Insofar as philosophizing transcends factical experience, it is characterized by the fact that it deals with higher objects and the highest of them, with the “first and ultimate things.” Moreover, in philosophy everything is related to the human being and to what concerns him (tendency toward world-views). In grasping the subject, the style remains the same, too: the subject is considered as an object. Admittedly, in this way philosophy, too, through its scientific relation to objects, would have to be designated a science in the sense of a formed-out cognizing.
Our considerations here have thus only increased the difficulty of the selfunderstanding of philosophy. How is a mode of cognition other than takingcognizance- of to be motivated? Factical life experience itself, through its indifference and self-sufficiency, always covers up again the philosophical tendency that might surface. In its self-sufficient concern, factical life experience constantly falls into significance. It constantly strives for an articulation in science and ultimately for a “scientific culture.” Apart from these strivings, however, factical life experience contains motives of a purely philosophical posture which can be isolated only through a peculiar turning around of philosophical comportment. The difference between philosophy and science consists not only in their objects and methods, but is in principle of a more radical nature. A self-understanding of philosophy is required even if one does not assume the derivation of science from philosophy. Heretofore, philosophers made an effort to degrade precisely factical life experience as a matter of secondary importance that could be taken for granted, despite that philosophy arises precisely from factical life experience and springs back into it in a reversal that is entirely essential.
If this thesis is justified, every compromise vanishes and with it vanishes every assimilation of philosophy into science, through whose assistance philosophy maintained its meager existence for centuries. Philosophy’s departure as well as its goal is factical life experience. If factical life experience is the point of departure for philosophy, and if we see factically a difference in principle between philosophical and scientific cognition, then factical life experience must be not only the point of departure for philosophizing but precisely that which essentially hinders philosophizing itself.
I would claim that all of you, with only a few exceptions, constantly misunderstand all of the concepts and determinations which I have set forth. It has to be that way, and it does not do any harm initially. This misunderstanding, in fact, accomplishes for our progress the indication, if misunderstood, of certain phenomenal connections, which will be indicated, and the meaning of which will become intelligible only later.
Factical life experience is the “attitudinal, falling, relationally indifferent, self-sufficient concern for significance.” Let us first of all consider the relational sense of factical life experience. What shows itself here is that the