I

Existentialism Is a Humanism is primarily devoted to the delimitation of Sartre’s branch of existentialism and its ability to make a practical contribution to France and Europe’s reconstruction immediately after the Second World War. Humanism was neither a unified outlook nor carried unqualified support at that time, but Sartre’s first aim was to reject the notion that his philosophy, the idea of nothingness included, was in fact a form of anti-humanism. Sartre’s idea of nothingness works as a form of immanent critique of ‘human reality’ so that we are able to creatively imagine a different world. Far from being the source of philosophical nihilism, Sartre contends that his idea of nothingness is centrally defined through its relation to human freedom: ‘[f]reedom is precisely the nothingness which is made-to-be at the heart of man and which forces human-reality to make itself instead of to be’ (Sartre Reference Sartre1957: 440). Humanism is the ethical point of reference for this lecture because it accounts for the practical and ultimately political justifications of his philosophy.

In Existentialism, Sartre is at pains to reject the common charge against the individualistic bias of his philosophy. This criticism centred on two main issues: first, and this is the core of Heidegger’s critique later on, Sartre’s insistence in subjectivity is interpreted as a dogmatic resistance to break free from Cartesianism and its anthropocentrism; second, as advanced primarily by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s inability to conceptualise classes as collective actors in their own right (Aronson Reference Aronson1980: 243–86, Soper Reference Soper1986: 60–74). Communists and Catholics shared a common target in criticising the ‘subjectivism’ that they regarded as central to existentialist philosophy, but this is a gambit that Sartre (Reference Sartre2007: 20) readily accepts: ‘subjectivity must be our point of departure’ because, rightly understood, subjectivity implies rather than negates our relationships with others. The problem, Sartre contends, lies in the fact that critics have misunderstood what subjectivity actually is and existentialist philosophy needs to put them right: communists reduce subjectivity merely to its individualistic connotations, while Catholics see subjectivity as just another name for historicism, cultural relativism or even nihilism. Against both, Sartre argues that individuality is inseparable from our relationships with the human species as a whole: ‘man finds himself in a complex social situation in which he himself is committed and by his choices commits all mankind’ (Reference Sartre2007: 45). His notion of subjectivity is not seen as exclusively individual but presupposes sociality and collective action. Humans, Sartre contends, are immediately thrust in a world of ‘intersubjectivity’ (Reference Sartre2007: 42). Writing in the decisionist language of ‘choices’, Sartre defends the idea that individualism is a collective achievement that finds its normative purchase in the idea of freedom: ‘I cannot discover any truth whatsoever about myself except through the mediation of another. The other is essential to my existence … my intimate discovery of myself is at the same time a revelation of the other as a freedom that confronts my own’ (Reference Sartre2007: 41–2, my italics). Quite rightly, his argument is that no form of modern thinking is worth its salt if it fails to uphold to a strong idea of subjectivity. Indeed, Sartre (Reference Sartre1995: 82) correctly warns against the possible essentialism of ‘group error’ that thinks it can do without subjectivity and individuality: this is what allows some to speak of ‘the Germans’, ‘the French’ and indeed ‘the Jews’ as homogeneous units.Footnote ¹⁰ With regard to the objection of relativism, Sartre discusses it on two fronts. On the one hand, he rejects any ‘reference to a given and immutable human nature’ and speaks rather of ‘the human condition’ (Reference Sartre2007: 29, 42). Values do not derive their authority from human nature nor can they appeal to any form of non-human authority: human freedom alone is ‘the foundation of all values’ (Reference Sartre2007: 48).Footnote ¹¹ On the other hand, Sartre needs to offer an alternative to secure the foundation of values in order to overcome relativism. This, he again contends, can only take the form of an idea of human freedom that becomes universally binding for humanity as a whole. A dialectics between individual freedom and the general freedom of the human species frames his approach: we ‘will freedom for freedom’s sake through our individual circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on our own’ (Reference Sartre2007: 48).Footnote ¹²

Having rejected the accusations of anti-humanism at the very start of the lecture, Sartre comes to the question of what humanism actually is only towards the end of his piece. There, he argues that existentialism and humanism share a common origin that is to be traced back to the enlightenment in the eighteenth century; more precisely, they share the realisation that, now that religious justifications of moral values have become problematic, only human beings can create values for themselves: indeed, they cannot but do so. Sartre then distinguishes between two different meanings of the term humanism – and this is an analytical move that we will find repeated countless times in the literature. There is a first type of humanism, which Sartre rejects, because it is ‘a theory that takes man as an end and as the supreme value’ (Reference Sartre2007: 51). This form of humanism takes pride in the collective accomplishments of the human species – for instance, its legal institutions, works of art or technological innovations – and then invites individual human beings to partake in this admiration for what the best among humans have been able to achieve through the ages. Sartre describes this humanism as a ‘cult of humanity’ and rejects it as a form of essentialism and reification: one can ‘never consider man as an end, because man is constantly in the making’ (Reference Sartre2007: 52). An argument that we will also find in Chapter 2, at least part of the question is whether, by claiming that we treat humans only as ends and never as means, the Kantian tradition has implicitly adopted within its moral thinking the utilitarianism that it thought to leave behind. Sartre rejects here a notion of the human that is based on a fixed, ahistorical essence: any idea that points towards the finitude of man can only lead to its hypostatisation and, eventually, to its devaluation – and this is again something that we will encounter below as we assess the tension between telos and finis in Derrida’s argument. But arguably the most consequential implication of this argument connects us to the core of Heidegger’s critique of humanism. While Sartre rejects this type of humanism because of its elitism, elitism is a key theme in Heidegger’s recovery of humanism. To Sartre, the glorification of the accomplishments of the few cannot be used to justify passive admiration on behalf of the many because this opens the door for the ultimate devaluation of those who are not deemed capable of reaching such heights. Sartre rejects this false ‘Comteian humanism’ because it ‘leads ultimately … to Fascism’ (Reference Sartre2007: 52).

Having rejected spurious ideas of human essence that can be turned into objects of demonic worship as well as ideas of the genius that elevate the chosen few over the many, Sartre now delineates the humanism to which he is positively committed. This he defines through an idea of human transcendence: ‘man is always outside of himself, and it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that man is realised … it is in pursuing transcendental goals that he is able to exist’ (Reference Sartre2007: 52). This appeal to transcendental relations and goals implies no deity or metaphysical cosmology, says Sartre, but points instead to an idea of ‘liberation’ that is defined in terms of human beings’ own internal transcendence: ‘man is nothing other than what he makes of himself … there is no other legislator than himself’ (Reference Sartre2007: 22, 53). Sartre’s humanism centres on the human capacity for self-legislation: a genuinely human life is above all based on this creative capacity, and thus the idea of imagination becomes a fundamental anthropological feature for Sartre. Sartre contends that this type of humanism demands a form of realism that gives humans no place to hide, for instance, from their own selfish motivations and ideological delusions: existentialism is a humanism because it demands that humans take full responsibility for who they are, for the way they behave and for the commitments they make. Existentialism makes it clear that the price to be paid for the realisation of this responsibility is a (Kierkegaardian) ‘anguish’ for the consequences of our decisions and also a (Heideggerian) sense of ‘abandonment’ (Reference Sartre2007: 25–7, 34). Sartre’s humanism then favours creativity, imagination and self-transcendence while it accepts the existential responsibility that comes with having to make these choices.Footnote ¹³

In terms of his debt to Heidegger, there is no question that Sartre felt a strong affinity with some of his theses and, above all, he was taken by Heidegger’s ability to offer a new language for a world that was undergoing dramatic change.Footnote ¹⁴ Heidegger figures centrally in Being and Nothingness and, in the Existentialism lecture, Sartre echoes Heidegger’s call for commitment, seizing the truth, and decision (Reference Sartre2007: 36, 40). Crucially, Sartre resorts to the French rendition of Dasein as ‘human existence’ which, as we will see below, was the standard anthropological reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time that was prevalent in France at the time (this is the very interpretation that Heidegger will forcefully reject a year later in Letter). Sartre’s interpretation of Heidegger is that of a humanist philosophy and is based on the ambiguities that can be found in Being and Time with regard to the relationships between man, being and Dasein: to this generation of writers, Heidegger was not and could not have been a Nazi sympathiser because he was an existentialist. Crucially, however, as we will see in detail below, Letter makes impossible to continue reading Heidegger along rationalist, egalitarian or conventionally humanist lines: Heidegger says no to an anthropological reading of his earlier work and rejects the idea that his branch of existentialism belongs to the Western philosophical canon that culminates in the Enlightenment.

In fact, Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism was to cause problems to Sartre’s political credentials before, during and indeed also after the war (Cohen-Solal Reference Cohen-Solal1991: 141–2, 187, 194, 221). On occasions, Sartre saw this as a strategy of delegitimisation by association and resorted to what have since become common counter-arguments: the idea that there was no systematic link between Heidegger’s politics and his philosophy and also that, although the man himself may have been a coward as he caved into Nazi pressures (not a minor charge for a ‘decisionist’ philosopher), personal traits are of no genuine philosophical implication. Sartre was not alone in failing to appreciate the connections between the irrationalism of Heidegger’s philosophy and the authoritarianism of his politics – not least as he knew about Heidegger’s politics as early as 1934 (Birchall Reference Birchall2004: 19–22). To his credit, on the other hand, Sartre did not avoid the issue and played a key role in setting up a first wave of debate on the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics. Les Temps Modernes, the journal Sartre co-founded and co-edited, published among his early issues of 1946 and 1947 several articles that explicitly addressed the question of Heidegger’s politics.Footnote ¹⁵

In Existentialism, Sartre used Heidegger in order to criticise lofty ideals that remained separated out from actual historical reality: ‘I cannot count on men whom I do not know based on faith in the goodness of humanity’ (Reference Sartre2007: 35). Heidegger’s key term ‘authenticity’ appears later in the text, twice on the same page, and is referred to positively because it points to the notion of total freedom that existentialism favours (Reference Sartre2007: 49). And indeed Sartre’s (Reference Sartre2007: 20) famous dictum that existence precedes essence is taken literally from Heidegger’s (Reference Heidegger1997: 68) preliminary delimitation of Dasein in Being and Time.Footnote ¹⁶ But as one reads through the final sections of Being and Nothingness that concentrate on the positive articulation of an idea of freedom, it becomes increasingly clear that there are also major differences between both projects. There, Sartre claims that the major shortcoming of Heidegger’s work lies in the fact Being and Time fundamentally lacks an ethical dimension. Sartre had dressed his argument up in Heideggerian rhetoric but his ultimate point is very much the opposite of Heidegger’s: ‘freedom is not a being; it is the being of man’ (Sartre Reference Sartre1957: 441). Sartre’s idea of freedom is not devoid of difficulties, not least as he insists that even under extreme duress the individual remains free to choose. And Sartre himself conceded that his anti-establishment sensibility during the war allowed for ‘a vague nostalgia of fascism’ in some of his own writing. But it is the constant return to an egalitarian idea of freedom that led Sartre to ‘employ Heidegger’s work against fascist totalitarianism’ (Kleinberg Reference Kleinberg2003: 132–3, my italics).

Another way of making a similar argument would be to show that, although the decisionist language that favours commitment over justification is not difficult to find in Existentialism, Sartre never suggests that decisions are to be taken beyond the realm of rational argument. For instance, there is more than a Kantian echo in Sartre’s argument that the idea of the individual cannot be understood outside notions of human freedom and responsibility. It is on this basis that Sartre then connects the particular and the universal: human responsibility is ‘much greater than we might have supposed, because it concerns all mankind … In choosing myself, I choose man’ (Reference Sartre2007: 24–5). His resort to the idea of freedom is a way to come out of moral paralysis and the argument here depends on an insight that is altogether alien to Heidegger; namely, an idea of freedom that is fundamentally connected to the Kantian dictum that ‘freedom wills itself and the freedom of others’ (Reference Sartre2007: 49). In so far as an idea of human dignity underpins the existentialism which he advocates, Sartre’s humanism is fundamentally tied to an anthropocentric perspective: ‘man is nothing other than what he makes of himself’ (Reference Sartre2007: 22). Kant is criticised because of the risk of essentialising human ends that we discussed above, and also because his ethical principles are ‘too abstract’ and therefore ‘fail to define action’; and yet Sartre commits to the universalistic and egalitarian thrust of this idea of freedom (Reference Sartre2007: 49).Footnote ¹⁷ For instance, Sartre’s universalistic commitments allow him to advance a strong notion of universal, rather than sociocultural, empathy:

An idea of universal empathy is something that ought to be refined and retained; it is essential if the social and political sciences are to remain open to genuine sociocultural and normative dialogue.Footnote ¹⁸ The idea of universal empathy works because, as members of the same human species, there are some needs and capabilities that apply to us all: we can and indeed do experience inter- and trans-cultural sympathy on such key experiences as grief, pain, love, fear, admiration and happiness. This universalism is incompatible with elitism or cultural essentialism: the idea of human dignity only makes sense on the basis of a strong commitment to the egalitarianism of a universalistic principle of humanity.

A theme that will accompany us throughout this book, Sartre does not distinguish clearly between normative ideas of humanity – the humanism that sees humans as possessors of a fundamental dignity – and cognitive notions of human authorship, that is, the anthropocentrism that focuses on humans’ mastery of the world. Because humans are not surrounded only by an environment that is made by humans themselves, Sartre is wrong when he claims that we are nothing but what we make of ourselves: we of course live as members of the natural world, we are in possession of a human body and there are social, cultural and technological structures that present themselves as alien to humans themselves. The challenge that remains is whether and how Sartre’s humanism can be separated out from the more contentious implications of his anthropocentrism; namely, whether humans are to be treated as the ultimate standard against which everything in the world is to be measured. Indeed, Sartre elides the principle of human authorship, the idea of universal empathy and the anthropocentric notion of humans as the ultimate standard: ‘[e]verything happens to every man as if the entire human race were staring at him and measuring itself by what he does’ (Reference Sartre2007: 26, my italics). We rather need a clear separation between humanism and anthropocentrism, between the key normative idea of human dignity and an inflated notion of human authorship. On the one hand, the proposition on the intrinsic value of human beings qua human beings underpins our understanding that social and cultural institutions are the product of human action itself; on the other hand, we should not translate this into an anthropocentric proposition that is deeply mistaken: humans are not the measure of all things, the cosmos is not organised for the benefit of humans and the natural environment is self-sustaining vis-à-vis human intervention.Footnote ¹⁹ We can follow neither Sartre’s uncritical anthropocentrism nor Heidegger’s rejection of humanism here: instead, we need to separate out the normative value of humanism from the reductionist implications of anthropocentrism; indeed we then require the former to inform our critique of the latter.

Another critical feature of Existentialism is whether humanism necessarily becomes a form of foundationalism and we have seen that Sartre consistently tries to unite opposites: ‘there is no difference between free being – being as a project, being as existence choosing its essence – and absolute being. Nor is there any difference between being as an absolute temporarily localized – that is, localized in history – and universally intelligible being’ (Sartre Reference Sartre2007: 43–4). At stake here is a logic of reconciliation that systematically tries to bring together the individual and the collective, the subjective and the objective, the immanent and the transcendental, the historical and the general, the particular and the universal.Footnote ²⁰ In Sartre, humanism becomes a form of foundationalism because our approval or rejection of it is ultimately made to depend on a question of principle: ontologically, whether reconciliation is an adequate doctrine of being in general (and of human beings in particular); historically, whether reconciliation awaits at the end of history (an idea of progress that helps us explain temporary distortions, deformations and even aberrations); normatively, whether reconciliation is the highest human value of them all. Sartre’s commitment to this logic of reconciliation makes his ultimate position untenable but the argument can be made that this is already a result of his previous conflation between humanism and anthropocentrism. Indeed, as we saw in the Introduction, most contemporary rejections of conventional humanism seem to hang on this weakness as they elaborate on the dystopian prevalence of symbolic and material violence in modern times. But what we really need is to question the logic that makes it difficult to distinguish humanism from anthropocentrism. It is the dual charge of subjectivism and foundationalism that mortally wounds Sartre’s project: but while the former ought to be retained on the humanist grounds of an egalitarian conception of freedom, the latter is to be rejected as the arrogant expression of our specie’s exclusive concern with ourselves.

Let me conclude this section by briefly mentioning three topics that shall prove central to later debates on humanism but which do not figure centrally in Sartre’s argument. First, we have seen that Sartre’s position is wholeheartedly atheistic. But to the extent that humanism centres on the question of human dignity, it can easily abandon the anthropocentric requirement of human authorship and be made compatible with various forms of religious arguments. Somewhat paradoxically, then, humanism has become increasingly close to religious convictions about the ‘sanctity’ of human life. Second, Sartre does not really discuss questions of inhumanity and even anti-humanism; there is no real engagement with the argument that social practices, themselves a product of human action, may be constitutively unable to bring about the reconciliatory motifs of humanism (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1993). The third and final theme that does not appear in the text, but which figures highly in subsequent discussions, is that of technology. From the alleged neutrality of modern technology to its being a source of alienation, technological innovations matter because they redefine our humanity by interfering directly on the relationships between culture and nature, between humanity and society. Whether this is a challenge to the logic of reconciliation of humanism, or it is rather that technologies themselves become an instrument in renewing our hopes for future human reconciliation, remains open to debate. Either way, questions about technology continue to inform anthropological debates that seek to understand the human.

II

We have said that Heidegger wrote his Letter on Humanism soon after the end of the war and as a request from French philosopher, Jean Beaufret. Living under French-occupied Germany and unsure about his future, Heidegger had every reason to welcome various exchanges with French officials and philosophers at the time. Letter was indeed first published in French in 1947.Footnote ²¹

American philosopher Tom Rockmore has devoted several works to explore the history of Heidegger’s reception in France (Reference Rockmore, Rockmore and Margolis1992, Reference Rockmore1995 , Reference Rockmore and Faye2009). He argues that we see its development in three waves. A first, humanist, interpretation was advanced by Alexandre Koyré, Alexander Kojeve and Sartre himself in the 1930s and 1940s. As apparent in our discussion in the previous section, Heidegger was being read here as fully belonging in the humanist tradition; he was a philosopher who sought to rejuvenate the venerable humanist tradition that in the meantime had lost touch with the realities of modern society. Crucially, Heidegger’s original approach was being interpreted as an attempt to develop a genuine philosophical anthropology – not least through the rendition of his notion of Dasein as human reality. A second wave of reception developed between the late 1940s and the mid 1980s.Footnote ²² Originally advanced by Jean Beaufret and eventually by such leadings figures as Derrida himself, Letter becomes the key text that allowed them to directly challenge this anthropological reading. In their view, the question was to show that Heidegger’s philosophy sought to overcome traditional humanism and, without turning into an apology for anti-humanism, the project was to offer a new, allegedly higher, version of humanism itself. Also, and given that details about Heidegger’s political past continued to emerge throughout this period, this second wave of reception had to face the question of the relationships between politics and philosophy in Heidegger’s work. The standard view was here that the two had to be separated out, and several claims were put forward to explain away their interconnections: Heidegger’s actions as rector were a strategic move to protect academic freedoms and the autonomy of the university against Nazi intervention; his endorsement of Nazism was genuine but short-lived, and it expressed nothing different from the various forms of ‘radicalism’ to which scholars of all persuasions felt attraction during the convoluted politics of the twentieth century; his behaviour was a mere expression of political immaturity, naivety or even cowardice for a philosopher who had until then remained wholly apolitical. Ultimately, however, it became impossible to deny that his politics had some connection to his philosophy, but the argument remained that this was ultimately inconsequential at the most fundamental intellectual level.Footnote ²³

A third wave of debate started in the 1980s and was triggered by the publication of Víctor Farías’s (Reference Farías1989) book Heidegger and Nazism. The merits of this publication have been the subject of heated discussion, but since its appearance it has become necessary to engage explicitly with the politics of Heidegger’s work as part of a general reassessment of his philosophy. For a sociological audience, Pierre Bourdieu’s (Reference Bourdieu1991) book on Heidegger offers a good case in point. First published in 1975, Bourdieu reworked his text and republished it in 1988 in the context of the contentious reception of Farías’s work. Bourdieu systematically applies his concepts of field, habitus and symbolic violence in order to explain Heidegger’s philosophical and political outlook. For instance, Bourdieu treats Letter as a paradigmatic case in which an author seeks to authoritatively adjudicate between competing readings of his previous work in order to impose the canon that is to rule over future interpretations (Reference Bourdieu1991: 90–4). Letter was expected to make it impossible to continue reading Heidegger alongside rationalist or humanist lines because Heidegger blames them for the rise of Nazism: Heidegger’s critique of humanism is the critique of modern anthropocentrism gone mad. Bourdieu also reflects on a certain isomorphism between the philosophical and the political fields and shows that Heidegger sought to establish a new path in both arenas: his philosophy sought to offer a third way in between Marxism and neo-Kantianism as much as his political endorsement of Nazism is to be seen as a third way in between the Soviet revolution and bourgeois democracy (Reference Bourdieu1991: 57–67).Footnote ²⁴

Beyond Bourdieu, the net result of this third wave of reception is that it is no longer tenable to suggest that we are only talking of a short period of time in which Heidegger was caught up in the irrational mood of its time or that, because he soon realised that it was all a terrible mistake, there is nothing philosophically consequential about his actions during the 1930s. The publication of a recent book by Emmanuel Faye (Reference Faye2009) has in fact led Rockmore to suggest that we have entered a fourth wave in which Heidegger’s political Nazism needs to be seen as integral to his philosophy.Footnote ²⁵ Faye’s research demonstrates that Heidegger showed genuine zeal and initiative in his actions as rector, that he wrote and lectured extensively on Fascism and Nazi ideology both before and after 1933, and that he explicitly sought to connect philosophical reflection and political action throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Faye’s claim is that Heidegger was both a highly talented and a wholly unreconstructed organic intellectual who openly endorsed Fascism since the early 1920s: this political commitment pre-dates the publication of Being and Time. This book then needs to be reread as the philosophical articulation of his own version of right-wing conservatism that belongs to the intellectual anti-intellectualism that was already popular in Germany at the time – what Adorno (Reference Adorno2003: 1, 43) later called the jargon of authenticity. The ultimate philosophical scandal is not Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies but his continuous lack of reflection on the victims of the war and of Nazi policies (Caputo Reference Caputo, Rockmore and Margolis1992).Footnote ²⁶

Credit must then be given to Karl Löwith, who saw it all quite clearly already in 1946: while Heidegger’s political endorsement of Nazism in particular was contingent upon its success as a mass movement in 1920s Germany, Heidegger’s philosophical edifice was explicitly in tune with the idea that, given the general decay of contemporary society, there was a demand to seize any opportunity for historical renewal: elitism, irrationalism, authenticity, historicity, collectivism and resoluteness are all central to Heidegger’s work both politically and philosophically: ‘Heidegger did not “misunderstand himself” when he supported Hitler; on the contrary, anyone who did not comprehend how he could do this did not understand him’ (Löwith Reference Löwith1995: 223). Heidegger’s critique of humanism then matters because he explicitly rejected any form of universalistic orientation in the form of egalitarianism, rationalism or subjectivity. As we will see below, Heidegger inaugurates an argument that is now ubiquitous in the literature: he blames the humanism of Western metaphysics for the contemporary crises of modern society.

Philosophically, as said, Letter was meant to be both a clarification of Heidegger’s own thinking with regard to the anthropological interpretation of Being and Time and a rejoinder to Sartre’s Existentialism lecture that had just been published. Maybe unsurprisingly, Heidegger challenges the terms of the invitation to reflect on humanism because the very question already ‘contains an admission that this word has lost its meaning’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 247). Early in the text, Heidegger makes clear the key move that inspires what will follow: ‘is the damage caused by all such terms still not sufficiently obvious?’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 219, my italics): Humanism is dead but rather than feeling sorry for this loss we must rather engage in a ‘radical’ reinterpretation of its presuppositions and implications.

Similar to what Sartre does in Existentialism, Letter also offers first a critique and then a redefinition of humanism. Heidegger shows no mercy towards Sartre, however, who is criticised for having shown no understanding of Heidegger’s genuine position. Sartre’s philosophy is depicted as fully belonging to the kind of metaphysics that must be rejected and abandoned, and the damage of humanism is defined by its endorsement of the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’ that defines modern times (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 222–37). Humanism is subjectivism because it focuses on the narrow, particularistic point of view of man and, in so doing, it renounces to grasp the ultimate essence of being: humanism sides with the subjectivity with the anthropos and, in so doing, it rejects the pursuit of the fundamental determinations of being in general.Footnote ²⁷ Heidegger accepts that ideas of humanism vary depending on how claims for it are introduced, so that different forms of humanism will develop based on how they justify a ‘conception of the “freedom” and “nature” of man’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 225). Humanism is not only a form of subjectivism but also a form of relativism and even nihilism because it leaves humans ‘free’ to do as they please; Heidegger rejects humanism because it encapsulates everything that in his view is wrong in Western metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche (Löwith Reference Löwith1995: 36, 55–60, 97).Footnote ²⁸

Heidegger argues that if we accept his thesis that we need to depart from humanism, we need also to accept its consequences and reject also all forms of anthropocentrism. Modern society has however moved in the opposite direction and is ever more dependent on the idea that ‘civilization and culture’ are only ‘vindicated … for the sake of man’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 233). Humanism remains the dogmatic expression of Western metaphysics after all its previous idols have gone, and Heidegger compares Marx’s materialist humanism, Sartre’s existentialist humanism and Christianity’s religious humanism in order to show that, although they are different in ‘purpose and principle’, this makes little substantive difference because they are all equally based on subjectivism, on the one hand, and on a reductionist account of the human, on the other. All these humanisms are problematic because they share the view ‘that the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, world’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 225). At face value at least, Heidegger seems to be aiming at a certain decentring of humanism, something we may describe as an anti-anthropocentric form of humanism:

In Heidegger’s argument, then, the failure of humanism is threefold. First, instead of a strong sense of the human, humanism offers nothing other than subjectivism and nihilism. Humanism is unable to live up to its promises; indeed, it is responsible for the irresponsibility that ensues in endorsing human self-determination. Second, this subjectivism claims to be self-positing but requires, instead, the external justifications that nature, history or god can provide. Humanism fails to deliver on its most essential commitments of making human life dependent on the autonomy of the will. Third, this subjectivism makes it impossible to reach an understanding of being as the genuine source of dignity of all forms of human experience. The subjectivist metaphysics of humanism presupposes rather than genuinely explores where the humanity of human beings ultimately lies and, as it blocks our vision of ultimate questions, these can only re-emerge through a radical critique of humanism itself. In dogmatically asserting a metaphysical idea of man, humanism contributes to the devaluation of humanity and, because it concentrates on the subjectivity of the anthropos, it becomes responsible for humans’ inability to see beyond themselves.

Heidegger takes issue with the alleged devaluation of the human that was now prevalent in philosophical anthropology: true humanism must stop looking at what humans share with other living species as much as it must stop looking inwardly in the direction of subjectivity itself; rather, it ought to concentrate on what lies above traditional ideas of humanity. Philosophical anthropology, as the latest expression of Western metaphysics, is deeply flawed because it ‘thinks of man on the basis of animalitas and does not think in the direction of humanitas. Metaphysics closes itself to the simple essential fact that man essentially occurs only in his essence, where he is claimed by Being’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 227, underlining mine). Philosophical anthropology may claim to be rational, philosophically informed and scientifically sound and yet it fails because it continues to define the human the wrong way round:

The humanity of human beings is to be defined through an essential notion of being because only thus may man be able to raise genuinely fundamental questions. Western metaphysics fails because it does not ‘ask in what way the essence of man belongs to the truth of Being’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 226, my italics).

In Karl Löwith’s (Reference Löwith1995: 39–48, 56–63, 78) interpretation, it is this question of the relationship between humans and being that is the fundamental question of Heidegger’s philosophy in its entirety. As we just saw, the predominant interpretation in France at the time of publication of Letter, the one on which Sartre draws, was to read Heidegger’s argument as supportive of anthropological humanism. But this is precisely the interpretation that Heidegger now explicitly dismisses: if in Being and Time the idea of Dasein could be reconstructed as the mediating point at which man and being relate to one and another – Dasein allows man and being to become co-constitutive (Reference Heidegger1997: 71–5) – the arguments have now definitively shifted and being is to preside over man. In his nuanced analysis of this argument, for instance, Michel Haar (Reference Haar1993: 57–63, 111–16) speaks of the ‘false symmetry’ between man and being in Heidegger’s work: man is depicted through such notions as ‘passivity’ and ‘radical receptivity’ and its key anthropological attributes become those of obedience, submission, destiny and response to the demands of being. If we then try to offer a definition of being in Heidegger, the first thing to say is that already in Being and Time he had opened with the proposition that being wholly defies a positive definition: not only does ‘the question of Being lacks an answer … the question itself is obscure and without direction’ (Reference Heidegger1997: 24). You do not actively look for being but let being come to you. In Letter, being is now credited with an ability to ‘address’ man: being ‘disposes’ and ‘determines’ man to action; being is able to will, love, need, desire; being alone is capable of freedom. The question is whether the modalities through which being will make itself available, visible, to man (Haar Reference Haar1993: 111–37). Heidegger’s being comes close to Hegel’s absolute spirit, Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or even ideas of providence or divinity that are defined through a negative anthropology: that which man is not. But what differentiates his argument from those of Hegel or Nietzsche is the fact that being is defined not only elusively as ‘mystery’, ‘simplicity’ or ‘enigma’ but also as ‘withdrawal’, ‘concealment’, ‘abandonment’, ‘absence’, ‘hiding’, ‘errancy’ and even ‘distress’: man is a ‘sign’, a ‘pointer’ a ‘bridge’ to being (Reference Heidegger2004: 9, 60).Footnote ²⁹ The negative anthropology that thus ensues is explicitly devised to understand man as lacking in genuine creative powers, reflexivity, interiority, subjectivity or autonomy, which allows for the focus on the ‘thrownness’ of historicity, tradition and authority. This subordination of man to being places the former in a position to receive but never to create authentic meaning. If the aim was to achieve an idea of man that does not fall back to metaphysical subjectivism, this shallow anthropology clearly succeeds because now humans are completely devoid of any possibility of agency. Haar (Reference Haar1993: 174–87) concludes that Heidegger moves inconsistently between a wholly historicist understanding of man that depends on language and culture as the ‘house of being’ and an account of the relationships between man and being that is placed at a pure ontological level as it becomes wholly devoid of any such socio-historical markers: in this second case, being always prevails and subordinates man.Footnote ³⁰

As he elaborates on the fundamental tenets of humanism in the history of Western philosophy, Heidegger criticises the traditional conception of the animal rationale because it still conceives our humanity in terms of what we share with beasts: ‘Animal means beast. Man is the beast endowed with reason’ (Reference Heidegger2004: 61).Footnote ³¹ Heidegger then distinguishes between this animal rationale and an idea of the human that he himself recovers from the Roman idea of humanitas. A first, positive, definition of humanism is then rearticulated through Heidegger’s key notion of care:

Let us first concentrate on the lower form of humanity, homo, which Heidegger defines as that man that is defined through its animalitas. The fact that humans share an organic constitution with other living creatures blocks our ability to specify the uniqueness of humanity; this is too base a ground to establish what is essential in our humanity. A form of anthropocentrism that reproduces the traditional dualisms of the metaphysical tradition – the mind and the organism, the body and the soul – Heidegger thought that philosophical anthropology encapsulated everything that is wrong with current attempts at understanding the human. In Heidegger’s view, the problem lies in the dualisms themselves rather than in the side that we choose. We cannot overcome metaphysics as long as we retain this way of thinking:

The apparent goal of Heidegger’s humanism is to rescue humans from themselves and their ideas that they are no more than animals; only thus can the essence of humanitas be brought back to its essence. But Heidegger’s idea of nature deserves closer scrutiny as it connects to his critique of defining the human through our organic constitution. If we look at what the secondary literature tells us, Heidegger’s idea of nature is defined in three, apparently contradictory, ways. First, the argument has been made that, because the possibilities of historical reconciliation have become fully closed to Heidegger within the realm of human action, this is now being implicitly transferred over to a general idea of being. I will show below that Heidegger’s work does resort to a logic of reconciliation, but the question that remains is whether this coheres, even if in spite of itself, on a pantheistic idea of nature.Footnote ³² Second, Heidegger’s rejection of naturalism has been presented as evidence of the incompatibility between his philosophy and the ‘blood and soil’ racism of the Nazis (Pöggeler Reference Pöggeler and Wolin1991: 203, Safranski Reference Safranski1998: 236). The question is more complicated, however, because the argument has also been made that, far from opposing blood and soil, Heidegger endorsed this form of racist naturalism as a way of rejecting the ‘liberal’, ‘positivist’ and indeed ‘British’ form of biological thinking as represented by Darwin (Faye Reference Faye2009: 66–74, 87–99). Third, Heidegger’s critique of philosophical anthropology is thrown back at his own failure to say anything meaningful about the organic side of human life. The devaluation of the animal in animal rationale is seen as consistent with Heidegger’s philosophical displacement of humanism, but it also leaves him with a wholly incomplete notion of a human being who has no body or physical relation to the world: even if it does not define the essential properties of the human, organic life remains one important dimension of human life as it actually is. The problem lies in Heidegger’s own insistence in that he is interested in the concreteness of life, and to that extent Hans Jonas surely has a point when he claims that ‘Heidegger too failed to bring the statement “I am hungry” within the purview of philosophy’ (Jonas Reference 247Jonas1996: 47).Footnote ³³

If we now return to Heidegger’s idea of the human that speaks directly to the higher humanity of humanitas, we have seen that it centres on ‘meditating and caring’ about the essence of being. Humanitas brings man closer to being; it is a return to the ancient Greek ideal of education, paideia, which was indeed the original term that the Romans translated as humanitas (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 224). In order to emphasise the fundamentally linguistic character of meditating and caring, Letter opens with a claim that has since become one of Heidegger’s best-known remarks: ‘[l]anguage is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 217, my italics). Here, Heidegger pays special homage to Hölderlin, as poets become key to the special breed of humans whose role is to liberate language and bring it closer to what is essential: ‘the world’s destiny is heralded in poetry, without yet becoming manifest in the history of Being’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 242).Footnote ³⁴ As for the role of philosophy, it may one day get back to that position of grasping genuine being, but before that can be reattempted philosophy needs to bring itself back into a position where simplicity, authenticity and mystery of being can be truly grasped. As we will see in some detail in Chapter 2, for Hannah Arendt the question of thinking is fundamentally egalitarian and worldly: thinking is one of our generic human capacities to make sense of the world that surrounds us. Heidegger also contends that thinking is an attribute of human beings because it is ‘something that is done by an act of the human spirit’ (Reference Heidegger2004: 127). The commonalities with Arendt end there, however. First, because in Heidegger elitism rather than egalitarianism defines thinking: ‘the involvement with thought is in itself a rare thing, reserved for few people’ (Reference Heidegger2004: 126). Second, because he is only interested in pure thinking; that is, the kind of thinking that distinguishes genuine philosophical genius and originality because it is concerned only with thinking itself: ‘A thinker is not beholden to a thinker – rather, when he is thinking, he holds on to what is to be thought, to Being’ (Reference Heidegger2004: 95).

Contemporary philosophy is in no position to achieve this genuine thinking that Heidegger contends is a precondition for the essential understanding of being. Current philosophy must abandon such metaphysical distinctions as the one between is and ought because pure thinking ‘is neither theoretical nor practical’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 259). It needs to step down from transcendental principles and move back to history, back to the ‘simplicity’ of the spoken word whereby ‘the essence of thinking’ regains control over the ‘technical-theoretical exactness of concepts’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 219). It is through the mastery of language, and indeed of the spoken word, that philosophy will renew itself. On the one hand, this can be read as a move against Husserl’s notion that philosophy was to be successful only in so far as it was to become (re-)elevated to the ‘rank of a science’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 218). On the other hand, however, Karl Jaspers saw this emphasis on pure thinking as an expression of the fact that Heidegger never really overcame Husserl’s even more fundamental insight that the true task of philosophy is that of finding the Archimedean point of uncontaminated thinking: the only difference is that Heidegger approached this goal through poetry and etymology rather than through a theoretical or technical command of concepts (Safranski Reference Safranski1998: 364–9, 388). Levinas (Reference 248Levinas2006: 18) is again right when he contends that ‘[f]or Heidegger, being is revealed out of the abstruseness and mystery of the unsaid that poets and philosophers bring to the world without ever saying all’. Heidegger makes thus another move that was to prove crucial for twentieth-century social science and philosophy: from now on ‘language dominates the philosopher instead of the philosopher dominating language’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991: 101).

Heidegger has distinguished between higher and lower ideas of man and this is key to his argument that although he rejects metaphysical humanism, this does not mean that he favours any form of anti-humanism. His argument is not to be read as if ‘it promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of man’; rather the opposite, as we have mentioned, he contends that ‘[h]umanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 233–4). Heidegger echoes the Nietzschean argument on the transvaluation of values so that, after humans have demoted god, nature and history as a source of value, this devaluation has now come to bite humans themselves: the same process that allows everything to be turned into an object of subjective preference accounts now also for their own devaluation. Anthropocentrism is the current source of this systematic demotion of all values because now things can have a value only because man deems that to be the case: ‘by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 251, my italics). But Nietzsche is not really being followed here because, in order to transcend the language of values and the inevitable process of transvaluation, Heidegger is after a genuine restoration. He demands a new source of values that lies above and beyond the modern devaluation and this is something that only being can offer: being endows man with value. Man is subordinate and his worthiness depends on how it cares for being; man is not and can never become a source of value. Humans are too mundane and do not reach the essential spheres where being resides: at their absolute best, only the chosen few – thinkers and poets – may be allowed to become the famous ‘shepherd of Being’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 234).Footnote ³⁵

Heidegger blames the near self-destruction of modern humanity on anthropocentrism and argues that the first step forward is to reject the egalitarian rationale that we saw underpins Sartre’s and most traditional forms of humanism. This separation between higher and lower forms of humanity allows Heidegger to make egalitarianism the main culprit of modern normative aporias. Heidegger’s critique of humanism is then construed through a dual negation: first, being is to be preferred over the human; second, within humanity itself, higher forms of humanitas are to be cared for at the expense of animale rational. This is 1946 and Heidegger knows exactly what he is doing: after having redefined humanism along these lines, he can now state that, through the radical egalitarianism of mass society, humanism is modernity’s real totalitarian ideology. The former rector rediscovers the pure thinker inside him and erects himself as the ultimate judge of what makes human beings human: at best, he dismisses nearly everything that most human beings would do throughout their lives as a lower form of humanity; at worst, these become an expression of their very inhumanity. A full-blown elitism is one key normative pillar of Heidegger’s humanism; his rejection of homo humanus on behalf of humanitas is justified because the former is simply unable to ‘realize the proper dignity of man’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 233, my italics).Footnote ³⁶

In fact, Heidegger’s argument does not simply depend on elitism being openly preferred over egalitarianism. He contends that elitism is just a moderate price to pay in order to avoid the repetition of the massacres towards which metaphysical humanism will again lead: irrationalism is more sober and less authoritarian than rationality, authenticity and simplicity more genuine than emancipation or self-determination, poetry touches on the essential, while science and technology are merely able to manipulate instruments. Only poetry and contemplative philosophy remain pristine and unpolluted human activities in a world that has nearly destroyed itself through its unrestricted beliefs in technology, state bureaucracy and mass movements. As the latter are now used to characterise both the Nazis and metaphysical humanism, Heidegger is allowed to ask: who is actually to blame for the modern crisis? Those like him who care for being in its simplicity and mystery or those who have become intoxicated by wild promises of emancipation, social change and self-determination of modern values, machines and institutions? The real danger of inhumanity lies dormant beneath modern institutions and its metaphysical humanism; conversely, humanity’s best hopes lie in those who care for the essence of being. Interestingly, however, this conservative critique will still depend on its own variant of a logic of reconciliation: we must trust those who can know better and let them show us the way.

Heidegger’s well-known critique of technology builds on this line of thought; this is a critique of the modern understanding of modern technology because technology has become an expression of the materialism and anthropocentrism of modern culture. Rather than being a mere instrument, technology is a ‘form of truth’ which ‘is grounded in the history of metaphysics’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 243–4). A purely instrumental conception of technology loses sight of handicraft and its relationship to the world; instead, it reinforces the distorted anthropocentrism that governs modern civilisation: as it creates the illusion of human authorship and full control of consequences, technology triggers an inauthentic relationship between being, man and the world (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993b: 324–6, 335). Technology is to Heidegger a form of knowledge and, through the strong association between techné and episteme (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993b: 320), between science and knowledge, technology is to be seen also as an art form: ‘[b]ecause the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive conformation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other hand, fundamentally different from it’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993b: 340). But this essential understanding of technology in its relation to being is precisely what ‘technological man’ cannot do within ‘mass society’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 255). Modern technology is a travesty of what is essential about technology: ‘The essence of technology lies in what from the beginning and before all else gives food for thought’ (Reference Heidegger2004: 22). The inauthenticity of modern man is mirrored by the ‘monstrousness’ of modern technology (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993b: 321); Heidegger dislikes technology because it uproots and no longer allows for an authentic separation between natives and strangers: technology is to be rejected because it knows no Heimat (Levinas 1990a: 232–3).Footnote ³⁷

At this point, the inversion, the so-called turn, that Heidegger has effectuated is total: there is an anti-humanist rejection of most human activities that is however introduced as essentially humanist. Humanism has been redefined as that caring for being that lies outside mundane activities and the organic dimension of human life. This restoration of being is given the task of redefining and then looking after the essence of man; a task that requires the philosopher to remove all the obstacles with which modern life has cut off man’s access to being. The oldest and primordial has now to provide orientation for the future:

Heidegger positions himself as the poet-thinker who alone is able to reclaim the purity of the Vita Contemplativa. Heidegger’s self-presentation is that of a pure thinker who craves only for peace and quiet – the contemplative monk that is not even understood by most of his peers. This requires him not only to reject the modern world but also to offer a highly elitist vision of what is essential and what is base in defining humanity. But, as we will see also in Chapter 2, this is a bastard version of the vita contemplativa that is not only reductionist but is also constituted at the expense of any genuine connection to the vita activa. Heidegger cannot speak about the political context within which his interventions have taken place, about his personal failures in the modern world, but then faults the world itself for the consequences of his actions. In this restorative humanism, real human beings truly do not matter.

We must not forget that this revalorisation of the life of the mind takes place after politics had failed Heidegger and indeed after he had failed the test of politics. But politics, it seems to me, is where we find the ultimate difficulty in Heidegger’s relationship to modernity. Heidegger may pretend to have nothing to say about what was happening to fellow human beings during the war, but philosophy itself did not – not least through the deeply humanist legacy of several of his own disciples: Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith.Footnote ³⁸ One can almost hear the grip of Heidegger’s furious hand as he writes that ‘[t]he essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of human action, but rather in the malice of rage. Both of these, however, healing and the raging, can essentially occur only in Being, in so far as Being itself is what is contested’ (Reference Heidegger and Heidegger1993a: 260, my italics). Barred from the university, guilty of ungratefulness towards old masters, disowned by his previously adoring pupils, Heidegger is now fighting against public humiliation. Here, the question is not only about his support for a regime that committed heinous crimes but about the seductions of power, his lack of remorse or sense of responsibility and, given his own reputation, about the role of philosophy itself:

In his intoxication with historicity and language, Heidegger lost control of his own thinking. The more he pushed for the autonomy of language, the less he had to concern himself with the actual implications of his words and, of course, his deeds. This argument can and indeed has been made as an attempt to exonerate him both politically and philosophically (Gadamer Reference Gadamer, Rockmore and Margolis1992). Yet it may also be seen as the ultimate warning against what may happen when, under extreme circumstances, to be sure, we actively seek to give up on ‘old’ humanist ideas of personal autonomy and responsibility.Footnote ⁴⁰

III

Even if some or even most aspects of my interpretation of Heidegger are seen as one-sided, one argument that remains is the extent to which his critique of humanism has become ubiquitous: the humanism of Western metaphysics is to blame for the contemporary crises of modern society. Through mass mobilisation, a blind belief in technology, the power of state bureaucracy and nationalism, the Nazis are an extreme but ultimately coherent result of Western metaphysics.Footnote ⁴¹

Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Heidegger touches on several issues that we have discussed already and, given Derrida’s own salience in later debates, can be taken as paradigmatic: Heidegger’s anti-naturalism places his thinking at odds with any form of racial thinking, his rejection of Western metaphysics is an invitation towards a truer form of philosophy, and the interconnections between poetry and philosophy are to be given greater intellectual consideration. Derrida’s difficulties in dealing with Heidegger and his legacy are a good case in point for Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s claim that ‘it is not always easy to be Heideggerian’ (1995: 108).Footnote ⁴² As he delved into Heidegger’s writing, Derrida’s interpretation becomes less a philosophical exercise and more an attempt at normative self-justification that, as it departs from Heidegger’s conclusions, is not prepared to disown its legacy. To be clear, my claim is not that, through his debt to Heidegger, Derrida is guilty by association (Habermas Reference Habermas1987). But nor am I convinced that Derrida’s philosophical exoneration of Heidegger’s political responsibility works at any level. The claim that there is ultimately a rationalist core in Derrida’s work may be too strong a conclusion for what I am going to argue below, but I will seek to demonstrate that there remains a humanist sensibility in his thinking that ultimately betrays the hermeneutical sophistication that Derrida himself deploys in his interpretation of Heidegger. Derrida’s difficulties are mostly self-inflicted, as they derive from what I consider is a failed attempt to get beyond the uncomfortable political implications of Heidegger’s anti-humanism.

Derrida (Reference Derrida1991b) devoted a short book to Heidegger where he discusses Heidegger’s relationship to the Nazi regime. He does so by focusing on two texts from the period between 1933 and 1935 when Heidegger was most active politically: the inaugural address he gave as rector, which was delivered in May 1933, and one lecture course of 1934–5 that was later published as Introduction to Metaphysics. Derrida’s argument for that period is that the political equivocations of these two texts represent an anomaly, a genuine exception, within Heidegger’s oeuvre. It is true that we now know much more about Heidegger’s biography than Derrida knew back then and this fact alone creates severe problems to his interpretation. But given that Derrida’s case does not rely on biographical facts but on philosophical exegesis – indeed, it fundamentally relies on the merits deconstruction as a philosophical ‘method’, his arguments are still worth looking at in some detail. Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger is based on three main claims.

1. There is, he contends, a subtle but unmistakable change in the way in which Heidegger used the idea of spirit (Geist) and its derivatives (geistig and geistlich). Derrida argues that spirit does not figure significantly in Heidegger’s work; indeed, references to it are explicitly avoided in Heidegger’s early writings and, when used, they appear always within inverted commas (Reference Derrida1991b: 3–7, 14–30, 37, 65–6, 71–2). This detached use of ‘spirit’ is taken to mean a critique of Hegel’s metaphysics. Hegel rather than Heidegger would have been prone to the historical and political mystification of a national Geist and it is Heidegger’s very criticism of Hegel that makes him immune to that kind of hypostatisation: Geist is simply the wrong term to capture the substantive historicity of Dasein. All this changes between 1933 and 1935, however, as this is the only time when Heidegger made full use of spirit and its derivatives without quotation marks; indeed, they are italicised and emphasised as expression of Heidegger’s new political commitments towards the regime (Reference Derrida1991b: 31). But then things change again after his stepping down as rector. Whereas before Heidegger had preferred the word geistig, after 1935 the word of choice is geistlich. Derrida’s case is that this modification expresses that Heidegger is dissociating himself from those writings in which he supported the Nazis (Reference Derrida1991b: 33).Footnote ⁴³

2. Derrida accepts that, during the critical 1933–5 period, Heidegger’s use of spirit did refer to a substantial unity between the individual and the collective; a sense of unity in which total commitment was to be expected and could be demanded (Reference Derrida1991b: 39).Footnote ⁴⁴ Derrida opens his discussion of the rectoral address by emphasising Heidegger’s personal responsibility for the text he had penned and then delivered on behalf of a German university: ‘[t]o the extent that he countersigns the assignment of spirit, the author of the Address, as such, cannot exempt himself from any responsibility’ (Reference Derrida1991b: 38). But as he elaborates on the nature of this responsibility, Derrida does not seem convinced that this really holds. He claims that ‘[o]ne could say that he spiritualizes National Socialism. And one could reproach him for this … But, on the other hand, by taking the risk of spiritualizing National Socialism, he might be trying to absolve or save it … This address seems no longer to belong simply to the “ideological” camp in which one appeals to obscure forces’ (Reference Derrida1991b: 39, underlining mine).

The German university in search for self-affirmation, the title of Heidegger’s speech, is now a fully politicised institution that is committed to the nation, speaks on behalf of the state and answers only to the Führer himself (Faye Reference Faye2009: 39–58). As we will see below, a major difficulty for Derrida is that in his own previous work about Heidegger he had already argued that philosophy is only viable in the context of freedom and democracy – and yet these are the very ideas against which Heidegger’s rectoral address was reacting. Derrida further contends that, when spirit is used in this highly ideological context, this was meant to oppose the racialist blood and soil ideology of the Nazis. We have raised doubts as to whether this is unequivocally the case, but Derrida still criticises Heidegger because, by siding with spirit and against nature, Heidegger is now ‘reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity’ (Reference Derrida1991b: 39). Heidegger pays a heavy philosophical price for this uncritical opposition between nature and spirit, Derrida contends, because it is now Heidegger himself who has returned to the subjective metaphysics that he had so vehemently criticised in Being and Time. Derrida draws an explicit comparison between these two, very different, errors: the political one that led to Heidegger’s support for National Socialism and the philosophical one that led Heidegger to the same kind of metaphysical subjectivism that in his view underpins our very discourses on ‘democracy or “human rights”’ (Reference Derrida1991b: 40). A point that we have made several times before, humanism is not only seen as impotent against totalitarianism, it actually is to blame for it. This is how Derrida takes the analogy further:

Derrida’s point remains ambiguous at best: what does it actually mean to contend that the sin of committing to the metaphysics of subjectivity and the political endorsement of the Nazis are ‘irreducible’? Is it adequate to speak of a diabolical programme on the grounds that it commits to ‘both evils at once’ (the political one towards the party, the philosophical one towards metaphysical subjectivism?). It is difficult to agree with Derrida when he finally claims that, in relation to Heidegger’s politics, ‘we do not yet know what Nazism is’ (Reference Derrida and Wolin1991a: 268).

3. Derrida’s final step in what increasingly reads like a rescue exercise is to lower the bar for what was deemed politically reasonable in the mid 1930s. The exculpatory argument now appeals to the anti-humanist temptations that were experienced by philosophers of all credos. To be sure, the political hypocrisy from Right and Left in the use of apparently humanist values in the context of the Cold War is central to any explanation of the mainstream anti-humanism in the social sciences and humanities since the 1960s (Said Reference Said2004: 12–13, 31–56). Derrida argues that, yes, it is true that Heidegger got this very wrong, but his political equivocations are no different, they are in fact very similar, to those of so many other European thinkers at the time. The critique of bourgeois modernity that was offered by the Nazis belonged to a more general trend among intellectuals of all persuasions; or, at least, it applies to those whose boldness prepared them to enter ‘into regions haunted by what is diabolical in relation to a philosophy that is self-assured in its left-liberal, democratic humanism’ (Reference Derrida and Wolin1991a: 266). Derrida thus quotes at length from Husserl’s The Crisis of European Science in order to show that Husserl made a similar use of the idea of spirit in that essay. He also analyses Paul Valéry’s writings from 1919 in order to make an analogous claim (Reference Derrida1991b: 120–4). The general point Derrida makes is well known, but also troublesome:

The argument has now shifted because here Heidegger has no special case to answer for his politics; either we all have to do so in equal measure – we are all guilty or, more plausibly, we could all have been guilty – or there is no use at all for the idea of responsibility in that context. There is nothing of philosophical relevance in our obsession with passing judgement on Heidegger’s politics; this is just another case of victor’s justice. Heidegger had consciously decided not to apologise for his deeds and Derrida has decided that half an apology will suffice.Footnote ⁴⁵

Let me now go back to the first text in which Derrida engaged directly with the question of humanism in Heidegger and beyond; a short piece that was composed in April 1968. A first thing to note is that Derrida devotes a long introduction to the political issues of the day (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 114). He explicitly mentions American involvement in Vietnam and his reservations that, by travelling to New York to attend the academic conference at which this paper was to be read, he was in no way endorsing US imperialist policies. Derrida also makes reference to the recent assassination of Martin Luther King and the entering of police forces into universities in Paris at the request of university authorities; these were all the explicit ‘historical and political horizon’ of his piece on humanism (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 114). But Derrida is not merely commenting on these very different political issues; he mentions them in order to draw two philosophical conclusions that have a direct bearing on our discussion. The first of these he terms ‘the universality of philosophical discourse’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 112), which he defines as the fact that international philosophical conferences transcend national parochialisms and must engage with the general questions that make philosophy a worthy intellectual pursuit. Indeed, the question of the human is central in this context: ‘the interest in the universality of the anthropos is doubtless a sign of this effort’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 113). The second implication refers to the interrelationships between philosophy and democratic politics, and his argument here is that only democratic dialogue can give form to an ‘international philosophical colloquium’: in so far as philosophers take part in these encounters, they only do so in their professional capacity – they speak on behalf of their genuine love for truth (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 114). Derrida put it quite strongly: ‘the philosophers present here do not assume the official policies of their countries’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 113). Freedom, understood as personal autonomy and responsibility, is the tie that binds philosophy and democratic discourse and, therefore, ‘democracy must be the form of the political organization of society’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 113).

These are intensely political opening remarks for a text that offers an elegant, original, but ultimately conventionally philosophical account of the same controversy on humanism that we have been revisiting so far. Indeed, it is difficult not to interpret Derrida’s political overture as intrinsically connected to the political motifs that we have been discussing up to now: the apparently apolitical tone of Heidegger’s Letter vis-à-vis the highly political context in which the text was composed. On the one hand, Derrida accepts the conventional self-comprehension of philosophy as an activity of unconstrained, critical thinking: ‘[p]hilosophy embodies the spirit of democracy insofar as it the institutionalization of radical questioning’ (Heller Reference 246Heller, Heller and Feher1991c: 493). On the other hand, it is as though Derrida is pre-empting the objections that may be raised against invoking Heidegger as the leitmotif for a paper on ‘man’ that starts with democracy and dialogue and defends a strong idea of personal autonomy.Footnote ⁴⁶ The philosopher that he undoubtedly was, Heidegger did not and indeed could not speak but from his love of truth: as a thinker, he could never have spoken on behalf of the nation. If the universality of the concern for the anthropos is an expression of a genuine philosophical mind, and if democracy must always be the political form of philosophy, then the democratic credentials of ‘Heidegger-the-philosopher’ are as good as anyone’s – and through this his actual political opinions and actions are turned irrelevant. And because in this commitment to the universality of philosophical language Heidegger had renounced all other commitments but philosophy itself, we must all do likewise in order to appreciate the philosophical merits of his work: nothing but philosophical motifs are to be allowed in. In so far as Heidegger showed an interest in the universality of the anthropological question, as a philosopher he is to be welcomed in the atemporal conversation of philosophy. No further questions can, need or ought to be raised.

Derrida then reads Heidegger’s Letter as an ‘archaeology’ whose main goal was to de-provincialise humanism: to separate it out from the tradition of Western metaphysics (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 128). Indeed, the very claim on the universality of the anthropological question with which Derrida opened his lecture was aimed at destabilising the ongoing debate as to whether Heidegger’s philosophy was to be read as for or against humanism. It does not really matter whether Heidegger changed his mind on this particular issue: what is essential is the fact that Heidegger was centrally concerned with these questions because this is part of the immanent logic of philosophy itself. Derrida then moves within familiar terrain as he distinguishes two forms of humanism. On the one side, there is the kind of humanism that we associate with Sartre, metaphysics and subjectivity. Derrida sides with Heidegger’s critique here and contends that this position is fundamentally misguided because of its logic of reconciliation. Sartre offers a humanism of ‘unity’ and, worse still, his logic of reconciliation turns Sartre’s claims into a form of religious thinking in disguise: what appears to be a ‘neutral’ discourse favours in fact ‘the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 116). Sartre’s humanism offers little other than a form of essentialism, and Derrida resorts to the Foucault of The Order of Things, which had just been published, to argue that ‘the history of the concept of man’ is still to be fully examined (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 116). Arguably best represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Derrida claims that this kind of humanism has become mainstream in the West after the Second World War: it is in fact ‘the unperceived and uncontested common ground of Marxism and of Social-Democratic and Christian-Democratic discourse’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 117).

But while this branch of humanism has remained the dominant philosophical and political discourse in France, in Germany, on the other hand, there is a different form of humanism whose trajectory Derrida traces through Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger himself.Footnote ⁴⁷ This variant of humanism does not have a systematic concern with ‘the unity of the anthropos’, which is rather seen as an open question: the grounds on which each rejected it remained ‘diffuse’, but they all tried to overcome this ‘old metaphysical humanism’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 119). A shared philosophical interest lies in their attempts towards the ‘neutralization of every metaphysical or speculative thesis’, so that anthropological questions can still be taken seriously because they are no longer endowed with a transcendental status (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 115). This is also Heidegger’s challenge: to dissolve humanism’s metaphysical legacy while at the same time trying to articulate a new, non-anthropocentric position that avoids anti-humanism. Derrida argues that Hegel’s phenomenology ‘is no longer, but it is still a science of man’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 120–1), whereas the jury is still out with regard to Husserl, whose philosophy openly poses the challenge that any anthropology has to face:

I have briefly mentioned that, in his Vienna lecture of 1935, Husserl did portray Europe sitting at the top of humanity’s intellectual evolution. But there is another claim that is arguably more important to us here: the unprecedented success of modern science should not blind us to the fact that science remains a fundamentally human product. Humanity is not science’s primary object but remains its unique source: science is nothing but a result of human action itself. When Derrida claims that being ‘remains the thinking of man’ we are in fact in the presence of two different arguments (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 128) and this is the duality that gives title to Derrida’s piece: the idea of the ends of man points to the ‘double genitive’ that was so important to Heidegger.Footnote ⁴⁸ There are those ends that humans set for themselves and whose value depend on the fact that they are pursued by human beings. And there are also those ends that speak of a movement towards human beings’ own completion as human beings: man as finis refers to the human ability to endow things with a certain dignity because they are the object of human pursuit, whereas man as telos speaks about the process of immanent fulfilment of humans’ own potentials. Making full use of his own methodology of writing from the margins of philosophy, Derrida elaborates on this point in a long footnote in which he explains the fundamentally Kantian horizon of this distinction (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 121–2, n. 15).

Derrida reconstructs Kant’s predicament as follows: if Kant stays close to the idea of man as a being who can become an end in itself, then a purely empirical idea of the human is insufficient. Only self-positing reason can speak of an end in itself but, although human beings are rational, they share this property with a whole range of pure rational beings. In other words, if the idea of an end in itself was expected to endow humans with dignity, this in fact undermines the very uniqueness of the human because it refers to a notion of transcendental rather than human reason. Kant knows that humans are not pure rational beings, but he equally knows that humans are the only empirical instance of a rational being of whom we are aware. Derrida comments sympathetically on Kant’s difficulty and, in fact, he holds onto it – as we said, this duality of the ends of man gives title to Derrida’s piece. Derrida’s reading now points in a direction that to my mind grows increasingly incompatible with Heidegger’s argument in Letter:

Derrida is arguing for a new lineage of humanism that recognises the ethical and even theological import of man. He accepts that the position of man is problematic at a philosophical level but, at the same time, an anthropology remains the one normative guarantee that philosophy will not turn itself against humans: ‘[w]hatever the breaks marked by this Hegelian-Husserlian-Heideggerian anthropology … there is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with that which, so naturally, links the we of the philosopher to the “we men,” to the we in the horizon of humanity’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 116). In relation to Hegel and Husserl, Derrida is critical of how they use this ‘we’ in which the philosopher believes he can play god; they have not fully broken free from the metaphysical logic of reconciliation. In relation to Heidegger, Derrida also speaks of a ‘kind of magnetic attraction’ that does not allow for the full dissociation of philosophy and anthropology (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 124). There is, he says, a ‘hold’ that remains between ‘the “humanity” of man and the thinking of Being’, between ‘a certain humanism and the truth of Being’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 123, my italics). Philosophically, humanism remains a form of metaphysics, but its disappearance leaves the door open for a non-humanism that is normatively unacceptable. Derrida uses the image of man as a gatekeeper; man becomes a methodological access point to being. The human does not disappear but its role is to be reduced to that of an entity whose goal is to allow for the enquiry into the essence of being: ‘[i]t is in the play of a certain proximity, proximity to oneself and proximity to Being, that we will see constituted, against metaphysical humanism and anthropologism, another insistence of man, one which relays, relieves, supplements that which it destroys’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 124).

Derrida has found a good reason to keep hold of ‘man’: it offers a point of access to being. A certain humanism can now be retained because it no longer plays its old role as a doctrine that endowed humans with their own autonomous value; rather, humanism has become the one residual category that, above all, prevents anti-humanism. As man opens the door for human access to being, Derrida has settled for a methodological justification of humanism. But we have seen that this is not Heidegger’s position and, as an interpretation of Heidegger, this remains problematic because it is hardly compatible with Heidegger’s own elitism and irrationalism: Derrida has to overlook not only Heidegger’s constant scepticism against the true philosophical value of any anthropology but also, and more importantly, against the idea that some activities (poetry and philosophy) are to remain being’s excusive shepherds. Derrida does not really solve this problem; instead, we end with the worst of both worlds – on the one hand, Heidegger’s insight that ‘man cannot be thought as a separate entity’ from being leaves the door open for all kinds of normative devaluation of the human; on the other hand, a purely instrumental idea of man as a methodological gatekeeper to something higher is no conception of man at all (Haar Reference Haar1993: 73–4). Derrida will of course insist that there is in Heidegger an attempt at ‘the reevaluation and revalorization of the essence of the dignity of man’, but then again the only motifs that remain available for Derrida to make this claim depend on Heidegger’s conservatism and anti-modernism: the fact that man is being ‘threatened in the extension of metaphysics and technology’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 128, my italics). Derrida has run into a dead end because the more he claims that Heidegger’s arguments remain a form of humanism, the more Heidegger himself is reframed within the reconciliatory logic that is central to their shared critique of metaphysics: ‘[t]he restoration of the essence is also the restoration of a dignity and a proximity: the co-responding dignity of Being and man, the proximity of Being and man’ (Reference Derrida and Derrida1982: 130, my italics).

As Derrida reads the late Heidegger more in line with Being and Time, he disowns the more explicit anti-humanism of Letter. His is an argument for a return to the idea that man and being are co-constitutive, whereas the whole point of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics depends precisely on the rejection of that interpretation. Heidegger’s mysterious being becomes in Derrida the more acceptable idea of human beings’ internal transcendence: humans are beings with the ability to transcend themselves – both in thinking and in action. As they participate in the construction of this exteriority, humans do experience others and themselves as something alien and beyond their control: in society, authenticity is indeed lost. As humans are only partly authors of the world that they inhabit, philosophy and science are to be seen as human activities whose success depends on they having to abandon the anthropocentric view that humans are the only source of all value.Footnote ⁴⁹ Derrida’s rescue exercise appears to work on the condition that Heidegger now favours the very logic of reconciliation that he had systematically criticised. Crucially, however, whereas Sartre’s case for reconciliation remains full of problems, he could still look positively to what humans, through freedom and autonomy, can do for others and for themselves as members of the same species. Pace Heidegger, it is Derrida who eventually clarified for us that a humanism of being is no humanism at all.