Page "Martin Heidegger" Paragraph 84

" Letter on ' Humanism '" is often seen as a direct response to Sartre's 1945 lecture " Existentialism is a Humanism.

" Aside from merely disputing readings of his own work, however, in " Letter on ' Humanism ,'" Heidegger asserts that " Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one.

" Heidegger's largest issue with Sartre's existential humanism is that, while it does make a humanistic ' move ' in privileging existence over essence, " the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement.

" From this point onward in his thought, Heidegger attempted to think beyond metaphysics to a place where the articulation of the fundamental questions of ontology were fundamentally possible: only from this point can we restore ( that is, re-give ) any possible meaning to the word " humanism ".