The life-world can be disclosed as a realm of subjective
phenomena which have remained “anonymous.”
WHEN WE PROCEED, philosophizing with Kant, not by starting from his beginning and
moving forward in his paths but by inquiring back into what was thus taken for granted
(that of which Kantian thinking, like everyone’s thinking, makes use as unquestioned and
available), when we become conscious of it as “presuppositions” and accord these their own
universal and theoretical interest, there opens up to us, to our growing astonishment, an
infinity of ever new phenomena belonging to a new dimension, coming to light only through
consistent penetration into the meaning and validity-implications of what was thus taken
for granted — an infinity, because continued penetration shows that every phenomenon
attained through this unfolding of meaning, given at first in the life-world as obviously
existing, itself contains meaning- and validity-implications whose exposition leads again to
new phenomena, and so on. These are purely subjective phenomena throughout, but not
merely facts involving psychological processes of sense-data; rather, they are mental [geistige]
processes which, as such, exercise with essential necessity the function of constituting forms
of meaning [Sinnesgestalten]. But they constitute them in each case out of mental “material”
which [itself] proves in turn, with essential necessity, to be mental form, i.e., to be constituted;
just as any newly developed form [of meaning] is destined to become material, namely, to
function in the constitution of [some new] form.
No objective science, no psychology — which, after all, sought to become the universal
science of the subjective — and no philosophy has ever made thematic and thereby actually
discovered this realm of the subjective-not even the Kantian philosophy, which sought, after
all, to go back to the subjective conditions of the possibility of an objectively experienceable
and knowable world. It is a realm of something subjective which is completely closed off
within itself, existing in its own way, functioning in all experiencing, all thinking, all life,
thus everywhere inseparably involved; yet it has never been held in view, never been grasped
and understood.
Does philosophy fulfill the sense of its primal establishment as the universal and ultimately
grounding science if it leaves this realm to its “anonymity”? Can it do this, can
any science do this which seeks to be a branch of philosophy, i.e., which would tolerate no
presuppositions, no basic sphere of beings beneath itself of which no one knows, which no
one interrogates scientifically, which no one has mastered in a knowing way? I called the
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sciences in general branches of philosophy, whereas it is such a common conviction that the
objective, the positive, sciences stand on their own, are self-sufficient in virtue of their supposedly
fully grounding and thus exemplary method. But in the end is not the teleological
unifying meaning running through all attempted systems in the whole history of philosophy
that of achieving a breakthrough for the insight that science is only possible at all as universal
philosophy, the latter being, in all the sciences, yet a single science, possible only as
the totality of all knowledge? And did this not imply that they all repose upon one single
ground [Grund], one to be investigated scientifically in advance of all the others? And can
this ground be, I may add, any other than precisely that of the anonymous subjectivity we
mentioned? But one could and can realize this only when one finally and quite seriously inquires
into that which is taken for granted, which is presupposed by all thinking, all activity
of life with all its ends and accomplishments, and when one, by consistently interrogating
the ontic and validity-meaning of these ends and accomplishments, becomes aware of the
inviolable unity of the complex of meaning and validity running through all mental accomplishments.
This applies first of all to all the mental accomplishments which we human
beings carry out in the world, as individual, personal, or cultural accomplishments. Before
all such accomplishments there has always already been a universal accomplishment, presupposed
by all human praxis and all prescientific and scientific life. The latter have the
spiritual acquisitions of this universal accomplishment as their constant substratum, and all
their own acquisitions are destined to flow into it. We shall come to understand that the
world which constantly exists for us through the flowing alteration of manners of givenness is
a universal mental acquisition, having developed as such and at the same time continuing to
develop as the unity of a mental configuration, as a meaning-construct [Sinngebilde]- as the
construct of a universal, ultimately functioning 1 subjectivity. It belongs essentially to this
worldconstituting accomplishment that subjectivity objectifies itself as human subjectivity,
as an element of the world. All objective consideration of the world is consideration of the
“exterior” and grasps only “externals,” objective entities [Objektivitten]. The radical consideration
of the world is the systematic and purely internal consideration of the subjectivity
which “expresses” [or “externalizes”]2 itself in the exterior. It is like the unity of a living
organism, which one can certainly consider and dissect from the outside but which one can
understand only if one goes back to its hidden roots and systematically pursues the life
1. letztfungierende, i.e., functioning at the ultimate or deepest level.
2. der sich selbst im Aussen “ussernden” Subjektivitt.
which, in all its accomplishments, is in them and strives upward from them, shaping from
within. But is this not simply a metaphor? Is it not in the end our human being, and the
life of consciousness belonging to it, with its most profound world — problematics, which is
the place where all problems of living inner being and external exhibition are to be decided?