Summary

Heidegger emphasized human mortality while Sartre seemed to be resisting or even running away from it. He calls it an “outrage that comes to me from outside and wipes out my projects” (299). Other phenomenologists agreed that death would steal the very concept of experience from someone, and is the opposite of phenomenology.

Camus’s potential experiences were stolen by death in a car crash in 1960. Though Beauvoir and Sartre had cut ties with him, they still mourned their wartime friend. A year later, Merleau-Ponty passed as well from a heart attack. Sartre wrote a gracious obituary. Jaspers passed away nearly a decade later, after giving a prominent radio talk about the sea. He used the sea to represent life itself and philosophy itself. Philosophy was a different way of thinking, venturing away from the solid, stagnant ground and thinking from the perspective of the...