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This uneasiness in human beings, which involves the negation of the living-world, hasinspired Max Scheler to observe, very eloquently, that we have never before accumulatedso much knowledge about humankind in the midst of such concurrent ignorance aboutitself. 6 Scheler has worked out the details of this statement in order to ground his projectof a philosophical anthropology. However, one can ask whether a philosophicalanthropology can really rise up to the dimension of the historical ‘becoming’ of man.The idea of a philosophical anthropology is not only problematic in terms of its subjectmatter, i.e., human beings, but also as to whether its method should be a philosophic one.Moreover, its historical genesis and its development are problematic, given that there isno generally accepted statement on when it was recognized as a philosophical discipline.There are three different theses, which I would like to mention here:a) - Philosophical anthropology arose when man appeared to himself as a humanbeing. However, this moment of initial self-contemplation is not historicallyascertainable. Moreover, it is not clear what is meant by it, as it is ofteninterwoven with a religious theory of the genesis of man.b) - Philosophical anthropology definitively formed itself up as an independent philosophicaldiscipline as recently as the twentieth century. Amongst the protagonistsof this newly-formed philosophical movement, one usually mentions Max Scheler,Helmuth Plessner, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Gehlen, to cite only a few. At the sametime, the ‘becoming’ of philosophical anthropology will explicitly be associatedwith the crisis of the modern self-awareness of man.c) - As a specific philosophical discipline, the latter is an entirely modern phenomenon.In fact, it has acquired this specificity with the emergence of the notion of man asa subject. Thereafter, the ‘becoming’ of philosophical anthropology coincides withthe endeavor to found philosophy itself on an anthropological basis. This attemptbegan in the second half of the nineteenth century. 7We must still be confronted with another question: in the end, in what sense is philosophicalanthropology philosophical? What differentiates it from other kinds of anthropology,e.g., from cultural anthropology, social anthropology, or from anthropologyas a medical discipline? 8 According to the long-standing definition of Aristotle, philosophyas such should investigate beings (Seiendes) as a whole, but not according to Kant,who claimed that one should actually analyze the conditions of the possibility ofknowledge. The purpose of philosophy is to give a description of the general, not theparticular, which signifies the essence and not merely the occurrence. Accordingly,philosophical anthropology should also study man as a whole and not only his biological6Cf. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9 (Bern/München: Francke, 1975), 11. In his essay Mensch und Geschichte, Scheler writes: »Wir sind in derungefähr zehntausendjährigen Geschichte das Erste Zeitalter, in dem sich der Mensch völlig und restlos‘problematisch’ geworden ist; in dem er nicht mehr weiß, was er ist, zugleich aber auch weiß, daß er esnicht weiß. Und nur indem man einmal mit allen Traditionen über diese Frage völlig tabula rasa zumachen gewillt ist und in äußerster methodischer Entfremdung und Verwunderung auf das Menschgennante Wesen blicken lernt, wird man wieder zu haltbaren Einsichten gelangen können.« Ibid., 120.7Cf. Odo Marquard, Zur Geschichte des philosophischen Begriffs ‘Anthropologie’ seit dem Endedes achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, in idem, Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt a.M.:Suhrkamp, 1982), 213-249.8See Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA3, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm vonHerrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991).194