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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heidegger’s philosophical secularization of Kierkegaard had

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

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

For Kierkegaard this relation is given meaning and is

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

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

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