1 From the anthropological to the existential turn

1.1 Pope and Coleridge

Between the early 18th and early 19th centuries, two significant reorientations occurred in the philosophical debate about the human being: the turn from theology to anthropology and the turn from anthropology to existence. While the first emerged as an explicit counter to a theological treatment of the question of man (Pope and Kant), the second emphatically stressed the close connection between the question of human existence and the question of God (Coleridge and Kierkegaard). This provided the frame of reference for a philosophical and theological debate that continues to this day, despite the great advances in the empirical study of human life over the past two centuries.

In his 1733 – 34 Essay on Man, Alexander Pope summed up the scientific awakening and the new philosophical orientation of the Age of Enlightenment in the famous lines: “Know then thy-self, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is Man.”1 A hundred years later, Coleridge commented on this project in his poem Self-Knowledge (1832):

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν!–and is this the prime

And heaven-sprung adage of the olden time!–

Say, canst thou make thyself?–Learn first that trade;–

Haply thou mayst know what thyself had made.

What hast thou, Man, that thou dar'st call thine own?–

What is there in thee, Man, that can be known?–

Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought,

A phantom dim of past and future wrought,

Vain sister of the worm,–life, death, soul, clod–

Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!2

It is not by studying ourselves that we find out who and what we are, but only by contemplating ourselves from the perspective of the one without whom none of us would exist. We remain caught in the web of our own delusions and fantasies if we do not step back from ourselves and learn to look at ourselves from another place–and if possible, not from just any other place, because then everyone comes into view differently, but from the place that brings everyone into view in the same way: the place of the Creator. Calvin had already emphasized this in the 16th century by closely linking “the knowledge of God and of ourselves” in such a way that without knowing God you cannot know yourself: “it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.”3 True self-knowledge consists in knowing ourselves as God knows us. Without this decentering we remain locked in our human self-centeredness and always see ourselves only as we want to see ourselves and not as we really are. Only a decentered view of ourselves shows us who we truly are. Without knowing God, and how God knows us, we will never know ourselves.

1.2 Kant and Kierkegaard

Few have followed this maxim as resolutely and consistently as Kierkegaard. In contrast to Kant, who more than anyone else brought Pope's concerns to bear philosophically, Kierkegaard emphasized the aporias of all attempts to understand human beings only in terms of themselves and their groping in the dark attempts to understand themselves. Kant implemented Pope's maxim by redesigning all philosophy as anthropology. The whole field of philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense can, in his opinion, be summarized in the following four questions:

“1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is the human being? Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this to anthropology, because the first three questions refer to the last one.”4

What does this “refer” mean? Kant clearly thinks that the fourth question includes the other three in some sense. They are the sub-questions that must be answered to answer the fourth question. But this does not yet capture the core of his view. If we understand him only in this way, two important aspects are neglected: The grammatical change from modal questions (can, ought, may) to an indicative question (is), and the rhetorical change from first-person language in the first three questions to third-person language in the last question.

For Kant it was clear: If one wants to understand what human beings are, as Alexander Pope had urged as the task of enlightened knowledge and research, then it is not enough to plunge into empiricism, to collect data, to formulate hypotheses, and to design theories. If the understanding of human beings is to have practical relevance for the orientation of life, then one must also consider what human beings are not, do not know, cannot, should not, may not do. Not only their capabilities, but also their inabilities must then be explored.

For Kant, therefore, research into the possibilities and limits of being human in philosophy–in metaphysics, morality, and religion–has its place alongside research into the reality of human beings in the natural and human sciences. Scientific research aims at knowledge about human beings (human beings are the object of this knowledge), philosophical reflection aims at existential insights that every human being can make in his or her place (human beings are the subjects of these insights).

Kant therefore interprets the indicative question in the third person ‘What is the human being?’ by three modal questions in the first person, which thematize all the limits that every thinking human being encounters: ‘What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope?’ All three questions assume that human beings, as beings capable of self-determination, strive for knowledge, want to act, and in fact hope. But precisely because we always already do this in one way or another, Kant asks about the conditions of possibility, the right, and the limits of our knowing, acting, and hoping. He wants to uncover where we transgress our limits when we want to know, do, or hope something that we cannot know, cannot do, cannot hope. These transgressions are sources of inhumanity. From them spring metaphysical illusions and anti-scientific know-it-all attitudes, moral arrogance and relativistic irresponsibility, religious fanaticism, and ideological traditionalism. They must be avoided if people are to live together in a humane way.

Therefore, Kant unfolds not an epistemology, but a critical metaphysics of the knowable in demarcation from the unknowable, not a philosophical morality, but a critical metaphysics of the ought in demarcation of moral from immoral willing and doing, and not a theory of God, but a critical metaphysics of reasonable religious practice in distinction from unreasonable religious enthusiasm, traditionalism, and fanaticism.

To be able to answer the fourth question, human beings must be understood not only as knowers and actors, but also as hopers. We need knowledge to be able to act, and we cannot act without hoping. Just as acting is not a form of knowledge, so hoping is not a deficient form of human activity according to the motto: Where we can no longer act, we can only hope. On the contrary, hoping is the opening of ourselves to the chance, the appropriation, the gift of the good. A person who hopes doesn't do anything, but relies on good things happening to him, on being the beneficiary of good things. He is not a doer, but a receiver. When we act, we want to realize something that is not already real (otherwise we would not need to do it), but which is also not impossible for us (otherwise we could not do it), and which should be real because it is good for us (otherwise we would not want to do it). But not everything that is possible is possible for us, not everything that is possible for us is always possible, and not everything that is good for us under one description is so under another.

This is a source of permanent ethical conflict. What is good for a scientific career is bad for a family. What would be good for pandemic containment becomes an unbearable burden for working parents with three young children. And much of what is possible and desirable for us is not only not real here and now but will never be real for us. That is why we must clarify again and again who and what we are and what we want to be, what we can and what we cannot do, what is good for us under which description, what we want to privilege, what we can and must rely on, and what we can and must hope for or not hope for. The third question, therefore, is related to the first, which is about the actual, insofar as it is directed to possibility; and it is related to the second question, which is about the good, insofar as it is directed to the possibility of the good. The three modal questions thus go from the actual to the possible and from...