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.