reliable feeling for "life." All the more fatal are the illusions; we are constantly dissuaded, by the very possibilities of the term, from disturbing it in its reputed fecundity and from investigating relentlessly its basic sense and its explication.
On the other hand, we might let the vagueness and ambiguity stand, acquiesce in the predominant sense of the term, and thereby, for example, emphasize in philosophy a so-called philosophy of life. In this, our refusal to acknowledge the unclarities in the use of the term is just as quick. We do not pursue the tendencies in the expression, and we do not ask of the relevant nexuses of expression how it happens that the san1e word breaks out in them and whether this word and its use might not give voice to certain basic tendencies of existence.
We will never, along this path, succeed in appropriating and delineating the positive tendencies of modern life-philosophy. Instead, we believe we have done enough by conceding that a philosophy of life is indeed necessary; though at a certain "distance" from life. Yet this expresses a mere theoretical sanctioning of the significance of life in philosophy. and the sense of the concept of distance remains determined by a wrongheaded theorizing with regard to cognition and, above all, with regard to the "concept."
To sketch the structures of the sense of the term, "life,· let us start with the verb, "to live." Here, as everywhere, there is a concrete experience to be presentified, even if at first the explication of the sense is purely and simply a matter of "feeling." 1. To live. in an intransitive sense: "to be alive," "to really live" (=to live intensely). "to live recklessly, dissolutely," "to live in seclusion," "to live half alive," "to live by hook or crook." 2. To live, in a transitive sense: "to live life," "to live one's mission in life"; here for the most part we find compounds: "to live through [durchleben] something." "to live out [verleben] one's years idly," and, especially, "to have a lived experience [erleben] of something."
These meanings of the verb are nominalized in the term, life, which thereby already has a definite transitive-intransitive ambiguity. We do not intend to eliminate this ambiguity but to let it remain and to seize bold of it.
These are not mere grammatical considerations, nor will the following considerations be such, for the categories of grammar in fact originate in those of living speech, in those of the immanent speaking of life itself [which are not the categories of logic, to be sure!]. The grammatical categories originate, in great part, historiologically, which explains how the explication of life itself fell very early on into the bands of a determinate theoretical explication and articulation of life; cf. the development of grammar by the Greeks.