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.