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at the same time, he belongs. This is the situation of all life, but of course in animal life it is only environment, in human life it has infinite dimension... We all belong to our world and we all look at our world to which we belong. This is one of the most fundamental and miraculous characteristics of human existence, and out of this possibility culture ^aalone can arise. It is the freedom ^bof the self from himself and from his world. He has the power of looking at himself, an astonishing power; and he has the power of looking at his world to which he belongs and does not belong. Now these are things which I only can point to, which are the foundations of every doctrine of man^c. But how can you have a doctrine of culture without having a doctrine of man? Man is that being who is able to create a culture, and he is able to do so because he is not bound to what is given, he can transcend it, he can go beyond it, he can create beyond it. We must therefore say: only a being who is free from the given moment, who can go beyond it, who can transcend it, is able to have culture. To understand what that freedom ^dmeans, we must make this difficult and intricate description: Man encountering himself and his world; he himself a part of part of [sic] his world, and, at the same time, being opposite to it and looking at it. I call this "freedom." The word freedom ^ehas at least 20 different meanings, and some of them are so distorted that if you discuss them, you are thrown into this ruinous, obsolete discussion which has been performed in philosophy for centuries, about determinism and indeterminism. I want to creep behind this impossible discussion, impossible because the presuppositions of it make a solution impossible. I want to describe what is our immediate experience, and our immediate experience is exactly what I said, that we encounter ourselves and our world, and that we are free from both of them. Therefore I would say: instead of wasting time and passion with discussing the insoluble problem of determinism and indeterminism (both concepts [are] equally wrong!), describe what is really given to us. And what is given to us is the possibility of speaking, of having language, and that means of transcending the concrete case, abstracting from it, and going to the universal^f. This is the basis of all culture^g. Those naturalists ^hwho want to derive everything human from the animal situation are always in a real despair about the fact that even the highest ape is not able to learn language, which every human child is able to learn in the course of the first two years of his life. Why?