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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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