What is Man?

Abstract

Man would be nothing without philosophy. To show this is the purpose of this chapter. If in the previous chapter we discussed the question: What is philosophy?, we observed the anthropological character of philosophy in as much as it reflected the conflicts and problems man was facing in a particular historical situation. In our investigation of the question: What is philosophy?, the accent lay naturally on the nature of philosophy, even though this nature already pointed to the nature of man. In this chapter now the accent is placed on man, and the view-point is not so much how philosophy reflects man’s nature, but that man’s nature is such that he has to reflect on the world and his position, purpose and function in the world over and over again and that, because of this necessity, man cannot help being a philosopher. It is hoped that it becomes evident that, if man could cease to be a philosopher, he would cease to be man, and that even there where the self-abolition of philosophy is advocated, philosophy is not really abolished, because such self-abolition occurs by philosophical criteria. This does not mean, however, that these attempts at the self-abolition of philosophy do not affect man as a critical and free individual, as we shall see later.