have a positive methodical significance in that 11primitive phenomena11 are often less hidden and complicated by extensive self-interpretation on the part of the Dasein in question. Primitive Dasein often speaks out of a more primordial [ürsprunglichen] absorption in 11phenomena11 (in the pre-phenomenological sense). The conceptuality which perhaps appears to be clumsy and crude to us can be of use positively for a genuine elaboration of the ontological structures of phenomena.
But up until now our information about primitive peoples has been provided by ethnology. And ethnology already moves in certain preliminary concepts and interpretations of human being in general, beginning with the initial 11collection" of its materials, its findings and elaborations. We do not know whether commonplace psychology or even scientific psychology and sociology, which the ethnologist brings with him, offer any scientific guarantee for an adequate possibility of access, interpretation, and mediation of the phenomena to be investigated. The situation here is the same as with the disciplines mentioned before. Ethnology itself already presupposes an adequate analytic of Dasein as its guideline. But since the positive sciences neither "can" nor should wait for the ontological work of philosophy, the continuation of research will not be accomplished as "progress"; but, rather, as the repetition and the ontologically more transparent purification of what has been ontically discovered.11
[52] Although the formal differentiation of the ontological problematic as opposed to antic investigation may seem easy, the development and above all the approach [Ansatz] of an existential analytic of Dasein is not without difficulties. A need is contained in this task which has made philosophy uneasy* for a long time, but philosophy fails again and again in fulfilling the task: working out the idea of a "natural concept of world." The wealth of knowledge of the most far-flung and manifold culrures and forms of existence available today seems favorable
* Not at all! The concept of world is not understood at all.
11 Recently E. Cassirer has made mythical Dasein the theme of a philosophical interpretation. Cf. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, part 2, "Das mythische Denken," 1925. Through this investigation more comprehensive guidelines are made available to ethnological investigation. Viewed in terms of the philosophical problematic the question remains whether the foundations of the interpretation are sufficiently transparent, whether especially the architectonic of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft and its systematic content are able to offer the possible outline for such a task at all, or whether a new and more primordial beginning is not necessary here. Cassirer himself sees the possibility of such a task as is shown in the footnote on pages 16ff., where Cassirer refers to the phenomenological horizon disclosed by Husserl. In a conversation which the author was able to have with Cassirer on the occasion of a lecture in the Hamburg group of the Kantian Society in December 1923, a lecture on "Aufgaben und Wege der phänomenologischen Forschung," an agreement as to the necessity of an existential analytic which was sketched out in the lecture already became apparent.