tXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
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World. On it rested the ancient world's and the whole western
world's conception of fate up to the nineteenth century (which means
till the appearance of the novel) ; without this pride, tragedy as well
as western philosophy would have been impossible. Likewise, Chris–
tianity had never denied that Man has an insight into God's plan
of salvation; whether this insight be due to his own godlike reason
or to God's revelation, is indifferent. In any case, he remained initi–
ated into the secrets of the cosmos and the course of the world.
What holds for Kant's destruction of the ancient notion of Being,
holds in stronger measure for his new concept of Man's freedom
-a concept in which, oddly enough, the modern lack of freedom is
indicated. According to Kant, Man has the possibility of determining
his own actions out of the freedom of the good will; these actions
themselves, however, fall under the causality of nature, a sphere es–
sentially alien to Man. As soon as human action leaves subjectivity,
which is freedom, it enters the objective sphere, which is causality,
and loses its character as freedom. Man, free in himself, is hopelessly
surrendered to the course of nature a1icn to him, a fate contrary to
him, destructive of his freedom. Herein is expressed the contradictory
structure of his human reality, so far as this plays its role in the world.
While Kant made Man the master and measure of Man, at the same
time he lowered him to a slave of Being. Every new philosopher since
Schelling has protested against this devaluation. Modern philosophy
is still occupied with this reduction of Man, who has just come of
age. It is as if Man had never before risen so high and fallen so low.
Since Kant, every philosophy maintains an element of defiance,
on the one hand, and an open or concealed concept of fate, on the
other hand. Even Marx-who nevertheless, as he himself explained,
wished no longer to interpret the world but to change it, and there–
fore stood on the crest of a new concept of Being and the Worldt in
which Being and the World are no longer recognized as only given,
but as a possible product of Man-quickly fled back to
the old security when he agreed with Hegel that freedom is
insight into necessity. Nietzsche's
amor fati,
Heidegger's Resoluteness,
Camus's Defiance which would risk living despite the absurdity of the
human condition, which consists in the homelessness of Man in the
world,-are nothing else but this effort to save themselves by a return
to security. The hero's gesture has not accidentally become
the
pose
of philosophy since Nietzsche; it requires heroism to live in the world
as Kant left it. Recent philosophers with their modern pose of the
hero show only too plainly that they could follow Kant to the end in
