have in life, are, in fact, much greater than we
ourselves wish to face for most of the time? Except now, here's where, you see, I think
Heidegger has an insight which is beyond him in this respect. Because the individual
hurls himself into this precipitous choice may, in tearing off in that sudden direction, remain
utterly as blind as he was when he started, you see. It's rather curious that Heidegger's view of
freedom is a very quiet one, and subtle and soft. Our fundamental freedom is the
freedom, if we can manage it, to become open, to let truth happen. And most of
us in our lives are shut off in our personal lives in one way or another, doesn't matter which, from
truth. In our dealings with other people we have resistances which can't be breached, and so on.
But sometimes there is a fissure in this wall that shuts us off, and we are able to let
be. We no longer seek to compel and so on. You see the whole of later Heidegger is really a prolonged attack on the will to power
as characterized in Western civilization. An attack on this urge we have to
dominate nature, dominate our environment? And even dominate our own personal
lives or dominate other people. The view being that you only really understand reality when in some sense
you submit yourself to it. Right, yes. Summing up, Professor Barrett, taking Heidegger
and Sartre, and indeed the whole existentialist tradition, together, if you were asked to
say, well now, what contribution has this made to human thought in our time, what would
you stress? What have we got from it all? I'll stress an academic point first, and then
the more important human point following. I think from the point of view of the history
of thought or the history of philosophy, existentialism has brought forward a kind of
revaluation of 19th century thought. For one thing and it has exhumed Kierkegaard, who
was virtually unknown in English-speaking countries. It's established him as a major
thinker. I don't know whether you'd call him a philosopher, but a thinker considerable
proportions and power in the 19th -- one of the major figures of century. As a matter
of fact, Wittgenstein said of Kierkegaard, he thought he was the greatest of the
19th century, which is rather interesting. Wittgenstein had discovered Kierkegaard
quite early, before existentialism, toward the end of the World War I. But the second point -- I think it's
made people aware of the fact that modern society tends to depersonalize, to a
certain extent. It gets larger and larger, more intricately organized, and so on. And that the
problem of the person, the individual, as a unique being who cannot be completely assimilated
into any framework, whether it bureaucratic, or conceptual, or systematic, something of him is
left out -- I think this kind of emphasis is what it has brought forward most powerfully. Thank you very much, Professor Barrett.
