their entire significance. Here we can only go so far as to ask whether dread and care are in fact emotional comportment-correlates for certain kinds of being, especially for being-real.

The dangers which lie in questions like this arc clear to see. How arc we to distinguish here what is essentially and ontologically meaningful for man "as such" from what conditions him only "characterologically"? or from what holds true, for example, only within a given cultural horizon or for a particular historical stage of man's development? or from what finally holds true only for Heidegger and me? To be sure, characterology itself takes on an entirely different ontological weight and different significance if the solus ipse and his kind of being become the center of reference for all types of being. I will concede that to Heidegger. But precisely because I do not share this doctrine (cf. the previous), one should not take it amiss if I pose a less banal preliminary question: Are dread and the "care" which has its source in dread actually the basic dispositions and comportment of primitive peoples (for example, the ever happy, carefree inhabitants of the island of . Sumatra) or for a child? Isn't dread-for example, the dread which gave birth to the myth of original sin - an historical product which I'd say can be demonstrated very precisely in its particular cases? For my part I am convinced that ever since Judaism and Christianity defined Western man, he has lived under a disproportionately greater burden of dread that any other type of man in the world, and that this weight of dread in great measure conditions his enormous world-activity, his hunger for power and his never-resting thirst for "progress" and technological transformation of the world; and furthermore that this dread has emerged in a very peculiar and strong way in Protestantism. But it is an extremely long road from such things as these to the ontology of man. And furthermore, aren't such things as care and dread situations and relations which are much too material for indicating the mode of existence of man -even if one subsequently tries to formalize them as Heidegger very instructively does for "care" when he finally [269] defines it with the purely ontological concepts "being-ahead-of-itself-already-in-a-world" (SZ, 192)? Couldn't the being-structure which Heidegger states in these words just as well be an expression of a disposition of hope which anxiously presses forward, although without an object, a disposition of a soaring eros-anticipation of rushing into a world of exultant hope and expectation? Aren't both states of affairs, dread and hope, isomorphic in relation to this structure?


Translated by Thomas Sheehan



SCHELER/143


Max Scheler (GA 16) Reality and Resistance: On Being and Time, Section 43 - Heidegger the Man and the Thinker