48
PARTISAN REVIEW
ground for all this world's Being,-in order to understand how seduc–
tive this scheme was.
It
was, in fact, the attempt to make Man
directly the "Master of Being."
-----
e em o
an eidegger calls Existenz or
Dasein.
Through
establishing this
terminology~
he gets away from using the expres–
sion "Man." This is not arbitrary terminology, its purpose is to
resolve Man into a series of modes of Being which are phenomeno–
logically demonstrable. Hence he discards all those characteristics of
Man which Kant had provisionally sketched as freedom, human
dignity, and Reason ; and which arise from the spontaneity of Man
and hence are not phenomenologically demonstrable, since, being
spontaneous, they are more than mere functions of Being, and since
in them Man intends more than himself. Heidegger's ontological ap–
proach hides a rigid functionalism in which Man appears only as a
conglomerate of modes of Being, which is in principle arbitrary, since
no concept of Man deternunes them odes of his Being.
The nself" has entered in place of Man: "With the expression
Self we answer the question concerning the Who of human reality."
For human reality (the Being of Man) is singled out by the fact that
"in its very Being it is concerned with its Being." This self-reflexive
character of human reality c
be "existentially_" grasped; which-is
all that remains of Man's power and freedom.
This grasping of one's own Existenz is, according to Heidegger,
the act of philosophising itself: "philosophical questioning must be
existentially seized as a possibility inherent in the Being of existing
human reality." Philosophy is the exceptional existential possibility of
human reality-which is, in the end, only a reformulation of Aris–
totle's
Bios Theoretikos,
of the contemplative life as the highest pos–
sibility for man. This is all the more intensified by the fact that in
Heidegger's philosophy Man is made a kind of
summum ens,
the
"Master of Being," insofar
-as
~xistenre..._and
... essence. re identical in
him. Mter Man was discovered as the being for whom he had so
long taken God, it appears that such a being is also, in fact, powerless,
and that there is no "Master of Being." The only things that remain
are anarchical modes of Being.
Human reality is thus characterized by the fact not that it simply
is,
but that its very Being is to put its own Being at stake. This fun–
damental structure is "Care," which lies at the basis of all our every–
day carefulness in the world. Carefulness, taking care, has truly a self–
reflexive character; it is only apparently directed towards the object
with which it is occupied.
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