ABSTRACT
The Letter on Humanism, which Heidegger published in 1946 in the midst of a historical and biographical defeat, seems to close the age-old story of humanism. Despite all attempts at restoring it in spiritualistic, Marxist and existentialist guises – Sartre’s essay Existentialism is a Humanism was released in the same year – the great humanist tradition could not resist the double trauma of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in which the very idea of humanity had been swallowed up by its opposite. Leaving aside all the circumstantial and even instrumental elements that determined the drafting of the Letter, the necessity of such an epistemological break lies at the centre of Heidegger’s text: a human culture that has not been able to avoid, or even favoured, the slaughtering of fifty million people around the middle of the twentieth century cannot expect to survive. After a catastrophe of these dimensions, the idea that it is possible to reinstate the old humanist myth of man as master of his destiny is doomed to fail for at least two sets of reasons: firstly, it is impossible to go back in history to a period that is irreparably terminated. Secondly, the smoking rubble that at the end of the war occupies the field in both a symbolic and material sense originates precisely from this period.
