EXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
39
"God's plan of salvation." Now, however, one could be sure neither
of the meaning or Being of the Christian world, nor of the always
present Being of the ancient Cosmos; and even the traditional defini–
tion of truth as
aequatio intellectus et rei
was no longer valid.
Already before Kant's revolutionising of the western conception of
Being, Descartes had posed the question of Reality in a very modern
sense, although he then gave an answer which was completely bound
up with the traditional seme. The question whether Being, in general,
is,
is just as modern as the answer of the
cogito ergo sum
is useless;
since this answer proves, as Nietzsche remarked, never the existence
of the ego cogitans (the thinking ego), but at most the existence of
the cogitare (the act of thought). In other words, the truly living "I"
never arises from the !-think, but only an "I" as object of thought.
We know this precisely from the time of Kant.
More depends than is commonly supposed in the history of
secularization on Kant's destruction of the ancient unity of thought
and Being. Kant's refutation of the ontological proof of God destroyed
that rational belief in God which rested on the notion that what I
can rationally conceive must also be; a notion which is not only older
than Christianity, but probably also much more strongly rooted in
European man since the Renaissance. This so-called atheising of the
world- the knowledge, namely, that we cannot prove God through
reason-touches the ancient philosophical concepts at least as much
as the Christian religion. In this atheised world man can be inter–
preted in his "abandonment" or in his "individual autonomy." For
every modern philosopher- and not only for Nietzsche-this inter–
pretation becomes a touchstone of his philosophy.
Hegel was for us the last ancient philosopher, since he was the
last to sneak past this question successfully. With Schelling modern
philosophy begins, since he clearly explains that he is concerned with
the individual who "wishes to have a providential God" who "is
Master of Being,"-whereby Schelling really intends the real man, the
"individual freed of everything universal"; since "it is not the uni–
versal in man that longs after happiness, but the individual." In this
astonishing directness of the individual's claim for happiness (after
Kant's contempt for the ancient will to be happy it was not at all so
simple to admit it again) there lies more than the desperate wish to
return to the security of a Providence. What Kant hadn't understood,
when he destroyed the ancient conception of Being, was that he was
at the same time putting in question the Reality of everything beyond
the individual; that, indeed, he implied what Schelling now directly
