Was Sérgio Buarque a reader of Heidegger? - reflection about a paradox of Cordial Man’s personalism

Abstract

This study sought to investigate the evidence of the influence of Martin Heidegger’s thought on the Brazilian sociologist and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. For this aim, we followed a retrospective path since the Sérgio Buarque’s texts published in the 50s and 40s, when his readings of Heidegger were manifest, toward his texts of the 30s, when he developed the theory of Cordial Man - and when his readings of Heidegger, if there were, they were not ostensively shown. Two hypotheses therefore form the basis of this study: the first, that it is possible to glimpse something of Heidegger’s philosophy at the thought of Sérgio Buarque; and second, that this approach is relevant to unveil aspects little explored in the literary criticism of the theory of cordial man, namely his relationship with the externality and the avoidance of self in the other, constituting what would be a fundamental paradox of Brazilian personalism.