THE SELF AND THE OTHER
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which a constitutive and inalienable quality is possessed, would
be
sure of being a man as the fish is in fact sure of being a fish. Now
this is a formidable and a fatal error. Man is never sure that he will
be
able to carry out his thought-that is, in an adequate manner;
and only
if
it is adequate is it thought.
Or,
in more popular terms:
man is never sure that he will be right, that he will hit the mark.
Which means nothing less than the tremendous fact that, unlike all
other beings in the universe, man can never be sure that he is, in fact,
a man, as the tiger is sure of being a tiger and the fish of being
a fish.
Far from thought having been bestowed upon man, the truth
is---,a truth which I cannot now properly argue but can only state–
that he has continually been creating thought, making it little by
little, by dint of a discipline, a culture or cultivation, a millennial
effort over many millennia, without having yet succeeded-far from
it!-in finishing his work. Not only was thought not given to man
from the first, but even at this point in history he has only suc–
ceeded in forming a small portion and a crude form of what in
the simple and ordinary sense of the word we call thought. And
even the small portion gained being an acquired and not a con–
stitutive quality, is always in danger of being lost, and considerable
quantities of it have been lost, many times in fact, in the past, and
today we are on the point of losing it again. To this extent, unlike
all the other beings in the universe, man is never surely
man;
on
the contrary,
being man
signifies precisely being always on the
point of not being man, being a living problem, an absolute and
hazardous adventure, or, as I am wont to say: being, in essence,
drama! Because there is drama only when we do not know what
is going to happen, so that every instant is pure peril and shudder–
ing risk. While the tiger cannot cease being a tiger, cannot be de–
tigered, man lives in the perpetual risk of being dehumanized.
With him, not only is it problematic and contingent, whether
this
or that will happen to him, as it is with the other animals, but at
times what happens to man is nothing less than
ceasing to be man.
And this is true not only abstractly and generically but it holds for
our own individuality. Each one of us is always in peril of not
being the unique and untransferable
self
which he is. The majority
of men perpetually betray this
self
which is waiting to be; and to tell
