The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary

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In this article, I discuss Sartre’s critic of the Heideggerian Being-towards-death and I identify two stages in Sartre’s confrontation with Heidegger. The first one is to be found in his “war diary” of 1939-1940, where Sartre criticizes Heidegger’s idea that the relationship to one’s own death individualizes the self. For Sartre, one is free not for death, as Heidegger assumes, but free against death. The second approach, which is also a more elaborated one, is to be found in Being and Nothingness. Sartre contests some fundamental aspects of the Heideggerian description of death, among which the idea that death belongs to the self, that it is a possibility, that it gives the meaning of life and that it is the mark of one’s own self. After analyzing these two levels, I am critically discussing Sartre’s critic, underlining a kind of hermeneutical incomprehension and inconsequence in Sartre’s reading of Heidegger, especially in the understanding of the ontological possibility.

Key words: Death, possibility, freedom, phenomenology, existentialism