In this essay [The age of the world picture], time is already reduced to nothing more than the framing of distinct historical epochs, rendering completely inexplicable how one epoch might be replaced by another. The ‘age’ (Zeit) of the title is nothing but the present epoch; and the ‘world picture’ displaces and obscures the framing of phenomena through a horizon, which, instead of being conceived of as shifting, is constructed into a rigid definitive account of a fixed ‘world’. For the age of the world picture, representation and representability exhaust the possibilities for constructing objects of thought and of reflection. In this context the question ‘what is human being? ’ takes on a special urgency. ‘What is human being?’ is a key question for Heidegger, not because he supposes himself uniquely equipped to answer it, but because he diagnoses the current age, the age of technology, as providing a significantly different kind of answer to it. Indeed, only in the contemporary age is the attempt made to give to this question a generalised answer with universal application. The problem with such answers is that they restrict our capacity to affirm the diversity of the relations we set up to ourselves, to our self-images, to our stances towards others and to the world in which we find ourselves. The generalised answer makes it appear as though there were one such image and as though those self-images and stances were fixed and given, not chosen and lived. Thus the problem is not one of finding a more adequate [106] answer to the question ‘what is it to be human?’, but of ceasing to want general answers to it at all. This in turn would permit the question to become a problem encountered by individual human beings in the specific contexts of their own lives. The question would cease to have the status presuming a single, complete, metaphysical answer that blocks the possibility of individual, flexible responses. The metaphysical question distinctive of the current epoch, ‘what is it to be human? ’, does not permit of an answer, since any such answer immediately subverts a central characteristic of that which is being defined: what it is to be human. It denies the self-interpretative capacities of human beings. The unanswerability of the question ‘what is it to be human?’ marks the unavailability in the modern epoch of a metaphysical specification of being. (p. 105-106)