Our humanity is not a matter of who we are, but of how we are whoever we are. Thus, respecting humanity, whether in the person of ourselves or in the persons of others, is not a matter of establishing a clear identity for ourselves, either collectively or individually. Nor is it a matter of preserving such an identity, once established. That is, being human is not becoming aware of who we are, then protecting that against whomever and whatever we, for whatever reason, perceive as somehow threatening it. That is especially so, if the supposed threat consists, as it often does, in no more than our supposed enemies simply having--in our eyes, even if not in their own—a supposedly different identity than the one we identify with.
Being fully human is, first, a matter, not of establishing our identity, but of stabilizing our hold on ourselves, what-ever and who-ever we are. And it is then an ongoing matter of demonstrating self-constancy or self-consistency in maintaining our grip on ourselves, thereby keeping faith in ourselves, staying steadily faithful to ourselves. We must, in effect, keep trust or faith in ourselves, ever vigilant against betraying ourselves by literally letting ourselves go, forgetting ourselves like some already toilet-trained and out-of- diapers child going potty in its pants (forgive me if I’m forgetting myself and all my training in the proprieties by putting it that poopy way). If we don’t in that way keep the faith, we inevitably will and do betray humanity itself.
In such betrayal we betray humanity both in the person of ourselves and in the persons of all others, whether those others share any identity with us or not. If we do not maintain our self-stability we will do again what we have so horribly and so often done before, inevitably forgetting our very humanity and “going ape” again, like the pet monkey going ape in the bar his master has taken him to, running all around in a frenzy, defecating all over everything, in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. To use another, less amusing but every bit as accurate, perhaps more properly sobering way of putting it (to borrow from a source I’ll let go unnamed, at the risk of being accused of plagiarism for my omission), like all the “good German” Nazis saying “This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen!” Such self-styled good Germans murdered millions upon millions of people for no better reason than that those oh-so-good-Germans took those they murdered to be Jews, regardless of whether those murdered took themselves that way or not. To give a paradigmatic example, Jean Améry, born Hans Meier, never took himself for a Jew until the Nazis forced him to, by making him one without his consent and even against his own wishes and sense of himself, in their Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
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In short, to give a perhaps surprising condensation, the meaning of Being is to let beings be. What Being itself means, whither it is tending, is just to let all beings be, that’s all! Being means, wants, tends, and intends just this: to let all beings be — all beings: rich or poor, near or far, big or little, pagan or Christian, Arab or Jew, Greek-Jew or Jew-Greek, conscious or unconscious, natural or nurtured, fish or fowl, animal or vegetable or mineral, man or woman, certified citizen or “illegal alien,” rock or scissors or paper, trees or stones, dolphins or homo sapiens-sapiens, snails or frogs or puppy-dogs’ tails, sugar or spice or everything nice: all beings!
Just let them all be! Nothing more. No big deal at all. And that’s what our humanity’s for, what being human means: staying faithful to ourselves and in that very process letting go of all our cherished images of ourselves so Being can have us, all of us, and use us to take place in and as us, at last fulfilling its own tendency, its own meaning, in us and through us and as us, by letting everything that in any sense “is,” just be, just as and what and how it is.
Thus, becoming human is perhaps as simple yet hard and rare as learning how to hear all the way through the lyrics of a certain old Beatles’ song, all the way through the song’s “simple words of wisdom” to what those words are telling us, what they are pointing and directing us to. And that is simply this, as the lyrics of the same song tell us, if we hear them clear through: “Let it be!” (Or, as the God of Abraham and Jacob and Isaac, the God of Saul-become-Paul and that devil Peter, the God of Mohammed the Prophet and Mohammed-Ali, says at the very start of Genesis, at least had he said it in Latin: “Fiat!”)
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And that, in my judgment, is a fitting tribute to that old Nazi. It gives him just what he deserves. May all old Nazis be damned! May they all rot in hell!
Indeed, I’m quite certain that all old Nazis, including the one who lurked in Heidegger, already are, and always have been, damned to hell by their own hands. To which I can only add “Amen!” — which is to say, “So be it!”
NOTE: The material in this post was actually written in 2012, for the Heidegger seminar I was teaching at the time.