| 1. So-called “primitive” ex-sistence |
| 2. Ethnological research |
| 3. Transition to §12. |
| 4. Conclusion to chapter 1 |
1. So-called “primitive” ex-sistence. When we speak of everyday ex-sistence, we do not mean what ethnologists [previously] called the lives of “primitive” peoples. Everydayness is not “primitive.” Quite the contrary, everyday ex-sistence is operative even in the most highly developed and differentiated cultures. Moreover, so-called “primitive” peoples have their own kinds of everydayness along with ways of ex-sisting that are not of the everyday kind. Focusing a hermeneutic of ex-sistence on the lives of such peoples could be methodologically fruitful for studying ex-sistence insofar as their experiences are often not obscured by complicated self-interpretations and are expressed more directly in terms of their lived, pre-theoretical absorption in things. To us, such ways of ex-sisting might seem unsophisticated, but they can help to bring out the genuine ontological structures of experience.
2. Ethnological research. Ethnology studies so-called “primitive” peoples. Clearly it brings its own presuppositions and theories about human being, inadequate as they are, to bear on its empirical work of collecting and analyzing the data. Hence, it is far from certain that the psychology and the sociology which ethnology utilizes can properly interpret the experiences that we will study in this book. In that regard, ethnology lines up with the disciplines mentioned in §10, all of which are based on an inadequate understanding of human being. Obviously the positive sciences neither can nor should wait for philosophy to complete its tasks before they take up theirs. Nonetheless, advances in these positive sciences will come not from more extensive empirical research but rather from clarifying their empirical discoveries in light of the ontology of ex-sistence.1
1. In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, [orig., 1925] Ernst Cassirer takes up mythical thought, but for all the philosophical contributions his work makes to ethnology, it is doubtful that his utilization of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the proper way to carry out the task. Perhaps an entirely new approach is required—as Cassirer himself intimates when he refers to Husserl’s phenomenology in his second volume, page 16, n. 1 [= ET 12, n. 7]. In a conversation following a lecture I gave on “Tasks and Paths in Phenomenological Research” (Hamburg Kant Society, December 17, 1926), Cassirer and I agreed on the need for the ex-sistential analysis that my lecture had sketched out.