Existence precedes essence . . . or does it? Do human beings have an essence? Heidegger said, “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (Being and Time, Section 9, p. 67). Jean-Paul Sartre was highly influenced by this statement. It inspired him to write his magnum opus Being and Nothingness (the “Bible” of existentialism). However, he misinterpreted this statement’s meaning; he thought it essentially meant that human beings (Daseins) have no essence whatsoever, thus, we must make something positive out of ourselves by the choices we make (this is the meaning of his famous phrase “existence precedes essence”). Sartre expressed his view like this:

[I]f God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence — a being whose existence comes before its essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept of it. That being is man, or, as Heidegger put it, the human reality. What do we mean here by “existence precedes essence”? We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism.

(Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 22)

Sartre mistakenly conflated “ek-sistence” with “existentia”. Heidegger pointed out the difference between the two terms:

Ek-sistence, thought in terms of ecstasis, does not coincide with existentia in either form or content. In terms of content ek-sistence means standing out into the truth of Being. Existentia (existence) means in contrast actualitas, actuality as opposed to mere possibility as Idea. Ek-sistence identifies the determination of what man is in the destiny of truth. Existentia is the name for the realization of something that is as it appears in its Idea. The sentence “Man eksists” is not an answer to the question of whether man actually is or not; rather, it responds to the question concerning man’s “essence.”

(Basic Writings, ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 230)

Heidegger would go on to explain Sartre’s misinterpretation in the following way:

Sartre’s key proposition about the priority of existentia over essentia does, however, justify using the name “existentialism” as an appropriate title for a philosophy of this sort. But the basic tenet of “existentialism” has nothing at all in common with the statement from Being and Time — apart from the fact that in Being and Time no statement about the relation of essentia and existentia can yet be expressed, since there it is still a question of preparing something precursory.

(Basic Writings, ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 232)

Let’s return to the quote from Being and Time I referenced above — the same one Heidegger just referred to in the second quote from ‘Letter on Humanism’: “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence”. The reason I believe Heidegger has the word ‘essence’ in quotation marks here isn’t to indicate that Dasein really has no essence, rather it’s to distance the essence of Dasein from the philosophical tradition’s standard way of thinking about essences, namely, via the concept of substantiality. Heidegger didn’t want to use the traditional terminology of substance ontology in his analytic of Dasein, so instead of talking about qualities and properties he chose to utilize terms like “existentialia” or “structures of existence” to talk about the essential aspects of Dasein. Since Dasein isn’t primordially a substance, as Aristotle and Descartes would have us believe, it would’ve been inappropriate and confusing for Heidegger to use words like “properties”, “qualities” and “accidents”. The existentialia are the fundamental structures that make Dasein the type of being it is, and, therefore comprise its essence. Heidegger said of them, “In this everydayness there are certain structures which we shall exhibit — not just any accidental structures, but essential ones which, in every kind of Being that factical Dasein may possess, persist as determinative for the character of its Being. Thus by having regard for the basic state of Dasein’s everydayness, we shall bring out the Being of this entity in a preparatory fashion” (Being and Time, Section 5, p. 38).

Now, it may appear that Heidegger is merely referring to empty abstractions when speaking of existentialia, but this is certainly not the case; throughout Being and Time he gives concrete phenomenological descriptions of them. Let’s name some of them: 1. worldhood, 2. das Man, 3. the understanding of Being, 4. Befindlichkeit, 5. meaning, 6. concern, 7. Being-with, 8. primordial truth, 9. discourse, 10. falling, 11. understanding, 12. Being-alongside, 13. De-severance, 14. possibility, 15. projection. Heidegger gives concrete descriptions of all of these phenomena. Each of the existentialia have their own temporal aspect. Dasein is care, and as care, it is temporality. The temporal totality of existentialia form the care structure of Dasein’s mode of Being, i.e., existence: “The formally existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). This Being fills in the signification of the term “care” [Sorge] , which is used in a purely ontologico-existential manner” (Being and Time, Section 41, p. 237). Thus, Heidegger, as opposed to Sartre, held that Dasein’s essence is its existence. Also, it appears Sartre was trapped within the confines of the concept of linearity. The fact is Dasein’s existence isn’t prior or posterior to its essence. The moment Dasein is it has an essence, however, this essence doesn’t exist prior to factical Dasein. It’s as much of a mistake to hold that Dasein’s essence precedes existence as it is to hold that its existence precedes essence. Sartre failed to phenomenologically spot the simultaneity of Dasein’s essence and existence. Dasein’s essence isn’t something it creates out of nothing on a whim — it’s something “in” which Dasein is always already thrown. Dasein, therefore, has a positive essence prior to any existentiell decision (decision-making, i.e., willing is an existentiell modification of the Being of Dasein, which means that Dasein factically exists in its essence — the structure of existentialia — before it ever wills anything) it reflectively makes concerning itself and the particular way it wants to exist. In relation to the essence of Dasein, Heidegger was right — Sartre was wrong.

Yes, Heidegger put the word “essence” in quotations when using it in relation to Dasein, but I don’t believe that they were meant to signify that Dasein has no essence and I provided the reasons why I don’t believe this to be the case. Anyway, there is another problem, and perhaps the main one, that an advocate of the Sartrean interpretation of Heidegger’s statement must face. The problem is simply the fact that many of the other statements Heidegger makes in Being and Time refer to Dasein’s essence or essential structures. Time and time again, Heidegger refers to Dasein’s “essential structure” in reference to an existentiale (or “essential structures” in reference to the existentialia) and sometimes he refers to Dasein’s “essential constitution”. Other times he speaks of something (an existentiale) that essentially belongs to the constitution of Dasein’s Being. It’s important to note that he doesn’t put the words “essential” or “essentially” in quotation marks when discussing the essential structures of Dasein. Let’s take a look at some of these quotes:

This guiding activity of taking a look at Being arises from the average understanding of Being in which we always operate and which in the end belongs to the essential constitution of Dasein itself.

(Being and Time, Section 2, pp. 27–28) But to Dasein, Being in a world is something that belongs essentially.

(Being and Time, Section 4, p. 33) In this everydayness there are certain structures which we shall exhibit — not just any accidental structures, but essential ones which, in every kind of Being that factical Dasein may possess, persist as determinative for the character of its Being.

(Being and Time, Section 5, p. 38) “Being-in” is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-world as its essential state.

(Being and Time, Section 12, p. 80) Not until we understand Being-in-the-world as an essential structure of Dasein can we have any insight into Dasein’s existential spatiality.

(Being and Time, Section 12, p. 83) Because Being-in-the-world belongs essentially to Dasein, its Being towards the world is essentially concern.

(Being and Time, Section 12, p. 84) Because Dasein is essentially an entity with Being-in, it can explicitly discover those entities which it encounters environmentally, it can know them, it can avail itself of them, it can have the ‘world’.

(Being and Time, Section 12, p. 84) If we now ask what shows itself in the phenomenal findings about knowing, we must keep in mind that knowing is grounded beforehand in a Being-already-alongside-the-world, which is essentially constitutive for Dasein’s Being.

(Being and Time, Section 12, p. 84) If Dasein is ontically constituted by Being-in-the-World, and if an understanding of the Being of its Self belongs just as essentially to its Being, no matter how indefinite that understanding may be, then does not Dasein have an understanding of the world — a pre-ontological understanding, which indeed can and does get along without explicit ontological insights?

(Being and Time, Section 16, p. 102) Dasein as such is always something of this sort; along with its Being, a context of the ready-to-hand is already essentially discovered: Dasein, in so far as it is, has always submitted itself already to a ‘world’ which it encounters,and this submission belongs essentially to its Being.

(Being and Time, Section 18, pp. 120–121) Dasein is essentially de-severant: it lets any entity be encountered close by as the entity which it is.

(Being and Time, Section 23, p. 139) In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness.

(Being and Time, Section 23, p. 140) Dasein is essentially de-severance-that is, it is spatial.

(Being and Time, Section 23, p. 143) Indeed space is still one of the things that is constitutive for the world, just as Dasein’s own spatiality is essential to its basic state of Being-in-the-world.

(Being and Time, Section 24, p. 148) Only so far as one’s own Dasein has the essential structure of Being-with, is it Dasein-with as encounterable for Others.

(Being and Time, Section 26, p. 157) This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “levelling down” of all possibilities of Being.

(Being and Time, Section 27, p. 165) Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the “they”; it is rather an existentiell modification of the “they” — of the “they” as an essential existentiale.

(Being and Time, Section 27, p. 168) This ‘fearfulness’ is not to be understood in an ontical sense as some factical ‘individualized’ disposition, but as an existential possibility of the essential state-of-mind of Dasein in general, though of course it is not the only one.

(Being and Time, Section 30, p. 182) Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood.

(Being and Time, Section 34, p. 207) Discourse,which belongs to the essential state of Dasein’s Being and has a share in constituting Dasein’s disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk.

(Being and Time, Section 35, p. 213) Falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself.

(Being and Time, Section 38, p. 224) But within-the-worldness is based upon the phenomenon of the world, which, for its part, as an essential item in the structure of Being-in-the-world, belongs to the basic constitution of Dasein.

(Being and Time, Section 43b, p. 252) In Being-in-the-world, whose essential structures centre in disclosedness, we have found the basic state of the entity we have taken as

our theme.

(Being and Time, Section 45, p. 274) Thus, when temporality has been laid bare, there arises for the existential analytic the task of repeating our analysis of Dasein in the sense of Interpreting its essential structures with regard to their temporality.

(Being and Time, Section 61, p. 352) Indeed, confirmation is to be found for temporality in all the essential structures of Dasein’s basic constitution.

(Being and Time, Section 66, p. 380) Bringing-close makes possible the kind of handling and Being-busy which is ‘absorbed in the thing one is handling’; and in such bringing-close, the essential structure of care — falling — makes itself known.

(Being and Time, Section 70, p. 420)

I could keep on going but that’s more than enough to make my point, but there’s many more references like these. Heidegger was very meticulous when it came to the language he used to express his thoughts and describe phenomena. Heidegger knew what he was doing when he used words like “essential” and essentially” in relation to the Being of Dasein. The totality of Dasein’s existentialia comprise its ontological essence, which is ahistorical and transcultural. Not to mention that the later Heidegger referred to Dasein’s essence on many occasions. But someone might ask, “Yes, but what about how Heidegger uses the word “essence” throughout Being and Time?” Let’s take a look at what Heidegger says concerning Dasein’s essence:

That kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call “existence” [Existenz]. And because we cannot define Dasein’s essence by citing a “what” of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter, and because its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own, we have chosen to designate this entity as “Dasein”, a term which is purely an expression of its Being.

(Being and Time, Section 4, p. 33) We are to set forth the Constitution of this Being. But in so far as the essence of this entity is existence, the existential proposition, ‘Dasein is its disclosedness’, means at the same time that the Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being is to be its ‘there’.

(Being and Time, Section 28, p. 171) When we came to analyse this Being, we took as our clue existence, which, in anticipation, we had designated as the essence of Dasein.

(Being and Time, Section 45, p. 274) Everydayness is precisely that Being which is ‘between’ birth and death. And if existence is definitive for Dasein’s Being and if its essence is constituted in part by potentiality-for-Being, then, as long as Dasein exists, it must in each case, as such a potentiality, not yet be something. Any entity whose Essence is made up of existence, is essentially opposed to the possibility of our getting it in our grasp as an entity which is a whole.

(Being and Time, Section 45, p. 276) The essence of Dasein as an entity is its existence.

(Being and Time, Section 60, p. 345)

Notice that Heidegger doesn’t put the word essence in quotations in any of these passages. Dasein does have a positive essence, but it’s not a positive essence in the sense of a present-at-hand property or actuality. And that’s why some of the time he does put the word in quotations. By putting it in quotations he was attempting to keep us from conceiving of Dasein’s Being (existence) in terms of substantiality and actuality. That’s all. Sartre’s existential formula was, therefore, based on a misinterpretation of a single sentence from Being and Time. Heidegger clarified all this in ‘Letter on Humanism’. There are some passages from “Letter on Humanism” in which Heidegger discusses the meaning of the statement and why he put the word “essence” in quotation marks. They support the position I argued for. Here they are:

What man is — or, as it is called in the traditional language of metaphysics, the “essence” of man — lies in his ek-sistence. But eksistence thought in this way is not identical with the traditional concept of existentia, which means actuality in contrast to the meaning of essentia as possibility. In Being and Time (p. 42) this sentence is italicized: “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.” However, here the opposition between existentia and essentia is not under consideration, because neither of these metaphysical determinations of Being, let alone their relationship, is yet in question. Still less does the sentence contain a universal statement about Dasein, since the word came into fashion in the eighteenth century as a name for “object,” intending to express the metaphysical concept of the actuality of the actual. On the contrary, the sentence says: man occurs essentially in such a way that he is the “there” [das “Da”], that is, the clearing of Being. The “Being” of the Da, and only it, has the fundamental character of ek-sistence, that is, of an ecstatic inherence in the truth of Being. The ecstatic essence of man consists in ek-sistence, which is different from the metaphysically conceived existentia. Medieval philosophy conceives the latter as actualitas. Kant represents existentia as actuality in the sense of the objectivity of experience. Hegel defines existentia as the self-knowing Idea of absolute subjectivity. Nietzsche grasps existentia as the eternal recurrence of the same. Here it remains an open question whether through existentia — in these explanations of it as actuality, which at first seem quite different — the Being of a stone or even life as the Being of plants and animals is adequately thought. In any case living creatures are as they are without standing outside their Being as such and within the truth of Being, preserving in such standing the essential nature of their Being. Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and on the other are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss. However, it might also seem as though the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures, closer, namely, in an essential distance which, however distant, is nonetheless more familiar to our ek-sistent essence than is our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast. Such reflections cast a strange light upon the current and therefore always still premature designation of man as animal rationale. Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely in the clearing of Being which alone is “world,” they lack language. But in being denied language they are not thereby suspended worldlessly in their environment. Still, in this word “environment” converges all that is puzzling about living creatures. In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing. Nor can it ever be thought in an essentially correct way in terms of its symbolic character, perhaps not even in terms of the character of signification. Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.

Ek-sistence, thought in terms of ecstasis, does not coincide with existentia in either form or content. In terms of content ek-sistence means standing out into the truth of Being. Existentia (existence) means in contrast actualitas, actuality as opposed to mere possibility as Idea. Ek-sistence identifies the determination of what man is in the destiny of truth. Existentia is the name for the realization of something that is as it appears in its Idea. The sentence “Man eksists” is not an answer to the question of whether man actually is or not; rather, it responds to the question concerning man’s “essence.” We are accustomed to posing this question with equal impropriety whether we ask what man is or who he is. For in the Who? or the What? we are already on the lookout for something like a person or an object. But the personal no less than the objective misses and misconstrues the essential unfolding of ek-sistence in the history of Being. That is why the sentence cited from Being and Time (p. 42) is careful to enclose the word “essence” in quotation marks. This indicates that “essence” is now being defined from neither esse essentiae nor esse existentiae but rather from the ek-static character of Dasein. As, ek-sisting, man sustains Da-sein in that he takes the Da, the clearing of Being, into “care.” But Da-sein itself occurs essentially as “thrown.” It unfolds essentially in the throw of Being as the fateful sending.

(Basic Writings, ‘Letter on Humanism’, pp. 229–231)

Sartre took his inspiration from Heidegger’s assertion. To me, he should’ve at least gone out of his way to say that Heidegger did believe that human beings do, in fact, have an essence. To me, Sartre came off as philosophizing in a Heideggerian spirit, but, for Heidegger, this was clearly not the case (as evidenced by his words in ‘Letter on Humanism’). The for-itself is not just a French version of Dasein and I wish Sartre would’ve had a more robust understanding of the essential structures of being-in-the-world. All this post is attempting to show is that “existence precedes essence” is not supported by Heidegger’s work in B&T. The point is simply to show that “existence precedes essence” is not just another way to say “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence”. From my readings of Sartre, I get the impression that, according to him, it was pretty easy to mix Descartes, Kant and Husserl with Heidegger, which it’s not. I’m not attacking Sartre’s work in general. I’m just attacking how he misread this single line from Being and Time. A lot of people tend to misinterpret Heidegger on the basis of Sartre’s reading of “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence”. I just wanted to clear up why this is a mistake.