Rabbi Bunam von Przysucha, one of the last great teachers of
Hasidism, is said to have once addressed his pupils thus: “I
wanted to write a book called Adam, which would be about the
whole man. But then I decided not to write it.”

In these naive-sounding words of a genuine sage the whole
story of human thought about man is expressed. From time
immemorial man has known that he is the subject most deserv-
ing of his own study, but he has also fought shy of treating this
subject as a whole, that is, in accordance with its total character.

Sometimes he takes a run at it, but the difficulty of this concern
with his own being soon overpowers and exhausts him, and in
silent resignation he withdraws—either to consider all things in
heaven and earth save man, or to divide man into departments
which can be treated singly, in a less problematic, less powerful
and less binding way.

The philosopher Malebranche, the most significant of the
French philosophers who continued the Cartesian investigations,
writes in the foreword to his chief work De la recherche de la vérité
(1674): “Of all human knowledge the knowledge of man is the
most deserving of his study. Yet this knowledge is not the most
cultivated or the most developed which we possess. The general-
ity of men neglect it completely. And even among those who
busy themselves with this knowledge there are very few who
dedicate themselves to it—and still fewer who successfully dedi-
cate themselves to it.” He himself certainly raises in his book
such genuinely anthropological questions as how far the life of
the nerves which lead to the lungs, the stomach, and the liver,
influences the origin of errors; but he too established no
doctrine of the being of man.
 

The most forcible statement of the task set to philosophical
anthropology was made by Kant. In the Handbook to his lectures
on logic, which he expressly acknowledged—though he himself
did not publish it and though it does not reproduce his under-
lying notes authentically—he distinguishes between a phil-
osophy in the scholastic sense and a philosophy in the universal
sense (in sensu cosmico). He describes the latter as “the knowledge
of the ultimate aims of human reason” or as the “knowledge
of the highest maxim of the use of our reason”. The field of
philosophy in this cosmopolitan significance may, according to
Kant, be marked off into the following questions. “1. What can I

know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is
man? Metaphysics answers the first question, ethics the second,
religion the third and anthropology the fourth.” And Kant adds:
“Fundamentally all this could be reckoned as anthropology,
since the first three questions are related to the last.” This formu-
lation repeats the three questions of which Kant says, in the
section of his Critique of Pure Reason entitled Of the ideal of the supreme
good, that every interest of the reason, the speculative as well as
the practical, is united in them. In distinction from the Critique of
Pure Reason he here traces these questions back to a fourth ques-
tion, that about the being of man, and assigns it to a discipline
called anthropology, by which—since he is discussing the
fundamental questions of human philosophizing—only philo-
sophical anthropology can be understood. This, then, would be
the fundamental philosophical science.

But it is remarkable that Kant’s own anthropology, both what
he himself published and his copious lectures on man, which only
appeared long after his death, absolutely fails to achieve what he
demands of a philosophical anthropology. In its express purpose
as well as in its entire content it offers something different—an
abundance of valuable observations for the knowledge of man, for
example, on egoism, on honesty and lies, on fancy, on fortune-
telling, on dreams, on mental diseases, on wit, and so on. But the
question, what man is, is simply not raised, and not one of the
problems which are implicitly set us at the same time by this
question—such as man’s special place in the cosmos, his con-
nexion with destiny, his relation to the world of things, his under-
standing of his fellowmen, his existence as a being that knows it
must die, his attitude in all the ordinary and extraordinary en-
counters with the mystery with which his life is shot through, and
so on—not one of these problems is seriously touched upon.
The wholeness of man does not enter into this anthropology. It is as
if Kant in his actual philosophizing had had qualms about setting
the question which he formulated as the fundamental one.

A modern philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who has dealt (in
his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929) with this strange con-
tradiction, explains it by the indefiniteness of the question, what
man is. The way of asking the question about man, he says, has
itself become questionable. In Kant’s first three questions it is
man’s finitude which is under discussion: “What can I know?”
involves an inability, and thus a limitation; “What ought I to do?”
includes the realization that something has not yet been accom-
plished, and thus a limitation; and “What may I hope?” means
that the questioner is given one expectation and denied another,
and thus it means a limitation. The fourth question is the ques-
tion about “finitude in man”, and is no longer an anthropo-
logical question at all, for it is the question about the essence of
existence itself. As the basis of metaphysics anthropology is
replaced by “fundamental ontology”.

Whatever this finding represents, it is no longer Kant.
Heidegger has shifted the emphasis of Kant’s three questions.
Kant does not ask: “What can I know?” but “What can I know?”
The essential point here is not that there is something I can do
and thus something else that I cannot do; nor is it that there is
something I know and thus something else that I do not know;
but it is that I can know something, and that I can then ask what
that is that I can know. It is not my finitude that is under discus-
sion here, but my real participation in knowing what there is to
know. And in the same way “What ought I to do?” means that
there is something I ought to do, and thus that I am not separated
from “right” doing, but precisely by being able to come to know
my “ought” may find the way to the doing. Finally, “What may I
hope?” does not assert, as Heidegger thinks, that a “may” is
made questionable here, and that in the expectation a want of
what may not be expected is revealed; but it asserts, first, that
there is something for me to hope (for obviously Kant does not
mean that the answer to the third question is “Nothing”), sec-
ondly, that I am permitted to hope it, and thirdly, that precisely

because I am permitted I can learn what it is that I may hope.
That is what Kant says. And thus in Kant the meaning of the
fourth question, to which the first three can be reduced is, what
sort of a being is it which is able to know, and ought to do, and
may hope? And the fact that the first three questions can be
reduced to this question means that the knowledge of the
essence of this being will make plain to me what, as such a being,
it can know, what, as such a being, it ought to do, and what, as
such a being, it may hope. This also means that indissolubly
connected with the finitude which is given by the ability to
know only this, there is a participation in infinity, which is given
by the ability to know at all. The meaning is therefore that when
we recognize man’s finitude we must at the same time recognize his
participation in infinity, not as two juxtaposed qualities but as
the twofold nature of the processes in which alone man’s exist-
ence becomes recognizable. The finite has its effect on him and
the infinite has its effect on him; he shares in finitude and he
shares in infinity.

Certainly Kant in his anthropology has neither answered nor
undertaken to answer the question which he put to
anthropology—What is man? He lectured on another anthro-
pology than the one he asked for—I should say, in terms of the
history of philosophy, an earlier anthropology, one that was still
bound up with the uncritical “science of man” of the 17th and
18th centuries. But in formulating the task which he set to the
philosophical anthropology he asked for, he has left a legacy.
 

It is certainly doubtful to me as well whether such a discipline
will suffice to provide a foundation for philosophy, or, as
Heidegger formulates it, a foundation for metaphysics. For it is
true, indeed, that I continually learn what I can know, what I
ought to do, and what I may hope. It is further true that

philosophy contributes to this learning of mine: to the first ques-
tion by telling me, in logic and epistemology, what being able to
know means, and in cosmology and the philosophy of history
and so on, what there is to know; to the second question by
telling me, in psychology, how the “ought to do” is carried out
psychically, and in ethics, the doctrine of the State, æsthetics and
so on, what there is to do; and to the third question by telling
me, at least in the philosophy of religion, how the “may hope” is
displayed in actual faith and the history of faith—whereas it can
certainly not tell me what there is to hope, since religion itself
and its conceptual elaboration in theology, whose task this is, do
not belong to philosophy. All this is agreed. But philosophy
succeeds in rendering me such help in its individual disciplines
precisely through each of these disciplines not reflecting, and not
being able to reflect; on the wholeness of man. Either a philo-
sophical discipline shuts out man in his complex wholeness and
considers him only as a bit of nature, as cosmology does; or (as
all the other disciplines do) it tears off its own special sphere
from the wholeness of man, delimits it from the other spheres,
establishes its own basic principles and develops its own
methods. In addition it has to remain open and accessible, first to
the ideas of metaphysics itself as the doctrine of being, of what is
and of existence, secondly to the findings of the philosophical
branch disciplines, and thirdly to the discoveries of philo-
sophical anthropology. But least of all may it make itself depend-
ent on the latter; for in every one of those disciplines the
possibility of its achieving anything in thought rests precisely
on its objectification, on what may be termed its “de-
humanization”, and even a discipline like the philosophy of his-
tory, which is so concerned with the actual man, must, in order
to be able to comprehend man as a historical being, renounce con-
sideration of the whole man—of which the kind of man who is
living outside history in the unchanging rhythm of nature is an
essential part. What the philosophical disciplines are able to

contribute to answering Kant’s first three questions, even if it is
only by clarifying them, or teaching me to recognize the prob-
lems they contain, they are able to do only by not waiting for the
answer to the fourth question.

Nor can philosophical anthropology itself set itself the task of
establishing a foundation either for metaphysics or for the indi-
vidual philosophical sciences. If it attempted to answer the ques-
tion What is man? in such a general way that answers to the other
questions could be derived from it, it would miss the very reality
of its own subject. For it would reach, instead of the subject’s
genuine wholeness, which can become visible only by the con-
templation of all its manifold nature, a false unity which has no
reality. A legitimate philosophical anthropology must know that
there is not merely a human species but also peoples, not merely
a human soul but also types and characters, not merely a human
life but also stages in life; only from the systematic comprehen-
sion of these and of all other differences, from the recognition of
the dynamic that exerts power within every particular reality and
between them, and from the constantly new proof of the one in
the many, can it come to see the wholeness of man. For that very
reason it cannot grasp man in that absoluteness which, though it
does not speak out from Kant’s fourth question, yet very easily
presents itself when an answer is attempted—the answer which
Kant, as I have said, avoided giving. Even as it must again and
again distinguish within the human race in order to arrive at a
solid comprehension, so it must put man in all seriousness into
nature, it must compare him with other things, other living
creatures, other bearers of consciousness, in order to define his
special place reliably for him. Only by this double way of distinc-
tion and comparison does it reach the whole, real man who,
whatever his people or type or age, knows, what no being on
earth but he can know, that he goes the narrow way from birth
towards death, tests out what none but he can, a wrestling
with destiny, rebellion and reconciliation, and at times even

experiences in his own blood, when he is joined by choice to
another human being, what goes on secretly in others.

Philosophical anthropology is not intent on reducing philo-
sophical problems to human existence and establishing the
philosophical disciplines so to speak from below instead of from
above. It is solely intent on knowing man himself. This sets it a
task that is absolutely different from all other tasks of thought.
For in philosophical anthropology man himself is given to man
in the most precise sense as a subject. Here, where the subject is
man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as
in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man
as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the
investigator, is himself a man and experiences his humanity in
his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience
any part of nature—not only in a quite different perspective but
also in a quite different dimension of being, in a dimension in
which he experiences only this one part of all the parts of nature.
Philosophical knowledge of man is essentially man’s self-
reflection (Selbstbesinnung), and man can reflect about himself only
when the cognizing person, that is, the philosopher pursuing
anthropology, first of all reflects about himself as a person. The
principle of individuation, the fundamental fact of the infinite
variety of human persons, of whom this one is only one person,
of this constitution and no other, does not relativize anthropo-
logical knowledge; on the contrary, it gives it its kernel and its
skeleton. In order to become genuine philosophical anthropo-
logy, everything that is discovered about historical and modern
man, about men and women, Indians and Chinese, tramps and
emperors, the weak-minded and the genius, must be built up
and crystallized round what the philosopher discovers by reflect-
ing about himself. That is a quite different matter from what, say,
the psychologist undertakes when he completes and clarifies by
reference to his own self in self-observation, self-analysis and
experiment, what he knows from literature and observation. For

with him it is a matter of individual, objectivized processes and
phenomena, of something that is separated from connexion
with the whole real person. But the philosophical anthropologist
must stake nothing less than his real wholeness, his concrete self.
And more; it is not enough for him to stake his self as an object of
knowledge. He can know the wholeness of the person and through
it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity
out and does not remain an untouched observer. He must enter,
completely and in reality, into the act of self-reflection, in order
to become aware of human wholeness. In other words, he must
carry out this act of entry into that unique dimension as an act of
his life, without any prepared philosophical security; that is, he
must expose himself to all that can meet you when you are really
living. Here you do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the
shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the
venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all
your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are
losing consciousness: in this way, and in no other, do you reach
anthropological insight. So long as you “have” yourself, have
yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a
thing among things, the wholeness which is to be grasped is not
yet “there”; only when you are, and nothing else but that, is the
wholeness there, and able to be grasped. You perceive only as
much as the reality of the “being there” incidentally yields to you;
but you do perceive that, and the nucleus of the crystallization
develops itself.

An example may clarify more precisely the relation between
the psychologist and the anthropologist. If both of them investi-
gate, say, the phenomenon of anger, the psychologist will try to
grasp what the angry man feels, what his motives and the
impulses of his will are, but the anthropologist will also try to
grasp what he is doing. In respect of this phenomenon self-
observation, being by nature disposed to weaken the spontaneity
and unruliness of anger, will be especially difficult for both of

them. The psychologist will try to meet this difficulty by a spe-
cific division of consciousness, which enables him to remain
outside with the observing part of his being and yet let his
passion run its course as undisturbed as possible. Of course this
passion can then not avoid becoming similar to that of the actor,
that is, though it can still be heightened in comparison with an
unobserved passion, its course will be different: there will be a
release which is willed and which takes the place of the elem-
ental outbreak, there will be a vehemence which will be more
emphasized, more deliberate, more dramatic. The anthropolo-
gist can have nothing to do with a division of consciousness,
since he has to do with the unbroken wholeness of events, and
especially with the unbroken natural connexion between feel-
ings and actions; and this connexion is most powerfully influ-
enced in self-observation, since the pure spontaneity of the
action is bound to suffer essentially. It remains for the anthro-
pologist only to resign any attempt to stay outside his observing
self, and thus when he is overcome by anger not to disturb it in
its course by becoming a spectator of it, but to let it rage to its
conclusion without trying to gain a perspective. He will be able
to register in the act of recollection what he felt and did then; for
him memory takes the place of psychological self-experience.
But as great writers in their dealings with other men do not
deliberately register their peculiarities and, so to speak, make
invisible notes, but deal with them in a natural and uninhibited
way, and leave the harvest to the hour of harvest, so it is the
memory of the competent anthropologist which has, with refer-
ence to himself as to others, the concentrating power which
preserves what is essential. In the moment of life he has nothing
else in his mind but just to live what is to be lived, he is there
with his whole being, undivided, and for that very reason there
grows in his thought and recollection the knowledge of human
wholeness.
 

The man who feels himself solitary is the most readily disposed
and most readily fitted for the self-reflection of which I am
speaking; that is, the man who by nature or destiny or both is
alone with himself and his problematic, and who succeeds, in
this blank solitude, in meeting himself, in discovering man in his
own self, and the human problematic in his own. The times of
spiritual history in which anthropological thought has so far
found its depth of experience have been those very times in
which a feeling of strict and inescapable solitude took possession
of man; and it was the most solitary men in whom the thought
became fruitful. In the ice of solitude man becomes most
inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question
pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he
becomes an experience to himself.

In the history of the human spirit I distinguish between
epochs of habitation and epochs of homelessness. In the former,
man lives in the world as in a house, as in a home. In the
latter, man lives in the world as in an open field and at times does
not even have four pegs with which to set up a tent. In the
former epochs anthropological thought exists only as a part of
cosmological thought. In the latter, anthropological thought
gains depth and, with it, independence. I will give a few
examples of both, which offer a glance at a few chapters of the
pre-history of philosophical anthropology.

Bernhard Grœthuysen (a pupil of my teacher Wilhelm
Dilthey, the founder of the history of philosophical anthro-
pology) rightly said of Aristotle, in a work called Philosophical
Anthropology (1931), that with him man ceases to be problematic,
with him man speaks of himself always as it were in the third
person, is only a “case” for himself, he attains to consciousness

of self only as “he”, not as “I”. The special dimension, in which
man knows himself as he can know himself alone, remains
unentered, and for that reason man’s special place in the cosmos
remains undiscovered. Man is comprehended only in the world,
the world is not comprehended in him. The tendency of the
Greeks to understand the world as a self-contained space, in
which man too has his fixed place, was perfected in Aristotle’s
geocentric spherical system. The hegemony of the visual sense
over the other senses, which appears among the Greeks for the
first time, as a tremendous new factor in the history of the
human spirit, the very hegemony which enabled them to live a
life derived from images and to base a culture on the forming of
images, holds good in their philosophy as well. A visual image of
the universe (Weltbild) arises which is formed from visual sense-
impressions and objectified as only the visual sense is able to
objectify, and the experiences of the other senses are as it were
retrospectively recorded in this picture. Even Plato’s world of
ideas is a visual world, a world of forms that are seen. But it is
not before Aristotle that the visual image of the universe is real-
ized in unsurpassable clarity as a universe of things, and now man
is a thing among these things of the universe, an objectively
comprehensible species beside other species—no longer a
sojourner in a foreign land like the Platonic man, but given his
own dwelling-place in the house of the world, not, indeed, in
one of the highest storeys, but not in one of the lower, either,
rather in the respectable middle. The presupposition for a philo-
sophical anthropology in the sense of Kant’s fourth question is
lacking here.
 

The first to pose the genuine anthropological question anew, and
in the first person—more than seven centuries after Aristotle—
was Augustine. The solitude out of which he asked the question

can only be understood when one realizes that that round and
unified world of Aristotle had long since collapsed. It collapsed
because the soul of man, divided against itself, could no longer
grasp as truth anything but a world which was divided against
itself. In place of the sphere which had collapsed there now arose
two autonomous and mutually hostile kingdoms, the kingdom
of light and the kingdom of darkness. We meet them again in
almost every system of that widespread and manifold spiritual
movement of gnosis, which at that time seized the embarrassed
heirs of the great oriental and antique cultures, split the godhead
and emptied value from creation; and in the most consistent of
these systems, in Manichæism, there is even, consistently, a
double earth. Here man can no longer be a thing among things,
and he can have no fixed place in the world. Since he consists of
soul and body he is divided between the two kingdoms, he is
simultaneously the scene and the prize of the struggle. In each
man the original man who fell is manifested; in each man the
problematic of being is stated in terms of life. Augustine
emerged from the school of Manichæism. Homeless in the
world, solitary between the higher and the lower powers, he
remains homeless and solitary even after he found salvation in
Christianity as a redemption that had already taken place. So he asks
Kant’s question in the first person, and not, indeed, as with Kant,
as an objectivized problem, which the hearers of his logic lec-
tures could certainly not understand as a question directed to
themselves; but he takes up the question of the psalmist again in
real address, with another sense and in another tone: What is man
that thou art mindful of him? He asks for information from one who
can give it: quid ergo sum, Deus meus? quœ natura mea? He does not
mean only himself; the word natura says clearly that in his person
he means man, that man whom he calls the grande profundum, the
great mystery. And he even draws that same anthropological
conclusion which we have heard in Malebranche; he does it in
his famous accusation of men, that they marvel at mountains, at

the waves of the sea and the course of the stars, but “relinquish”
themselves without being astonished at themselves. This wonder
of man at himself, which Augustine demands as a result of his
own self-experience, is something quite different from the
wonder with which Aristotle in his metaphysic makes all philo-
sophizing begin. The Aristotelian man wonders at man among
the rest, but only as a part of a quite astonishing world. The
Augustinian man wonders at that in man which cannot be
understood as a part of the world, as a thing among things; and
where that former wondering has already passed into method-
ical philosophizing, the Augustinian wondering manifests itself
in its true depth and uncanniness. It is not philosophy, but it
affects all future philosophy.

In the post-Augustinian west it is not the contemplation of
nature, as with the Greeks, but faith which builds a new house in
the cosmos for the solitary soul. The Christian cosmos arises; and
this was so real for every mediæval Christian that all who read
the Divina Commedia made in spirit the journey to the nethermost
spiral of hell and stepped up over Lucifer’s back, through purga-
tory, to the heaven of the Trinity, not as an expedition into lands
as yet unknown, but as a crossing of regions already fully
mapped. Once again there is a self-enclosed universe, once again
a house in which man is allowed to dwell. This universe is still
more finite than that of Aristotle, for here finite time too is taken
into the image in all seriousness—the finite time of the Bible,
which here appears, however, transformed into a Christian form.
The pattern of this image of the universe is a cross, whose verti-
cal beam is finite space from heaven to hell, leading right across
the heart of the human being, and whose cross-beam is finite
time from the creation of the world to the end of days; which
makes time’s centre, the death of Christ, fall coveringly and
redemptively on the centre of space, the heart of the poor sinner.
The mediæval image of the universe is built round this pattern.
In it Dante painted life, the life of men and spirits, but the

conceptual framework was set up for him by Thomas Aquinas.
As of Aristotle, so too it is true of Aquinas, though he was a
theologian, and therefore in duty bound to know about the real
man who says “I” and is addressed as “Thou”, that man speaks
here “as it were always in the third person”. In Aquinas’s world-
system man is indeed a separate species of a quite special kind,
because in him the human soul, the lowest of the spirits, is
substantially united with the human body, the highest of phy-
sical things, so that man appears as it were as “the horizon and
the dividing line of spiritual and physical nature”. But Aquinas
knows no special problem and no special problematic of human
life, such as Augustine experienced and expressed with trem-
bling heart. The anthropological question has here come to rest
again; in man, housed and unproblematic, no impulse stirs to
questioning self-confrontation, or it is soon appeased.
 

In the late middle ages there already emerged a new earnestness
about man as man. The finite world still hedged man safely in;
hunc mundum haud aliud esse, quam amplissimam quandam hominis domum,
says Carolus Bovillus as late as the sixteenth century. But the
same Bovillus cries to man: homo es, sistere in homine, and thus takes
up the motif that had been expressed by the great Cusa before
him: homo non vult esse nisi homo. This by itself certainly does not
imply that man by his nature steps out of and forth from the
world. For Cusa there is not a thing which would not prefer its
own being to all being and its own way of being to all other
ways of being; all that is wishes in eternity to be nothing but
itself, but to be this one thing always more perfectly in the way
proper to its nature; it is precisely from this that the harmony of
the universe grows, for every being contains everything in a
special “contraction”.

But with man there is also thought, the reason which

measures and values. He has in himself all created things, like
God; but God has them in himself as the archetypes, man has
them in himself as relations and values. Cusa compares God to
the coining master of the mint, and man to the money-changer
with his scale of values. God can create all, we can know all; we
can know all because we too carry all in ourselves potentially.
And soon after Cusa, Pico della Mirandola draws from this proud
self-assurance the anthropological conclusion, which again
reminds us of the words of Malebranche: nos autem peculiare aliquid
in homine quaerimus, unde et dignitas ei propria et imago divinae substantiae
cum nulla sibi creatura communis comperiatur. Here the theme of anthro-
pology already clearly appears. But it appears without that setting
of the problematic which is indispensable for the genuine estab-
lishment of anthropology—the deadly earnestness of the ques-
tion about man. Man steps forth here in such autonomy and
such consciousness of power that the real question does not step
up to him. These thinkers of the Renaissance affirm that man can
know, but the Kantian question, what he can know, is still quite
foreign to them: he can know all. It is true that the last in the
series of these thinkers, Bovillus, excepts God: the human spirit
cannot reach God, but Bovillus lets the whole universe be known
by man, who has been created outside it as its spectator, in fact,
as its eye. So securely are these pioneers of a new era still housed
in a secure universe. Cusa, it is true, speaks of the spatial and
temporal infinity of the universe, and thus deprives the earth of
its central position, and destroys in thought the mediæval pat-
tern. But this infinity is only one that is thought, it is not yet
beheld and lived. Man is not yet solitary again, he has still to
learn again to ask the solitary man’s question.

But at the same time as Bovillus was extolling the universe as
man’s amplissima domus, all the walls of the house were in fact
already crumbling beneath the blows of Copernicus, the
unlimited was pressing in from every side, and man was
standing in a universe which in actual fact could no longer be

experienced as a house. Man was no longer secure, but though at
first he had a heroic enthusiasm for the grandeur of this uni-
verse, as with Bruno, then a mathematical enthusiasm for its
harmony, as with Kepler, yet finally, more than a century after
the death of Copernicus and the publication of his work, the new
reality of man proved itself to be more powerful than the new
reality of the universe. Pascal, a great scientist, a mathematician
and a physicist, young and destined to die early, experienced
beneath the starry heavens not merely, as Kant did, their majesty,
but still more powerfully their uncanniness: le silence éternel de ces
espaces infinis m’effraie. With a clarity that has not since then been
surpassed he discerns the twin infinities, that of the infinitely
great and that of the infinitely small, and so comes to know
man’s limitation, his inadequacy, the casualness of his existence:
combien de royaumes nous ignorent! The enthusiasm of Bruno and
Kepler which as it were skipped man is here replaced by a ter-
ribly clear, melancholy yet believing sobriety. It is the sobriety of
the man who has become more deeply solitary than ever before,
and with a sober pathos he frames the anthropological question
afresh: qu’est ce qu’un homme dans l’infini? Cusa’s sovereignty, in
which man boasted that he carried all things in himself and thus
that he could know all things, is opposed here by the insight of
the solitary man, who endures being exposed as a human being
to infinity: Connaissons donc notre portée: nous sommes quelque chose, et ne
sommes pas tout; ce que nous avons d’être nous dérobe la connaissance des premiers
principes, qui naissent du néant; et le peu que nous avons d’être nous cache la vue
de l’infini. But, in this renewal of anthropological thought, from
the very fact that self-reflection is carried out with such clarity,
there is yielded man’s special place in the cosmos. L’homme n’est
qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature: mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas
que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser: une vapeur, une goutte d’eau, suffit pour
le tuer. Mais, quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce
qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui.
L’univers n’en sait rien. This is not the stoic attitude over again; it is

the new attitude of the person who has become homeless in
infinity, for here everything depends on the knowledge that
man’s grandeur is born of his misery, that he is different from all
things just because even as he passes away he can be a child of
the spirit. Man is the being who knows his situation in the
universe and is able, so long as he is in his senses, to continue
this knowledge. What is decisive is not that this creature of all
dares to step up to the universe and know it—however amazing
this is in itself; what is decisive is that he knows the relation
between the universe and himself. Thereby from out of the
midst of the universe something that faces the universe has
arisen. And that means that this “from out of the midst” has its
own special problematic.
 

We have seen that the strict anthropological question, which
refers to man’s specific problematic, becomes insistent in times
when as it were the original contract between the universe and
man is dissolved and man finds himself a stranger and solitary in
the world. The end of an image of the universe, that is, the end of
a security in the universe, is soon followed by a fresh questioning
from man who has become insecure, and homeless, and hence
problematic to himself. But it can be shown that a way leads from
one such crisis to the next, and on to the one after that. The
crises have something essential in common, but they are not
similar. Aristotle’s cosmological image of the universe breaks up
from within, through the soul’s experience of the problem of
evil in its depth, and through its feeling of being surrounded by
a divided universe; Aquinas’s theological image of the universe
breaks up from without, through the universe manifesting itself
as unlimited. What causes the crisis is on the one occasion a
myth, the dualistic myth of gnosis, on the other occasion it is the
cosmos of science itself, no longer clothed with any myth.

Pascal’s solitude is truly historically later than Augustine’s; it is
more complete and harder to overcome. And in fact something
new arises that has not existed before; work is carried out on a
new image of the universe, but a new house in the universe is
no longer built. Once the concept of infinity has been taken
seriously a human dwelling can no longer be made of the uni-
verse. And infinity itself must be included in the image of the
universe—which is a paradox, for an image, if it is really an
image, is limited, yet now the unlimited itself must enter the
image. In other words, when the point is reached where
the image ends, the point, say—to use the language of modern
astronomy—of the nebulæ, which are a hundred million light-
years distant from us, then it must be felt with the utmost
urgency that the image does not and cannot end. Incidentally it
may be noticed, though it is self-evident, that Einstein’s concept
of finite space would be by no means fit for rebuilding the
universe as a house for man, since this “finitude” is essentially
different from that which produced the feeling of the universe as
a house. And more, it is certainly possible that this concept of the
universe, which has been disclosed by the mathematician’s
genius, freed from sensuality, can one day become accessible to
natural human understanding; but it will no longer be in a pos-
ition to produce a new image of the universe, not even a
paradoxical image as the Copernican concept could. For the
Copernican concept only fulfilled what the human soul had
vaguely felt in the hours when the house of universal space, the
Aristotelian or the Thomist, seemed too cramped, and it dared to
beat on its walls to see if a window could not be thrown out into
a world beyond—it fulfilled it, it is true, in a way which deeply
perturbed this same human soul, which cannot help being as it
is, once and for all. But Einstein’s concept of the universe signi-
fies no fulfilment of the spirit’s inkling, but the contradiction of
all its inklings and imaginings: this universe can still be thought,
but it can no longer be imaged, the man who thinks it no longer

really lives in it. The generation which works modern cos-
mology into its natural thought will be the first, after several
millennia of changing images of the universe, which will
have to forego the possession of an image of its universe; this
very fact, that it lives in a universe which cannot be imaged, will
probably be its feeling of the universe, so to speak its image
of the universe: imago mundi nova—imago nulla.
 

I have far anticipated the course of our investigation. Let us
return to our second example and ask how from there we reach
our age in its special human homelessness and solitude, and its
new setting of the anthropological question.

The greatest attempt to master the situation of post-
copernican man, as mediated to us by Pascal, was undertaken
shortly after Pascal’s death by a man who was destined to die
almost as young. Spinoza’s attempt, from the point of view of
our problem, means that astronomical infinity is both
unconditionally accepted and stripped of its uncanniness: exten-
sion, of which this infinity is stated and demonstrated, is only
one of the infinitely many attributes of infinite substance, and it
is one of the two which alone we know—the other is thought.
Infinite substance, also called God by Spinoza, in relation to
which this infinity of space can be only one of infinitely many
attributes, loves, it loves itself, and it loves itself also, and espe-
cially, in man, for the love of the human spirit for God is only
pars infiniti amoris, quo Deus se ipsum amat. Here one may say that
Pascal’s question, what is a man in the infinite, is answered: he
is a being in whom God loves himself. Cosmology and anthro-
pology appear here imposingly reconciled, but the cosmos has
not again become what it was with Aristotle and Aquinas—a
manifold universe, ordered as an image, in which every thing
and every being has its place and the being “man” feels himself

at home in union with them all. A new security of being in the
world is not given; yet for Spinoza this is not necessary: his
devotion to the infinite natura naturans lifts him above the mere
outline character of his natura naturata, which is drawn into the
system only conceptually, as the aggregate of the divine modes,
and in which the kinds and orders of being are not really
grasped and united. There is no new house of the universe, no
ground-plan of a house and no material for it: a man accepts his
homelessness, his lack of a universe, because it enables him to
have adæquata cognitio æternæ et infinitæ essentiæ Dei, that is, enables him
to know how God loves himself in him. A man, however, who
knows this can no longer be problematic to himself.

In Spinoza’s intellectual separatedness reconciliation was
effected. But in actual man’s concrete life with the actual world,
in the unseparated and inseparable life out of which Pascal spoke
and expressed at once man’s frailty and the world’s terror, it
became increasingly difficult to effect it. The age of rationalism,
which weakened and adapted Spinoza’s objectification of being
in which world and man are united, breaks off the point of the
anthropological question; but it remains embedded in the flesh
and secretly festers.

Certainly, one can point to a man who was a true heir of
Spinoza in the post-rationalist age and was made happy by
Spinoza’s “atmosphere of peace”, who was “a child of peace”
and minded to keep peace “for ever and ever with the whole
world”, who grasped and penetrated this world in its living
fulness, as a whole which gives us in its synthesis with spirit
“the most blissful assurance of the harmony of existence”.
Gœthe, who in his place in history appears to us in many
respects like a glorious lethal euphoria before the end of an age,
was undoubtedly still able to live really in the cosmos; but he,
who had plumbed the depths of solitude (“I can speak only with
God about many things”), was exposed in his inmost being to
the anthropological question. Certainly, man to him was “the

first conversation which nature holds with God”, yet, like
Werther, he heard “the voice of the creature completely driven
into itself, lacking itself, and falling irresistibly downwards”.
 

Kant was the first to understand the anthropological question
critically, in such a way that an answer was given to Pascal’s real
concern. This answer—though it was not directed metaphysic-
ally to the being of man but epistemologically to his attitude to
the world—grasped the fundamental problems. What sort of a
world is it, which man knows? How can man, as he is, in his
altered reality, know at all? How does man stand in the world he
knows in this way—what is it to him and what is he to it?

In order to understand the extent to which the Critique of Pure
Reason may be taken as an answer to Pascal’s question we must
consider the question once more. To Pascal infinite space is an
uncanny thing which makes him conscious of the questionable
nature of man, exposed as he is to this world. But what stirs and
terrifies him is not the newly discovered infinity of space in
contrast to the finitude previously believed of it. Rather it is the
fact that, by the impression of infinity, any concept of space, a
finite no less than an infinite, becomes uncanny to him, for really
to try and imagine finite space is as hazardous a venture as really
to try and imagine infinite space, and makes man just as
emphatically conscious that he is not a match for the world.
When I was about fourteen years of age I myself experienced
this in a way which has deeply influenced my whole life. A
necessity I could not understand swept over me: I had to try
again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness,
time with a beginning and an end or a time without beginning
or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless—yet
there seemed to be only the choice between the one or the other
absurdity. Under an irresistible compulsion I reeled from one to

the other, at times so closely threatened with the danger of mad-
ness that I seriously thought of avoiding it by suicide. Salvation
came to the fifteen year old boy in a book, Kant’s Prolegomena to all
Future Metaphysics, which I dared to read although its first sentence
told me that it was not intended for the use of pupils but for
future teachers. This book showed me that space and time are
only the forms in which my human view of what is, necessarily
works itself out; that is, they were not attached to the inner
nature of the world, but to the nature of my senses. It further
taught that it is just as impossible to all my concepts to say that
the world is infinite in space and time as to say that it is finite.
“For neither can be inherent in experience”, and neither can be
situated in the world itself, since the world is given to us only as
an appearance “whose existence and connexions take place only
in experience”. Both can be asserted and both can be proved;
between the thesis and the antithesis there exists an irresoluble
contradiction, an antinomy of cosmological ideas; being itself is
not touched by either. Now I was no longer compelled to torture
myself by trying to imagine first the one unimaginable and then
the opposite equally unimaginable thing: I could gain an inkling
that being itself was beyond the reach alike of the finitude and
the infinity of space and time, since it only appeared in space and
time but did not itself enter into this appearance. At that time I
began to gain an inkling of the existence of eternity as some-
thing quite different from the infinite, just as it is something
quite different from the finite, and of the possibility of a
connexion between me, a man, and the eternal.

Kant’s answer to Pascal may be formulated after this fashion:
what approaches you out of the world, hostile and terrifying, the
mystery of its space and time, is the mystery of your own com-
prehension of the world and the mystery of your own being.
Your question What is man? is thus a genuine question to which
you must seek the answer.

Here Kant’s anthropological question is shown in all clarity as

a legacy to our age. No new house in the universe is being
planned for man, but he, as the builder of houses, is being
required to know himself. Kant sees the age after him in all its
uncertainty as an age of self-restraint and self-reflection, as the
anthropological age. First—as is clear from that well-known
letter of 1793—he saw in the treatment of the fourth question
a task which he set himself, and whose resolution was to follow
that of the first three questions; he did not really set about it,
but he set it in such clarity and urgency that it remained a task
set to following generations, till at last our own generation is
preparing to place itself in its service.
 

First, however, there follows such a radical alienation from the
anthropological setting of the question as has probably never
happened before in the history of human thought. I mean the
system of Hegel, that is, the system which has exercised a
decisive influence not merely on an age’s way of thought but
also on its social and political action—an influence which can be
characterized as the dispossessing of the concrete human person
and the concrete human community in favour of universal
reason, its dialectical processes and its objective structures.
This influence, as is well-known, has also operated on thinkers
who, though deriving from Hegel, have travelled far from
him, such as Kierkegaard on the one hand, the critic of modern
Christianity, who certainly grasped like no other thinker of our
time the significance of the person, but still saw the life of the
person entirely in the forms of the Hegelian dialectic as a move-
ment from the æsthetic to the ethical and from there to the
religious, and Marx on the other hand, who entered with an
unexampled earnestness on the actuality of human society, but

considered its development in forms of Hegelian dialectic as
a movement from primitive communal economy to private
property and from there to socialism.

In his youth Hegel accepted Kant’s anthropological setting of
the question, which was at that time not published in its final
form but whose sense was certainly known to the young man so
deeply engaged with Kant. From this point his thought pro-
ceeded in a genuinely anthropological fashion, in that he sought
to reach, by understanding the organic connexion of the spirit’s
capacities, what Kant himself knew only as a regulative idea, not
as living being, namely, what the young Hegel himself called
(about 1798) the “unity of the whole man”. What he strove
after then has been rightly called an anthropological metaphysic.
He took the concrete human person so seriously that it was by
him that he demonstrated his conception of man’s special posi-
tion. To illustrate this I quote a beautiful sentence from the notes
The Spirit of Christianity and its Destiny, which clearly shows the way
in which Hegel, going beyond Kant, seeks to penetrate the
anthropological problem: “In every man himself there is light
and life, he is the property of light; and he is not illumined by a
light like a dark body which has only a reflected brilliance, but
his own fuel is being kindled and there is a flame of its own.” It
is worth noticing that Hegel does not speak of a general concept
of man here, but of “every man”, that is, of the real person from
whom genuine philosophical anthropology must seriously
begin.

But this setting of the problem will be sought in vain in the
later Hegel, in the one, that is, who has influenced a century’s
thought. I should go so far as to say that the real man will be
sought in vain in the later Hegel. If one, for instance, looks
through the section in the Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences
which is entitled “Anthropology”, one sees that it begins with
statements about what spirit is and signifies, then passes to
statements about the soul as substance. There follow valuable

references to distinctions within mankind and human life,
especially to distinctions of age, of sex, between sleeping and
waking, and so on—but without our being able to relate all this
to a question about the reality and significance of this human
life. Also the chapters about feeling, self-feeling, and habit, give
no help, and even in the chapter entitled “The real soul” we
learn only that the soul is real as the “identity of the inner with
the outer”. The systematic philosopher Hegel no longer begins,
like the young Hegel, with man, but with universal reason; man
is now only the principle in which the universal reason reaches
perfect self-consciousness and thus completion. All the contra-
diction in human life and history does not lead to the anthropo-
logical questionableness and question, but presents itself as a
“ruse” which the idea makes use of in order to reach its own
perfection through the very fact that it overcomes contradiction.
The claim is made that Kant’s fundamental question What is man?
is finally answered here; in reality it is obscured, even eliminated.
Even the first of Kant’s three philosophical questions which pre-
cede the anthropological question, the question What can I know?
is silenced. If man is the place and medium in which the uni-
versal reason knows itself, then there is simply no limitation to
what man can know. In terms of the idea man knows all things,
just as in terms of the idea he realizes all things, that is, all that is
in the reason. Both the knowing and the realizing take place in
history, in which the perfect State appears as the completion
of being and the perfect metaphysic appears as the completion of
knowledge. By experiencing both we experience simultaneously
and adequately the meaning of history and the meaning of man.

Hegel undertakes to give man a new security, to build a new
house of the universe for him. No further house can be built in
Copernican space; Hegel builds it in time alone, which is “the
supreme power of all that is” (1805).

Man’s new house is to be time in the form of history whose
meaning can be perfectly learned and understood. Hegel’s system

is the third great attempt at security within western thought;
following Aristotle’s cosmological attempt and Aquinas’s theo-
logical attempt it is the logological attempt. All insecurity, all
unrest about meaning, all terror at decision, all abysmal prob-
lematic is eliminated. The universal reason goes its undeflectable
way through history, and knowing man knows this way, rather,
his knowledge is the real goal and end of the way in which truth
as it realizes itself knows itself in its realization. The stages of the
way follow one another in an absolute order: the law of dialectic,
in which the thesis is relieved by the antithesis and the antithesis
by the synthesis, is sovereign over them. As one goes with sure
step from storey to storey and from room to room of a well-built
house with its solid foundations and walls and roof, so Hegel’s
all-knowing man goes through the new world-house, history,
whose whole meaning he knows. If only he shares thoroughly in
the thought of the new metaphysic his glance is saved from
dizziness, for he can survey everything. The young man over
whom the dread of the infinite swept since the Copernican revo-
lution, when he opened the window of his room at night and
stood solitary in the darkness, is to know peace now; if the
cosmos, in its infinite greatness and infinite smallness, denies
itself to his heart, the reliable order of history, which “is nothing
but the realization of the spirit”, takes him and makes him at
home. Solitude is overcome, and the question about man is
obliterated.

But now there appears a remarkable historical phenomenon.
In earlier times it took some centuries for criticism to destroy a
cosmic security and to reinvigorate the anthropological ques-
tion. Now the Hegelian image of the universe had, indeed, tre-
mendous effect for a century, penetrating every realm of the
spirit; but the rebellion against it was raised immediately, and
with it the demand for an anthropological perspective was
renewed. The Hegelian house of the universe is admired,
explained, and imitated; but it proves uninhabitable. Thought

confirms it and the word glorifies it; but the real man does not
set foot in it. In the universe of Aristotle real ancient man felt
himself at home; similarly with the real Christian in the universe
of Aquinas; the universe of Hegel has never become the real
universe for real modern man. In the thought of mankind Hegel
succeeded in repressing Kant’s anthropological question only for
a moment; in the life of man he did not overcome even for a
moment the great anthropological unrest which in modern
times is first expressed in Pascal’s question.

I wish to indicate here only one of the reasons for this phe-
nomenon. An intellectual image of the universe which builds on
time can never give the same feeling of security as one which
builds on space. To grasp this fact we must distinguish sharply
between cosmological and anthropological time. We can as it
were comprehend cosmological time, that is, make use of the
concept of it, as if all time were present in a relative way, even
though the future is not given to us at all. Anthropological time,
on the other hand, that is, time in respect of actual, consciously
willing man, cannot be comprehended, because the future can-
not be present, since it depends to a certain extent, in my con-
sciousness and will, on my decision. Anthropological time is real
only in the part which has become cosmological time, that is, in
the part called the past. This distinction is not identical with
Bergson’s well-known one, whose durée means a flowing present,
whereas the anthropological time which I mean functions essen-
tially through the memory—of course, in respect of the present,
this is always “open” memory: as soon as we experience some-
thing as time, as soon as we become conscious of the dimension
of time as such, the memory is already in play; in other words,
the pure present knows no specific consciousness of time. It is
true that we do not know cosmological time as a whole either, in
spite of our knowledge of the regular movements of the stars,
and so on; but our thoughts may be engaged with it as
with something real, even in what we do not know of this, and

naturally even in what we do not know of future human actions,
since in the moment of thought all their causes are present. With
the anthropological future, on the other hand, our thoughts
cannot be engaged as with something real, since my decision,
which will take place in the next moment, has not yet taken
place. The same is true of the decisions of other men, since I
know, on the basis of the anthropological concept of man as a
consciously willing being, that he cannot be understood simply
as a part of the world. Within the boundaries of the human
world which is given in the problem of human being there is no
certainty of the future. The time which Hegel introduced into
the groundwork of his image of the universe, cosmological time,
is not actual human time but a time in terms of thought. It lies in
the power of human thought but not of living human imagin-
ation to incorporate perfection in the reality of what is; it is
something which can be thought, but not lived. An intellectual
image of the universe, which incorporates “the goal of universal
history”, has no power in this part of it to give assurance, the
unbroken line changes as it were into a dotted line, which even
the mightiest philosopher cannot transform for us into a con-
tinuous line. The only exception is an image of the universe
which is grounded on faith: the power of faith alone can experi-
ence perfection as something assured, because it is something
guaranteed to us by someone we trust—whom we trust as the
guarantor also for what has not yet come to be in our world. In
the history of religion we know above all two such great images
of the universe, that of Persian Messianism, in which the future
final and complete victory of light over darkness is guaranteed to
the precise hour, and that of Israelite Messianism, which rejects
such precision because it understands man himself, frail, contra-
dictory, questionable man himself as an element that can both
contribute to salvation and hinder it; but final and complete
salvation is guaranteed to this form of Messianism as well, in
faith in the saving power of God which carries out in the midst

of history its work on resisting man. In the Christian picture of
the universe, as we saw it in its finished form in Aquinas, the
effect of Messianism persists, though weakened. In Hegel’s sys-
tem Messianism is secularized, that is, it is transferred from the
sphere of faith, in which man feels himself to be bound up with
the object of his faith, to the sphere of evident conviction, in
which man contemplates and considers the object of his convic-
tion. This has been repeatedly remarked. But it has not been
sufficiently observed that in such a transference the element of
trust cannot be taken over at the same time. Faith in creation may
be replaced by a conviction about evolution, faith in revelation
by a conviction about increasing knowledge, but faith in salva-
tion will not really be replaced by a conviction about the perfect-
ing of the world by the idea, since only trust in the trustworthy
is able to establish a relation of unconditional certainty towards
the future. I say, not really replaced, that is, not in and for real life.
For in mere thought a conviction about the self-realization of an
absolute reason in history does not achieve less, even for man’s
relation to the future, than a messianic faith in God; in fact, it
achieves even more, since it is, so to speak, chemically pure and
undisturbed by any kind of adulteration by actuality. But
thought does not have the power to build up man’s real life, and
the strictest philosophical certainty cannot endow the soul with
that intimate certitude that the world which is so imperfect will
be brought to its perfection. In the last resort the problem of
the future does not exist for Hegel, since he saw, in fact, in his
own age and in his own philosophy the beginning of fulfil-
ment, so that the dialectical movement of the idea through time
has really reached its end already. But what devoted admirer of
the philosopher has ever truly shared in this worldly auto-
messianism, that is, not merely with thought, but—as has con-
tinually happened in the history of religion—with the whole
real life?

It is true that there is a significant phenomenon within the

sphere of Hegel’s influence which seems to contradict what I
said about the attitude to the future. I mean Marx’s doctrine of
history, which is based on the Hegelian dialectic. Here too a
certainty with regard to perfection is proclaimed, here too Mes-
sianism is secularized; yet real man, in the shape of the modern
proletarian masses, has entered into this certainty and made this
secularized Messianism his faith. How is this to be understood?
What Marx has carried out with Hegel’s method can be called a
sociological reduction. That is, he does not wish to present any
image of the universe; none is necessary any more. (The repre-
sentation of an image of the universe which Engels later—in
1880—attempted, under the title Dialectic of Nature, a quite deriva-
tory rendering of the teaching of Hæckel and other evolution-
ists, completely contradicts the fundamental restriction made by
Marx.) What Marx wants to give the men of his age is not an
image of the universe but only an image of society, more pre-
cisely, the image of the way by which human society is to reach
its perfection. The Hegelian idea or universal reason is replaced
by human conditions of production, from whose transformation
proceeds the transformation of society. Conditions of produc-
tion are what are essential and basic for Marx; they are the point
from which he starts and to which he retraces everything; there
is no other origin and no other principle for him. Certainly, they
cannot be considered, like Hegel’s universal reason, as the first
and the last; sociological reduction means an absolute renunci-
ation of a perspective of being in which there exists a first and a
last. In Marx the home in which man can dwell—that is, will be
able to dwell when it is ready—is built up on conditions of
production alone. Man’s world is society. In actual fact a security
is established by this reduction which the proletarian masses
really did accept and take up into their lives, at least for the
duration of an age. When the attempt has been made within
Marxism, as by Engels, to eliminate this reduction and to present
the proletariat with an image of the universe, the proved vital

security has been confused with a completely baseless
intellectual security and thus robbed of its genuine force.

Certainly, something else, which is particularly important, is
added to the reduction. Hegel perceives the beginning of fulfil-
ment in his own age, in which the absolute spirit reaches its
goal. Marx simply cannot see the fulfilment beginning in the
heyday of capitalism, which has to be relieved by socialism
which brings about the fulfilment. He sees, however, in his age
something existing in which fulfilment is manifested and
guaranteed—namely, the proletariat. In the existence of the pro-
letariat the elimination of capitalism, the “negation of the neg-
ation”, is bodily declared. “When the proletariat,” says Marx,
“proclaims the dissolution of the hitherto existing world-order,
then it is only expressing the mystery of its own existence,
for it is the actual dissolution of this world-order.” By this
fundamental thesis Marx is able to provide the proletariat with a
security. Nothing else needs to be believed in but its own con-
tinuation, till the hour in which its existence becomes its action.
The future appears here as bound to the directly experienced
present and assured by it. Thought consequently does not have
the power to construct man’s real life; but life itself has this power,
and the spirit has it, if it acknowledges the power of life and joins
to it its own power, which is different in nature and effect.

Marx is both right and wrong in this view of the power of
social life proper. He is right, since in fact social life, like all life,
itself produces the forces which can renew it. But he is wrong,
since human life, to which social life belongs, is distinct from all
other kinds of life by the power of decision which is distinct
from all other kinds of power: this power is different from them
all in that it does not appear as quantity, but reveals the measure
of its strength only in action itself. It depends on the direction
and force of this power how far the renewing powers of life as
such are able to take effect, and even whether they are not trans-
formed into powers of destruction. The development depends

essentially on something which cannot be explained in terms of
the development. In other words, neither in man’s personal nor
in his social life must anthropological time be confused with
cosmological time, not even when the latter is endowed with the
form of the dialectical process, as, for example, in Marx’s famous
statement that capitalist production breeds its negation “with the
necessity of a natural process”. With all his sociological reduc-
tion he does no more than follow in Hegel’s tracks and intro-
duce cosmological time—that is, a time which is alien to man’s
reality—into his consideration of the future. The problem of
human decision, as the origin of events and of destiny, including
social events and destiny, does not exist here at all. Such a doc-
trine can persist in power only so long as it does not clash with a
moment in history in which the problematic of human decision
makes itself felt to a terrifying degree, I mean a moment in
which catastrophic events exercise a frightening and paralysing
influence over the power of decision, and repeatedly move it to
renunciation in favour of a negative élite of men—men who,
knowing no inner restraint, do not act as they do from real
decision, but only stick to their power. In such situations the
man who is striving for the renewal of social life, socialist man,
can only share in the decision of his society’s destiny if he
believes in his own power of decision and knows that it matters,
for only then does he actualize, in the effect which his decision
has, the highest strength of his power of decision. In such a
moment he can only share in the decision of his society’s destiny
if the view of life which he holds does not contradict his
experience.

Hegel as it were compulsorily combined the course of the
stars and of history into a speculative security. Marx, who con-
fined himself to the human world, ascribed to it alone a security
in regard to the future, which is likewise dialectic, but has the
effect of an actual security. To-day this security has perished in
the ordered chaos of a terrible historical revulsion. Gone is the

calm, a new anthropological dread has arisen, the question about
man’s being faces us as never before in all its grandeur and
terror—no longer in philosophical attire, but in the nakedness of
existence. No dialectical guarantee keeps man from falling; it lies
with himself to lift his foot and take the step which leads him
away from the abyss. The strength to take this step cannot come
from any security in regard to the future, but only from those
depths of insecurity in which man, overshadowed by despair,
answers with his decision the question about man’s being.
 

With Marx we are already in the midst of the anthropological
rebellion against Hegel. At the same time we can see in per-
fect clarity in Marx the peculiar character of this rebellion. There
is a return to the anthropological limitation of the picture
of the universe without a return to the anthropological proble-
matic and setting of the question. The philosopher who so
rebelled against Hegel, and as whose pupil in this respect Marx
has to be regarded, in spite of all differences and even opposi-
tions between them, is Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s anthropological
reduction precedes Marx’s sociological reduction.

In order to understand aright Feuerbach’s struggle against
Hegel and its significance for anthropology, it is best to begin
with the fundamental question, What is the beginning of phil-
osophy? Kant, in opposition to rationalism, and based on Hume,
had established cognition as the very first thing for philosophiz-
ing men, and thus made the decisive philosophical problem
what knowing is and how it is possible. This problem then led
him, as we saw, to the anthropological question—what kind of a
being is man, who knows in this way? Hegel, perfectly conscious
of what he was doing, passed over this first thing. In his view, as

he expressed it with complete clarity in the first edition of his
Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), there must not be any
immediate object at the beginning of philosophy, since immedi-
acy is by nature opposed to philosophical thought; in other
words, philosophy is not permitted, as with Kant and Descartes
before him, to start from the situation of the philosophizing
man, but it must “anticipate”. He carries out this anticipating in
the sentence: “Pure being is the beginning,” which is straight-
away explained as follows: “Now, pure being is pure abstrac-
tion.” On this basis Hegel is able to make the development of the
universal reason, instead of that of human cognition, into the
object of philosophy. This is the point where Feuerbach puts in
his attack. The universal reason is only a new concept for God;
and as theology, when it said “God”, only transferred the human
essence itself from earth to heaven, so metaphysics, when it says
“universal reason”, only transfers the human essence from con-
crete existence to abstract existence. The new philosophy—so
Feuerbach formulates it in his manifesto, Principles of the Philosophy
of the Future (1843)—has as its principle “not the absolute, that is,
the abstract, spirit—in short, not reason in abstracto, but man’s
real, whole being”. Unlike Kant, Feuerbach wishes to make the
whole being, not human cognition, the beginning of philoso-
phizing. In his view nature too is to be understood only as the
“basis of man”. “The new philosophy”, he says, “makes man . . .
the exclusive, universal . . . object of philosophy, and thus makes
anthropology . . . the universal science.” Thus the anthropo-
logical reduction, the reduction of being to human existence, is
carried out. One could say that Hegel, in the position he assigns
to man, follows the first creation story, that of the first chapter of
Genesis, of the creation of nature, where man is created last and
given his place in the cosmos, yet in such a way that creation is
not only ended but also completed in its significance now that
the “image of God” has appeared; while Feuerbach follows the
second creation story, that of the second chapter of Genesis, of the

creation of history, where there is no world but that of man, man
in its centre, giving all living things their true name. Never
before has a philosophical anthropology been so emphatically
demanded. But Feuerbach’s postulate does not lead beyond the
threshold to which Kant’s fourth question led us. More, in one
decisive respect we feel that we are not merely no further
advanced than with Kant, but actually less advanced. For in
Feuerbach’s demand the question What is man? is not included at
all. Indeed, his demand means a renunciation of this question.
His anthropological reduction of being is a reduction to
unproblematic man. But the real man, man who faces a being that is
not human, and is time and again over-powered by it as by an
inhuman fate, yet dares to know this being and this fate, is not
unproblematic; rather, he is the beginning of all problematic. A
philosophical anthropology is not possible unless it begins from
the anthropological question. It can be attained only by a formula-
tion and expression of this question which is more profound,
sharp, strict, and cruel than it has ever been before. Nietzsche’s
real significance lies, as we shall see, in his undertaking of such a
deepening and sharpening of the question.

But we must first continue to deal with Feuerbach, for the sake
of a matter which is extraordinarily important for the thought of
our age about man. By man, whom he considers as the highest
subject of philosophy, Feuerbach does not mean man as an indi-
vidual, but man with man—the connexion of I and Thou. “The
individual man for himself,” runs his manifesto, “does not have
man’s being in himself, either as a moral being or a thinking
being. Man’s being is contained only in community, in the unity
of man with man—a unity which rests, however, only on the
reality of the difference between I and Thou.” Feuerbach did not
elaborate these words in his later writings. Marx did not take up
into his concept of society the element of the real relation
between the really different I and Thou, and for that very reason
opposed an unreal individualism with a collectivism which was

just as unreal. But in those words Feuerbach, passing beyond
Marx, introduced that discovery of the Thou, which has been
called “the Copernican revolution” of modern thought, and “an
elemental happening which is just as rich in consequences as the
idealist discovery of the I” and “is bound to lead to a new
beginning of European thought, pointing beyond the Cartesian
contribution to modern philosophy”.1 I myself in my youth was
given a decisive impetus by Feuerbach.
 

Nietzsche depends much more solidly on Feuerbach’s anthropo-
logical reduction than is usually admitted. He falls short of
Feuerbach in that he loses sight of the autonomous sphere of the
relation between I and Thou and is content, in respect of inter-
human relations, to continue on the line of the French moral
philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
complete it by depicting the origin and development of moral-
ity. But he far surpasses Feuerbach in that, like no other previous
thinker, he brings man into the centre of his thought about the
universe, and not, as with Feuerbach, man as a clear and
unambiguous being, but rather man as a problematic being; and
thereby he endows the anthropological question with an
unprecedented force and passion.

The questionableness of man is Nietzsche’s real great theme,
which engages him from his first philosophical efforts till the
end. As early as 1874, in his study of Schopenhauer as an educa-
tor, he puts a question which is like a marginal note to Kant’s

1 Karl Heim, Ontologie und Theologie, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, neue
Folge XI (1930), 333; Karl Heim, Glaube und Denken I. Auflage (1931), 405 ff (in
the revised edition of 1934 Heim excised this passage). The English translation,
God Transcendent, has been made from this third, revised and shortened, and
altogether more orthodox edition. For a similar point of view see especially
Emil Brunner.

fourth question, and in which our age is mirrored as Kant’s age
is mirrored in his question: “How can man know himself?” And
he adds by way of explanation: “He is something dark and
veiled.” Ten years later comes an explanation of this explanation:
man is “the animal that is not yet established”. That is, he is not a
determined, unambiguous, final species like the others, he is not
a finished form, but something that is only becoming. If we
regard him as a finished form then he must appear “as the
supreme aberration of nature and a self-contradiction”, for he is
the being which, “in consequence of a violent separation from
the animal past”, suffers from himself and from the problem of
what his life means. But that is only a transition. In truth, man—
as Nietzsche finally expresses it in the notes which were brought
together posthumously under the title The Will to Power—is “as it
were an embryo of the man of the future”, of the real man, of
the real species man. The paradox of the situation consists in the
fact that the coming of this real future man is not at all assured;
present man, the man of the transition, must first create him out
of the material which he himself is. “Man is something fleeting
and plastic—one can make of him what one will.” Man, animal
man, “has hitherto had no meaning. His existence on earth has
had no goal. ‘To what end man?’ was a question without an
answer”. He suffered, “but it was not the suffering itself which
was his problem, but that there was no answer to the cry ‘To
what end this suffering?’ ” The ascetic ideal of Christianity
wishes to free man from the meaninglessness of suffering; it
does this by separating him from the foundations of life and
leading him towards nothing. It is from life that man must take
the meaning which he has to give to himself. But life is “the will
to power”; all great humanity and great culture has developed
from the will to power and from a good conscience to it. The
ascetic ideals, which gave man a “bad conscience”, have sup-
pressed this will. The real man will be he who has a good con-
science towards his will to power. That is the man we should

“create” and “breed”, for whose sake we should “overcome”
what is called man. Present man is “no goal, but only a way, an
episode, a bridge, a great promise”. That is what, in Nietzsche’s
view, distinguished man from all animals: he is “an animal that
may promise”; that is, he treats a bit of the future as something
dependent on him for which he answers. No animal can do that.
This human quality has arisen out of the contractual relation
between creditor and debtor, out of the debtor’s obligation. The
“leading ethical concept of ‘guilt’ (Schuld) took its origin from
the very material concept of ‘debts’ (Schulden)”. And human soci-
ety has elevated by every possible means the quality which has
arisen in this way, in order to keep the individual fulfilling his
ethical and social duties. As the supreme means it made use of
the ascetic ideals. Man must be free of it all, of his bad con-
science and of the bad salvation from this conscience, in order to
become in truth the way. Now he no longer promises others the
fulfilment of his duties, but he promises himself the fulfilment
of man.

Whatever of these ideas is meant as an answer is wrong. First,
the sociological and ethnological presupposition about the his-
tory of man’s origins is wrong. The concept of guilt is found
most powerfully developed even in the most primitive com-
munal forms which we know, where the relation between
creditor and debtor is almost non-existent: the man is guilty
who violates one of the original laws which dominate the soci-
ety and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy
who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws,
which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is
often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically
carried out on the boy, with a symbolical re-birth. Just because
the man has learned to promise in this way it is possible for
the contract-relation in private economy to develop between the
debtor who promises and the creditor who is promised.

Secondly, the psychological and historical view of the will to

power is wrong. Nietzsche’s concept of a will to power is not so
unambiguous as Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to life, on
which it was modelled. Sometimes he understands by it the will
to acquire ever more and more power; “all purposive happen-
ings”, he says, “can be reduced to the purpose of increasing
power”; all that lives strives, in his view, “for power, for increase
in power”, “for a maximal feeling of power”. But another time
he defines the will to power as the “insatiable desire to display
power, or to employ, to practise power”. These are two different
things. We may, nevertheless, look on them as the two sides, or
the two moments, of the same event. At any rate we know that
real greatness in history, in the history of the spirit and of cul-
ture, as well as in the history of peoples and of states, cannot be
characterized by either of these. Greatness by nature includes a
power, but not a will to power. Greatness has an inner powerful-
ness, which sometimes grows suddenly and irresistibly to power
over men, sometimes exerts its effect quietly and slowly on a
company that is quietly and slowly increasing, sometimes, too,
seems to have no effect at all, but rests in itself, and sends out
beams which will perhaps catch the glance only of some far
time. But greatness strives neither to “increase” nor to “display”
power. The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most
intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his
forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but
he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of
what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit. Of course he
needs power for this realization; for power—when we strip the
concept of the dithyrambic splendour with which Nietzsche
equipped it—means simply the capacity to realize what one
wants to realize; but the great man is not avid for this capacity—
which is, after all, only a self-evident and indispensable means—
but for what he wishes to be capable of. This is the point from
where we can understand the responsibility in which the powerful
man is placed, namely whether, and how far, he is really serving

his goal; and also the point from where we can understand the
seduction by power, leading him to be unfaithful to the goal and
yield to power alone. When we see a great man desiring power
instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more
precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches
himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the
spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senseless-
ness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the
genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being
by nature without power, slave for power, for an ever fresh dis-
play of power and an ever fresh increase of power, in order that
they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and
who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since
a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and
self-reflection would bring collapse. From this point, too, the
connexion between power and culture is to be judged. It is an
essential element of the history of almost all peoples that the
political leadership which is historically important strives to win
and to increase the power of the nation; that is, precisely what, as
we saw, has a pathological character in personal life is normal in
the relation between the historical representatives of the nation
and the nation itself. Now again the characters separate in
decisive fashion. It is decisively important whether the man who
leads longs in his inmost heart, in his deepest desire and dream,
to acquire power for his nation for power’s sake, or in order that
the nation may attain the capacity to realize what in his view
appears as their nature and destiny—what he has discovered in
his own soul as the sign of a future which is waiting for this
nation, to be realized by it. If a man longs in this way for power
for his nation then what he does in the service of his will or his
vocation furthers, enriches and renews the national culture; if he
longs for national power in itself then he may achieve the
greatest successes—what he does will only weaken and paralyse
the national culture he wishes to glorify. The heyday of a

community’s culture is only rarely identical with the heyday of
its power: great, genuine, spontaneous cultural productivity
mostly precedes the time of intense striving and struggling for
power, and the cultural activity which follows that time is mostly
only a gathering and completing and imitating—unless a con-
quered people brings a new elemental cultural force to the
powerful conqueror and enters into an association with it in
which the people which has become politically powerless repre-
sents culturally the powerful, male, generative principle. No-one
knew more clearly than the historian Jakob Burckhardt that polit-
ical predominance and the capacity to realize the hidden form,
the “idea”, thus producing culture, are only seldom compatible.
Burckhardt was the man whom Nietzsche admired as he did
scarcely any other of his contemporaries, though Burckhardt
more and more set him quietly aside. It is noteworthy that the
spark which kindled Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the will to
power probably came from a lecture by Burckhardt which he
heard in 1870. We possess these lectures now in Burckhardt’s
posthumous book, published with the title Reflections on World His-
tory, one of the few important books about the powers which
determine what we call history. We read there that the real inner
incentive for the great historical individual is not love of glory,
not ambition, but “the sense of power, which as an irresistible
impulse drives the great individual into the light of day”. But
Burckhardt understands by that something quite different from
the will to power in itself. He sees “the characteristic of great-
ness” in “its carrying out a will which goes beyond the indi-
vidual”. It is possible that the community and the age are
unconscious of this will; “the individual knows what the
nation’s will should really be, and carries it out”, because “the
force and capacity of infinitely many are concentrated” in him.
There appears here, as Burckhardt says, “a secret coincidence of
the egoism of the individual” with the greatness of the whole.
But the coincidence can be broken up if the means of power

which are adopted “react on the individual and in the long run
deprive him of the taste for great aims”. On the basis of this
insight Burckhardt uttered, in another lecture at that time—
taking up the words of an earlier historian, Schlosser—the
memorable, much-repeated and much-misunderstood words:
“Now power in itself is evil, no matter who exercises it. It has no
persistence, but is greed and eo ipso cannot be fulfilled, hence it is
unhappy in itself and is bound to be the cause of unhappiness in
others.” These words can only be understood in the context of
Burckhardt’s thoughts, when one notes that he is speaking here
of power in itself. So long as a man’s power, that is, his capacity to
realize what he has in mind, is bound to the goal, to the work, to
the calling, it is, considered in itself, neither good nor evil, it is
only a suitable or an unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this
bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases
to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of
it as a possession, that is, thinks of power in itself, then his
power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil; it is power with-
drawn from responsibility, power which betrays the spirit,
power in itself. It corrupts the history of the world. Genuine
knowledge of historical reality must rectify in this way
Nietzsche’s wrong answer to the anthropological question,
when he says that man is to be understood, and released from his
problematic nature, from the standpoint of the will to power.

As we see, Nietzsche did not give a positive foundation for a
philosophical anthropology. But in elevating, as no previous
thinker has done, the questionableness of human life to be the
real subject of philosophizing he gave the anthropological ques-
tion a new and unheard-of impulse. Yet it is specially noteworthy
that from beginning to end of his thought he endeavoured to
overcome the special problem of man in its strict sense. With
Augustine, with Pascal, and even with Kant, the pathos of the
anthropological question lies in our perceiving something in
ourselves that we cannot explain to ourselves from nature and its

development alone. For philosophy till Nietzsche, so far as it has
an anthropological concern, “man” is not merely a species, but a
category. But Nietzsche, who is very strongly determined by the
eighteenth century, and whom one would sometimes like to call
a mystic of the Enlightenment, does not acknowledge such a
category or basic problem. He attempts to follow out a thought
indicated by Empedocles, but since then never discussed in a
genuinely philosophical fashion: he wants to understand man
purely genetically, as an animal that has grown out and stepped
forth from the animal world. He writes: “We no longer derive
man from the ‘spirit’, we have put him back among the ani-
mals.” These could be the words of one of the French encyclo-
pædists. But all the same Nietzsche remains deeply conscious
of the specifically human questionableness. It is this very ques-
tionableness which he wants to explain by the fact of man’s
breakaway from the animal world and his aberration from his
instincts; man is problematic because he is an “overwrought
kind of animal” and thus a “sickness” of the earth. For Kant the
problem of man is a frontier problem, that is, the problem of a
being which belongs, certainly, to nature, but not to nature
alone, of a being that is established on the frontier between
nature and another realm. For Nietzsche the problem of man is a
problem of the edge, the problem of a being that has moved from
within nature to its utmost edge, to the perilous end of natural
being, where there begins, not as for Kant the ether of the spirit
but the dizzying abyss of nothing. Nietzsche no longer sees in
man a being in himself, a “new thing”, which has come out of
nature but in such a way that the fact and the way of this coming
cannot be grasped by concepts of nature; he sees only a becoming,
“an attempt, a groping, a missing the mark”, not precisely a
being but at best the pre-form of a being, “the animal that is not
yet established”, thus an extreme piece of nature, where some-
thing new has only begun to grow, which till now has certainly
seemed very interesting but, considered in respect of its totality,

not really a success. Yet two definite things, he thinks, can arise
from this indefinite thing. Either man, in virtue of his “growing
morality”, which suppresses his instincts, will develop in him-
self “merely the herd animal” and thus “establish” the animal
Man as the species in which the animal world goes into decline,
as the decadent animal. Or man will overcome what is “funda-
mentally amiss” with him, give new life to his instincts, bring to
light his unexhausted possibilities, build up his life on the
affirmation of the will to power, and breed the superman who
will be the real man, the successful new being. For this goal
Nietzsche apparently does not think how it could come to pass
that such an “ill-bred” animal could pull itself out of the bog of
its own ambiguity. He demands conscious breeding on a wide-
spread scale, and does not think of what he himself wrote: “We
deny that anything that is being consciously made can be made
perfect.” We are, however, not concerned here with these inner
contradictions in Nietzsche’s thought, but with something else.
Nietzsche, as we have seen, undertook with passionate earnest-
ness to explain man in terms of the animal world; the specific
problem of man does not thereby fade out, but has become
more visible than ever. Only, from this point of view, the ques-
tion ceases to be, How is it to be understood that there is such a being as
man? but is How is it to be understood that such a being as man has emerged
and stepped forth from the animal world? But in spite of all the arguments
he brought to bear throughout his thought Nietzsche has not
made this clear. He has scarcely troubled about what is for us the
fundamental anthropological fact and the most amazing of all
earthly facts—that there is in the world a being who knows the
universe as a universe, its space as space, its time as time, and
knows himself in it as knowing it. But that does not mean, as has
been asserted, that the world exists “over again” in man’s con-
sciousness, but that a world in our sense, a unified, spatio-
temporal world of the senses, only exists in virtue of man,
because only the human person is able to combine into a cosmic

unity the data of his own senses and the traditional data of the
whole race. Certainly, if Nietzsche had troubled about this fun-
damental fact it would have led him to the sociology he des-
pised, namely, to the sociology of knowledge and the sociology
of tradition, to that of language, and that of the generations—in
brief, to the sociology of human thinking together, which
Feuerbach had in principle already pointed out. The man who
knows a world is man with man. The problem which Nietzsche
neglected, that such a being exists, is only shifted in his view
from the realm of the being of a species to the realm of its
becoming. If a being has emerged from the animal world who
knows about life and about his own life, then the fact and the
manner of this emergence cannot be explained by his place in
the animal world or comprehended by concepts of nature. For
post-Nietzschian philosophy man is more than ever not merely
a species, but a category. Kant’s question What is man? is put to us
with new urgency by Nietzsche’s passionate anthropological
concern. We know that to answer it we must invoke not
merely the spirit but also nature to tell us what it has to tell; but
we know that we have also to approach another power for
information, namely, community.

I say “we know”. But it is true that modern philosophical
anthropology, even in its most significant representatives, has
not yet realized this knowledge. Whether it has turned more to
the spirit or more to nature, the power of community has not
been invoked. If this power is not invoked the others lead
not only to fragmentary knowledge but of necessity also to
knowledge which is inadequate in itself.
 

Only in our time has the anthropological problem reached
maturity, that is, come to be recognized and treated as an
independent philosophical problem. Besides philosophical
development itself, which led to an increasing insight into the
problematic nature of human existence, and whose most
important points I have presented, two factors which are con-
nected in many ways with this development have contributed to
bringing the anthropological problem to maturity. Before dis-
cussing the present situation I must indicate the character and
significance of these factors.

The first is predominantly sociological in nature. It is the
increasing decay of the old organic forms of the direct life of
man with man. By this I mean communities which quantita-
tively must not be too big to allow the men who are connected
by them to be brought together ever anew and set in a direct
relation with one another, and which qualitatively are of such a
nature that men are ever anew born into them or grow into
them, who thus understand their membership not as the result
of a free agreement with others but as their destiny and as a vital
tradition. Such forms are the family, union in work, the com-
munity in village and in town. Their increasing decay is the price
that had to be paid for man’s political liberation in the French
Revolution and for the subsequent establishment of bourgeois
society. But at the same time human solitude is intensified anew.
The organic forms of community offered to modern man—
who, as we saw, has lost the feeling of being at home in the
world, has lost cosmological security—a life which had the qual-
ity of home, a resting in direct connexion with those like him, a

sociological security which preserved him from the feeling of
being completely exposed. Now this too slipped away from him
more and more. In their outer structure many of the old organic
forms remained as before, but they decayed inwardly, they stead-
ily lost meaning and spiritual power. The new community forms
which undertook to bring the individual anew into connexion
with others, such as the club, the trade union, the party, have, it
is true, succeeded in kindling collective passions, which, as is
said, “fill out” men’s lives, but they have not been able to re-
establish the security which has been destroyed. All that happens
is that the increased sense of solitude is dulled and suppressed by
bustling activities; but wherever a man enters the stillness, the
actual reality of his life, he experiences the depth of solitude, and
confronted with the ground of his existence experiences the
depth of the human problematic.

The second factor can be described as one of the history of the
spirit, or better, of the soul. For a century man has moved ever
deeper into a crisis which has much in common with others that
we know from earlier history, but has one essential peculiarity.
This concerns man’s relation to the new things and connexions
which have arisen by his action or with his co-operation. I
should like to call this peculiarity of the modern crisis man’s
lagging behind his works. Man is no longer able to master the
world which he himself brought about: it is becoming stronger
than he is, it is winning free of him, it confronts him in an
almost elemental independence, and he no longer knows the
word which could subdue and render harmless the golem (14)
he has created. Our age has experienced this paralysis and failure
of the human soul successively in three realms. The first was the
realm of technique. Machines, which were invented in order to
serve men in their work, impressed him into their service. They
were no longer, like tools, an extension of man’s arm, but man
became their extension, an adjunct on their periphery, doing
their bidding. The second realm was the economic. Production,

immensely increased in order to supply the growing number of
men with what they needed, did not reach a reasonable co-
ordination; it is as though the business of the production and
utilization of goods spread out beyond man’s reach and with-
drew itself from his command. The third realm was the political.
In the first world war, and on both sides, man learned with ever
greater horror how he was in the grip of incomprehensible
powers, which seemed, indeed, to be connected with man’s will
but which threw off their bonds and again and again trampled
on all human purposes, till finally they brought all, both on this
side and on the other, to destruction. Man faced the terrible fact
that he was the father of demons whose master he could
not become. And the question about the meaning of this
simultaneous power and powerlessness flowed into the
question about man’s being, which now received a new and
tremendously practical significance.

It is no chance, but significant necessity, that the most import-
ant works in the sphere of philosophical anthropology appeared
in the decade after the first world war; nor does it seem to me to
be chance that Edmund Husserl, the man in whose school and
methods the most powerful attempts of our time to construct an
independent philosophical anthropology made their appear-
ance, was a German Jew, that is, the son of a people which
experienced more grievously and fatefully than any other the
first of those two factors, the increasing decay of the old organic
forms of man’s common life, and the pupil and adopted son, as
he thought, of a people which experienced more grievously and
fatefully than any other the second of the two factors, man’s
lagging behind his works.

Husserl himself, the creator of the phenomenological method
in which the two attempts at a philosophical anthropology of
which I shall have to speak, those of Martin Heidegger and Max
Scheler, were undertaken, never treated the anthropological
problem as such. But in his last, unfinished work, a treatise on

the crisis of the European sciences, he made, in three separate
sentences, a contribution to this problem which seems to me, in
view of the man who uttered them and the time when they were
uttered, to be important enough to be adduced and have their
truth scrutinized at this point, before we pass to the discussion
and criticism of phenomenological anthropology.

The first of the three sentences asserts that the greatest histori-
cal phenomenon is mankind wrestling for self-understanding.
That is, Husserl says that all the effective events which have again
and again, as it is usually put, changed the face of the earth, and
which fill the books of the historians, are less important than
that ever new effort, which is carried out in stillness and is
scarcely noted by the historians, to understand the mystery of
man’s being. Husserl describes this effort as a wrestling. He
means that the human spirit encounters great difficulties, great
opposition from the problematic material it is striving to
understand—that is, from its own being—and that from the
beginning of history it has had to fight them. The history of this
struggle is the history of the greatest of all history’s phenomena.

Thus Husserl confirms the significance for the growth of man
of the historical course of philosophical anthropology—the
course from question to question, some of whose stages I have
indicated.

The second sentence runs: “If man becomes a ‘metaphysical’,
a specifically philosophical problem, then he is called in ques-
tion as a reasoning thing”. These words, whose significance was
particularly stressed by Husserl, are only true, or only become
true, if they mean that the relation of “reason” to non-reason in
man must be called in question. In other words, it is not a case of
considering reason as the specifically human and considering
what is not reason in man as the non-specific, as what
man has in common with non-human beings, as what is “nat-
ural” in man—as has been done again and again, especially since
Descartes. Rather, the depth of the anthropological question is

first touched when we also recognize as specifically human that
which is not reason. Man is not a centaur, he is man through and
through. He can be understood only when one knows, on the
one hand, that there is something in all that is human, including
thought, which belongs to the general nature of living creatures,
and is to be grasped from this nature, while knowing, on the
other hand, that there is no human quality which belongs fully
to the general nature of living creatures and is to be grasped
exclusively from it. Even man’s hunger is not an animal’s hun-
ger. Human reason is to be understood only in connexion with
human non-reason. The problem of philosophical anthropology
is the problem of a specific totality and of its specific structure.
So it has been seen by Husserl’s school, whom Husserl himself,
however, was unwilling to acknowledge as his school at the
decisive points.

The third sentence runs: “Humanity in general is essentially
the existence of man in entities of mankind which are bound
together in generations and in society”. These words funda-
mentally contradict the whole anthropological work of the
phenomenological school, both that of Scheler who, though a
sociologist, scarcely noticed man’s social connexions in his
anthropological thought, and that of Heidegger, who certainly
recognized that these connexions were primary but treated them
essentially as the great obstacle to man’s attainment of himself.
In these words Husserl says that man’s essence is not to be found
in isolated individuals, for a human being’s bonds with his gen-
eration and his society are of his essence; we must therefore
know what these bonds really mean if we want to know the
essence of man. That is to say that an individualistic anthropol-
ogy either has as its subject man in a condition of isolation, that
is, in a condition not adequate to his essence, or in fact does
consider man in his bonds of community, but regards their
effects as impairing his real essence, and thus is not thinking of
that fundamental communion of which Husserl speaks.
 

Before I pass to the discussion of phenomenological anthropol-
ogy I must refer to the man to whose influence its individualistic
character is largely traceable, namely, Kierkegaard. This influ-
ence is admittedly of a special nature. The phenomenological
thinkers of whom I have to speak, and pre-eminently Heidegger,
have certainly taken over Kierkegaard’s mode of thinking, but
they have broken off its decisive presupposition, without which
Kierkegaard’s thoughts, especially those on the connexion
between truth and existence, change their colour and their
meaning. Moreover, as we shall see, they have broken off not
merely the theological aspect of this presupposition but the
whole presupposition, including the anthropological aspect, so
that the character and thus also the effect of “existential”
thought represented by Kierkegaard have been almost converted
into their opposite.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Kierkegaard, as a
single and solitary man, confronted the life of Christendom with
its faith. He was no reformer, again and again he emphasized that
he had no “authority” from above; he was only a Christian
thinker, but he was of all thinkers the one who most forcibly
indicated that thought cannot authorize itself but is authorized
only out of the existence of the thinking man. Yet thought in this
latter sense was not the important thing for him, he really saw in
it only a conceptual translation of faith—either a good or a bad
translation. As for faith, he was intensely convinced that it is
genuine only when it is grounded in and proved by the existence
of the believer. Kierkegaard’s criticism of actual Christianity is an
inner one; he does not confront Christianity, as, for example,
Nietzsche does, with an alleged higher value, and test it by that
and reject it. There is for him no higher, and really no other,
value. He measures the so-called Christianity lived by Christians
against the real Christianity which they profess and proclaim,

and rejects this whole so-called Christian life together with its
false faith (false because it is not realized), and its proclamation
which has turned into a lie (because it is self-satisfied). Kierke-
gaard does not acknowledge any faith which is not binding. The
so-called religious man, no matter how great the enthusiasm
with which he thinks and speaks of the object of his faith and
gives expression to what he considers to be his faith by taking
part in religious services and ceremonies, is only imagining that
he believes unless the heart of his life is transformed by it, unless
the presence of what he believes in determines his essential atti-
tude from the most secret solitude to public action. Belief is a
relation of life to what is believed, a relation of life which
includes all life, or it is unreal. Obviously that cannot mean that a
man’s relation to the object of his faith is established, or can be
established, by man. To Kierkegaard’s insight as to that of all
religious thought this connexion is by nature, first, ontic, that is,
concerning not merely a man’s subjectivity and life but his
objective being, and second, like every objective connexion,
two-sided, of which, however, we are able to know only one, the
human side. But it can be influenced by man—at least in respect
of this human side. That is, it depends on the man to a certain
extent, which we cannot measure, if or how far his subjectivity
enters his life, in other words, if or how far his faith becomes the
substance and form of the life he lives. This question is fraught
with destiny, because it does not concern a connexion estab-
lished by man but one by which man is established, and which,
constituting human life and giving it its meaning, should not
merely be mirrored in the subjectivity of a religious view and a
religious feeling, but bodily fulfilled in the wholeness of human
life and “become flesh”. Kierkegaard calls the striving for this
realization and incarnation of faith an existential striving, for
existence is the transition from a possibility in the spirit to a
reality in the wholeness of the person. For the sake of this ques-
tion, fraught with destiny, Kierkegaard makes the stages and

conditions of life itself, guilt, fear, despair, decision, the prospect
of one’s own death and the prospect of salvation, into objects of
metaphysical thought. He lifts them beyond the sphere of purely
psychological consideration, for which they are indifferent
events within the course of the soul’s life, and looks on them as
links in an existential process, in an ontic connexion with the
absolute, as elements of an existence “before God”. Metaphysics
here takes possession of the actuality of the living man with a
strength and consistency hitherto unknown in the history of
thought. Its ability to do this springs from the fact that man is
considered not as an isolated being but in the problematic nature
of his bond with the absolute. It is not the I, absolute in itself, of
German idealism that is the object of this philosophical thought,
the I which makes a world for itself by thinking it, it is the real
human person, but considered in the ontic connexion which
binds it to the absolute. This connexion is for Kierkegaard a real
mutual connexion of person with person, that is, the absolute
also enters it as a person. Kierkegaard’s anthropology is therefore
a theological anthropology. But modern philosophical anthro-
pology has been made possible by it. This philosophical
anthropology had to renounce the theological presupposition in
order to acquire its philosophical basis. The problem was
whether it would succeed in doing that without losing at the
same time the metaphysical presupposition of the concrete
man’s bond with the absolute. As we shall see, it did not succeed.
 

We have seen, in the discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of
Kant’s four questions, that he wants to establish as the principle
of metaphysics not philosophical anthropology but “funda-
mental ontology”, that is, the doctrine of existence as such. By

existence he understands a present being which has a relation
to its own being and an understanding of it. Man is the only
one whom we know as such a present being. But fundamental
ontology does not have to do with man in his actual manifold
complexity but solely with existence in itself, which manifests
itself through man. All concrete human life which is drawn
upon by Heidegger concerns him only because (and in so far
as) the modes of relation (Verhalten) of existence itself are shown
in it, both the relation in which it comes to itself and becomes a
self and the relation in and through which it fails to do so.

Even though Heidegger himself does not regard his philo-
sophy or wish it to be regarded as philosophical anthropology,
we must nevertheless test the genuineness and correctness of its
anthropological content, since in philosophical fashion it draws
upon concrete human life, which is the subject of philosophical
anthropology; that is, against its intention we must subject it to
criticism as a contribution to answering the anthropological
question.

At the very beginning we must question Heidegger’s starting-
point. Is the extraction of “existence” from real human life
anthropologically justified? Are statements which are made
about this separated existence to be regarded in any way as
philosophical statements about actual man? Or does the “chem-
ical purity” of this concept of existence not rather make it
impossible for the doctrine to stand up to the real facts of its
subjects—a test which all philosophy and all metaphysics must
be able to pass?

Real existence, that is, real man in his relation to his being, is
comprehensible only in connexion with the nature of the being
to which he stands in relation. To exemplify what I mean I
choose one of the most audacious and profound chapters of
Heidegger’s book, which treats of man’s relation to his death.
Here everything is perspective, what matters is how man looks
to his end, whether he has the courage to anticipate the whole of

his existence, which is made fully revealed only in death. But
only when the subject of discussion is man’s relation to his
being is death to be limited to the end-point; if one is thinking
of objective being itself, then death is also there in the present
second as a force which wrestles with the force of life. The state
of this struggle at a given time helps to determine man’s whole
nature at that moment, his existence at that moment, his attitude
towards being at that moment; and if man looks now to his end,
the manner of this looking cannot be separated from the reality
of death’s power in this very moment. In other words, man as
existence, as comprehension of being that looks towards death,
cannot be separated from man as a creature that begins to
die when it begins to live, and that cannot possess life
without death, or preserving power without destructive and
disintegrative power.

Heidegger abstracts from the reality of human life the categor-
ies which originate and are valid in the relation of the individual
to what is not himself, and applies them to “existence” in the
narrower sense, that is, to the relation of the individual to his
own being. Moreover he does not do this merely to enlarge the
sphere of their validity; in Heidegger’s view the true significance
and depth and import of these categories is disclosed only in the
realm of the individual’s relation to himself. But what we find
here is that on the one hand they are refined, differentiated, and
subtilized, and that on the other hand they are weakened and
devitalized. Heidegger’s modified categories disclose a curious
partial sphere of life, not a piece of the whole real life as it is
actually lived, but a partial sphere which receives its independ-
ence, its independent character and laws as it were through hav-
ing the circulation of the blood in the organism arrested at some
point and the isolated part examined. We enter a strange room of
the spirit, but we feel as if the ground we tread is the board on
which a game is being played whose rules we learn as we
advance, deep rules which we ponder, and must ponder, but

which arose and which persist only through a decision having
once been reached to play this intellectual game, and to play it in
this very way. And at the same time, it is true, we feel that this
game is not arbitrarily chosen by the player, but he is under
necessity, it is his fate.
 

I take as an example the concept of guilt (Schuld). Heidegger,
who always begins from the “everyday” (of which we shall have
to say more later), begins here from the situation presented by
the German language, which says that someone “owes” some-
thing to another (schuldig ist), and then from the situation that
someone “is answerable” for something (an etwas Schuld ist), from
where he advances to the situation that someone becomes guilty
in respect of another (schuldig wird), that is, that he causes a lack in
the existence of another, that he becomes the reason for a lack
in the existence of another. But this too is only indebtedness
(eine Verschuldung) and not the original and real guilt (Schuldigsein)
out of which the indebtedness proceeds and by which it is made
possible. Real guilt, according to Heidegger, consists in the fact
that the existence itself is guilty. The existence is “guilty in the
ground of its being”. And the existence is guilty through not
fulfilling itself, through remaining in the so-called “generally
human”, in “one” (das Man), and not bringing its own self, the
man’s self, into being. The call of conscience sounds into this
situation. Who calls? Existence itself. “In conscience the exis-
tence calls itself.” The existence, which by its guilt has not
reached selfbeing, summons itself to remember the self, to free
itself to a self, to come from the “unreality” to the “reality” of
existence.

Heidegger is right to say that all understanding of indebted-
ness must go back to a primal guilt. He is right to say that we are
able to discover a primal guilt. But we are not able to do this by

isolating a part of life, the part where the existence is related to
itself and to its own being, but by becoming aware of the whole
life without reduction, the life in which the individual, in fact, is
essentially related to something other than himself. Life is not
lived by my playing the enigmatic game on a board by myself,
but by my being placed in the presence of a being with whom I
have agreed on no rules for the game and with whom no rules
can be agreed on. This presence before which I am placed
changes its form, its appearance, its revelation, they are different
from myself, often terrifyingly different, and different from
what I expected, often terrifyingly different. If I stand up to
them, concern myself with them, meet them in a real way, that
is, with the truth of my whole life, then and only then am I
“really” there: I am there if I am there, and where this “there” is,
is always determined less by myself than by the presence of this
being which changes its form and its appearance. If I am not
really there I am guilty. When I answer the call of present
being—“Where art thou?”—with “Here am I,” but am not
really there, that is, not with the truth of my whole life, then I
am guilty. Original guilt consists in remaining with oneself. If a
form and appearance of present being move past me, and I was
not really there, then out of the distance, out of its disappear-
ance, comes a second cry, as soft and secret as though it came
from myself: “Where were you?” That is the cry of conscience. It
is not my existence which calls to me, but the being which is
not I. Now I can answer only the next form; the one which spoke
can no longer be reached. (This next form can of course some-
times be the same man, but it will be a different, later, changed
appearance of him.)
 

We have seen how in the history of the human spirit man again
and again becomes solitary, that is, he finds himself alone with a

universe which has become alien and uncanny, he can no longer
stand up to the universal forms of present being; he can no
longer truly meet them. This man, as we recognized him in
Augustine, in Pascal, in Kierkegaard, seeks a form of being which
is not included in the world, that is, he seeks a divine form of
being with which, solitary as he is, he can communicate; he
stretches his hands out beyond the world to meet this form. But
we have also seen that there is a way leading from one age of
solitude to the next, that is, that each solitude is colder and
stricter than the preceding, and salvation from it more difficult.
But finally man reaches a condition when he can no longer
stretch his hands out from his solitude to meet a divine form.
That is at the basis of Nietzsche’s saying, “God is dead”. Appar-
ently nothing more remains now to the solitary man but to seek
an intimate communication with himself. This is the basic situ-
ation from which Heidegger’s philosophy arises. And thereby
the anthropological question, which the man who has become
solitary discovers ever afresh, the question about the essence of
man and about his relation to the being of what is, has been
replaced by another question, the one which Heidegger calls the
fundamental-ontological question, about human existence in its
relation to its own being.

There remains, however, one irrefragable fact, that one can
stretch out one’s hands to one’s image or reflection in a mirror,
but not to one’s real self. Heidegger’s doctrine is significant as
the presentation of the relations to one another of various
“beings” abstracted from human life, but it is not valid for
human life itself and its anthropological understanding, however
valuable its suggestions for this subject.
 

Human life possesses absolute meaning through transcending
in practice its own conditioned nature, that is, through man’s

seeing that which he confronts, and with which he can enter
into a real relation of being to being, as not less real than himself,
and through taking it not less seriously than himself. Human life
touches on absoluteness in virtue of its dialogical character, for
in spite of his uniqueness man can never find, when he plunges
to the depth of his life, a being that is whole in itself and as such
touches on the absolute. Man can become whole not in virtue of
a relation to himself but only in virtue of a relation to another
self. This other self may be just as limited and conditioned as he
is; in being together the unlimited and the unconditioned is
experienced. Heidegger turns away not merely from a relation to
a divine unconditioned being, but also from a relation in which
man experiences another than himself in the unconditioned,
and so experiences the unconditioned. Heidegger’s “existence”
is monological. And monologue may certainly disguise itself
ingeniously for a while as dialogue, one unknown layer after the
other of the human self may certainly answer the inner address,
so that man makes ever fresh discoveries and can suppose that he
is really experiencing a “calling” and a “hearing”; but the hour
of stark, final solitude comes when the dumbness of being
becomes insuperable and the ontological categories no longer
want to be applied to reality. When the man who has become
solitary can no longer say “Thou” to the “dead” known God,
everything depends on whether he can still say it to the living
unknown God by saying “thou” with all his being to another
living and known man. If he can no longer do this either, then
there certainly remains for him the sublime illusion of detached
thought that he is a selfcontained self; as man he is lost. The man
of “real” existence in Heidegger’s sense, the man of “self-
being”, who in Heidegger’s view is the goal of life, is not the
man who really lives with man, but the man who can no longer
really live with man, the man who now knows a real life only in
communication with himself. But that is only a semblance of real
life, an exalted and unblessed game of the spirit. This modern

man and this modern game have found their expression in
Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger isolates from the wholeness
of life the realm in which man is related to himself, since he
absolutizes the temporally conditioned situation of the radically
solitary man, and wants to derive the essence of human
existence from the experience of a nightmare.
 

This seems to be contradicted by Heidegger’s statement that
man’s being is by nature in the world, in a world in which man is
not merely surrounded by things which are his “gear”, that is,
which he uses and applies, in order to “take care of” what has to
be taken care of, but also by men together with whom he is in the
world. These men are not, like things, mere being, but, like
himself, existence, that is, a being that stands in relation to itself
and knows itself. They are for him an object not of “care” but of
“carefulness”, solicitude; moreover they are this by nature, exist-
entially, even when he passes them by and does not trouble
about them, when they “do not concern” him, and even when
he treats them with complete inconsiderateness. Further, they are
by nature the object of his understanding, for only by the under-
standing of others do cognition and knowledge become possible
at all. This is how it is in the everyday, which is Heidegger’s
point of departure in a way specially important for him. But of
the highest level, which he calls real self-being or resolution,
more precisely resolution to be a self, he emphasizes that it does
not separate existence from its world or isolate it into a freely
moving I. “Resolution,” he says, “in fact makes the self into a
being with what is to hand, taking care each time, and urges it
into a life of solicitude with others.” Further, “Real life together
is the first thing to arise out of the real self-being of resolution.”
Thus it looks as though Heidegger fully knew and acknowledged
that a relation to others is essential. But this is not actually the

case. For the relation of solicitude which is all he considers can-
not as such be an essential relation, since it does not set a man’s
life in direct relation with the life of another, but only one man’s
solicitous help in relation with another man’s lack and need of
it. Such a relation can share in essential life only when it derives
its significance from being the effect of a relation which is essen-
tial in itself—such as that between mother and child; of course it
can lead to such a relation, as when genuine friendship or love
arises between the solicitous person and the object of his solici-
tude. In its essence solicitude does not come from mere co-
existence with others, as Heidegger thinks, but from essential,
direct, whole relations between man and man, whether those
which are objectively based on ties of blood, or those which
arise by choice and can either assume objective, institutional
forms or, like friendship, shrink from all institutional forming
and yet touch the depth of existence. It is from these direct
relations, I say, which have an essential part in building up the
substance of life, that the element of solicitude incidentally
arises, extending after that, beyond the essential relations, into
the merely social and institutional. In man’s existence with man
it is not solicitude, but the essential relation, which is primal.
Nor is it any different if we set aside the problem of origin, and
undertake the pure analysis of existence. In mere solicitude man
remains essentially with himself, even if he is moved with
extreme pity; in action and help he inclines towards the other,
but the barriers of his own being are not thereby breached; he
makes his assistance, not his self, accessible to the other; nor does
he expect any real mutuality, in fact he probably shuns it; he “is
concerned with the other”, but he is not anxious for the other to
be concerned with him. In an essential relation, on the other
hand, the barriers of individual being are in fact breached and a
new phenomenon appears which can appear only in this way:
one life open to another—not steadily, but so to speak attaining
its extreme reality only from point to point, yet also able to

acquire a form in the continuity of life; the other becomes pres-
ent not merely in the imagination or feeling, but in the depths of
one’s substance, so that one experiences the mystery of the other
being in the mystery of one’s own. The two participate in one
another’s lives in very fact, not psychically, but ontically. This is
certainly something which comes to a man in the course of his
life only by a kind of grace, and many will say that they do not
know it; but even he to whom it has not come has it in his
existence as a constitutive principle, because the conscious or
unconscious lack of it plays an essential part in determining the
nature and character of his existence. And certainly, in the course
of their life many will be given the opportunity of it which they
do not fulfil in their existence; they acquire relations which they
do not make real, that is, which they do not use to open them-
selves to another; they squander the most precious, irreplacable
and irrecoverable material; they pass their life by. But then this
very void penetrates the existence and permeates its deepest
layer. The “everyday”, in its inconspicuous, scarcely perceptible
part, which is nevertheless accessible to an analysis of existence,
is interwoven with what is “not the everyday”.

But we have seen that, according to Heidegger, even on the
highest level of self-being man does not pass beyond “a life of
solicitude with others”. The level which Heidegger’s man can
reach is that of the free self which, as Heidegger emphasizes, is
not separated from the world, but is only now mature and reso-
lute for right existence with the world. But this mature resolute
existence with the world knows nothing of an essential relation.
Heidegger would perhaps reply that it is only the self which has
become free that is really capable of love and friendship. But
since self-being is here an ultimate, the ultimate, which the exist-
ence is able to reach, there is absolutely no starting-point for
understanding love and friendship still as essential relations. The
self which has become free certainly does not turn its back on
the world, its resolution includes the resolve really to be with the

world, to act in it and on it, but it does not include the belief that
in this life with the world the barriers of the self can be
breached, nor even the desire that it should happen. Existence is
completed in self-being; there is no ontic way beyond this for
Heidegger. What Feuerbach pointed out, that the individual does
not have the essence of man in himself, that man’s essence is
contained in the unity of man with man, has entirely failed to
enter Heidegger’s philosophy. For him the individual has the
essence of man in himself and brings it to existence by
becoming a “resolved” self. Heidegger’s self is a closed system.
 

“Everyone,” said Kierkegaard, “should be chary about having
dealings with ‘others’ and should essentially speak only with
God and with himself.” And he uttered this “should” as he
looked to the goal and the task which he set to man, namely, to
become a Single One. Heidegger seems to set man the same goal.
But with Kierkegaard “to become a Single One” means only the
presupposition to entry into a relation with God: only by having
become a Single One can man enter into this relation. Kierke-
gaard’s Single One is an open system, even if open solely to God.
Heidegger knows no such relation; and since he does not know
any other essential relation his “to become a self” means some-
thing quite different from Kierkegaard’s “to become a Single
One”. Kierkegaard’s man becomes a Single One for something,
namely for the entry into a relation with the absolute;
Heidegger’s man does not become a self for something, since he
cannot breach his barriers, and his participation in the
absolute—so far as there is such a thing for him—consists in his
barriers and nothing else. Heidegger speaks of man becoming
“opened” to his self; but this self itself to which he becomes
opened is by nature closedness and reserve. What Kierkegaard
says appears here in a modified form: “Everyone should

essentially speak only with himself”. But in fact Heidegger leaves
out the “should” as well. What he means is that everyone can
essentially speak only with himself; what he speaks with others
cannot be essential—that is, the word cannot transcend the indi-
vidual’s essence and transfer him into another essential life,
which does not arise but is between the beings and grows by
their essential relation with one another. Heidegger’s man is
certainly pointed towards being with the world and towards an
understanding and solicitous life with others; but in the
essentiality of his existence, wherever his existence is essential,
he is alone. With Kierkegaard’s man anxiety and dread become
essential as anxiety about the relation with God and dread lest he
miss it. With Heidegger they become essential as anxiety about
the growth of self-being and dread lest it be missed. In his
anxiety and dread Kierkegaard’s man stands “alone before God”,
Heidegger’s man stands before himself and nothing else, and—
since in the last resort one cannot stand before oneself—he
stands in his anxiety and dread before nothing. In order to
become a Single One and to enter into the Single One’s relation
with the absolute, Kierkegaard’s man has to renounce the essen-
tial relation to another, as Kierkegaard himself renounced the
essential relation to another, to his fiancée—a renunciation
which shapes the great theme of his works and journals.
Heidegger’s man has no essential relation to renounce. In
Kierkegaard’s world there is a Thou spoken with the very being to
the other person, even if only to tell this person direct (as in a
letter from Kierkegaard to his fiancée long after the engagement
was broken off) or indirectly (as often in his books) why the
essential relation had to be renounced. In Heidegger’s world
there is no such Thou, no true Thou spoken from being to being,
spoken with one’s own being. One does not say this Thou to the
man for whom one is merely solicitous.
 

Heidegger’s “openness” of the existence to itself thus in truth
involves its being finally closed—even though it appears in
humane forms—to all genuine bonds with the other and with
otherness. This becomes still clearer if we pass from the person’s
relation to individuals to his relation to anonymous generality,
to what Heidegger calls “one” (das Man). Here, too, Kierkegaard,
with his concept of the “crowd”, has anticipated him. The
crowd, in which a man finds himself when he tries to advance to
self-reflection, that is, the general, the impersonal, the faceless
and formless, the average and the levelled down, this “crowd” is
“untruth” for Kierkegaard. On the other hand the man who
breaks out of it, escapes from its influence and becomes a Single
One, is as a Single One the truth. For to Kierkegaard there is no
other possibility of man’s becoming truth, human (that is, con-
ditioned) truth except by confronting unconditioned or divine
truth and entering into the decisive relation with it. One can do
this only as a Single One, through having become a person with
the complete and independent responsibility of singleness. But
one may only become a Single One through disengaging oneself
from the crowd, which deprives one of, or at least weakens,
personal responsibility. Heidegger takes over Kierkegaard’s con-
cept and develops it in the subtlest fashion. But the growth of the
Single One—or, as he says, of self-being—has with him lost its
goal of entering into relation with divine truth and thereby
becoming human truth. The action which engages man’s life—
freeing himself from the crowd—retains its central place in
Heidegger, but it loses its meaning, which is to lead man out
beyond himself.

Heidegger’s “one” is not something definite, but is the gen-
eral condition into which we are born. All are this “one”, not as
an aggregate of individuals but as the faceless and nameless mass
in which nothing individual can be recognized. Its real character

is to be the “average”, and it is with this that the “one” in its
being is essentially concerned. “Every title of precedence”, says
Heidegger, “is noiselessly suppressed. Everything original is
smoothed out in a trice as common knowledge. All that was
once fought for is now plausible. Every mystery loses its power.”
The “one” has the tendency to “level” every possibility of being
and to reduce human existence to a uniform flatness. Every
interpretation of the world and of existence is arranged in
advance by the “public”. Almost in the same words as Kierke-
gaard uses Heidegger says that the “one” deprives the actual
human life of its responsibility. If it is asked who then is this
“one”, the answer can only be that it is “no-one”. Actual human
life is handed over to this mighty no-one, and thus deprived of
independence and reality. Instead of being concentrated in the
self, it is dispersed in the “one”, and has first to find itself. The
power of the “one” causes existence to be fully absorbed by it.
The life to which this happens flees from itself, from its power to
be a self, it misses its own existence. Only the life which “fetches
itself back” from this dispersal (which is, incidentally, a gnostic
concept by which the gnostics meant the concentration and
salvation of the soul which is lost in the world) attains to
self-being.

We have seen that Heidegger does not look on the highest
level as an isolation, but as resolution to co-existence with
others. We have also seen, however, that this resolution only
confirms the relation of solicitude on a higher plain, but knows
nothing of any essential relation with others or any real I-Thou
with them which could breach the barriers of the self. Whereas
in the relation between persons, a relation is affirmed even for
the self which has become free—namely, the relation of
solicitude—in Heidegger there is lacking any corresponding
reference for the relation to the impersonal “multitude” of men.
The “one”, and all that belongs to it, the “idle talk”, “curiosity”
and “ambiguity” which are dominant there and which are

shared in by the man who has fallen a prey to the “one”—all this
is purely negative, and destructive of the self: nothing positive
takes its place; anonymous generality as such is repudiated, but
there is nothing to replace it.

What Heidegger says about the “one” and a man’s relation to
it is right in essential traits. It is also right that a man has to
disengage himself from it in order to reach self-being. But some-
thing is lacking here, without which what is right in itself
becomes wrong.

As we have seen, Heidegger secularizes the Single One of
Kierkegaard, that is, he severs the relation to the absolute for
which Kierkegaard’s man becomes a Single One. And as we have
seen, he does not replace this “for” with any other worldly and
human “for”. He ignores the decisive fact that only the man who
has become a Single One, a self, a real person, is able to have a
complete relation of his life to the other self, a relation which is
not beneath but above the problematic of the relations between
man and man, and which comprises, withstands and overcomes
all this problematic situation. A great relation exists only between
real persons. It can be strong as death, because it is stronger
than solitude, because it breaches the barriers of a lofty soli-
tude, subdues its strict law, and throws a bridge from self-being
to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe. It is true
that the child says Thou before it learns to say I; but on the
height of personal existence one must be truly able to say I in
order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth. The
man who has become a Single One—even if we limit ourselves
to immanence—is there for something: he has become “this
Single One” for something, for the perfect realization of the
Thou.
 

But is there on this level something corresponding to the essen-
tial Thou in the relation to the multitude of men, or is Heidegger
here finally right?

What corresponds to the essential Thou on the level of self-
being, in relation to a host of men, I call the essential We.2

The person who is the object of my mere solicitude is not a
Thou but a He or a She. The nameless, faceless crowd in which I am
entangled is not a We but the “one”. But as there is a Thou so there
is a We.

Here we have to do with a category essential for our consider-
ation, which it is important to clarify. It cannot be straightway
grasped from out of current sociological categories. It is true that
a We can arise in every kind of group, but it cannot be under-
stood from the life of any single one of the groups. By We I mean
a community of several independent persons, who have reached
a self and self-responsibility, the community resting on the basis
of this self and self-responsibility, and being made possible by
them. The special character of the We is shown in the essential
relation existing, or arising temporarily, between its members;
that is, in the holding sway within the We of an ontic directness
which is the decisive presupposition of the I-Thou relation. The
We includes the Thou potentially. Only men who are capable of
truly saying Thou to one another can truly say We with one
another.

As we have said, no particular kind of group-formation as such
can be adduced as an example of the essential We, but in many of
them the variety which is favourable to the arising of the We can
be seen clearly enough. For example, in revolutionary groups we
find a We most readily among those whose members make it
their labour among the people to waken and teach quietly and

2 I shall not discuss in this connexion the primitive We, to which the essential We
is related in the same way as the essential Thou to the primitive Thou.

slowly; in religious groups we find it among those who strive for
an unemphatic and sacrificial realization of faith in life. In both
cases it is enough to prevent the We arising, or being preserved,
if a single man is accepted, who is greedy of power and uses
others as means to his own end, or who craves for importance
and makes a show of himself.

The essential We has hitherto been all too little recognized,
both in history and in the present, because it is rare, and because
group-formations have hitherto been considered mostly in
respect of their energies and effects and not their inner
structure—though the direction of the energy and the nature of
the effects (even if not often their visible and measurable
compass) depend most closely on the inner structure.

For more precise understanding I must point out that beside
the constant forms of the essential We there are also transient
forms, which nevertheless merit attention. Among these is to be
reckoned, for example, the closer union which is formed for a
few days among the genuine disciples and fellow-workers of a
movement when an important leader dies. All impediments and
difficulties between them are set aside, and a strange fruitfulness,
or at all events incandescence, of their life with one another is
established. Another transient form is seen when in face of a
catastrophe which appears inevitable the really heroic element of
a community gathers together within itself, withdraws from all
idle talk and fuss, but in it each is open to the others and they
anticipate, in a brief common life, the binding power of a
common death.

But there are still other, remarkable structures which include
men hitherto unknown to one another, and which are at least
very close to the essential We. Such a structure can arise in, say, a
terrorist régime, when adherents of an opinion which is
opposed by the régime, hitherto strangers to one another, per-
ceive that they are brothers and meet not as members of a party
but in genuine community.

We can see that even in the sphere of the relation to a host of
men there is an essential relation which takes up the man who
has reached self-being—in fact, can truly take up no-one but
him. Here only is the realm where a man is truly saved from the
“one”. A man is truly saved from the “one” not by separation
but only by being bound up in genuine communion.
 

Let us now summarize our comparison of Kierkegaard’s man
and Heidegger’s man.

In virtue of his nature and his situation man has a threefold
living relation. He can bring his nature and situation to full
reality in his life if all his living relations become essential. And
he can let elements of his nature and situation remain in unreal-
ity by letting only single living relations become essential, while
considering and treating the others as unessential.

Man’s threefold living relation is, first, his relation to the
world and to things, second, his relation to men—both to indi-
viduals and to the many—third, his relation to the mystery of
being—which is dimly apparent through all this but infinitely
transcends it—which the philosopher calls the Absolute and the
believer calls God, and which cannot in fact be eliminated from
the situation even by a man who rejects both designations.

The relation to things is lacking in Kierkegaard, he knows
things only as similes. In Heidegger it can be found only as a
technical, purposive relation. But a purely technical relation can-
not be an essential one, since it is not the whole being and whole
reality of the thing one is related to which enter into the relation,
but just its applicability to a definite aim, its technical suitability.
An essential relation to things can only be a relation which
regards them in their essential life and is turned towards them.
The fact of art can only be understood in the connexion of an
essential with a technical relation. Nor is it to the purpose even

in an analysis of everyday existence that things should be present
only as “gear”. The technical is only what can be easily surveyed,
easily explained, it is the co-ordinated. But besides, and in the
midst of this, there is a manifold relation to things in their
wholeness, their independence, and their purposelessness. The
man who gazes without purpose on a tree is no less “everyday”
than the one who looks at a tree to learn which branch would
make the best stick. The first way of looking belongs to the
constitution of the “everyday” no less than the second. (Besides,
it can be shown that even genetically, in human development,
the technical does not come first in time, and that what in its late
form is called the æsthetic does not come second.)

The relation to individual men is a doubtful thing to Kierke-
gaard, because in his view an essential relation to God is
obstructed by an essential relation to human companions. In
Heidegger the relation to individual men appears only as a rela-
tion of solicitude. A relation of mere solicitude cannot be essen-
tial; in an essential relation which includes solicitude the
essentiality is derived from another realm which is lacking in
Heidegger. An essential relation to individual men can only be a
direct relation from life to life in which a man’s reserve is
resolved and the barriers of his self-being are breached.

The connexion with the faceless, formless, nameless many,
with the “crowd”, with the “one”, appears in Kierkegaard, and
following him in Heidegger, as the preliminary situation which
must be overcome for self-being to be attained. In itself this is
true; that nameless human all and nothing in which we are
immersed is in fact like a negative womb from which we have to
emerge in order to come into the world as a self. But it is only
one side of the truth, and without the other side it becomes
untrue. The genuineness and adequacy of the self cannot stand
the test in self-commerce, but only in communication with the
whole of otherness, with the medley of the nameless crowd. A
genuine and adequate self also draws out the spark of self-being

wherever it touches the crowd, it makes self be bound to self, it
founds the opposition to the “one”, it founds the communion
of individuals, it shapes the form of community in the stuff of
social life.

Man’s third living relation is that which is called respectively
the relation to God or to the Absolute or to the mystery. We have
seen that this is the sole essential relation for Kierkegaard, while
it is completely lacking in Heidegger.

The essential relation to God, which Kierkegaard means, pre-
supposes, as we saw, a renunciation of every essential relation to
anything else, to the world, to community, to the individual
man. It can be understood as a subtraction which, reduced to a
crude formula, appears thus: Being—(World + Man) = Object
(the object or partner of the essential relation); it comes into
existence by leaving out everything except God and myself. But a
God reached only by renunciation of the relation to the whole
being cannot be the God of the whole being whom Kierkegaard
means, cannot be the God who has made and preserves and
holds together all that is. Though the history of creation which is
left to its own resources may be called separation, the goal of the
way can only be communion, and no essential relation to this
God can stand outside this goal. The God of Kierkegaard can
only be either a demiurge outgrown by and suffering from his
creation, or a saviour who is a stranger to creation, approaching
it from without and taking pity on it. Both are gnostic figures. Of
the three great Christian philosophers of solitude, Augustine,
Pascal and Kierkegaard, the first is thoroughly conditioned by
gnosticism, the presuppositions of the last touch on it—
obviously without his knowing it—and only Pascal has nothing
to do with it, perhaps because he comes by way of science and
never abandons it, and because science can come to terms with
faith but not with gnosis, which itself claims to be the true
science.

Heidegger’s philosophical secularization of Kierkegaard had

to abandon the religious conception of a bond of the self with
the Absolute, a bond in real mutual relation of person with
person. But neither does it know any other form of a bond
between the self and the Absolute or between the self and the
dimly apparent mystery of being. The Absolute has its place in
Heidegger’s philosophy only in the sphere to which the self
penetrates in its relation to itself, that is, where the question
about the entry into a connexion with it ceases to be asked.
Heidegger, influenced by Hölderlin, the great poet of this mys-
tery, has undoubtedly had a profound experience of the mystery
of being which is dimly apparent through all that is; but he has
not experienced it as one which steps before us and challenges
us to yield the last thing, so hard fought for, the being at rest in
one’s own self, to breach the barriers of the self and to come out
from ourselves to meet with essential otherness.

Besides man’s threefold living relation there is one other, that
to one’s own self. This relation, however, unlike the others, can-
not be regarded as one that is real as such, since the necessary
presupposition of a real duality is lacking. Hence it cannot in
reality be raised to the level of an essential living relation. This is
expressed in the fact that every essential living relation has
reached its completion and transfiguration, that to things in art,
that to men in love, that to the mystery in religious manifesta-
tion, while man’s relation to his own life and his own self has
not reached, and obviously cannot reach, such a completion and
transfiguration. (It could perhaps be maintained that lyric poetry
is such a completion and transfiguration of men’s relation to his
own self. But it is rather the tremendous refusal of the soul to be
satisfied with self-commerce. Poetry is the soul’s announcement
that even when it is alone with itself on the narrowest ridge it is
thinking not of itself but of the Being which is not itself, and that
this Being which is not itself is visiting it there, perplexing and
blessing it.)

For Kierkegaard this relation is given meaning and is

consecrated by the relation to God. For Heidegger it is essential
in itself and it is the only essential relation. That means, that man
can attain to his real life only as a system which in respect of his
essential relation is a closed system. In contrast to this, the
anthropological view which considers man in his connexion
with being must regard this connexion as supremely realizable
only in an open system. Connexion can mean only connexion
with the integrality of his human situation. Neither the world of
things, nor his fellow-man and community, nor the mystery
which points beyond these, and also beyond himself, can be
dismissed from a man’s situation. Man can attain to existence
only if his whole relation to his situation becomes existence, that
is, if every kind of living relation becomes essential.

The question what man is cannot be answered by a consider-
ation of existence or of self-being as such, but only by a con-
sideration of the essential connexion of the human person and
his relations with all being. Consideration of existence or self-
being as such yields only the concept and outline of an almost
ghostly spiritual being, that possesses, indeed, bodily contents of
its basic sensations, its dread of the universe, its anxiety about
existence, its feeling of primal guilt, yet possesses even these in a
way that has nothing to do with the body. This spiritual being
lurks in man, lives its life and settles the accounts of this life with
itself; but it is not man, and our question is about man. If we try
to grasp man on the far side of his essential connexion with the
rest of being then we understand him, as Nietzsche does, to be
a degenerate animal, or, as Heidegger does, to be a separated
spiritual being. Only when we try to understand the human
person in his whole situation, in the possibilities of his relation
to all that is not himself, do we understand man. Man is to be
understood as the being who is capable of the threefold living
relation and can raise every form of it to essentiality.
 

“No age”, writes Heidegger in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,
“has known so much, and so many different things, about man
as ours... And no age has known less than ours of what man
is.” In his book Being and Time he has tried to give us a knowledge
of man by the analysis of his relation to his own being. This
analysis he did in fact give, on the basis of a separation of this
relation from all other essential human relations. But in this way
one does not learn what man is, but only what the edge of man
is. One can also say, one learns what man is on the edge—the
man who has reached the edge of being. When I read Kierke-
gaard in my youth, I regarded Kierkegaard’s man as the man on
the edge. But Heidegger’s man is a great and decisive step out
from Kierkegaard in the direction of the edge where nothing
begins.
 

The second significant attempt of our time to treat the problem
of man as an independent philosophical problem has likewise
come from the school of Husserl: it is the “anthropology” of
Scheler.

Scheler, indeed, did not complete his work on this subject, but
what has been published of articles and addresses on anthropo-
logy, by himself and posthumously, is sufficient to show us his
point of view and to make it possible for us to form a judgment.

Scheler expresses clearly the situation in our time from which
anthropology starts. “We are the first epoch in which man has
become fully and thoroughly ‘problematic’ to himself; in which
he no longer knows what he essentially is, but at the same time
also knows that he does not know.” It is now a case of beginning,

in this situation of his extreme problematic condition, with the
systematic comprehension of what he is (Wesen). Scheler, unlike
Heidegger, refuses to abstract from the concreteness of the
whole man present to him and to consider his “existence”
(Dasein), namely his relation to his being (Sein), as what is
metaphysically the only essential. He has to do with the sheer
concreteness of man, i.e. he wants to treat what on his under-
standing divides man from other living creatures only in
connexion with what he has in common with them; and he
wants to treat it in such a way that it may be recognizable pre-
cisely in relation to what is common, by its standing out in its
specific character from what is common.

For such a treatment, as Scheler rightly recognizes, the history
of anthropological thought in the widest sense, both the philo-
sophical and the pre-philosophical and extra-philosophical, that
is, the “history of man’s consciousness of himself”, can have
only an introductory significance. By means of discussion of all
“mystical, religious, theological and philosophical theories of
man” freedom must be won from all theories. “Only,” says
Scheler, “by being willing to make a complete tabula rasa of all
traditions about this question, and by learning to look in
extreme methodical aloofness and astonishment on the being
called man, can we reach tenable insights again.”

That is indeed the real, genuine philosophical method, and is
especially to be recommended in face of a subject that has
become so problematic as this. All philosophical discovery is the
uncovering of what is covered by the veil woven from the
threads of a thousand theories. Without such an uncovering we
shall not be able to master the problem of man at this late hour.
But we have to investigate whether Scheler employs with all
strictness in his anthropological thought the method which he
sets forth. We shall see that he does not. If Heidegger considers
instead of the real man only a metaphysical essence and
composition, a metaphysical homunculus, Scheler lets his

consideration of the real man be permeated by a metaphysic,
and moreover one which, though independently achieved and
of independent value, is deeply influenced by Hegel and
Nietzsche, however much it seeks to rid itself of these influences.
But a metaphysic which permeates the consideration in this way
can no less than all anthropological theories prevent the glance
being directed “in extreme aloofness and astonishment on the
being called man”.

Of the two named influences it must be said that Scheler’s
earlier anthropological writings are more determined by
Nietzsche, the later more by Hegel. Scheler has followed both, as
we shall see, in his over-estimation of the significance of time for
the absolute. Nietzsche admittedly wishes to know nothing of
the absolute itself, all idea of absoluteness is for him—not essen-
tially different than for Feuerbach—merely a game and a projec-
tion of man. But in wanting to find the meaning of human life in
its transition to a “superman” he establishes so to speak a relative
absolute, and this no longer has its content in a supra-temporal
being but only in becoming, in time. But for Hegel, at whom
Scheler arrives by way of Nietzsche, the absolute itself attains
complete and final realization of its own being and conscious-
ness only in man and his perfection. Hegel sees the substance of
the universal spirit in its “producing itself”, in its “knowing and
realizing itself and its truth” in an “absolute process”, “step by
step”, culminating in history. Scheler’s metaphysic—which has
essentially determined his anthropology in its later form—is to
be understood from this starting-point, in the doctrine, namely,
of the “ground of things”, which “is realized in the temporal
course of the world-process”, and about the human self as “the
only place of the becoming of God which is accessible to us and
at the same time a true part of the process of this becoming of
God”; so that the becoming is dependent on it and it on the
becoming. The absolute, or God, is thereby far more radically
than with Hegel introduced into time and made dependent on it.

God is not, but he is becoming; thus he is inserted into time, in
fact he is its product. And even if there is, in passing, talk about a
supra-temporal being which only manifests itself in time, for
such a being there is no genuine place in a doctrine of a God
who is becoming. There is in truth no other being but that of
time, in which the becoming takes place.

This basic assumption of Scheler’s metaphysic must, however,
by no means be confused with Heidegger’s teaching about time
as the essence of human existence and thereby of existence in
general. Heidegger relates only existence to time and does not
overstep the boundary of existence. But Scheler lets being itself
be resolved in time. Heidegger is silent about eternity, in which
perfection is; Scheler denies this eternity.
 

The spirit as a happening, the spirit I have indicated in the child and
the peasant, proves to us that it is not inherent in spirit, as
Scheler contends, to arise by repression and sublimation of the
instincts. Scheler, as is well-known, takes these psychological
categories from Sigmund Freud’s ideas, among whose greatest
services is that he has formed them. But though these categories
have general validity, the central position which Freud gives
them, their dominating significance for the whole structure of
personal and communal life, and especially for the origin and

development of the spirit, is not based on the general life of man
but only on the situation and qualities of the typical man of to-
day. But this man is sick, both in his relation to others and in his
very soul. The central significance of repression and sublimation
in Freud’s system derives from analysis of a pathological condi-
tion and is valid for this condition. The categories are psycho-
logical, their dominating power is pathopsychological. It can,
indeed, be shown that nevertheless their significance is valid not
only for our time but also for others akin to it, that is, for times
of a pathological condition similar to our own, times like our
own when a crisis is arising. But I know no such deep-reaching
and comprehensive crisis in history as ours, and that indicates
the extent of the significance of those categories. If I were to
express our crisis in a formula I should like to call it the crisis of
confidence. We have seen how epochs of security of human
existence in the cosmos alternate with epochs of insecurity; but
in the latter there still reigns for the most part a social certainty,
one is borne along by a small organic community living in real
togetherness. Being able to have confidence within this com-
munity compensates for cosmic insecurity; there is connexion
and certainty. Where confidence reigns man must often, indeed,
adapt his wishes to the commands of his community; but he
must not repress them to such an extent that the repression
acquires a dominating significance for his life. They often
coalesce with the needs of the community, which are expressed
by its commands. This coalescence, indeed, can really take place
only where everything really lives with everything within the
community, where, that is to say, there reigns not an enjoined
and imagined but a genuine and elementary confidence. Only if
the organic community disintegrates from within and mistrust
becomes life’s basic note does the repression acquire its domin-
ating importance. The unaffectedness of wishing is stifled by
mistrust, everything around is hostile or can become hostile,
agreement between one’s own and the other’s desire ceases, for

there is no true coalescence or reconciliation with what is neces-
sary to a sustaining community, and the dulled wishes creep
hopelessly into the recesses of the soul. But now the ways of the
spirit are also changed. Hitherto it was the characteristic of its
origin to flash forth from the clouds as the concentrated mani-
festation of the wholeness of man. Now there is no longer a
human wholeness with the force and the courage to manifest
itself. For spirit to arise the energy of the repressed instincts must
mostly first be “sublimated”, the traces of its origin cling to the
spirit and it can mostly assert itself against the instincts only by
convulsive alienation. The divorce between spirit and instincts is
here, as often, the consequence of the divorce between man and
man.
 

In opposition to Scheler’s conception it must be said of the spirit
that in its beginning it is pure power, namely man’s power to
grasp the world, from inner participation in it and from strict
and close struggle with it, in picture and sound and idea. First
comes man’s intimate participation in the world, intimate with
it in strife as in peace. Here the spirit as a separate being is not
yet present, but it is contained in the force of the primitively
concentrated participation. Only with the tremendous impulse
not merely to perceive the world in wrestling or in playing with
it, but also to grasp it; only with the passion to bind the experi-
enced chaos to the cosmos, does the spirit arise as a separate
being. The picture emerges distinctly from the wild flickering
light, the sound from the wild tumult of the earth, the idea from
the wild confusion of all things: in this way the spirit arises as
spirit. But there cannot be imagined any primal stage of the spirit
in which it does not wish to express itself: the picture itself
strives to be painted on the roof of a cave, and the reddle is at
hand, the sound strives to be sung, and the lips are opening in a

magic song. Chaos is subdued by form. But form wishes to be
perceived by others besides him who produced it: the picture is
shown with passion, the singer sings to the listeners with pas-
sion. The impulse to form is not to be divorced from the impulse
to the word. From participation in the world man reaches par-
ticipation in souls. The world is bound up, and given order; it
can be spoken between man and man, now for the first time it
becomes a world between man and man. And again the spirit is
pure power; with gesture and words the man of the spirit sub-
dues the resistance of the friends of chaos and gives order to
community. The powerlessness of the spirit which Scheler con-
siders to be original is always an accompanying circumstance of
the disintegration of community. The word is no longer
received, it no longer binds and orders what is human, participa-
tion in souls is forbidden to the spirit and it turns aside and cuts
free from the unity of life, it flees to its citadel, the citadel of the
brain. Hitherto man thought with his whole body to the very
finger-tips; from now on he thinks only with his brain. Only
now does Freud receive the object of his psychology and Scheler
the object of his anthropology—the sick man, cut off from the
world and divided into spirit and instincts. So long as we sup-
pose that this sick man is man, the normal man, man in general,
we shall not heal him.

Here I must break off the presentation and criticism of
Scheler’s anthropology. In a genetic study it would remain to
be shown that the essential difference between man and beast,
the difference which establishes the essential life of man, is not
his separation from instinctive connexion with things and living
beings but on the contrary his different and new way of turning
to things and living beings. It would remain to be shown that the
primary relation is not the technical relation common to man
and beast, above which man then rises, but that man’s specific
primitive technique, the invention of independent tools suited
to their purpose and able to be used again and again, has become

possible only through man’s new relation to things as to some-
thing that is inspected, is independent, and lasting. It would
further remain to be shown that in the same way in relation with
other men the original and defining characteristic is not the
instinctive in general, above which man only later rises in the
struggle of the spirit with a turning to men as persons who are
there, apart from my need, independent and lasting, and that the
origin of speech is to be understood only on the basis of such a
turning to others. Here as there a unity of spirit and instinct and
a formation of new spiritual instincts obviously stand at the
beginning. And here as there man’s essential life is not to be
grasped from what unrolls in the individual’s inner life nor from
the consciousness of one’s own self, which Scheler takes to be
the decisive difference between man and beast, but from the
distinctiveness of his relations to things and to living beings.
 

Scheler reached this later metaphysic of his after a Catholic
period in which he confessed a theism. All theism is a variety of
that conception of eternity for which time can signify only the
manifestation and effect but not the origin and development of a
perfect being. Heidegger comes from the neighbouring Protest-
ant realm of the same Christian theism. But he only draws a line
between himself and theism, Scheler breaks with it.

I wish to insert a personal recollection here, for it seems to me
to have a significance that goes beyond the personal. Since my
own thoughts over the last things reached, in the first world war,
a decisive turning-point, I have occasionally described my
standpoint to my friends as the “narrow ridge”. I wanted by this
to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that
includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a
narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness
of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what
remains, undisclosed. When I met Scheler a few years after the
war, after we had not seen one another for some time—he had at

that time completed that break with the church’s thought, with-
out my knowing—he surprised me by saying, “I have come very
near your narrow ridge.” In the first moment I was nonplussed,
for if there was anything I did not expect from Scheler it was the
giving up of the supposed knowledge about the ground of
being. But in the next moment I answered, “But it is not where
you think it is.” For in the meantime I had understood that
Scheler did not really mean that standpoint which I had then,
and have had since then; he confused it with a point of view
which I had cherished and upheld for a long time, and which
indeed was not far from his new philosophy of the becoming
God. Since 1900 I had first been under the influence of German
mysticism from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius, according to
which the primal ground (Urgrund) of being, the nameless,
impersonal godhead, comes to “birth” in the human soul; then I
had been under the influence of the later Kabbala and of Hasi-
dism, according to which man has the power to unite the God
who is over the world with his shekinah dwelling in the world. In
this way there arose in me the thought of a realization of God
through man; man appeared to me as the being through whose
existence the Absolute, resting in its truth, can gain the character
of reality. It was this point of view of mine which Scheler meant
in his remark; he saw me as still holding it; but it had long since
been destroyed in me. He on the other hand surpassed it by his
idea of a “becoming of God”. But he too had had a decisive
experience during the war, which for him was translated into a
conviction of the original and essential powerlessness of the
spirit.
 

Primal and present being, the world’s ground, has according to
Scheler two attributes, spirit and impulse. In this connexion one
thinks of Spinoza; but with him the two attributes are two of

infinitely many, the two which we know. For Scheler the life of
absolute being consists in this duality. Further, with Spinoza the
two attributes of thought and extension stand to one another in
a relation of perfect unity; they correspond to and complete one
another. With Scheler the attributes of spirit and impulse stand
in a primal tension with one another which is fought out and
resolved in the world process. In other words, Spinoza grounds
his attributes in an eternal unity which infinitely transcends the
world and time; Scheler—in fact though not explicitly—limits
being to time and the world process which takes place in time.
With Spinoza, when we turn from the world to what is not the
world, we have the feeling of an incomprehensible and over-
mastering fulness; with Scheler, when we do this, we have the
feeling of a meagre abstraction, even a feeling of emptiness.
Scheler, who speaks in his lecture on Spinoza of the “air of
eternity of the very godhead”, which the reader of Spinoza
breathes in “in deepest draughts”, no longer gives his own
reader this air to breathe. In truth the man of our time scarcely
knows with living knowledge anything of an eternity which
bears and swallows all time as the sea a fleeting wave; though
even to him a way to eternal being still stands open, in the
content of eternity of each moment into which the whole
existence is put and lived.

But in still another important point Scheler differs from
Spinoza. He does not, like Spinoza, give the second of his attri-
butes a static denomination, like extension, corporeal or material
nature, but the dynamic denomination impulse. That is, he substi-
tutes for Spinoza’s attributes Schopenhauer’s two fundamental
principles, the will, which he terms impulse, and the idea,
which he terms spirit.
 

With regard to the attribute of spirit in the ground of being,
Scheler asserts, in an incidental remark which acquires essential
significance for the understanding of his thought, that it is also
possible to term this attribute the godhead, deitas, in the ground
of being. The godhead is thus for him not the world’s ground
itself, but only one of two opposed principles within it. More-
over it is that of the two which possesses “as spiritual being no
kind of original power or force” and hence is not able to exert
any kind of positive creative effect. Over against it stands the
“almighty” impulse, the world fantasy which is charged with
infinitely many images and lets them grow to reality, but in its
origin is blind to spiritual ideas and values. In order to realize the
godhead with the wealth of ideas and values that are latent in it
the world’s ground must “lift the brakes” of the impulse, must
release it and set the world-process on its course. But since the
spirit has no energy of its own it can influence the world-process
only by holding ideas and meaning before the primal powers,
the life-impulses, and guiding and sublimating them till in ever
higher ascent spirit and impulse penetrate one another, impulse
being given spirit and spirit being given life. The decisive place
of this event is the living being “in which the primal being
begins to know and comprehend itself, to understand and to
redeem itself”, and in which “the relative becoming of God”—
namely, man—begins. “Being in itself becomes a being worthy
to be called divine existence only to the extent that it realizes,
in and through man, the eternal deitas in the impulse of
world-history.”

This dualism, fed on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, goes back
to the gnostic idea of two primal gods, a lower, related to matter,
who creates the world, and a higher, purely spiritual god who
redeems the world. Only, in Scheler’s thought the two have
become attributes of the one world’s ground. This cannot be

termed a god, since it contains a godhead only alongside a non-
divine principle and is only destined to become a god. But it
appears to us as much like a man as any kind of divine image, as
the transfigured likeness of a modern man. In this man the
sphere of the spirit and the sphere of impulse have fallen apart
more markedly than ever before. He perceives with apprehen-
sion that an unfruitful and powerless remoteness from life is
threatening the separated spirit, and he perceives with horror
that the repressed and banished impulses are threatening to des-
troy his soul. His great anxiety is to reach unity, a feeling of
unity and an expression of unity, and in deep self-concern he
ponders on the way. He believes he finds it by giving his
impulses their head, and he expects his spirit to guide their
working. It is a misleading way, for the spirit as it is here can
indeed hold ideas and values before, but can no longer make
them credible to, the impulses. Nevertheless, this man and his
way have found their transfiguration in Scheler’s “world’s
ground”.
 

Scheler’s idea of the world’s ground shows, behind the philo-
sophical influences it has received, an origin in the constitution
of the modern soul. This origin has introduced into it a deep and
insoluble contradiction. Scheler’s basic thesis, which is very
understandable from the spirit’s experiences in our time, affirms
that the spirit in its pure form is simply without any power at all.
He comes across this powerless spirit present in primal being
itself as its attribute. Thereby he makes an empirically developed
powerlessness which he comes across into one primally exist-
ing. But it is an inner contradiction of his conception of
the world’s ground that in this the spirit is in origin powerless.
The world’s ground “releases” the impulse in order that it
may produce the world, in order, that is, that the spirit may be

realized in the history of this world. But by what force did the
world’s ground bind its impulse and by what force does it now
release it? By what other than that of the one of its two attributes
which seeks for realization, that of the deitas, of the spirit? The
impulse cannot itself yield the power to keep itself bound, and if
it is to be released this can only happen by the same power
which is so superior to its power that it could keep it bound.
Scheler’s conception of the world’s ground demands in fact an
original preponderant power of the spirit—a power so great that
it is able to bind and to release all the motive-force from which
the world proceeds.

It may be objected that this is not a positive creative power of
its own. But this objection rests on a confusion of power and
force—a confusion which, indeed, Scheler himself makes many
times. Concepts are formed from our highest experiences of a
certain kind, which we recognize as being repeated. But our
highest experiences of power are not those of a force which
produces a direct change, but those of a capacity to set these
forces directly or indirectly in motion. Whether we use the posi-
tive expression “to set in motion” or the negative expression “to
release” is irrelevant. Scheler’s choice of words veils the fact that
even in his world’s ground the spirit has the power to set the
forces in motion.
 

Scheler asserts that in face of his thesis of an original powerless-
ness of the spirit the thought of a “creation of the world from
nothing” falls to the ground. He means, of course, the biblical
story of the creation, for which a later theology has coined the
misleading description of a creation from nothing. The biblical
story does not know the idea of “nothing”, an idea which would
harm the mystery of the “beginning”. The Babylonian epic
of the creation of the world makes the god Marduk strike

amazement into the assembly of the gods by causing a garment
to rise up out of nothing; such magic tricks are alien to the
biblical story of the creation. What it at the very beginning calls
“to create” heaven and earth—in a word that originally means
“to hew out”—is left wholly in mystery, in a process taking
place within the godhead. This process is described falsely by
later theology in the language of bad philosophy, but gnosis
draws it out of mystery into the world and thereby subdues the
alogical to the logic which reigns in the world as such. After this
beginning there is a “spirit”—which is, indeed, something
quite different from a “spiritual being”, namely, the source of all
motion, of all spiritual and natural motion—upon the face of the
“waters” which are obviously charged with germinal forces,
since they can make living beings “swarm forth” from them.
The creation by the Word which is reported is not to be separ-
ated from the effect of the spirit which sets the forces in motion.
Forces are set going, and the spirit has the power over them.

Scheler’s “world’s ground”, too, is only one of the countless
gnostic attempts to strip the mystery from the biblical God.
 

But let us turn from the world’s origin to its existence, from the
divine spirit to our own which is known to us in our experience.
What about this?

In man, says Scheler, the spiritual attribute of present being
itself is becoming manifest “in the unity of concentration of the
person gathering himself to himself”. On the ladder of becom-
ing, primal present being, in the building-up of the world, is
always more and more bent back on itself, “in order to become
aware of itself on ever higher levels and in ever new dimensions,
in order finally to possess and to comprehend itself wholly in
man”. But the human spirit, in which this Hegelian ladder cul-
minates, is, precisely as spirit, in its origin without any power. It

acquires power only by letting itself “be supplied with energy”
by the life-instincts, i.e. by man’s sublimating his instinctive
energy to spiritual capacity. Scheler depicts this process in this
way: first the spirit guides the will by instilling into it the ideas
and values which are to be realized; then the will as it were
starves out the impulses of the instinctive life by mediating to
them the conceptions they would use in order to attain to an
instinctive action; finally the will places “the conceptions,
appropriate to the ideas and values”, “before the waiting
instincts” “like bait before their eyes”, until they execute the
project of will set by the spirit.

Is the man of whose inner life this presentation—based on the
concept of modern psycho-analysis—is given, really man? Or is it
not rather a certain kind of man, namely that in which the
sphere of the spirit and the sphere of the instincts have been
made so separate and independent from one another that the
spirit from its height can bring before the instincts the fascinat-
ing magnificence of ideas, as in gnostic lore the daughters of
light appear to the mighty princes of the planets in order to
make them burn in love and lose the force of their light?
 

Scheler’s description may fit many who are ascetics by a decision
of the will and who have reached contemplation by way of
asceticism. But the existential asceticism of so many great philo-
sophers is not to be understood as the spirit in them depriving
the instincts of life-energy, or having it conveyed into itself. This
asceticism is rather to be understood in terms of a high measure
of concentrated power having been allotted, and an unqualified
mastery lent, to thought in the primal constitution of their life.
What happens in them between the spirit and the instincts is
not, as with Scheler’s man, a struggle conducted from the side of
the spirit by great strategical and pedagogic means, against

which the instincts offer a resistance which is first violent and is
then gradually overcome. But what happens is, as it were, the
two-sided carrying-out of an original contract which assures to
the spirit unassailable mastery and which the instincts now
fulfil—in individual instances grudgingly but in most actually
with pleasure.

But the ascetic type of man is not, as seems to Scheler, the basic
type of spiritual man. This is shown most clearly of all in the
realm of art. If you try to understand a man like Rembrandt or
Shakespere or Mozart with this type as your starting-point, you
will notice that it is precisely the mark of artistic genius that it
does not need to be ascetic in its being. It too will have constantly
to carry out ascetic acts of denial, of renunciation, of inner trans-
formation; but the real conduct of its spiritual life is not based
on asceticism. There is here no endless negotiation between
spirit and instincts; the instincts listen to the spirit, so as not to
lose connexion with the ideas, and the spirit listens to the
instincts so as not to lose connexion with the primal powers.
Certainly the inner life of these men does not run in a smooth
harmony; in fact it is precisely they who know, as scarcely any
other, the dæmonic realm of conflict. But it is a mistaken and
misleading implication to identify the dæmons with the
instincts; they often have a purely spiritual face. The true negoti-
ations and decisions take place, in the life of these and in general
of great men, not between spirit and instincts but between spirit
and spirit, between instincts and instincts, between one product
of spirit and instinct and another product of spirit and instinct.
The drama of a great life cannot be reduced to the duality of
spirit and instinct.

It is altogether precarious to want to show, as Scheler does, the
being of man and of his spirit on the basis of the philosopher-
type, his qualities and experiences. The philosopher is an
immensely important human type, but he represents a remark-
able exceptional case of the spiritual life rather than its basic

form. But even he is not to be understood on the basis of that
duality.

Scheler wishes to represent to us, in the act of forming ideas, the
particular nature of the spirit as a specific good of man, in dis-
tinction from technical intelligence which he shares with the
animals. He gives this example.

A man has a pain in his arm. The intelligence asks how it has
arisen and how it can be removed, and answers the question
with the help of science. But the spirit takes the same pain as an
example of that character of existence, namely, that the world is
shot through with pain, it asks about the nature of pain itself and
from there it goes on to ask what the ground of things must be
like, that something like pain should be possible at all. That is,
man’s spirit abolishes the character of reality of the empirical
pain which the man has felt. Moreover, the spirit does not
merely exclude, as Husserl supposed, the judgment about the
actuality of the pain and treat it according to its nature, but it
removes “experimentally” the whole impression of reality, it
carries out the “basically ascetic act by which reality is stripped
off ” and thus rises above the pain-tormented impulse of life.

I contest, even in respect of the philosopher, so far as he takes
the discovery of a mode of being as the starting-point of his
thought, whether the decisive act of forming ideas is of this
character. The nature of pain is not recognized by the spirit as it
were standing at a distance from it, sitting in a box and watching
the drama of pain as an unreal example. The man whose spirit
does this may have all sorts of brilliant thoughts about pain, but
he will not recognize the nature of pain. This is recognized by
pain being discovered in very fact. That is, the spirit does not
remain outside and strip off reality, it casts itself into the depth
of this real pain, takes up its abode in the pain, gives itself over to

the pain, permeates it with spirit, and the pain itself in such
nearness as it were discloses itself to him. The recognition does
not happen by the stripping off of reality but by the penetration
into this definite reality, a penetration of such a kind that the
nature of pain is exposed in the heart of this reality. Such a
penetration we call spiritual.

The first question is therefore not, as Scheler supposes, “What
then really is pain itself apart from the fact that I feel it here now?”
There is no “apart from” this fact. The nature of pain is disclosed
to me by this very pain that I have here now, its being mine, its
being now, its being here, its defined and particular being, the
perfected presence of this pain. Under the penetrating touch of
the spirit the pain itself as it were communicates with the spirit
in dæmonic speech. Pain—and every real happening of the
soul—is to be compared not with a drama but with those early
mysteries whose meaning no-one learns who does not himself
join in the dance. The spirit translates out of the dæmonic
speech, which it learned in intimate touch with the pain, into
the speech of ideas. It is this translation which takes place in a
differentiation and removal from the object. “Contemplating”
thought is with the philosopher too, so far as he is really
empowered by the being of the world to proclaim it, not first but
second.

The first thing is the discovery of a mode of being in com-
munion with it, and this discovery is pre-eminently a spiritual
act. Every philosophical idea springs from such a discovery. Only
a man who has communicated in his spirit with the pain of the
world in the ultimate depth of his own pain, without any kind of
“apart from”, is able to recognize the nature of pain. But for him
to be able to do this there is a presupposition, that he has already
really learned the depth of the pain of other lives—and that
means, not with “sympathy”, which does not press forward to
being, but with great love. Only then does his own pain in its
ultimate depth light a way into the suffering of the world. Only

participation in the existence of living beings discloses the
meaning in the ground of one’s own being.

But to learn more precisely what spirit is we must not be content
with investigating it where it has reached expression in
achievement and a calling. It must also be sought out where it is
still a happening. For the spirit in its original reality is not some-
thing that is but something that happens; more precisely, it is
something that is not expected but suddenly happens.

Consider a child, especially at the age when it has absorbed
speech but not yet the accumulated wealth of tradition in the
language. It lives with things in the world of things, with what
we adults also know and also with what we no longer know,
what has been scared away from us by the wealth of tradition, by
concepts, by all that is sure and stable. And suddenly the child
begins to speak, it tells its story, falls silent, again something
bursts out. How does the child tell what it tells? The only correct
designation is mythically. It tells precisely as early man tells his
myths which have become an inseparable unity composed from
dream and waking sight, from experience and “fantasy” (but is
fantasy not originally also a kind of experience?). Then suddenly
the spirit is there. But without any preceding “asceticism” and
“sublimation”. Of course the spirit was in the child before it tells
its story; but not as such, not for itself, but bound up with
“instinct”—and with things. Now the spirit steps forth itself,
independently—in the word. The child “has spirit” for the first
time when it speaks; it has spirit because it wants to speak.
Before it now speaks the mythical images were not there separ-
ately but inserted and mingled into the substance of life. But
now they are there—in the word. Only because the child has the
spiritual instinct to the word do these images come forward now,
and at the same time become independent: they exist and can be

spoken. The spirit begins here as an instinct, as an instinct to the
word, that is, as the impulse to be present with others in a world
of streaming communication, of an image given and received.

Or consider a typical peasant, as he still exists, although the
social and cultural conditions for his existence seem to have
disappeared. I mean a peasant who all his life seemed able to
think only purposively and technically, who bore in mind only
what he needed for his work and the immediate condition of his
life. But now he begins to age, to have to make an effort to carry
out his job. And then it happens that on his day off he can be
seen standing there staring into the clouds, and if he is asked he
replies, after a while, that he has been studying the weather and
you see that it is not true. At the same time he can occasionally
be seen with his mouth quite unexpectedly opening—to utter a
saying. Before this he had of course uttered sayings, but tradi-
tional and known ones, which were mostly humorously pessim-
istic utterances about “the way of things”. He still utters the
same kind now, and preferably if something has gone amiss, if
he has experienced the “contraryness” of things (which Scheler
takes as the fundamental nature of all experience of the world),
that is, if he has once more experienced the contradiction which
reigns in the world. But now he makes, time and again, remarks
of a quite different kind, such as were not heard from him
earlier, and unknown to tradition. And he utters them staring
ahead, often only whispering as though to himself, they can
barely be caught: he is uttering his own insights. He does not do
this when he has experienced the contrariness of things, but for
example when the ploughshare has sunk softly and deeply into
the soil as though the furrow were deliberately opening to
receive it, or when the cow has been quickly and easily delivered
of her calf as though an invisible power were helping. That is, he
utters his own insights if he has experienced the grace of things, if
he has once again experienced despite all contrariness that man
participates in the being of the world. Certainly the experience

of grace is only made possible by the experience of contrariness
and in contrast to it. But here too it holds true that the spirit
arises from concord with things and in concord with instincts.
 

In his first anthropological treatise, written during his theistic
period, Scheler makes true man begin with the “God-seeker”.
Between the beast and homo faber, the maker of tools and
machines, there exists only a difference of degree. But between
homo faber and the man who begins to go out beyond himself and
to seek God there exists a difference of kind. In his last anthropo-
logical works, whose underlying position is no longer theism
but that idea of a becoming God, the philosopher takes the place
of the religious man. Between homo faber and the beast, so Scheler
expounds here, there exists no difference of kind, for intelli-
gence and the power of choice belong also to the beast. Man’s
special position is established by means of the principle of spirit
as absolutely superior to all intelligence and standing altogether
outside all that we call life. Man as a being in the order of living
things is “without any doubt a cul-de-sac of nature”, while “as a
potential spiritual being” he is “the bright and glorious way out
of this cul-de-sac”. Man is therefore “not a static being, not a
fact, but only a potential direction of a process”.

That is almost exactly the same as Nietzsche says about man,
except that here the “spirit” takes the place of Nietzsche’s “will to
power” which makes man into real man. But the basic definition
of a “spiritual” being is for Scheler his existential separability
from the organic, from “life” and all that belongs to life. To a
certain extent—with the essential limitations I have formulated
above—this is true of the philosopher; it is not true of the spirit-
ual existence of man in general, and especially it is not true of
spirit as a happening. In his early and in his later works Scheler
draws two different lines of division through mankind, but both

are inadmissible and full of self-contradiction. If the religious
man is something different from the existential actuation of all
that lives in the “non-religious” man as dumb need, as stammer-
ing dereliction, as despair crying out, then he is a monster. Man
does not begin where God is sought, but where God’s farness
means suffering without the knowledge of what is causing it.
And a “spiritual” man, in whom a spirit dwells which is not
found anywhere else, and which understands the art of cutting
itself free from all life, is only a curiosity. If the spirit as a calling
wants to be in its essence something different from the spirit as a
happening then it is no longer the true spirit but an artificial
product usurping the spirit’s place. The spirit is inserted in
sparks into the life of all, it bursts out in flames from the life of
the most living man, and from time to time there burns some-
where a great fire of the spirit. All this is of one being and one
substance. There is no other spirit but that which is nourished by
the unity of life and by unity with the world. Certainly it experi-
ences being separated from the unity of life and being thrown
into abysmal contradiction to the world. But even in the martyr-
dom of spiritual existence true spirit does not deny its primal
community with the whole of being; rather it asserts it against
the false representatives of being who deny it.
 

In two significant modern attempts we have seen that an indi-
vidualistic anthropology, an anthropology which is substantially
concerned only with the relation of the human person to him-
self, with the relation within this person between the spirit and
its instincts, and so on, cannot lead to a knowledge of man’s
being. Kant’s question What is man? whose history and effects I
have discussed in the first part of this work, can never be
answered on the basis of a consideration of the human person as
such, but (so far as an answer is possible at all) only on the basis
of a consideration of it in the wholeness of its essential relations
to what is. Only the man who realizes in his whole life with his
whole being the relations possible to him helps us to know man
truly. And since, as we have seen, the depths of the question
about man’s being are revealed only to the man who has become
solitary, the way to the answer lies through the man who over-
comes his solitude without forfeiting its questioning power. This

means that a new task in life is set to human thought here, a task
that is new in its context of life. For it means that the man who
wants to grasp what he himself is, salvages the tension of soli-
tude and its burning problematic for a life with his world, a life
that is renewed in spite of all, and out of this new situation
proceeds with his thinking. Of course this presupposes the
beginning of a new process of overcoming the solitude—despite
all the vast difficulties—by reference to which that special task of
thought can be perceived and expressed. It is obvious that at the
present stage reached by mankind such a process cannot be
effected by the spirit alone; but to a certain extent knowledge
will also be able to further it. It is incumbent on us to clarify this
in outline.

Criticism of the individualistic method starts usually from the
standpoint of the collectivist tendency. But if individualism
understands only a part of man, collectivism understands man
only as a part: neither advances to the wholeness of man, to man
as a whole. Individualism sees man only in relation to himself,
but collectivism does not see man at all, it sees only “society”.
With the former man’s face is distorted, with the latter it is
masked.

Both views of life—modern individualism and modern
collectivism—however different their causes may be, are essen-
tially the conclusion or expression of the same human condi-
tion, only at different stages. This condition is characterized by
the union of cosmic and social homelessness, dread of the uni-
verse and dread of life, resulting in an existential constitution of
solitude such as has probably never existed before to the same
extent. The human person feels himself to be a man exposed by
nature—as an unwanted child is exposed—and at the same time
a person isolated in the midst of the tumultuous human world.
The first reaction of the spirit to the awareness of this new and
uncanny position is modern individualism, the second is
modern collectivism.

In individualism the human being ventures to affirm this
position, to plunge it into an affirmative reflexion, a universal
amor fati; he wants to build the citadel of a life-system in which
the idea asserts that it wills reality as it is. Just because man is
exposed by nature, he is an individual in this specially radical
way in which no other being in the world is an individual; and
he accepts his exposure because it means that he is an individual.
In the same way he accepts his isolation as a person, for only a
monad which is not bound to others can know and glorify itself
as an individual to the utmost. To save himself from the despair
with which his solitary state threatens him, man resorts to the
expedient of glorifying it. Modern individualism has essentially
an imaginary basis. It founders on this character, for imagination
is not capable of actually conquering the given situation.

The second reaction, collectivism, essentially follows upon the
foundering of the first. Here the human being tries to escape his
destiny of solitude by becoming completely embedded in one of
the massive modern group formations. The more massive,
unbroken and powerful in its achievements this is, the more the
man is able to feel that he is saved from both forms of homeless-
ness, the social and the cosmic. There is obviously no further
reason for dread of life, since one needs only to fit oneself into
the “general will” and let one’s own responsibility for an
existence which has become all too complicated be absorbed in
collective responsibility, which proves itself able to meet all
complications. Likewise, there is obviously no further reason for
dread of the universe, since technicized nature—with which
society as such manages well, or seems to—takes the place of the
universe which has become uncanny and with which, so to
speak, no further agreement can be reached. The collective
pledges itself to provide total security. There is nothing imagin-
ary here, a dense reality rules, and the “general” itself appears to
have become real; but modern collectivism is essentially illusory.
The person is joined to the reliably functioning “whole”, which

embraces the masses of men; but it is not a joining of man to
man. Man in a collective is not man with man. Here the person is
not freed from his isolation, by communing with living beings,
which thenceforth lives with him; the “whole”, with its claim
on the wholeness of every man, aims logically and successfully at
reducing, neutralizing, devaluating, and desecrating every bond
with living beings. That tender surface of personal life which
longs for contact with other life is progressively deadened or
desensitized. Man’s isolation is not overcome here, but over-
powered and numbed. Knowledge of it is suppressed, but the
actual condition of solitude has its insuperable effect in the
depths, and rises secretly to a cruelty which will become mani-
fest with the scattering of the illusion. Modern collectivism is the
last barrier raised by man against a meeting with himself.

When imaginings and illusions are over, the possible and
inevitable meeting of man with himself is able to take place only
as the meeting of the individual with his fellow-man—and this
is how it must take place. Only when the individual knows the
other in all his otherness as himself, as man, and from there
breaks through to the other, has he broken through his solitude
in a strict and transforming meeting.

It is obvious that such an event can only take place if the
person is stirred up as a person. In individualism the person, in
consequence of his merely imaginary mastery of his basic situ-
ation, is attacked by the ravages of the fictitious, however much
he thinks, or strives to think, that he is asserting himself as a
person in being. In collectivism the person surrenders himself
when he renounces the directness of personal decision and
responsibility. In both cases the person is incapable of breaking
through to the other: there is genuine relation only between
genuine persons.

In spite of all attempts at revival the time of individualism is
over. Collectivism, on the other hand, is at the height of its
development, although here and there appear single signs of

slackening. Here the only way that is left is the rebellion of the
person for the sake of setting free the relations with others. On
the horizon I see moving up, with the slowness of all events of
true human history, a great dissatisfaction which is unlike all
previous dissatisfactions. Men will no longer rise in rebellion—
as they have done till now—merely against some dominating
tendency in the name of other tendencies, but against the false
realization of a great effort, the effort towards community, in the
name of the genuine realization. Men will fight against the dis-
tortion for the pure form, the vision of the believing and hoping
generations of mankind.

I am speaking of living actions; but it is vital knowledge alone
which incites them. Its first step must be to smash the false
alternative with which the thought of our epoch is shot
through—that of “individualism or collectivism”. Its first ques-
tion must be about a genuine third alternative—by “genuine”
being understood a point of view which cannot be reduced to
one of the first two, and does not represent a mere compromise
between them.

Life and thought are here placed in the same problematic
situation. As life erroneously supposes that it has to choose
between individualism and collectivism, so thought erroneously
supposes that it has to choose between an individualistic
anthropology and a collectivist sociology. The genuine third
alternative, when it is found, will point the way here too.

The fundamental fact of human existence is neither the indi-
vidual as such nor the aggregate as such. Each, considered by
itself, is a mighty abstraction. The individual is a fact of existence
in so far as he steps into a living relation with other individuals.
The aggregate is a fact of existence in so far as it is built up of
living units of relation. The fundamental fact of human existence
is man with man. What is peculiarly characteristic of the human
world is above all that something takes place between one being
and another the like of which can be found nowhere in nature.

Language is only a sign and a means for it, all achievement of the
spirit has been incited by it. Man is made man by it; but on its
way it does not merely unfold, it also decays and withers away. It
is rooted in one being turning to another as another, as this
particular other being, in order to communicate with it in a
sphere which is common to them but which reaches out beyond
the special sphere of each. I call this sphere, which is established
with the existence of man as man but which is conceptually still
uncomprehended, the sphere of “between”. Though being real-
ized in very different degrees, it is a primal category of human
reality. This is where the genuine third alternative must begin.

The view which establishes the concept of “between” is to be
acquired by no longer localizing the relation between human
beings, as is customary, either within individual souls or in a
general world which embraces and determines them, but in
actual fact between them.

“Between” is not an auxiliary construction, but the real place
and bearer of what happens between men; it has received no
specific attention because, in distinction from the individual soul
and its context, it does not exhibit a smooth continuity, but is
ever and again re-constituted in accordance with men’s meet-
ings with one another; hence what is experience has been
annexed naturally to the continuous elements, the soul and its
world.

In a real conversation (that is, not one whose individual parts
have been preconcerted, but one which is completely spon-
taneous, in which each speaks directly to his partner and calls
forth his unpredictable reply), a real lesson (that is, neither a
routine repetition nor a lesson whose findings the teacher knows
before he starts, but one which develops in mutual surprises), a
real embrace and not one of mere habit, a real duel and not a
mere game—in all these what is essential does not take place in
each of the participants or in a neutral world which includes the
two and all other things; but it takes place between them in the

most precise sense, as it were in a dimension which is accessible
only to them both. Something happens to me—that is a fact
which can be exactly distributed between the world and the
soul, between an “outer” event and an “inner” impression. But
if I and another come up against one another, “happen” to one
another (to use a forcible expression which can, however,
scarcely be paraphrased), the sum does not exactly divide, there
is a remainder, somewhere, where the souls end and the world
has not yet begun, and this remainder is what is essential. This
fact can be found even in the tiniest and most transient events
which scarcely enter the consciousness. In the deadly crush of an
air-raid shelter the glances of two strangers suddenly meet for a
second in astonishing and unrelated mutuality; when the All
Clear sounds it is forgotten; and yet it did happen, in a realm
which existed only for that moment. In the darkened opera-
house there can be established between two of the audience,
who do not know one another, and who are listening in the
same purity and with the same intensity to the music of Mozart,
a relation which is scarcely perceptible and yet is one of elem-
ental dialogue, and which has long vanished when the lights
blaze up again. In the understanding of such fleeting and yet
consistent happenings one must guard against introducing
motives of feeling: what happens here cannot be reached by
psychological concepts, it is something ontic. From the least of
events, such as these, which disappear in the moment of their
appearance, to the pathos of pure indissoluble tragedy, where
two men, opposed to one another in their very nature, entangled
in the same living situation, reveal to one another in mute clarity
an irreconcilable opposition of being, the dialogical situation
can be adequately grasped only in an ontological way. But it is
not to be grasped on the basis of the ontic of personal existence,
or of that of two personal existence, but of that which has its
being between them, and transcends both. In the most powerful
moments of dialogic, where in truth “deep calls unto deep”, it

becomes unmistakably clear that it is not the wand of the indi-
vidual or of the social, but of a third which draws the circle
round the happening. On the far side of the subjective, on this
side of the objective, on the narrow ridge, where I and Thou
meet, there is the realm of “between”.

This reality, whose disclosure has begun in our time, shows
the way, leading beyond individualism and collectivism, for
the life decision of future generations. Here the genuine third
alternative is indicated, the knowledge of which will help to
bring about the genuine person again and to establish genuine
community.

This reality provides the starting-point for the philosophical
science of man; and from this point an advance may be made on
the one hand to a transformed understanding of the person and
on the other to a transformed understanding of community. The
central subject of this science is neither the individual nor the
collective but man with man. That essence of man which is
special to him can be directly known only in a living relation.
The gorilla, too, is an individual, a termitary, too, is a collective,
but I and Thou exist only in our world, because man exists, and
the I, moreover, exists only through the relation to the Thou. The
philosophical science of man, which includes anthropology and
sociology, must take as its starting-point the consideration of
this subject, “man with man”. If you consider the individual by
himself, then you see of man just as much as you see of the
moon; only man with man provides a full image. If you consider
the aggregate by itself, then you see of man just as much as we
see of the Milky Way; only man with man is a completely out-
lined form. Consider man with man, and you see human life,
dynamic, twofold, the giver and the receiver, he who does and
he who endures, the attacking force and the defending force, the
nature which investigates and the nature which supplies infor-
mation, the request begged and granted—and always both
together, completing one another in mutual contribution,

together showing forth man. Now you can turn to the individual
and you recognize him as man according to the possibility of
relation which he shows; you can turn to the aggregate and you
recognize it as man according to the fulness of relation which he
shows. We may come nearer the answer to the question what
man is when we come to see him as the eternal meeting of the
One with the Other.