existence upon and in this freedom, is the site where beings in the whole become revealed, i.e. he is that particular being through which beings as such announce themselves. At the beginning of these lectures, we viewed man as one being among others, as a small, fragile, powerless and transitory being, occupying a tiny corner within the totality of beings. Seen now from the ground of his essence in freedom, something awesome [ungeheuerlich] and remarkable becomes clear, namely that man exists as the being in whom the being of beings, thus beings in the whole, are revealed. Man is that being in whose ownmost being and essential ground there occurs the understanding of being. Man is awesome in a way that a god can never be, for a god must be utterly other. This awesome being, that we really know and are, can only be as the most finite of all beings, as the convergence of opposing elements within the sphere of beings, and thus as the occasion and possibility of the separation of beings in their diversity. At the same time, it is here that the central problem of the possibility of truth as deconcealment resides.
If we view man in this way – and this is the view forced upon us by the fundamental content of the leading question of philosophy – if, in short, we view man metaphysically, then, provided that we understand ourselves, we no longer move along the path of egoistic reflection upon our I. We now stand in our own essence, where all psychology breaks down. It would be unfruitful to engage in further discussions or to put forward further hypotheses concerning this metaphysical experience of man. What this is, and how it sets itself to work as philosophy, is experienceable and knowable only in concrete questioning. Just one thing is clear. Man, as grounded in the freedom of his existence, has the possibility of penetrating into this his own ground, such that he loses himself in the truly inner metaphysical greatness of his essence and thus precisely wins himself in his existential uniqueness. For a long time, the greatness of finitude has been downgraded through a false and deceptive infinity, such that we are no longer able to reconcile finitude and greatness. Man is not the image of a god conceived in the sense of the absolutely bourgeois. but this latter god is the ungenuine creation of man.
Still, for the concrete unfolding and development of the problem of freedom, the question now arises as to how we can arrive at where our essential questioning leads us. What does it mean to say that freedom is the ground of the possibility of man's existence? Freedom is only revealed as this ground when our way of questioning, and the conciseness of our conceptual clarification, succeed in letting it be the ground. We therefore ask: what does the existence of man mean? What does the ground of
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