Heidegger

Heidegger is a recurring philosophical interlocutor in the book, whose account of existence supplies concepts and insights that the author both adopts and challenges. His influence is most visible in discussions of language, sexual existence, shared experience, tools, freedom, and action: across these topics, Heidegger’s descriptions illuminate how human beings are situated in a world, but the author argues that they do not fully explain the relations and changes that make that world meaningful.

Language and Being-with-Others

Heidegger’s claim that a person is what they say appears in a discussion of language as an original condition of being-for-others. Language, in this account, is not an invention added to an otherwise self-contained subject, nor is it limited to articulated words. It begins in the encounter with another subject, where a person experiences their own acts as carrying meanings that escape their control and are experienced from outside. The author says Heidegger is right in this particular sense: what someone is for another is bound up with what they say and do. Yet language is also more than a passive disclosure of an existing identity. It lets a person take up the meanings attributed to them and use them toward possibilities of being this or that for the Other.

The argument about the “we” similarly grants Heidegger’s account of being-with-others a place, while denying it the status of a foundation. A street incident—a slight collision between a jeep and a taxi—changes the scene outside a café. The patrons, previously involved in separate relations of observation and rivalry, become spectators together: the speaker experiences himself as part of a “we” looking at the event. The shared attention makes collective experience palpable, and the author connects this unanimity to Heidegger’s Mitsein. But the experience belongs to a particular consciousness; it does not establish a collective consciousness that fuses everyone into a new whole. Being-with-others therefore presupposes a more basic encounter with the Other rather than explaining it.

Sexuality and the Limits of the Existential Analytic

Heidegger’s silence about sexuality marks a further limit in the account of human existence. The book first recognizes that sexual differentiation belongs to facticity: a person’s particular bodily formation is contingent, not something deduced from the ontology of consciousness. That observation, however, does not settle whether sexuality is merely an incidental addition to the human condition. Desire and sexual repulsion may be fundamental structures of being-for-others, and the discussion asks whether treating them only as consequences of biological anatomy misses their existential significance.

The criticism is pointedly directed at Heidegger’s existential analytic, which makes no allusion to sexuality and thus presents Dasein as apparently asexual. The point is not that sexual difference can be removed from facticity, but that contingency alone cannot establish that sexuality is philosophically dispensable. By raising desire as a possible basic relation to others, the book identifies an area its account must investigate rather than assume away.

The Other’s Look and the Changing World

Heidegger’s descriptions of the human being as surpassing existents toward their being help explain how things disclose their modes of being. The author nonetheless argues that this account is incomplete if it treats the for-itself only as the source of an ontology of existents. Human action also brings about ontic modifications: it changes existents in their materiality, their “flesh.” The world does not merely acquire a meaning through projection; it is altered as projects are enacted. This difference leads the discussion toward the question of how action is possible and how it relates the for-itself to the in-itself.

The preceding account of the Other’s look clarifies the stakes of that question. Alone, the for-itself transcends the world as the nothingness through which things appear. When the Other appears, that same for-itself is fixed from outside as a being-in-itself among things. The author associates this petrifaction with the myth of Medusa: the Other’s look gives the subject an objectified being in the world, even though the subject cannot by nature coincide with that being. This is not a contradiction in the account but a distinction between the for-itself’s living existence and its externally apprehended aspect.

Freedom, Action, and Situation

Heidegger’s formulation that existence precedes and commands essence helps the book describe freedom without turning it into a fixed property. Freedom is not an essence that can be isolated and defined; it makes itself in acts, which are organized together with their causes, motives, and ends. To seek a further constitutive power behind freedom would simply start an infinite regress. The discussion therefore approaches freedom through particular existence and action rather than a universal definition.

The author’s account also rejects the idea that freedom means arbitrary choice, detached from history or circumstance. The for-itself is free insofar as it is its own nothingness: it remains at a distance from its past, is conscious rather than reducible to an external cause, and exists as a project defined by an end. This means the past does not mechanically determine a present act. A person takes up the past as a tradition in light of a future possibility, and that projected end gives the past its present significance. Freedom is thus neither caprice nor escape from conditions; it is the way conditions become meaningful in a project.

This account of action has consequences for how human character is understood. The discussion affirms that human reality does not first exist as a fixed set of traits and then act; it exists in conduct. To be ambitious, cowardly, or irritable is to conduct oneself in particular ways in particular circumstances. Even apparently disinterested scientific perception is a way of taking up an object, and therefore one conduct among others. Because the determination to act is itself an act, a prior state cannot simply reduce conduct to a chain of movements without undermining the very notion of action.

Tools and the Meaning of Place

Heidegger’s account of practical involvement gives the book a vocabulary for showing why lived distance is not the same as geometric distance. A city twenty miles from a village, connected by a streetcar, can be nearer in practical terms than a rocky peak only four miles away but 2,800 meters high. Likewise, glasses resting on the nose can be farther from the user than the object seen through them. Everyday concern orders things according to their use and place in a project, not according to measurement alone.

The author extends this insight by arguing that a person’s facticity becomes intelligible through freely chosen ends. A place does not have one fixed existential meaning: it can appear as an obstacle, a shelter, or something to be changed, depending on what the person projects. The wish to see New York can make living in Mont-de-Marsan seem painful and absurd; the envisaged future gives the present location that character. At the same time, the project can only be a project of change because there is already a place to change. Heidegger’s analysis of practical relations thus supports an account in which freedom discovers facticity, while facticity provides the conditions that freedom takes up and transforms.