LETTER ON "HUMANISM"


the expression of a living thing. Nor can it ever be thought in an essentially correct way in terms of its symbolic character, perhaps not even in terms of th e character of signification. Language is the clearing-concealing advent of being itself.

Ek-sistence, thought in terms of ecstasis, does not coincide with existentia in either form or content. In terms of content ek-sistence means standing out" into the truth of being. Existentia (existence) means in contrast actualitas, actuality as opposed to mere possibility as Idea. Ek-sistence identifies the determination of what the human being is in the destiny of truth. Existentia is the name for the realization of something that is as it appears in its Idea. The sentence "The human being {GA 9: 327} ek-sists" is not an answer to the question of whether the human being actually is or not; rather, it responds to the question concerning the "essence" of the human being. We are accustomed to posing this question with equal impropriety whether we ask what the human being is or who he is. For in the Who? or the What? we are already on the lookout for something like a person or an object. But the personal no less than the objective misses and misconstrues the essential unfolding of ek-sistence in the history of being. That is why the sentence cited from Being and Time (p. 42) is careful to enclose the word "essence" in quotation marks. This indicates that "essence" is now being defined neither from esse essentiae nor from esse existentiae but rather from the ek-static character of Dasein. As ek-sisting, the human being sustains Da-sein in that he takes the Da, the clearing of being, into "care." But Da-sein itself occurs essentially as "thrown." It unfolds essentially in the throw of being as a destinal sending.

But it would be the ultimate error if one wished to explain the sentence about the human being's eksistent essence as if it were the [159] secularized transference to human beings of a thought that Christian theology expresses about God (Deus est ipsum esse9 [God is his being]); for ek-sistence is not the realization of an essence, nor does ek-sistence itself even effect and posit what is essential. If we understand what Being and Time calls "projection" as a representational positing, we take it to be an achievement of subjectivity and do not think it in the only way the "understanding of being" in the context of the "existential analysis" of "being-in-the-world" can he thought — namely, as the ecstatic relationb to the clearing of being. The adequate execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons subjectivity is surely made more difficult by the fact that in the publication of Being and Time the third division of the first part, "Time and Being," was


a Plato's Doctrine of Truth, first edition, 1947: "Out": into the "out" of the "out of one another" of the difference (the "there"), not "out" out of an interior.

b First edition, 1949: Imprecise, better: ekstatic in-standing within the clearing.


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Martin Heidegger (GA 9) Letter on Humanism - Pathmarks