“living”? And why should these explanations be erroneous? Is not the human being the “rational living being”—is not all of “biology” and “psychology” and “morals” as such cut to the measure of this being? Certainly—but this “psychology” and its sustaining sovereignty of lived experience are conversely at the same time the whirlpool into which that conception of the human being is drawn ever again and thus is twisted and hardened.
What trap resides in the fact that the oldest determination of the human being secures itself and endures? Is it the oldest—and does it originate out of a fullness of knowledge of the human being, or out of a failure of this knowledge? Whence comes to the human being his own interpretation? When will come to him finally a deep mistrust of it? And how will he come upon the source of this necessary mistrust—| upon the question of the truth of beyng, the question which alone can become the place of the essential origin of the human being?
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“Lived experience”—the reason these words are entrapping is not that they are now used up and have become a mere catchphrase. This using up is only the consequence of the fact that indeed everything has become a lived experience, that one now encounters oneself in the most superficial form of the cogito me cogitare, that now in the most concealed way the certainty of lived experience has become the measure of actuality and thus the measure of truth. The result is that soon, perhaps already, “lived experiences” will be redeemed through “happenings” and that therefore in continuous increase everything will be poured into the mill of lived experience and be ground up, and that this will more and more count as that reality providing the measures for the projection of “all-encompassing life.”
Indeed the use of this term, “lived experience,” has risen into the unendurable—but that would not be worth noting if it did not indicate that lived experience has entrenched itself therein as a form of humanity—i.e., | of modern humanity as the organizer of nihilism.
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If it is in the form of objectivity that beings are primarily referred to being, and especially if this objectivity is meant in a “realistic” sense and beyng is snatched up just like a glove found on the roadside and is investigated straightforwardly, then it first comes to light that beings have already long since been tacitly degraded to presence at hand and that thereby the essential volition has been suppressed, the volition for what the truth of being harbors, for work and deed, for meditation and self-renunciation.