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Man  is  the  being  who  (1)  feels;  (2)  thinks  (or  believes): and (3)  thinks  that  he  thinks  (or  believes  that  he  believes).  (2)  is what may be called "existential  understanding"  which  as  such  is  constitutive of  the  very  being  of  man, who  is precisely the being who understands himself  and therewith understands reality itself. This existential  un­derstanding  may be either authentic or inauthentic--but in either case it involves an understanding of self, others, and the whole. Inauthen­tic  understanding is an understanding which in one way or another qual­ifies the  sola  in  sola  gratia, i.e., treats self and/or others  as  sig­nificant or of  worth independently of the relation to the whole which alone endows them with worth. Even so, inauthentic understanding is understanding of self, others, and the whole, however distorted or per­verted, or, as it were, eccentric it may be. Since existential under­standing is identical with  the  human  mode  of  being-is  the  distinctively human  way  of  existing{}- it  is  instantiated  somehow  in  every  distinctively human act, either as authentic or inauthentic;  and this choice is the ever-present decision, the  truly  eschatological  decision, at stake in every moment of human existence. Although it is not itself feeling, but understanding, it is the level of understanding closest to feeling and is the proximate relation of man to the concrete: it is, one may say, man's  way{} - as  man, that is as the being who thinks as well as feels-of  being  concrete. But  if,  as  seems  reasonable,  "human  consciousness is  essentially linguistic,"  i.e.,  man  precisely  at  level  (2),  at  the level  of  existential  understanding...

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