Thinking Against Humanism? Heidegger on the Human Essence, the Inhuman, and Evil

In his ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, Martin Heidegger advances a critique of humanism while insisting that this critique does not imply that he ‘advocates the inhuman’. There are two reasons why Heidegger might be concerned to rebut this accusation. First, one might worry that any rejection of humanism commits one to rejecting its central values, such as the idea that human beings have an essential worth. Second, Heidegger might be concerned to distance his critique from the inhuman policies of National Socialism, with which he was associated in the early 1930s.

In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Heidegger's conception of ‘the inhuman’ to shed light on his critique's normative implications. Through this examination of Heidegger's views, I raise concerns about the political prospects of his anti-humanism, and, more tentatively, of anti-humanistic thought in general. First, I reconstruct Heidegger's critique of humanism, his positive conception of the human essence, and his cryptic account of evil in the Letter. I argue that the view that emerges involves a problematic displacement of human responsibility for evil, which Heidegger interprets as symptomatic of the modern epoch in the ‘history of Being’. Moreover, while his account opposes ‘the inhuman’ in a ‘Being-historical’ sense, I argue that it disavows crucial normative resources for resisting ‘the inhuman’ in the ordinary moral sense.