Who Is Man? (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Who Is Man? John C. Merkle Who Is Man? by Abraham J. Heschel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965. Like all of Heschel’s books but in a more concentrated and explicitly philosophical way, Who Is Man? is an eloquent defense of the transcendent dignity of being human—a transcendent dignity grounded in the human orientation toward and manifestation of meaning that transcends the human. Heschel has often been acclaimed as one of the most profound and poetic spiritual writers of our age. But he has not gained the recognition he deserves as a philosopher. This is probably due precisely to the poetic—rather than the strictly systematic—quality of his writing. But the fact that his writing is not systematic in the strict sense does not mean it is unsystematic. It is an organic system in that there is an order, direction, and inner consistency to it. In my view, Heschel’s books are every bit as philosophical as they are poetic, and this is especially true of Who Is Man? whose title states the question at the heart of Heschel’s philosophical exploration. “We ask: What is man? Yet the true question should be: Who is man? As a thing man is explicable; as a person he is both a mystery and a surprise” (p. 28). In responding to the question “Who is man?” Heschel engages in what he elsewhere calls “situational thinking” as contrasted with “conceptual thinking” (God In Search of Man, p. 5). The latter deals with concepts by way of detached [End Page 200] analysis; the former deals with situations by way of concerned involvement. By conceptual thinking Heschel does not simply mean thinking in concepts, which even situational thinking must include, but thinking about concepts rather than the situations underlying them. Situational thinking is the reverse, attending to the situations that give rise to the concepts. Conceptual thinking is an important way of dealing with many intellectual questions, but ultimate questions such as “Who is man?” are not merely intellectual issues but existential problems. Situational thinking is necessary when dealing with such problems: “No genuine problem comes into being out of sheer inquisitiveness. A problem is the outcome of a situation. . . . To understand the meaning of the problem and to appreciate its urgency, we must keep alive in our reflection the situation of stress and strain in which it comes to pass” (p. 1). It is easier to keep alive the conceptualization of a problem than the situation in which it emerged, and it is easier to spawn a conceptual problem than to grapple with a situational problem. But the conceptualization of a problem is not the problem itself and is often a distortion of it. “The predicament of much of contemporary philosophy is partly due to the fact that ongoing conceptualizations have so far outdistanced the situations which engender philosophizing that their conclusions seem to be unrelated to the original problems” (p. 2). Situational thinking focuses on “the human situation” (p. 14) and its original problems more than on concepts or speculations about human nature. Therefore, writes Heschel: “Our question is not only: What is the nature of the human species? but also: What is the situation of the human individual? What is human about a human being? Specifically, our theme is not only: What is a human being? but also: What is being human?” (pp. 28–29). For Heschel, any description of human existence that does not take into account human relatedness to transcendence is inadequate. But classical definitions of human beings as “tool-making animals,” “rational animals,” “political animals,” etc. fail to capture what is distinctive about human beings—“not the undeniable fact of [their] animality” but the enigma of what they do “with and apart from [their] animality” (p. 21). We can attain an adequate understanding of human existence only if we think in distinctively human terms and avoid categories developed in the study of other forms of life (p. 3). Thus any doctrine that describes human beings as qualified animals precludes a genuine understanding of human existence. “Man is a peculiar being trying to understand his uniqueness. What he seeks to understand is not his animality but...