Heidegger, Sartre, Peirce

The basis of Sartre's synthesis of Existentialism and Marxism is the common theme of Praxis. So, at least at that stage of his career, he construes Existentialism as committed to the priority of Practice over Theory. However, such a commitment is less clear in Being and Nothingness, in which his focus vacillates between nihilating by Consciousness and nihilating by action. At the root of the uncertainty there may be that its explicit Phenomenological method is descriptive, and, thus, not well-suited to characterizing action, i. e. what has yet to appear. Being and Time comprises a similar tension--it attempts to present the pragmatic apparatus of the ready-to-hand via Phenomenological techniques. But, in contrast with Sartre, Heidegger eventually accords priority to Theory, i. e. to the revelatory rather than to the practical dimension of experience. Now, these encounters of Phenomenology and Pragmatism are not unprecedented.--as has been previously discussed here, Peirce's pioneering formulations of Pragmatism are themselves occasionally compromised by his own 'phenomenological' method. Regardless, his ultimate priority of Practice over Theory is plain, which would make Sartre, rather than Heidegger, his truer Existentialist heir, regardless of the greater scholarly attention paid to the latter's, as opposed to the former's, connections to Pragmatism.