Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Hitler and the Germans

Titel: Hitler and the Germans

Stichwort: Was ist der Mensch?: Aufweisung in der Geschichte; Geist u. Vernunft als Bestimmung des Menschen; Leibniz; Existenz; zetema, theomorph

Kurzinhalt: What does it mean to exist as constituted by reason and spirit? ... that man experiences himself as a being who does not exist from himself

Textausschnitt: 85a In the series of definitions of democracy I have just given you, I have focused on the question of being human or of not being human. Now we must become clear about a number of concepts: first, What is man? and second, What are the symptoms of the falling down and the derailment of man? For they all play a big role in the decline of a society and made it possible for a type like Hitler to come to the top. The idea of man is not a question of arbitrary definitions; rather, man is discovered in quite specific historic places and in quite concrete situations. We have two such points where what man is was experienced, and from the experience of man in the concrete case, the idea of man was then generalized as binding on all men. I say this as a methodological introduction, so that you do not come up with the objection that man can be defined in one or the other way, and that human nature may be such and such but that it changes, and so on. (Fs) (notabene)

86a We are dealing here with strictly empirical questions: When was man as such discovered? and What was he discovered to be? These discoveries have taken place respectively in the Hellenic and in the Israelite societies. In the Hellenic society, man was experienced by the philosophers of the classical period as a being who is constituted by the nous, by reason. In the Israelite society man is experienced as the being to whom God speaks his word, that is, as a pneumatic being who is open to God's word. Reason and spirit are the two modes of constitution of man, which were generalized as the idea of man. We have not gone beyond these contents of the idea of man, that is, his constitution by reason and spirit. That seems to be the definitive discovery. (Fs) (notabene)

86b What does it mean to exist as constituted by reason and spirit? The experiences of reason and spirit agree on the point that man experiences himself as a being who does not exist from himself. He exists in an already given world. This world itself exists by reason of a mystery, and the name for the mystery, for the cause of this being of the world, of which man is a component, is referred to as "God." So, dependence of existence (Dasein) on the divine causation of existence (Existenz) has remained the basic question of philosophy up to today. (Fs) (notabene)

86c This was formulated by Leibniz in the classic proposition that metaphysics has to deal with two questions: Why is there something, why not nothing? and the second question, Why is the something as it is? These why-questions place at the beginning of all reflections on man what we can call, with a classic philosophical expression, the etiological problem of the existence of man and world. There is a ground of being in the sense of a first cause, a prima causa or a proton aition, to which we remain in relation philosophically through the seeking, the zetema in the Platonic sense, and pneumatically through hearing the word in the sense of revelation. (Fs) (notabene)

87a In both manners, through the seeking for the divine, the loving reaching out beyond ourselves toward the divine in the philosophical experience and the loving encounter through the word in the pneumatic experience, man participates in the divine. The concepts are methexis in Greek, participatio in Latin, participation in the divine. Insofar as man shares in the divine, insofar, that is to say, as he can experience it, man is "theomorphic," in the Greek term, or the image of God, the imago Dei, in the pneumatic sphere. The specific dignity of man is based on this, on his nature as theomorphic, as in the form and in the image of God. This is a basic complex of ideas we must start out with in order to critically investigate the defection from this complex. (Fs) (notabene)