The dismantling of the ”human” is based on the following premise: the self-transparent subject is an illusion. From this two phases in the dismantling occurred: in the first phase the mantra “you were never alone” explicated the fact that humans are brought up, they learn and are socialized which was considered “evidence” for the human subject not being master of his own house. In the second phase, focus was based on the mantra “we were never alone” – materiality, stuff, things, nature is used as “evidence” of a much bigger world inhabited by humans, but neither controlled by humans nor serving as the only source of action. Both can probably be seen as unfolding or accentuating two ways of interpreting Heidegger’s “Sein und Zeit” philosophy, the first as taking up the idea unfolded in Sein und Zeit, where the human as Dasein is characterized as thrown as “being in the world“, the second as a characterization of this thrownness as “being in the world as being with”. This could serve as a background for discussing if the human has ever been away: for whom is it possible to articulate the idea that the material ‘means more’ than the human (by accentuating that we, the humans, have overlooked it) than the human? Being in the world as being with is one of the consequences of putting the question of being anew, and any answer to this question has a distinct human touch – so in a way, the human, as the one who answer and asks questions, have never been away. In the same way the ‘forgetting’ of the material presupposes a being capable of feeling responsible, thinking that it is responsible or simply just being responsible to what have been lost. This calls for a reconsideration of philosophical anthropology and I’ll use the German philosopher Thomas Rentsch’s ‘revival’ of philosophical anthropology as an example of how ethics, semantic criticism, and transcendental anthropological conditions are necessary elements in any thinking on our practical self-understandings and doings.