Humanism and its others

Sartre, Heidegger, Yourcenar

pp. 108-130

in: Colin Davis, Ethical issues in twentieth-century French fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

On 28 October 1945 Sartre held a public lecture in which, drawing support from the thought of Heidegger, he famously announced that "l"existentialisme est un humanisme" (existentialism is a humanism).¹ A year later Heidegger addressed what became known as his Lettre sur l"humanisme to Jean Beaufret and the French philosophical world in general; in that letter Heidegger repudiated both existentialism and humanism as being rooted in precisely the patterns of thought which his own work aimed to destroy. However, Heidegger does not reject the term humanism outright, even if he appears unsure about continuing to use it; he argues that a proper understanding of the human (that is, his own understanding of it) may constitute what could be called a humanism, albeit a humanism "d"une étrange sorte" (119) (of a strange kind). As one commentator puts it, Heidegger's use of the word humanism "has nothing other than the name in common with the term as used in the Western intellectual tradition."²