LETTER ON "HUMANISM"


as such17 remains indispensable for the prospective approach of thinking toward the question concerning the truth of being. In this way thinking attests to its essential unfolding as destiny. It is far from the arrogant presumption that wishes to begin anew and declares all past philosophy false. But whether the definition of being as the transcendens pure and simple really does name the simple essence of the truth of being — this and this alone is the primary question for a thinking that attempts to think the truth of being. That is why we also say (p. 230) that how being is, is to be understood chiefly from its "meaning" [Sinn], that is, from the truth of being. Being is cleared for the human being in ecstatic projection [Entwurf]. But this projection does not create being.

Moreover, the projection is essentially a thrown projection. What throws in such projection is not the human being but being itself, which sends the human being into the ek-sistence of Da-sein that is his essence. This destiny propriates as the clearing of being — which it is. The clearing grants nearness to being. In this nearness, in the clearing of the Da, the human being dwells as the ek-sisting one without yet being able properly to experience and take over this dwelling today. In the lecture on Hölderlin's elegy "Homecoming" (1943) this nearness "of" being, which the Da of Dasein is, is thought on the basis of Being and Time; it is perceived as spoken from the minstrel's poem; {GA 9: 338} from the experience of the oblivion of being it is called the "homeland." The word is thought here in an essential sense, not patriotically or nationalistically, but in terms of the history of being. The essence of the homeland, however, is also mentioned with the intention of thinking the homelessness of contemporary human beings from the essence of being's history. Nietzsche was the last to experience this homelessness. [169] From within metaphysics he was unable to find any other way out than a reversal of metaphysics. But that is the height of futility. On the other hand, when Hölderlin composes "Homecoming" he is concerned that his "countrymen" find their essence. He does not at all seek that essence in an egoism of his people. He sees it rather in the context of a belongingness to the destiny of the West. But even the West is not thought regionally as the Occident in contrast to the Orient, nor merely as Europe, but rather world-historically out of nearness to the source. We have still scarcely begun to think the mysterious relations to the East that have come to word in Hölderlin's poetry (cf. "The Ister"; also "The Journey," third strophe ff.). "German" is not spoken to the world so that the world might be reformed through the German essence; rather, it is spoken to the Germans so that from a destinal belongingness to other peoples they might become world-historical along with them (see remarks on Hölderlin's poem


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Martin Heidegger (GA 9) Letter on Humanism - Pathmarks