PATHMARKS
the "I" (a definition that arises from a preconception about such things as a stream of consciousness or a nexus of experience), we thereby "efface" the sense of the "am" and turn the "I" into an object that can be ascertained and classified by inserting it into a region. Consequently, there is a need for radical suspicion (and the appropriate investigations as well) about all preconceptions that objectify by means of regions, about the contexts of concepts that arise from such preconceptions, and about the various avenues through which these concepts arise.
When it has the sense of "is," the sense of being [Seinssinn] has developed from objectively oriented experiences that have been explicated in "theoretical" knowledge, and in which we always somehow or other say of something that it "is something." The object here need not be classified expressly within a particular scientific realm that has been worked out through the special logic of the science in question. Rather, it usually takes the form of the nontheoretical "objectivity" that belongs to what is of significance to us in our experience of the environing world, the social world we share with each other, and also the world of the self. In factical life, I have dealings of one sort or another with what is of significance to me, and to these "dealings with" there corresponds a unique sense of objectivity that can be understood phenomenologically. When the sense of existence is investigated in terms of its origin and our genuine basic experience of it, we see that it is precisely that sense of being that cannot be obtained from the "is" we use to explicate and objectify our experience in one way or another when we acquire knowledge about it. The sense of human existence is to be obtained rather from its own basic experience of having itself in an anxiously concerned manner. This having is enacted prior to whatever knowledge about it we might later acquire by objectifying it with the "is," and such knowledge is in fact inconsequential for this enaconent. If I seek this objectifying knowledge, the attitude of observation will become central for me. All my explications will then have an objectifying nature, but they will put me at a remove from existence and from a genuine having of it (anxious concern).
The "I" should be understood here as the full, concrete, and historically factical self that is accessible to itself in its historically concrete experience of itself. It is not synonymous with the notion of the empirical subject as the possible subject matter of theoretical observation in psychology. In this kind of objectivity, which is understood more or less as a realm of"physical" processes that occur, the "soul" has been eclipsed in a fundamental sense. That is, whenever this kind of psychology has begun with this kind of object, it has never once brought the "soul" experientially into view, so that it could be given in a preliminary way as an object for further investigation.
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