[363] indeed what they want; they want to concentrate exclusively on special groups in a special situation, and leave out and deny the possibility of the question, "How could that come out of the nature of man?" I ASK this question, and am not afraid--against all these groups, which I have met and with whom I have discussed these problems--to say there are underlying structures which make the changes possible. If there is no point of identity which makes [change?] possible, no change EITHER does exist. Now this answer of course must be concretely carried through. I remember in my discussion with Marxists^a that there always was the point that they said: if you say anything about man, this is reactionary because that means that man cannot be changed, that presentday [sic.] society must be maintained, etc. Now there is much truth in this. Many people use [the concept] "an eternal nature of man"-- especially Lutheran theologians--namely the distorted nature of man, which makes any political change

impossible. Against this, certainly the Marxist criticism is justified. But when they say: to say something MORE than this about man, you must wait to the day after the perfect revolution--then this is a statement which is not only absurd but which is also self-contradictory because how do you know, about the nature of man, that, after the REVOLUTION, the true nature of man will come out? So I am not afraid of this. Now this belongs to an earlier period of my development; the presentday [sic.] discussion would be more with anthropologists and sociologists who in this respect are completely in the same boat with the Marxists, namely to say that man has no nature but has

only different social structures, they all are different in different societies, and that is what we have to deal with. There is no basic anxiety^b, there is no basic courage^c, there is no basic freedom^d, there is