To have faith in the Reality of the 'external world', whether rightly or wrongly; to "prove" this Reality for it, whether adequately or inadequately; to presuppose it, whether explicitly or not-attempts such as these which have not mastered their own basis with full transparency, presuppose a subject which is proximally worldless or unsure of its world, and which must, at bottom, first assure itself of a world. Thus from the very beginning, Being-in-a-world is disposed to "take things" in some way [Auffassen], to suppose, to be certain, to have faith—a way of behaving which itself is always a founded mode of Being-in-the-world.
The 'problem of Reality' in the sense of the question whether an external world is present-at-hand and whether such a world can be proved, turns out to be an impossible one, not because its consequences lead to inextricable impasses, but because the very entity which serves as its theme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of the question. Our task is not to prove that an 'external world' is present-at-hand or to show how it is present-at-hand, but to point out why Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, has the tendency to bury the 'external world' in nullity 'epistemologically' before going on to prove it.1 The reason for this lies in Dasein's falling and in the way in which the primary understanding of Being has been diverted to Being as presence-at-hand—a diversion which is motivated by that falling itself. If one formulates the question 'critically' with such an ontological orientation, then what one finds present-at-hand as proximally and solely certain, is something merely 'inner'. After the primordial phenomenon of Being-in-the-world has been shattered, the isolated subject is all that remains, and this becomes the basis on which it gets joined together with a 'world'.
In this investigation we cannot discuss at length the many attempts to solve the 'problem of Reality' which have been developed in various kinds of realism and idealism and in positions which mediate between [207] them. Certainly a grain of genuine inquiry is to be found in each of these; but certain as this is, it would be just as perverse if one should want to achieve a tenable solution of the problem by reckoning up how much has been correct in each case. What is needed rather is the basic insight that while the different epistemological directions which have been pursued have not gone so very far off epistemologically, their neglect of any existential analytic of Dasein has kept them from obtaining any basis for a well secured phenomenal problematic. Nor is such a basis to be obtained by subsequently making phenomenological corrections on the concepts of subject and consciousness. Such a procedure would give no guarantee
1 '... warum das Dasein als In-der-Welt-sein die Tendenz hat, die "Aussenwelt" zunächst "erkenntnistheoretisch" in Nichtigkeit zu begraben urn sie dann erst zu beweisen.'