Sartre's Heidegger vs. Derrida's Heidegger

by Steve Martinot

In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (9/9/83), Derrida explains that though he had gravitated toward philosophy under the aegis of Sartre as a model, who introduced him to the Heidegger's texts, he eventually read Heidegger against Sartre, concluding that Sartre had misread Heidegger himself. (DD,75) In "The Ends of Man," Derrida reproaches Sartre for having obstructed French awareness of Heidegger's thinking by accepting and valorizing Corbin's faulty translation, which resurrected definitude and conceptualization within Heidegger's attempt to displace both. Sartre can be defended against Derrida's charge. In Being and Nothingness, his critique of Heidegger strongly differentiates "Dasein" from his own notion of "human reality," thus ignoring Corbin's translation. The for-itself emerges in negativity, nihilation, from nothingness, while Heidegger casts Dasein in positive terms. For Sartre, Dasein is an empoverished notion. (BN,18,73)

But this is a strange dispute since Heidegger clearly stands in direct and recognized anteriority to both Sartre and Derrida. In his project of dismantling metaphysics, Derrida claims to derive both insight and inspiration for deconstruction from Heidegger. And Heidegger's existential analytic provides Sartre with a structural model or template; as Joseph Fell points out, Being and Nothingness presents itself as a response and an alternative to Being and Time. (HS,66)

Yet Sartre and Derrida appear incommensurable. Derrida charges that Sartre leaves his philosophical language (the "meaning and origin of the concept of (human) reality" (M,116)) unquestioned. And he argues that this (non)act has a meaning; to ignore the "history of the concept" (whether of "human," "reality," or "man") as if it were self-evident, with "no origin, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit," is to render it a priori, self-referential, and to close off investigation.

Conversely, Sartre thought both the structuralists and post-structuralists were somewhat misguided for having emptied their texts of what he himself considered essential to philosophy: an account of the subject, an approach to history, and a confrontation with the aprioris and presuppositions of traditional philosophy. The post-structuralist (and Derridean) response was that an account of the subject only constituted its construction as a simulacrum, that an investigation of history as such had to assume its own history within that investigation, and that confrontation with presupposition only prioritized a different set of presuppositions as the condition for confrontation itself.

Furthermore, Sartre wants to be definitive about what he says. He desires language that is unequivocal, message-bearing, and that says what he thinks. (WL,13) Derrida would suggest this is an idle endeavor, that the polyvalence of language calls in question what "say" and "think" mean, what the "who" that does it is, as well as "about-ness" itself. Where, for Sartre, consciousness produces writing as its text, the post-structuralists argue (half-metaphorically) that consciousness is inseparable from social textualities that constitute the world's meanings, and thus that writing produces consciousness as its text. (SP,146)

Is Heidegger party to this difference? Does it only emerge from his text as a matter of (mis)reading? Or does this hiatus point to an incommensurability already within Heidegger's text itself.

It is suggestive that both Sartre and Derrida establish central elements of their early thinking through a critique of how Heidegger had undermined his own attempts to address certain problems. For instance, Heidegger argues that the other is always already grasped, since being-in-the-world is founded on Being-with (in "ontological co-existence," where one is through others). (BT,154ff) The other is known as Dasein (as that which Dasein itself already is); Dasein already understands what it finds there. Sartre argues that if one's being is that by which there is (es gibt) a world, and hence, an Other, one is caught in a solipsism (BN,244ff). Being and Nothingness is marked by Sartre's resolution of this question through the ontology of the look.

Analogously, where Heidegger sought to escape metaphysical language (and the metaphysics of language) by including language's poetic possibilities in his own discourse, Derrida argues that he merely assumes that poetic efflorescence will overcome the constraints of presence or metaphysical referentiality. Though Heidegger thinks allowing language to "speak" will be sufficient to return to the meaning of Being, he succeeds in relating to language only within his own poetic. Heidegger underestimates the disparity between language's equivocality and his own creation of a new poetic "clarity" -- which renews articulated presence. (Dis,5) Derrida's attention to the difference between assumed clarity and structural equivocality is central to his deconstruction of metaphysical language.

Let us look more closely at how these two thinkers relate to Heidegger. It is commonly accepted, nowadays, that Heidegger's project is quite antithetical to Sartre's. Heidegger does not want to speak about consciousness. For him, to do so is already to separate it from what consciousness is conscious of, and thus to reaffirm the Cartesian duality of subject and object. (BT,72) Heidegger seeks to apprehend the pre-condition of that duality, and of the cogito. Antecedent to Derrida, Heidegger charges that phenomenology has not critiqued its own language or tradition sufficiently; in assuming itself, it assumes the transcendence and universality of its terms. Thus, he investigates Dasein, the Being-there of "Man," as other than a metaphor for consciousness.

On the other hand, Dasein is of interest to Sartre. He maps the for-itself's being-in-the-world through a structure of existential moments that is similar to Heidegger's (authenticity, temporality, angst, the Other, etc.). (HS,67) However, his notion of consciousness' upsurge inverts the Heideggerian ek-static; the for-itself loses itself in order that a world may exist, (HS,88) while Dasein arises as ek-static being in-the-world.

A similar skewing of their texts occurs on the issue of temporality. Sartre understands the present as an absence that exists in the difference between a future toward which one is always involved (what one must be in the mode of not being it), and a past that is both facticity and a being that one is not (that "[one has] to be in order not to be it and [what one] has not to be in order to be it" (BN,117)). "The Present is not; ... [it is] the being to which the present is presence." (BN,123) For Heidegger, the present is what is absent to Dasein through a double displacement to an already (Dasein is its past, and in that sense is what it is not) and a not yet (the future as "coming toward," as Dasein's "ownmost potentialities;" that is, not what it is). (BT,41,372) Heideggerian temporality invokes the Sartrean expression for the for-itself, while Sartrean temporality invokes a Heideggerian inarticulability of Being.

Finally, on the question of the Other: for Heidegger, one is not at first separate from others, as an "I", but rather in the world with others as those among whom one already is (an apriori of relatedness). Being-with implies that Dasein is like others in a sameness of Being. (BT,154) One lives in a world made by others. Sartre argues that the assumption of a sameness of Being is aporetic. One cannot be granted one's subjectivity among others by those others without them already being subjectivities that can grant it; and one cannot grant others their subjectivity without having already granted it to oneself. The social logic of Heidegger's mitsein is that one (the "me") is always not yet oneself; but Sartre argues that the "ontic" "me" must nevertheless exist to participate in the "they" (das Man), which would contradict the priority of the mitsein. (BN,246)

Heidegger would argue that the "me", as behavior, is precisely what is not fundamental; Others are always already more than their behavior, and the perception of that behavior requires an act of abstraction from the other whose condition must be the Other embraced as Being-with. For Sartre, this implies that others are set at a distance by one's being the source of their existence, in order for the Other to be the source of oneself. Either the "me" is fundamental to the mitsein, or it is always elsewhere than the subject through that distance to Others among whom the "me" is as mitsein. In effect, Sartre transforms the (ontic) Heideggerian notion of the other to the ontological in order to interrogate the aporia that one always is and is not yet who one is. (SHP,165) Sartre adapts the content and transforms the form of Heidegger's concept of relatedness by shifting the ontological difference itself to the ontological realm.

Derrida regards a different area of Heidegger's thought, and uses Heidegger for different antecedence. Heidegger's original purposes, in raising the question of Being, were first, to investigate how one returns to the meaning of Being; and second, to interpret the ontological difference revealed in doing so. Metaphysics thinks of Being as entities, reducing the former to the latter; Heidegger argues that Being cannot be understood either through entities or as an entity because it is the condition for there to be entities in the first place; beings are present, and Being is that presencing of beings. Being persists as a trace even in the metaphysics of beings, allowing one to return to it by re-posing, or un-forgetting, the meaning of that trace. The problem is to (re)pose the meaning of Being without reconstituting a metaphysics, i.e. without re-articulated Being in thingness. The implicit aporia is that one cannot approach beings to understand Being, yet one can only approach beings. To resolve this, Heidegger turns to Dasein, that being for which Being is a question.

Heidegger's original approach involved what he called de-struction (Destruktion, Abbauen: un-building, de-construction) of metaphysical ontology through an archeology of Being. (BT,41,154) He discovered that one could not just return to an originary question of Being, because the language of that questioning and return was that of metaphysical ontology. A return to the meaning of Being involved a critique of that language as first, a critique of the language of metaphysics, and second, an apprehension of metaphysic's own circular self-assumption or self-production. Like an oroburus, metaphysics depends upon a language that depends in turn upon metaphysics for its meaning.

This circularity implies that the question of the Being of language is hidden behind the way metaphysics generates its language of Being (in the same way that the question of Being had been hidden behind the metaphysics of beings). That is, the Being of language is disguised by the language of being. (LH,198ff) The irony of ontology is that metaphysics conceals the Being of language precisely by using language to re-direct our attention to what language speaks about.

Derrida adapts this double turn to his deconstructive critique of language. (SP,156) For Derrida, language is always double in both signifying something and signifying itself as a signifier; it engenders meaning and it means itself. (DH,19) In positing thought as autonomous and self-presencing, metaphysics conceals this double aspect of language. To judge the truth of thought, language must be only representational, for which speech (rather than writing), in its immediacy to thought, is the exemplary (representational) mode. If language were self-referential, or self-representational, and generated meaning autonomously, its independence would interrupt the subordination of language to thought, and call thought's metaphysically-assumed autonomy in question. Conversely, to displace the priority of speech over writing by reaffirming the double nature of language, is to dismantle metaphysics.

Beneath and through this doubleness of writing, Derrida discloses the Being of writing as a system of differences, in which difference, iterability, and spacing are what allow signs to be and to mean (to be assigned meaning). (Marg,317) It is

like Heidegger's "ontological difference;" writing in general ("arche-writing") is the condition for writing and speech in a sense similar to Being as the condition for beings. Arche-writing is the foundation of writing, the trace in each writing as writing. (SP,153) For Derrida, the semiotic trace is the trace of difference (within the materiality of the signifier) that constitutes meaning. (HD,65) The trace is thus a continual impingement of structure upon the sign by what is absent behind the sign as difference. The multiplicity of differences that constitutes each sign marks the disclosure of systemic undecidability. (HD,168) By extension, each text conceals a structure of discursive differences that are the condition for and undermine its assumptions or presuppositions, its pretense to univocal meaning or referentiality. A text may claim to establish a truth for itself, but the means by which it does that import ambivalent meanings. What deconstruction reveals, in disclosing the structure of textual signs and forms through which each text signifies, is the semiotic deferral of meaning, the being of meaning as again a signifier.

Derrida thus turns the form of Heidegger's critique against its content. For Heidegger, the logos (from legein, meaning gathering, as into a name), must be recuperated from metaphysics, (QLH,61) to be renamed and re-gathered, thereby returning to the Being of language. (QLH,61) For Derrida, the logos, in its demand for univocal meaning, affirms the unavoidable dissemination of meaning; logos remains both the source of metaphysics and its impossibility. Because Heidegger did not critique the Being of language, his substitution of a poetic for metaphysical articulation leaves unchanged its relation to Being. Being remains, in Heidegger's text, a transcendental signifier, a final proper name.

Sartre also adapts the form of Heidegger's double approach. For Sartre, consciousness must be conscious of an (its) object, in a thetic or positional mode, and non-thetically consciousness of itself as conscious. This latter mode is not self-consciousness (conscience de soi), which is thetic toward itself, but awareness of being aware (conscience(de)soi). That is, as the condition for being conscious of its object, consciousness is conscious that it is not that object, and not identical with itself (Heidegger's double turn in the negative). For Sartre, this implies that the being of consciousness, which is not the object and not itself, is non-being, nothingness. The double (aporetic) expression by which Sartre characterizes consciousness (being-for-itself) is that it "is what it is not and is not what it is." (BN,77)

Sartre incorporates Heidegger's double turn for the comparable purpose of preserving an inarticulable in his ontology, which he posits again in the negative where Heidegger's inarticulable is a positivity as Being. When Sartre says that being-for-itself apprehends itself as not being its own foundation, (BN,79) he is similarly constituting an inarticulable as a trace in a manner congruent to Heidegger's. Sartre's inarticulable is freedom, what one cannot not be; it is what one cannot delimit from beyond itself. But this negative relation is not one of negation, but of inversion; that is, a topological rather than a dialectical form.

This inversion of Heidegger is sufficiently extensive in Sartre's text to be systematic. The inversion of upsurge and ek-stasis from nothingness and Being has already been mentioned. Sartre inverts Heidegger's notion of nothingness. For Heidegger, nothingness marks the trace of the obliteration of Being by metaphysics, and thus is what renders a return to the question of Being possible. (QLH,54-7) Because the trace is nothing, it cannot be spoken in the logos, and marks the inarticulability of the meaning of Being. For Sartre, rather than be what casts itself in beings as the trace, nothingness is what lurks in the heart of Being itself. When Heidegger refers to language as the "house of Being," (LH,239) or the "advent of the truth of Being," (LH,206) he invokes a being of language anterior to instrumentality, and anterior to the metaphysics of subjectivity; for Sartre, speech is an action, whose centerality to the being of consciousness, as freedom, is anterior to the instrumentality of activity, and anterior to the bad faith of reducing activity to pure instrumentality. Where Heidegger re-interprets the circularity in metaphysical language as language's own self-generation and self-grounding, as the Being of language, Sartre understands the for-itself as similarly self-generating and self-grounding in its negativity, its non-being.

In sum, Heidegger's text functions as a precursor for Sartre in a different form from its antecedence to Derrida. Because their connection is formal, a profound philosophical disparity is possible, linked to different aspects of Heidegger's text. In general, at the risk of simplifying, one could say that where Sartre adapts the content of Heidegger's text, and inverts its form, Derrida adapts the form and inverts, or deconstructs, its content. In their incommensurability they both express Heidegger as a trace, and thus as an inseparability. Their inseparable and incommensurable relation then reflects and characterizes a similar incommensurability within Heidegger's text, between its form and the content of his discourse.

Let us review this. The aporia of Heidegger's text is that one must reapproach Being through beings, and one cannot reapproach Being through beings. Two dimensions of form are contained in this: 1) the analytic as a mode of returning to the meaning of Being, and 2) the discursive situation that conditions how one does so. With respect to returning to the meaning of Being, the aporia is the content of doing so (Heidegger's analytic); and the structure of possibility of doing so produces the aporetic form of the ontological difference, the inarticulable. Sartre and Heidegger both take the substance of the aporia as foundation, as form. Derrida and Heidegger both take the formal structure of the aporetic as their subject matter, as content. Because each adopts a disparate formal relation to Heidegger, both can critique the very core of his philosophy and end up distant from each other, yet near as mutually inverse. From within their respective approaches to the Heideggerian ontological difference, Sartre emphasizes the ontological rather than difference, and Derrida emphasizes difference rather than the ontological.

Thus, their connection beyond the relation of form is itself an inversion of form that can only produce disparity. For Sartre, difference is something that is to be apprehended ontologically by a consciousness, a freedom, through a project for which difference is always discernible and meaningful. For Derrida, on the other hand, it is the ontological that is to be understood through a system of differences, something whose textuality is nowhere ignorable, or indifferent.