50
PAR T I SAN REVIEW
no equals. What, consequently, appears as "Fall" in Heidegger, are
all those mo
uman existence which rest on the fact t a
an
lives to
the world with his fellows. To put it historically,
Heidegger's Self is. an ideal which has een working mischief in Ger–
man philosophy and literature since Romanticism. In Heidegger this
arrogant passion to will to be a Self has contradicted itself; for
never before was it so clear as in his philosophy that this is probably
the one being which Man cannot be.
Within the framework of this philosophy the Self "falls" in the
following way :
· -· n-the-world Man has not made himself,
but has been "thrown" into this his Being. He seeks to escape from the
condition o emg t rown t roug the ''project" which always anti–
cipates death as his most extreme possibility. But "in the structure of
being-thro~n
(
Geworfenheit)
as in the project there lies essentially
a Nothingness" : Man has not contrived to bring himself to be and
he usually does not contrive to escape from being. (Suicide plays no
role in Heidegger; Camus, in maintaining
an
n'y a qu'un probleme
philosophique vraiment serieux: c-'est le suicide,"
is the first to draw
from this position a consequence which is contrary to Heidegger, since
the latter does not leave Man even the freedom of suicide.) In other
words, the character of Man's Being is essentially determined by
what he is
not,
his nothingness. The only thing the Self can do to
become ; Self is to take upon itself "resolutely" this factual charac–
ter of its Being, so that in its Existcnz it
uis
the void
(nichtige)
ground
of its nothingness."
~
n t e res_.9lutene "
o
what Man on the basls o his
nothin n- cannot be, namely a Self, Man recognizes that "human
reality
as such
is
guilty." The Being of Man is such that, perpetually
falling to the world, it perpetually hears the "Cry of conscience from
the ground of its Being." Existentially, living means therefore: "The
Will-to-have-conscience resolves to be uilty."
-
The most essential characteristic of this Self is its absolute egoism,
its radical
~eparatiorlfmm
_a ·
ts fellows. The anticipation of death
as existential was introduced to achieve this; for in death Man
realizes the absolute
principium individuationis.
Death alone tears
him from the context of his fellows, within which he becomes a
public person and is hindered from being a Self. Death may indeed
be the end of human reality; at the same time it is the guarantee that
nothing matters but myself. With the experience of death as nothing–
ness I have the chance of devoting myself exclusively to being a Self,
and once and for all freeing myself from the surrounding world.
