Heidegger's "Letter On Humanism"

How often have I read Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" over the years? I couldn't begin to say. What I can say is that I am only now beginning to understand it.

Better late than never.

Ontology "...fails to recognize that there is a thinking more rigorous than the conceptual...Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of Being and nothing else. Belonging to Being, because thrown by Being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks Being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect...For it lets Being--be."

In this letter, Heidegger critiques the "humanisms of the tradition" for being "intrinsically correlative with the metaphysics" that he intends to surpass through his conception of the human being as "ek-sistence." But inasmuch as redescribing the human being as ek-sistence "discerns man's true value, is it not by that very fact a humanism of a higher kind?" [See William J. Richardson, Heidegger, 4th edition, 552].

The task of the thoroughly modern dervish is to engage Heidegger in "conversation" and, in the process, to inscribe what dervishes say and do in a Heideggerian redescription of Being. In so doing, Heidegger's project will be drawn out into the "openness" of Being in ways that he could not have foreseen--and that few, if any, Heideggerians presently writing or thinking have foreseen. And the Heidegger conversation will be changed, once again, as it was when Sartre joined it, and Derrida, and Rorty, etc.