Starting with the viewpoint that a philosopher’s work and the language they use can not be wholly understood by reader in the exact way it originates from the author’s mind, and that what we, as reader, end up taking home from it is but an instance of impressionist recollection of the author’s intention, I proceed to talk about my own interpretation of Heidegger and Sartre. Whether this interpretation is agreed by others, is beside the point of this article.

Before I picked up my first book on Heidegger, I have read numerous fictions and essays from and memoirs on Sartre. Existentialism is the phenomenology for the turbulent 20th century, Sartre himself, just like Heidegger himself (though only for a short while in Heidegger’s case) is extremely political. I think that is what called to me from his philosophy in the first place, the ability to choose and the inevitability of choice become the centrepieces of human existence. Contrasting to Heidegger, who too believes that even not choosing is a choice, Sartre doesn’t go into detail in the case which Heidegger stresses to be the Fallen dasein (being-there), a human being who simply goes with the flow of everyday life and their choices culturally implicit. I do not personally enjoy this distinction between a person who is conscious and aware of the condition of their human lives, i.e. the inevitability of choice and the constancy of it, and a person who is unaware of such philosophical thesis and in turn goes on with their lives according to their own beliefs. Their isn’t space for any other category of dasein in the realm laid out by Heidegger, you are either a resolute dasein who transcends the everydayness of collective societal life and makes decision with knowledge of your freedom as well as solitude in death, or you are someone who drowns in the noise of triviality and custom.  A person may very much understand their freedom and yet not their whole spectrum of possibilities, hence rendering the action of choosing meaningless and impossible. Heidegger argues that death allows any humanly choice to be made because it imposes the finity and urgency of life. This implies that with infinite lifetime one would fall to inaction, however, if someone truly lives forever then by default there could be infinite time of inaction, or rather of anything and everything, infinite action, and this isn’t by active choice, but simply mathematical probability. In infinite, anything that could happen, for whatever reason and chance, WILL happen. And conversely a perfectly free and aware person may choose inactivity for their whole finite life simply because they are free, and they choose to do so. The belief that the awareness of freedom and transcendental reflection on one’s past and future would result in choice of life that results in more truth, which Heidegger defines to be the relative uncovering of being, seems to me but a widening of constraints. Instead of being bound by everydayness, now you are bound by everydayness plus freedom, of course, action taken under the latter circumstance intrinsically comes from a background more revealed than the former.

As I see it, the real freedom which lies in someone who understands such freedom, is the freedom of interpretation, the freedom to view beings in the world with a perspective that is not culturally taught. The freedom to view life and death not as a medical fact nor empirical knowledge. For I can even argue that sleep is no different to death for as far as I am concerned, except I go to sleep with the belief that I will wake up again. Ultimately this freedom allows one to transcend the shared human condition, the common knowledge of mortality which dictates every human act, individually and collectively. This freedom also turns the inevitability of choice to the constant ability of choice.  I enjoy Heidegger’s philosophy that systematically puts the human mind as the pre-condition of metaphysical and epistemological discussion, especially because it indeed precedes every human experience, including with those we deem to be standalone material world.  The spatial world and temporal life I experience is one that I shape with my own mind, in which I possess complete and unreserved freedom.

This isn’t a call for lunacy, nor one that leads to social chaos.  Does this mean that with this freedom suicide and murder are also justified?  I believe suicide yes, and with murder more complicated. Sartre has written many fictions and plays infused with the idea that Hell is other people. How one is never alone even when no one else is around, how the society and the company of other human beings has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.  I have always had a rather peculiar relationship with other people myself, when I was a child, it took me a long time to realise that I shared something in common with the people around me, more so with them than a cat run over by a car on my way to school. It took me even longer to figure out what I shared in common with other people. For I was so sad and cried for days after the sight of that cat, more than I have ever been in my encounter with other people up to that point. There is a crucial step between a child and a social being, to me as a child, the behaviour of other children and adults around me and towards me were hardly taken by me differently than the way busses move and rain pours. They all confused me.  The reason I believe murder isn’t justified is that I also believe murder is a social phenomenon. In order for someone to commit murder, they must first acknowledge the other being they are murdering as another entity who share something in common as themselves.  For otherwise it is not murder, is it slaughter. Then they must also have chosen murder over other possibilities. There is something that sets murder apart from other acts, for it uniquely terminates the other being completely. It deprives the being of any further possibility of action. Some murder for revenge, because they believe they are taking the victim’s most precious possession, life. Some murder because they do not want some particular possibility of action of the victim to come true. All these reasons of murder assumes something either deemed to be human nature or builds upon future possibilities, or rather the lack thereof.  Once these reasons don’t stand, and neither does one assume anything in common with others, murder is as unfounded as cutting down a tree.

The question comes to this: with the complete freedom in one’s mind, how is it possible to choose anything over the other? This speaks of a preference, a metric that sets direction in the previous homogeneity.  Such metric has been proposed by schools of ethics,  systems of value have been studied in metaphysics.  Nietzsche, for example,  advocates for the eradication of all notions of metaphysical value and the creation of individual values. But how is such creation possible? Mathematically directions comes from constraints, under every vector field of flow there is an underlying potential scalar field. In physics, under complete symmetry there is spontaneous broken symmetry that for example gives particles mass. To have complete freedom is having the complete symmetry, symmetry between what was thought of as good and bad, noble and evil. For society and history no longer acts as the scalar potential field dictating the flow of individual life. But the human sensory system isn’t completely symmetric, the body prefers comfort and adverse to pain. The presence of people we enjoy bring us joy and those who threaten us makes us stressed. This sounds like it could easily turn into the hedonistic theory of happiness where people live to maximize sensory pleasure. It is nonetheless a symmetry breaking factor, albeit there exists so many more. Through empathy people care for one another, and the symmetry breaking factors evolve chaotically that they are no longer linear in sensory pleasure.

Empathy, the stimulated feeling in oneself in response to the outward expression or knowledge of experience of others, is the key element that gives rise to human’s collective behavior and binary relationships. It also complicates the case of murder, an analysis for the future, simply because I want to write it down.