Heidegger’s Correlation Model of Being Human

The distinction between contemporary schools of philosophical anthropology does not stem as much from the different anthropological basic determinations itself as from the different modes in which these determinations are thought to determine human being. This opens the way to various models of anthropology (additional, transformative, privational, etc.). This paper demonstrates that the thematic core of Heidegger's early investigations—from the hermeneutics of facticity to fundamental ontology and the metaphysics of Dasein—namely the anthropo-ontological correlation, which is Heidegger’s appropriation of Husserl's noematic-noetic correlation, relocating it from the realm of transcendental pure consciousness to the more original domain of factical life, entails a model of philosophical anthropology to which we shall refer as “correlational”. According to the correlational model, human being is to be thematized not per se, as an independent subject of study, but in terms of a more fundamental anthropo-ontological correlation.