Conclusion

Summary

In his Letter on Humanism Heidegger takes note of a statement Jean-Paul Sartre made in his own essay on humanism. Sartre said that précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il'y a seulement des hommes. Heidegger amends this statement to read précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il y a principalement l'Etre. This emendation has a special interest, since it expresses the characteristic emphasis of Heidegger's later thought on being rather than on Dasein– what I am calling human being – and it also recalls the difference between Heidegger's conception of being as presence and Sartre's view of it as a summum genus under which the being of things and the being of persons were to be subsumed but, as it turned out, could not be. Because being is single and unique and human being is plural and individuated, a predilection for being has a marked tendency – very noticeable in Heidegger's later philosophy – to keep the manyness of human being out of the center of philosophical interest. From the perspective of this study, however, it seems evident that even in Heidegger's terms, the one “level” – the one on which there are only human beings – must always be the other one as well, on which there is mainly being. The reason is given by Heidegger himself when, in the same essay, he declares the special distinction of human beings to consist precisely in their familiarity with being, inarticulate and overlaid by false assimilations though it may be.