In-der-Blog-sein

Over at Net Politik a certain J.P. Sartre demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding:

The question is only complicated because there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence -- or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective.

No. Nope. Not the subjective.

Whether, however, the saying "No" at first posits the Not as merely something thought or whether the nihilating at first claims the "No" as what is to be [doing the] speaking in the letting [come to] be of [any kind of] be-ing, this can certainly never be decided in terms of a subjective reflection on thinking already formulated as subjectivity.

And earlier in the Letter on Humanism Heidegger responds directly to Sartre:

On the other hand, Sartre articulates the fundamental statement of existentialism in this way: life precedes what is of the essence. In doing so, he takes existentia and essentia in the sense they have for metaphysics, which since Plato has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this proposition. The reversal of a metaphysical proposition, however, is still a metaphysical proposition.

  ¶ 1:17 PM