Professor Pettigrew
PHI 408 Fall 2017

Selected passages from Martin Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”

“Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks.  Such action is…. the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to [man] human beings.” (217 translation modified)

“thinking…lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. Thinking accomplished this letting. Thinking is engagement par l’Être pour l’Être…(218)

Language falls into the service of expediting communication along routes where objectification –the uniform accessibility of everything to everyone- branches out and disregards all limits. …language comes under the dictatorship of the public realm. ” (221)

“The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of language; it arises from a threat to the essence of humanity.” (222)

“..language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings…. We encounter beings in a calculative businesslike way.” (223)

“But if [man] human beings are to find [his] their way once again into the nearness of Being,[he]  they must learn to exist in the nameless.” (223, translation modified, my emphasis.)

“Ek-sistence, thought in terms of ecstasis , does not coincide with existentia in either form or content. …ek-sistence means standing out into the truth of Being.” (232)

“…the highest determinations of the essence of [man] human beings in humanism still do not recognize the proper dignity of [man] human beings. To that extent the thinking in Being and Time is against humanism. But this opposition does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and advocates the inhuman…” (233)

Note: see the important discussion on 236 – the first half of the page - where Heidegger clarifies the use of certain terms in Being and Time.

“…the point is that in the determination of the humanity of [man] human beings as ek-sistence what is essential is not [man] human beings but Being – as the dimension of the ecstasies of ek-sistence.” (237, translation modified)

Note: see Heidegger’s direct reference to and restatement of Sartre on the bottom of 237.

“Human beings [man] stands ek-sistingly in the destiny of Being. The ek-sistence of human beings [man] is historical as such.” (239, translation modified)

“The tragedies of Sophocles …preserve the ethos in their sagas more primordially that Aristotle’s lectures on “ethics”.” (256)

“…that thinking which thinks the truth of Being as the primordial element of  [man] human beings is itself the original ethics.” (258)

“…such thinking is neither theoretical nor practical…” (259)

“…it lets Being-be.” (259)

“But now in what relation does the thinking of Being stand to theoretical and practical behavior? It exceeds all contemplation because it cares for the light in which a seeing, as theoria, can first live and move. Thinking attends to the clearing of Being in that it puts its saying of Being into language as the home of ek-sistence. Thus thinking is a deed. But a deed that also surpasses all praxis. Thinking towers above action and production…not as a consequence of its effect, but through the humbleness of its inconsequential accomplishment.” (262)

“Thinking in its essence as thinking of Being, is claimed by Being…Being is the destiny of thinking.” (264)

“The thinking that is to come is no longer philosophy…” (265)