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in greater detail is the ontological fundament for what Augustine and above all Pascal already noted. They called that which actually knows not knowing but love and hate. All knowing is only an appropriation and a form of realization of something which is already discovered by other primary comportments. Knowing is rather more likely to cover up something which was originally uncovered in non-cognitive comportment.
What Augustine identifies as love and hate and only in certain contexts specifies as Dasein's truly cognitive mode of being we shall later have to take as an original phenomenon of Dasein, though not in this one-sided restriction to just this comportment. Rather, we shall first learn to understand, from the more refined apprehension of the modes of being of Dasein within which knowledge is possible at all, that knowledge as such cannot even be grasped if we do not from the outset see the specific context of being in which knowing as such is possible. When this is truly understood, it will always appear grotesque to explain knowledge in terms of itself by way of an epistemology. And it remains absurd to approach this entity, which as Dasein is constituted in its being as being-in-the-world, without regard to its world. This involves approaching it in such a way that its basic constitution is after a fashion taken away from it; this denatured Dasein is then approached as a subject, which amounts to a complete inversion of its being. It now becomes the source of a problem of explaining how a relation of being between this fantastically conceived entity and another entity called world might be possible. To explain knowing on this basis which is no longer a basis, that is, to make sense of manifest nonsense, naturally calls for a theory and metaphysical hypotheses.
The in-being of Dasein remains a puzzle for every attempt to explain it as an entity which it a priori is not. For every explanation conducts what is to be explained back to its contextures of being. This must always be guided by the prior question of whether the entity to be explained is experienced beforehand in its being and whether it is adequately specified in its being. The in-being of Dasein is not to be explained but before all else has to be seen as an inherent kind of being and accepted as such; in short, it has to be deciphered ontologically. Hardly an arbitrary act, but just the opposite! Of course, this is easier said than done, especially in a truly expository analysis.
Before proceeding to this analysis, the phenomenon may be clarified by an analogy which itself is not too far removed from the matter at issue, inasmuch as this analogy is concerned with an entity to which we must likewise attribute, in a formal way, the kind of being which belongs to Dasein—'life.'
We may compare the subject and its inner sphere to a snail in its shell. Let it be expressly noted that we do not presume that the theories