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Contents
1 Summary

2 Notes

Summary
The heart of The Anthropology a point of convergence and divergence
between law and moral principle
The Anthropology is NOT:
Practical does not conceive of man as belonging to the moral
republic of souls (which would make it practical),
Juridical not a civil society made up of legal subjects (which
would make it juridical)
The Anthropology is Pragmatic:
Man is a Citizen of the World to say that anthropology is
pragmatic, and to say that it envisages man as a citizen of the
world, effectively amounts to saying the same thing.
man as belonging to the realm of the concrete universal
man as the legal subject is determined by and submits to certain
laws
To be a citizen of the world is to belong to a realm that is as
concrete as an ensemble of precise juridical rules, themselves as
universal as moral law but is at the same time a human being
who, in his or her freedom, acts according a universal moral code.
In such conditions, it falls to anthropology to show how a juridical relationship of the order of a possession, which is to manages
to preserve the moral kernel of a person construed as a free subject.
To preserve it, though not without compromising it at the same
time.
The Zone of Free-Exchange,
Man trades his second-hand freedoms connecting with others
By way of an unspoken and uninterrupted commerce which ensures
that he is at home anywhere on earth.
A citizen of the world.
The Anthropology and the Critique
The Anthropology says nothing other than what is said in the Critique

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The Critique announces and makes space for anthropology at the

heart of an empirical philosophy
The Anthropology makes no reference to the Critique or to the organizing principles that it sets out.
The Anthropology repeats the general articulations of the Critique,
as well as the now traditional division of the faculties, as if it went
without saying that it should do so
The Anthropology repeats the Critique on the popular level of
advice, narrative and example, and so to secretly set Kantian
thought on the path toward a founding philosophy
The Anthropology repeats the major themes of the Critique as
Communication Problematics:
the relation to the object
the synthesis of the manifold
the universal validity of representation
The Critique has no foundational value with regard to the Anthropology
The Anthropology rests on the Critique but is not rooted in it.
The Anthropology spontaneously inclines towards that which must
serve as its foundation: not critical, but transcendental philosophy
itself. It is there that we will discover the structure and the function
of its empiricity.
To critical thought, which represents the investigation into that
which is conditional in the founding activity, Anthropology responds by offering an inventory of what is un-founded in the
conditioned.
In the anthropological domain, there is no synthesis that it is not
under threat: it is as if the realm of experience were hollowed
out from within by dangers which are not of the order of some
arbitrary going beyond, but of collapse.
Possible experience, in its limited range, defines the field of the
loss of truth with as much success as it does the field of truth.
The Metaphysics of Law - Second Half of the 18th Century
Investigation into the forms of ownership amongst individuals in the
concrete and particular forms of:
the couple
the family group
the home
the household
The Object of the Study of Anthropology
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Man
Not the description of what man is
Not how man can be used
But what he can make of himself.
What can be expected of him.
What man can and should make of himself.
The notion of usage wrenched from the level of technical actuality
and placed within a double system:
of obligation asserted with regard to oneself
of distance respected with regard to others.
Usage is inscribed within the text of a freedom postulated as
both singular and universal.
The World
The world is its own school
The aim of anthropology is to situate man within this instructive
context.
Anthropology will thus be:
the analysis of how man acquires the world (his use, rather
than his knowledge of it),
how he manages to take his place in the world and participate
in the game
, the synthesis of the prescriptions and rules that the world
imposes on man, which train him, readying him to take control of the game
Anthropology is therefore neither a history of culture nor an analysis of its successive forms, but the practice, at once immediate
and imperative, of a culture already given in advance.
It teaches man to recognise, within his own culture, what the
world teaches him.
Anthropology and Freedom
Freedom and use are already bound together in the reciprocity of a
usage
What one can do and what one must do belong together in the unity
of a play which measures the one against the other
In Anthropology, man is neither a homo natura, nor a purely free
subject; he is caught by the syntheses already operated by his relationship to the world.
Anthropology and Language
Anthropology, popular knowledge, can find its basis in itself because,
speaking a shared language, it speaks of a shared language, and sheds
light on it from within.
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It is therefore a knowledge of man that man himself can immediately

understand, recognise, and indefinitely extend-for the two are subject
to the same inexhaustible language.
Anthropology is the elucidation of that already established languagewhether explicit or silent through which man engages with things
and enters their likenesses into a system of exchange, reciprocity,
and silent understanding, which in fact forms neither the republic
of minds, nor amounts to the total appropriation of nature but this
universal citizenship of man in the world.
And yet, language is not yet presented as a system to be interrogated,
but rather as an element which goes without saying, in which we find
ourselves from the beginning; an instrument of exchange, a vehicle
for dialogue, a form of virtual understanding, language is what philosophy and non-philosophy have in common. It is in language that
the one meets the other-or rather, that they communicate.
As for the content of the conversation itself, it must obey the laws
of an internal structure: those of a flexible continuity, which procedes without break, so that each persons freedom to formulate his
or her opinion, to insist upon it or to take the conversation in another
direction, is never felt by others to be an abuse or a constraint.
Thus, in the regulated aspect of language, the expression of freedoms
and the possibility, for individuals, of gathering together to form a
whole, can happen spontaneously, without the intervention from an
outside force or authority, renunciation, or alienation. By speaking
within the community of a Convivium, freedoms encounter one another and, spontaneously, are universalized. Everyone is free, but in
the form of totality.

Notes
We know nothing, or virtually nothing, about the different versions of the
text that existed prior to the final draft. (p. 18)
For this reason, it is impossible to make a clear distinction between the
genetic perspective and the structural method in the analysis of this work:
we are dealing with a text which, in the thickness of its many layers, its
definitive presence and the particular balance of its elements, is contemporary with each phase of the movement that it concludes. Only a genetic
study of the whole of the critical enterprise, or, if not that, then a reconstruction of the movement of the whole, could register the finality of the
form in which it was achieved and dissolved. Conversely, if the structure
of the anthropologico-critical relations could be precisely defined, then
only this could uncover the genesis which was to culminate in that final
stability-or penultimate, if it is indeed the case that the Opus Postumum

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was already making the first steps on the ground, at last regained, of
transcendental philosophy. (p. 22-23)
What, then, were the issues preoccupying Kant as he prepared the text
for publication-this text, so archaic in its concerns, and so remotely rooted
in his oeuvre? (p. 33)
the relating of a representation, as a determination of the subject, to
an object distinct from it, by which means it becomes cognition. Kant
makes the point that the representation does not befit the object but
that a relation to something else befits the representation, whereby it
becomes communicable to other people. He also stresses that grasping
(apprehensio) a given multiplicity and its reception in the unity of consciousness (upperceptio) amounts to the very same thing as the representation of a composite that is possible only through composition. And it is
only from the point of view of this composition that we can communicate
with one another: in other words, we are able to communicate with one
another because of this composition, it is its relationship to the object that
renders the representation valid for everyone and everywhere communicable; which does not mean we are exempt from producing the composition
ourselves. The major themes of the Critique-the relation to the object,
the synthesis of the manifold, the universal validity of representation-are
in this way directly related to the problem of communication. The transcendental synthesis is only ever given as balanced in the possibility of an
empirical division manifested in the double form of agreement (Ubereinstimmung) and communication (Mitteilung). In what only appears to be a
contradiction, the fact that a representation can be assigned to more than
one thing, and that such multiplicity is not already given as bound up in
itself, is what ensures that one representation can always be exchanged
for another: (p. 34)
discussions on the subject of the metaphysics of Law. Since the sixteenth
century, juridical thought has been concerned either with defining the individuals relationship to the State in its general form or the relationship
between the individual and the thing in the abstract form of property.
But here we have, in the second half of the eighteenth century, an investigation into the forms of ownership amongst individuals in the concrete
and particular forms of the couple, the family group, the home, and the
household: how can civil society, which is presupposed by the bourgeoisie
both as its foundation and its justification, be divided into discrete units
which no longer have anything to do with the feudal model but which are
solid enough to withstand its final dissolution? Christian Gottfried Schiitz
was concerned to find, reading Kants Metaphysics of Morals ownership
amongst individuals so closely modeled on the main forms of rights over
things. Indeed, Kant makes room for these forms of ownership in a section
entitled Von dem auf dingliche Art personlichen Recht, which is divided
into three parts according to the three types of aquisition: a man acquires

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(erwirbt) a wife; a couple acquires children; a family acquires domestics.

(p. 39)
the very heart of the anthropological concern, which is itself a point of
convergence and divergence between law and moral principle. The Anthropology is pragmatic in the sense that it does not conceive of man as
belonging to the moral republic of souls (which would make it practical),
nor to a civil society made up of legal subjects (which would make it
juridical) instead, man is considered to be a citizen of the world,59 as
belonging, that is, to the realm of the concrete universal, in which the legal
subject is determined by and submits to certain laws, but is at the same
time a human being who, in his or her freedom, acts according a universal
moral code. To be a citizen of the world is to belong to a realm that is as
concrete as an ensemble of precise juridical rules, themselves as universal
as moral law Thus, to say that anthropology is pragmatic, and to say that
it envisages man as a citizen of the world, effectively amounts to saying
the same thing. In such conditions, it falls to anthropology to show how
a juridical relationship of the order of a possession, which is to say zjus
rerum, manages to preserve the moral kernel of a person construed as a
free subject. To preserve it, though not without compromising it at the
same time. (p. 42)
in the Preface to the Anthropology, he states as his object what man
makes of himself-or can and should make of himself-as a free-acting being Cfreihandelndes Wesen)- the commerce of freedom with itself, finding
itself restricted by the movement by which it is affirmed; manipulation,
where the negotiations of exchange are never interrupted by the straightforward recognition of value. Treating man as a freihandelndes Wesen?
the Anthropology uncovers a whole zone of free-exchange, where man
trades his second-hand freedoms, connecting with others by way of an
unspoken and uninterrupted commerce which ensures that he is at home
anywhere on earth. A citizen of the world. (p. 44)
to write a Regimen on the topic of the power exercised by the mind
over morbid bodily sensations. He meant to send the work to Hufeland,
despite the fact that the book would not be a medical one, but more a
reflection on his own personal experience. Kant would make two uses of
the Regimen: he sent it to Hufeland, who was also given permission to
publish it in his Revue, either in full or in part, with an introduction
and commentary; it was also to become the third part of the Conflict of
the Faculties-thereby creating a systematic whole which would study the
relationship between the Faculty of Philosophy and the three others. Thus
a philosophers personal contribution to the medical enterprise, to come
up with a Regimen, comes to signify, simultaneously and without having
undergone any modification, the debate and the division between medical
science and philosophical reflection over how to define the everyday art of
healthy living. (p. 47)
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The fact is, with regard to medicine, a moral and practical philosophy is
the universal negative (it excludes illness)-which means, with regard to the
Regimen, it serves as the universal positive (it deines the laws of preservation in the play of health). Philosophy is the element of universality
against which the particulars ofmedical prescription are always measured:
it forms its unprescribable horizon, taking in both health and illness. To
be sure, this precedence is masked by the immediacy of human wishes:
when we wish for a long and healthy life, only the first of those wishes
is unconditional: a sick man pleading for delivrance in death always calls
for a reprieve when the moment inally comes; but what is unconditional
in the register of the wish takes second place in life: no one dies a natural
death when in good health-we might not feel ill, but still, illness is there.
Illness is the indispensable seed of death. The art of prolonging life is
therefore not about scoring a victory over the absolute of death in the
comprehensive mastery of life; it is, at the very heart of life, the measured
and relative art of managing the relationship between health and illness.
(p. 48)
The object of study, then, is not memory as such, but the use made of
it. Not the description of what man is but what he can make of himself.
This theme had no doubt been, from the beginning, the very seed of
anthropological reflection, as well as the mark of its singularity: wir
untersuchen hier den Menschen... um zu wissen was er aus sich machen
und wie man ihn brauchen kann. Such is the programme as it is defined in
the Collegentwurfe. In 1798, it has been doubly modified. Anthropology
is no longer interested in finding out how man can be used, but what
can be expected of him. Moreover, it will investigate what man can
and should make (kann und soil) of himself. Which is to say that the
notion of usage is wrenched from the level of technical actuality and placed
within a double system: of obligation asserted with regard to oneself, and
of distance respected with regard to others. Usage is inscribed within the
text of a freedom postulated as both singular and universal. (p. 52)
The pragmatic character was therefore nothing more than the useful universalized. (p. 52)
This notion of Spielen is singularly important: man is natures play; it
is the game that he plays, and is played by it; if he is sometimes played
with-as when his senses are deceived-it is because he is playing the victim
of the game, despite it being within his power to be in control, to take
back control by feigning his intention. In this way, the game becomes a
kiinstlicher Spiel and the show he puts on receives its moral justification.
Anthropology thus develops on the basis of this dimension of human exercise that goes from the ambiguity of the Spiel (game-toy) to the indecision
of the Kunst (art-artifice). (p. 53)
The world being its own school, the aim of anthropology is to situate

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man within this instructive context. It will therefore be both, indissociably: the analysis of how man acquires the world (his use, rather than
his knowledge of it), which is to say how he manages to take his place
in the world and participate in the game: Mitspielenf and, at the same
time, the synthesis of the prescriptions and rules that the world imposes
on man, which train him, readying him to take control of the game: das
Spiel verstehen. Anthropology is therefore neither a history of culture nor
an analysis of its successive forms, but the practice, at once immediate
and imperative, of a culture already given in advance. It teaches man to
recognise, within his own culture, what the world teaches him. (p. 54)
Time rules here, but in the synthesis of the present. (p. 54)
It explores a region where freedom and use are already bound together in
the reciprocity of a usage, where what one can do and what one must do
belong together in the unity of a play which measures the one against the
other, where the world becomes a school on the basis of the prescriptions
of a culture. We are touching on the essential point: in Anthropology,
man is neither a homo natura, nor a purely free subject; he is caught by
the syntheses already operated by his relationship to the world. (p. 54-55)
Put another way, the a priori of knowledge from the point of view of the
Critique cannot immediately be transposed into the a priori of existence
in the terms of the anthropology; it appears in the density of a becoming
where its sudden emergence infallibly assumes the retrospectively constituted meaning of the already there. (p. 67)
Thus, the structure of the relationship between the given and the a priori in
Anthropology is the opposite of that revealed in the Critique. The a priori,
in the order of knowledge, becomes, in the order of concrete existence, an
originary which is not chronologically first, but which, having appeared in
the succession of figures of the synthesis, reveals itself as already there; on
the other hand, that which, in the order of knowledge, is a pure given, is,
in the reflection on concrete existence, lit up by muted lights which give
it the depth of the already occurred. (p. 68)
To critical thought, which represents the investigation into that which is
conditional in the founding activity, Anthropology responds by offering an
inventory of what is unfounded in the conditioned. In the anthropological
domain, there is no synthesis that it is not under threat: it is as if the
realm of experience were hollowed out from within by dangers which are
not of the order of some arbitrary going beyond, but of collapse. Possible
experience, in its limited range, defines the field of the loss of truth with
as much success as it does the field of truth. (p. 70)
Characteristic, the Way of cognizing the Interior of the Human Being
from the Exterior. (p. 71)

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As for the Characteristic, it shows that the ensembles of phenonemathe

body, the couple, the race, the species-are not closed in upon themselves,
given once and for all, but are what relates the apparently immobile truths
of phenomena back to those radical possibilities that gave them meaning
and movement; it allows us to go from the sign back to the power, das
Innere des Menschen aus dem Ausseren zu erkennen? (p. 72)
The critical model, having imposed itself for so long, is succeeded by an
articulation which repeats it, but as in a negative: the theory of the elements becomes a prescription with respect to all possible phenomena
(which, strictly speaking, was the goal of the Methodenlehre Conversely,
the theory of the method becomes a regressive analysis that aims to uncover to the primitive seed of the powers (which was the intention of the
Elementarlehre)A repetition, then, but back-to-front, as in a mirror. This
is how close, and, at the same time, how distant the region where the a
priori of knowledge is defined is from the domain specifying the a prioris
of existence. That which is announced in the order of conditions appears,
in the form of the originary, as both same and other. (p. 72-73)
The Anthropology says nothing other than what is said in the Critique,
we need only glance through the 1798 text to see that it covers exactly
the same ground as the critical enterprise. (p.83)
The meaning and function of the question What is man? is to carry
the divisions of the Critique to the level of a fundamental cohesion: that
of a structure, more radical than any possible faculty lends itself to
transcendental philosophy, liberated at last. And yet we have not reached
the end of the road. Or rather, we have already gone too far down the
path which was supposed to lead us the exact position of Anthropology-to
its birth-place and to the moment it inserted itself into critical thought.
As if an anthropology only looked possible (not only its programmatic
but also its fundamental possibility) from the standpoint of the Critique
having already reached its end, having already led to the realization of
transcendental philosophy. But there is still further to go: the question
What is man? presents itself in the Logic as the anthropological question
par excellence. And yet, in the Opus Postumum, it is linked, from the very
beginning, to the interrogation of God and the world; the question is fully
developed on this level, as if it had nothing to do with the singular domain
that is anthropology. The reference in the Logic to an anthropology that
would bring all philosophical interrogation back to itself appears to have
been no more than a fleeting episode in Kantian thought. An episode
situated between an anthropology that has no pretentions to such universal
meaning, and a transcendental philosophy which takes the question of man
to another, far more radical level. This episode was structurally necessary:
its transcient character is linked to the transition that it made possible.
(p. 86-87)

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The relationship between the 1798 text and the Critique is therefore paradoxical. On the one hand, the Critique announces and makes space for
anthropology at the heart of an empirical philosophy; the Anthropology,
for its part, makes no reference to the Critique or to the organizing principles that it sets out. On the other hand, the Anthropology repeats the
general articulations of the Critique, as well as the now traditional division
of the faculties, as if it went without saying that it should do so; and yet,
despite this implicit and constant reference to the Critique, the latter has
no foundational value with regard to the Anthropology. The Anthropology rests on the Critique but is not rooted in it. It inclines spontaneously
toward that which must serve as its foundation: not critical, but transcendental philosophy itself. It is there that we will discover the structure and
the function of its empiricity. (p. 87-88)
The Anthropology describes itself as both systematic and popular; and
it is by unpacking these two words that we will be able to decipher its true
meaning: to repeat the Critique on the popular level of advice, narrative
and example, and so to secretly set Kantian thought on the path toward
a founding philosophy. (p.88)
This circle is not to be undone, but to be taken as it presents itself, where
it presents itself-that is, in language. For language offers the possibility
of speaking and of speaking about language, and of doing so in the same
movement; it is in the everyday use of the inexhaustible source of these
examples that reading goes on, uninterrupted, and in the familiarity of
what is known, writing. To say that a book is popular because readers can
find further examples for themselves is to say that, between the author and
the reading public, there is the undivided basis of an everyday language
which goes on speaking, without transition and without change, even after
the last page. Anthropology, popular knowledge, can find its basis in itself
because, speaking a shared language, it speaks of a shared language, and
sheds light on it from within. It is therefore a knowledge of man that man
himself can immediately understand, recognise, and indefinitely extend-for
the two are subject to the same inexhaustible language. (p. 94)
Anthropology is the elucidation of that already established language-whether
explicit or silent through which man engages with things and enters their
likenesses into a system of exchange, reciprocity, and silent understanding,
which in fact forms neither the republic of minds, nor amounts to the total
appropriation of nature but this universal citizenship of man in the world.
(p. 97)
The Anthropology is thus rooted in a German system of expression and
experience. To be sure, Kant tried to extend his analysis beyond this domain by looking at the way foreign languages are spoken, and by referring
to other linguistic systems. No doubt he made use of what was the most
particular to his experience so as to overcome its limitations: Konigsberg,

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an administrative capital, university town and business centre, situated

at a crossroads and close to the sea, has a guaranteed pedagogical value
when it comes to understanding man as a citizen of the whole world. But
all this does not prevent Anthropology from inhering situated within geographical and linquistic space from which it cannot quite be dissociated.
It is a reflection on and in a system of constituted and all-encompassing
signs. (p. 97)
And yet, language is not yet presented as a system to be interrogated,
but rather as an element which goes without saying, in which we find
ourselves from the beginning; an instrument of exchange, a vehicule for
dialogue, a form of virtual understanding, language is what philosophy
and nonphilosophy have in common. It is in language that the one meets
the other-or rather, that they communicate. (p. 100)
As for the content of the conversation itself, it must obey the laws of an
internal structure: those of a flexible continuity, which procedes without
break, so that each persons freedom to formulate his or her opinion, to
insist upon it or to take the conversation in another direction, is never felt
by others to be an abuse or a constraint. Thus, in the regulated aspect of
language, the expression of freedoms and the possibility, for individuals,
of gathering together to form a whole, can happen spontaneously, without the intervention from an outside force or authority, renunciation, or
alienation. By speaking within the community of a Convivium, freedoms
encounter one another and, spontaneously, are universalized. Everyone is
free, but in the form of totality. (p. 101-102)
The Anthropology is therefore systematically projected by a reference to
the Critique which works across time; it also has the value of popularity
because its thinking is situated within a given language that it makes
transparent without reformulating it, for the very particularities of that
language are the legitimate birthplace of universal significations. From
an anthropological perspective, then, truth takes its shape through the
temporal dispersion of syntheses and in the movement of language and
exchange; there, it does not find its most primitive form, nor the moments
leading to its constitution, nor indeed the pure shock of the already given;
it finds, in a time that has already elapsed, and in a language which is
already spoken, within a temporal flux and a linguistic system never given
at degree zero, something like its original form: the universal emerges from
the very heart of experience in the movement of the truly temporal and
the actually exchanged. It is in this way that the analysis of the Gemiit
(in the form of inner sense) becomes cosmopolitan prescription (in the
form of human universality) (p. 103)
Doubtless it is in the recurrence of these three notions, their fundamental
rootedness, that the movement according to which the conceptual destiny, that is, the problematic, of contemporary philosophy can be seen to

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take shape: that dispersion which no confusion, dialectical or phenomenological, will have the right to reduce, and which divides up the field of
all philosophical reflection according to the a priori, the originary and
the fundamental. Since Kant, the implicit project of all philosophy has
been to overcome this essential division, to the point where it becomes
clear that such overcoming cannot take place outside of a thinking which
repeats it, and by repeating it, instates it. Anthropology is precisely the
site where that confusion will be reproduced, incessantly. Whether it is referred to as such, or concealed in other projects, Anthropology, or at least
the anthropological level of reflection, will come to alienate philosophy.
The intermediary character of the originary and, with it, of anthropological analysis, situated between the a priori and the fundamental, is what
allows it to function as an impure and unthought hybrid within the internal economy of philosophy: it will be accorded both the privileges of the
a priori and the meaning of the fundamental, the preliminary character
of critical thought and the realized form of transcendental philosophy; it
makes no distinction between the problematic of the necessary and that
of existence; it confuses the analysis of conditions with the interrogation
of finitude. One day, the whole history of post-Kantian and contemporary philosophy will have to be envisaged from the point of view of the
perpetuation of this confusion-a revised history which would start out by
denouncing it. (p. 106-107)
In fact, the moment we think that we can give critical thought the value
of positive knowledge, we will have forgotten the essential point of Kants
lesson. The difficulty we encountered in situating the Anthropology in
relation to the critical ensemble ought to have been indication enough
that the lesson is not simple. What Kant teaches us is that Anthropology
empiricity cannot be grounded in itself, that it is possible only on account
of the repetition of the Critique, that it therefore cannot contain the Critiques but that could not help referring to it; and if the Anthropology looks
like the extrinsic and empirical analogon of the Critique it is because it
is based on the structures of the a priori that had already been identified and made known. In the general organization of Kantian thought,
finitude can therefore never be thought on its own level; it presents itself
to knowledge and to discourse only in a secondary fashion; but that to
which it is bound to refer is not an ontology of the infinite; rather, it is, in
their organization of the ensemble, the a priori conditions of knowledge.
Which is to say that Anthropology finds itself doubly beholden to critical
thought: as knowledge, it relies on the conditions that it sets and the
realm of experience that it determines; as an investigation of finitude, it
relies on the first, impassable forms that critical thought makes manifest.
(p. 118-119)
We can now see why, in a single movement, characteristic of the thinking of our time, all knowledge of man is presented as either dialecticized
from the start or fully dialecticizable-as always invested with a meaning
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which has to do with the return to the origin, to the authentic, to the
founding activity, to the reason why there is meaning in the world. We
can also see why all philosophy presents itself as capable of communicating directly with the sciences of man or empirical studies ofman without
having to take a detour through a critique, an epistemology, or a theory
of knowledge. Anthropology is the secret path which, orientated toward
the foundations of our knowledge, connects, in the form of an unthought
mediation, mans experience with philosophy. The values implicit in the
question Was its der Mensch? are responsible for this homogenous, destructured and infinitely reversible field in which man presents his truth as
the soul of truth. The polymorphous notions of meaning, structure,
and genesis-whatever value they might have, and which a rigorous
reflection ought to restore to them-here indicate only the confusion of
the domain in which they assume their communicative roles. That these
notions circulate indiscriminately throughout the human sciences and philosophy does not justify us in thinking this or that, as if in unison, this or
that; it merely points up our incapacity to undertake a veritable critique
of the anthropological illusion. (p. 123-124)
And yet, the model for just such a critique was given to us more than
fifty years ago. The Nietzschian enterprise can be understood as at last
bringing that proliferation of the questioning of man to an end. For is
not the death of God in effect manifested in a doubly murderous gesture
which, by putting an end to the absolute, is at the same time the cause of
the death of man himself? For man, in his finitude, is not distinguishable
from the infinite of which he is both the negation and the harbinger; it is
in the death of man that the death of God is realized. Is it not possible to
conceive of a critique of finitude which would be as liberating with regard
to man as it would be with regard to the infinite, and which would show
that finitude is not an end but rather that camber and knot in time when
the end is in fact a beginning?
The trajectory of the question Was ist der Mensch? in the field of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms
it: der Ubermensch. (p. 124)

Shaun Gamboa

Concordia University

2013