EXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
51
In this absolute isolation, the Self emerges as the concept really
contrary to Man.
If,
namely, since Kant the nature of Man con–
sisted in the fact that every individual man represents humanity; and
if since the French Revolution and the rationalizing of human law it
belonged to the concept of Man that in every single individual human–
ity can be debased or exalted; then the Self
is
the conce t of Man
according to whlch he can exist independently of humanity and need
represent no one but himself-his own nothingness.
As
the Categorical
mperative in Kant
~rted
that every action must assume respon–
sibility for all humanity, so the experience of guilty nothingness would
precisely eliminate the pz:.esence of_ humanity in every man. The
Self as conscience has put itself in place of humanity, and the Being
of the Self in place of the Being of Man.
-
Heidegger has therefore attempted in later lectures to bring in,
by way of afterthought, such mythologizing confusions as Folk and
Earth as a social foundation for his isolated ·selves. It is evident that
such conceptions can lead one only out of philosophy into some
naturalistic superstition.
If
it is not art of the concept of Man that
he inhabits the world with his fellows,
~n
1-here remain - only- a
mechanical
I
econdlia
i..
by wnich the atomised Self is given a sub–
stratum essentially discordant with its own concept. This can only
serve to organize the Selves engaged in willing themselves into an
Over-self, in order to make a transition from the fundamental guilt,
grasped through resoluteness, to action.
Indications of Human Exist enz: jaspers
From an historical point of view, it would have been more cm–
rect to have begun the discussion of contemporary Existenz philosophy
with J aspers. The
Psychologie der Weltanschauungen)
first printed
in
1919,
is undoubtedly the first book of the new "school." On the
other hand, there was not only the external circumstance that Jaspers'
big
Philosophie
(in three volumes) appeared some five years after
Sein und Zeit)
but also, more significantly, the fact that Jaspers'
philosophy is not really closed and is at the san1e time more modern.
By modern we mean no more than that it immediately yields more
clues for contemporary philosophical thinking. There are such clues,
naturally, also in Heidegger; but they have the peculiarity that they
can lead either only to clues for polemic or to the occasion of a
radicalization of Heidegger's project- as in contemporary French
