EXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
49
The Being, for which human reality is care-ridden, is "Existenz,"
which, perpetually threatened by death, is condemned in the end to
extinction. Human reality stands continuously in relation to Existenz
thus menaced; and from this point of view all attitudes are to be
understood, and the analysis of Man coherently made. The structures
of Man's Existenz, namely the structures of his That, Heidegger calls
existential,
and their structural interrelatedness
existentiality.
The in–
dividual possibility of grasping these existential structures and thereby
of
existing
in an explicit sense, Heidegger calls
existentiele.
In tlus
concept of the existential, the question, never put to rest since Schel–
ling and Kierkegaard, how the universal can
be,
comes out into the
open, together with the answer which had already been given by
Kierkegaard.
Seen from the point of view of Nietzsche, who had always nobly
tried to make Man a real "Master of Being," Heidegger's philosophy
is the first absolutely and uncompromisingly this-worldly philosophy.
Man's BeingTscharacterized as Being-in-the-world, and what is at
stake for tbis Being-in the world is, finally; notliing else tfian to main–
tam liimself m the world. Precisely this is not given..him; hence the
fundamental character of Being:in-the-world is uneasiness in the
double meaning of homelessness and fearfulness. In anxiety, which
is fundamentally anxiety before death, the not-being-at-home in the
world becomes explicit ."Bein -in-the-world appears in the existentiel
!!lode of not-being-at-home." This is uneasiness.
Human reality would be truly itself only if it could withdraw
from this Being-in-the-world to itself; which it ·essentially never can
do, hence is always essentially a decline, a falling away, from itself.
"Human reality always fal away from its_elf as a real unity–
declines into the 'world'." Only in the realization of death, which
will take him away from the world, has Man the certainty of being
himself.
By bringing back reality to the Self without the detour through
Man, the question concerning the meaning of Being has fundamental–
ly been given up, and replaced by the question, obviously more basic
to this philosophy, concerning the meaning of the Self. But this ques–
tion appears, in fact, unanswerable, since a Self taken in its absolute
·
Q~eaningless;
if not isolated, on the _ other hand, it becomes
(sunk to the everyday life of the public individual) no longer a Self.
Heiaegger arrives at this ideal of the Self as a consequence of his
making Man what God was in the earlier ontology. Such a highest
being is, in fact, possible only as a
~nique
individual being who knows
