central problem. At the same time, I pose a further methodological question: How, then, must such a metaphysics of Dasein, which has the ground for its determination in the problem of winning the foundation for the problem of the possibility of metaphysics, be put forth? Is a determinate world-view not taken as a basis for it? I would misunderstand myself if I said that I gave a philosophy free of points of view. And here a problem is expressed: that of the relationship between philosophy and world-view. Philosophy does not have the task of giving world-view, although, again, world-view is the presupposition of philosophizing. And the world-view which the philosopher gives is not a direct one in the sense of a doctrine or in the sense of an influencing. Rather, the world-view which the philosopher gives rests in the fact that in the philosophizing, it succeeds in making the transcendence of Dasein itself radical, i.e., it succeeds in making the inner possibility of this finite creature comport itself with respect to beings as a whole. To turn it another way: Cassirer says: We do not grasp freedom, but only the ungraspability of freedom. Freedom does not allow itself to be grasped. The question: How is freedom possible? is absurd. From this, however, it does not follow that to a certain extent a problem of the irrational remains here. Rather, because freedom is not an object of theoretical apprehending but is instead an object of philosophizing, this can mean nothing other than the fact that freedom only is and can only be in the setting-free. The sole, adequate relation to freedom in man is the self-freeing of freedom in man.

In order to get into this dimension of philosophizing, which is not a matter for a learned discussion but is rather a matter about which the individual philosopher knows nothing, and which is a task to which the philosopher has submitted himself-this setting-free of the Dasein in man must be the sole and central [thing] which philosophy as philosophizing can perform. And in this sense, I would believe that for Cassirer there is a wholly other terminus ad quem in the sense of a cultural philosophy. Further, I believe that for Cassirer this question of cultural philosophy first gets its metaphysical function in the happening of the history of humankind, if it is not to remain and to be a mere presentation of the various regions. Rather, at the same time within its inner dynamic, it is so deeply rooted that it becomes visible in the metaphysics of Dasein itself as basic happening, and so deeply rooted that it does so expressly and from the first, not after the fact.

Questions for Cassirer:

1. What path does man have to infinitude? And what is the manner in which man can participate in infinity?

2. Is infinitude to be attained as privative determination of finitude, or is infinitude a region in its own right?

3. To what extent does philosophy have as its task to be allowed to become free from anxiety? Or does it not have as its task to surrender man, even radically, to anxiety?