Consciousness in Sartre and Heidegger

of the treatment of the concepts of consciousness and freedom by Sartre and Heidegger in their works Being and Nothingness and Being and Time.

Sartre's Being and Nothingness is in fact entirely a study of consciousness, of its existence and its absence. As such, the book qualifies as, and can truly be understood only as, a work of phenomenological psychology. At the heart of this specific psychology is the belief that much of what man perceives to be immanent and "within" his consciousness is in fact an illusion. The event we perceive as immanent is in fact not the event itself, but rather our consciousness of the possibility of that event occurring. Such subtle distinctions provide the structure of Being and Nothingness. Without an understanding of those distinctions one cannot begin to see the grand portrait of human consciousness constructed in the book.

Both Sartre's book and Heidegger's Being and Time are ponder-ous works utilizing the phenomenological method of investigation and both exert to the last degree their philosophical muscles in exploring the relationship between consciousness and freedom. Writing first, Heidegger influenced Sartre (and Sartre is open about that influence), but whereas Heidegger was concerned primarily with Being, and with the individual only insofar as the existence of that individual is a means for understanding Being, Sartre was concerned almost exclusively with the existence of th

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may be" (Sartre, 1956, p. 521). It is then that the individual must choose and it is a process, which goes on as long as life goes on. An individual must decide how to deal with the impulses of that freedom. And in choosing the individual chooses either to try to smother that sense of freedom by submission to an outside force such as social mores and expectations, organized religion, etc. Or the individual chooses to deliberately and consciously fill the lack inside which demands attention and which can only be defined and filled by the exercise of freedom. The individual who is truly free must eventually come to the conclusion that he has created the situation, for better or worse, in which he finds himself: He must assume the situation with the proud consciousness of being the author of it, for the very worst disadvantages or the worst threats which can endanger my person have meaning only in and through my project; and it is on the ground of the engagement which I am that they appear. It is therefore senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are, further-more, this absolute responsibility is not resignation; it is simply the logical requirement of the conseque
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Approximate Word count = 2841
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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