Poets are witnesses to Being before the philosophers are able to bring it into thought. - William Barrett

We do not ask ourselves what the ultimate ideas behind our civilization are that have brought us into this danger; we do not search for the human face behind the bewildering array of instruments that man has forged; in a word, we do not dare to be philosophical.

Now at the end, we come back to the beginning: to the situation of the world here and now, from which all understanding must start and to which it must return. In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners, who are ultimately in question.

Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine (in the Confessions) asks, Who am I? — and this shift is decisive.