Dijalog između svijeta i čovjeka

Clearly, Fink’s work does not bear the stamp of absolute knowledge, the outcome of which we are now very familiar with; but neither is it intoxicated with relativism, with the perception that there is now an almost inconceivable multiplicity of human self-understanding and culture, of different, mutually contradictory interpretations of human life in the form of technical and economic life, where material advantage is to the forefront, or in the forms of religion, myth, art, philosophy and so on, philosophically or theoretically; there is no triviality there, or rather, triviality is an impossibility. The philosophical question of man, of the fundamental modes of our existence, of life and death, of labor and governance, of work as the historical action of freedom, of consumption and production, of work as the framework of governance, of communism as a “system of historical materialism,” of the arrogation of power and the threat of death, of erotic communion and sociality, of games – this is implicitly a dual question. First, it is a rejection of the obvious, of what goes without saying, of whatever is most fiercely defended, even when it is utterly grotesque and contrary to everything just. Second, it is an insight into what mediates the creation of knowledge of man for us: sociology, history, psychology, philology, moral philology, ethnology, economics, cultural geography, pedagogy and so on. There is no doubt, however, that the sciences are powerful and influential in “man’s quest for true self-discovery.”Still, there is good reason for saying that, for all that, they are incapable of grasping man in his entirety; for the law of misfortune, the law of the rift, of the open wound within us is at work in them. Fink no doubt had in mind the fact that philosophy is known to man as man: at times of spiritual and corporeal affliction, in the maelstrom of the times we live in, in the wastelands and singlemindedness of public institutions that “already know too much about us.” The institutions of modern societies, with their image of man, know that there is nothing enigmatic about man; that we find our happiness in the eyes of others, in the beatitude of suffering and submission. Just as Marx associated his critique of dehumanization with a critique of the entire history of human society, so too Fink’s existential anthropology should be associated with the critique of metaphysics, of the millennia-long tradition that raises us for the egoism of institutions in