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.