Explore
Compare
Life
He asked the question everyone else had forgotten: what does it mean to be? And then joined the Nazi Party. The two facts cannot be separated.
Existence precedes essence. He said it, lived it, and refused the Nobel Prize to prove it.
Connection
Martin Heidegger fundamental ontology reinterpreted Jean-Paul Sartre — Being and Time gave Sartre the vocabulary for Being and Nothingness: facticity and transcendence, authenticity and bad faith. Heidegger later complained that Sartre had humanized, and missed, what Being and Time was about.
Ideas
Words
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed.”
“Existence precedes essence.”
“Hell is other people.”
Key Moments
1927
Being and Time published
1933-34
Nazi rector of Freiburg University
1943
Being and Nothingness published under occupation
October 1964
Refuses the Nobel Prize in Literature
Works
Being and Time
Being and Nothingness