§ 1. The Apparent Contradiction between the 'Particular' Question Concerning the Essence of Human Freedom and the 'General' Task of an Introduction to Philosophy
The theme of this introduction to philosophy is already signalled in the title of the lecture course. It is the essence of human freedom. We are to treat of freedom, more specifically, of human freedom. We are to treat of man.
So we shall be considering man and not animals: not plants, not material bodies, not the products of craft and technology, not works of art, not God, but man and his freedom.
Those things just listed as outside or alongside man are as familiar to us as man himself. All these things are spread out before us and we can distinguish various items one from another. Yet we are also acquainted with that in which, despite every distinction and difference, all things agree. Everything we know is known as something that is, and everything that is we call a being [ein Seiendes]. To be a being [Seiendes zu sein] is what everything we have mentioned, primarily and in the last instance, has in common.
The human being, whose freedom we are going to consider, is one being among all the others. The totality of beings is what we usually call world, and the ground of world is what we commonly call God.1 If we bring to mind, however indefinitely, the totality of known and unknown beings, at the same time thinking specifically of man, it becomes clear that human beings occupy only a small corner within the totality. Set before the forces of nature and cosmic processes this tiny being exhibits a hopeless fragility, before history with its fates and fortunes an ineluctable powerlessness, before the immeasurable duration of cosmic processes and of history itself an inexorable transitoriness. And it is this tiny, fragile, powerless, and transitory being, the human being, of whom we are to treat.
Further, we shall examine just one of this being's properties – its
1 'World' and 'God' are here intended as noncommital words for the totality of beings (the specific totality of nature and history: world) and for the ground of the totality (God).
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