Letters on humanism and rules for the guidance of humans: Sloterdijk’s re-examination of Heidegger and the critiques thereof

Abstract

Heidegger’s answer to Sartre’s existentialism is written in a letter to Beaufret, a disciple of the German thinker, in which Sartre’s thought is dismissed as a vulgar humanism. This letter is not only the deployment of a specific problem between two authors, but also the cornerstone of the anti-humanist basis. The same text, taken up in the late twentieth century by Sloterdijk, revives the problem of the human in Heidegger to give it a political expression in which humanism ends by becoming a device of cultural inhibition necessary for civilization.

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