returns back into factical life experience. The concept of factical life experience is fundamental. The designation of philosophy as cognitive, rational comportment says nothing at all; with this designation, one falls prey to the ideal of science, thus obscuring precisely the main difficulty.
§ 3. Factical Life Experience as the Point of Departure
What is called “factical life experience?” “Experience” designates: (1) the experiencing activity, (2) that which is experienced through this activity. However, we use the word intentionally in its double sense, because it is precisely the fact that the experiencing self and what is experienced are not torn apart like things that expresses what is essential in factical life experience. “Experiencing” does not mean “taking-cognizance-of ” but a confrontation-with, the self-assertion of the forms of what is experienced. It has both a passive and an active sense. “Factical” does not mean naturally real or causally determined, nor does it mean real in the sense of a thing. The concept “factical” may not be interpreted from certain epistemological presuppositions, but can be made intelligible only from the concept of the “historical.” At the same time, however, “factical life experience” is a danger zone for independent philosophy since the ambitions of the sciences already validate themselves in this zone.
The idea that philosophy and science are objective formations of sense, separated propositions, and propositional complexes must be eliminated. When the sciences in general are taken to be philosophically problematic, they are investigated according to a theory of science as to their extricated propositional truth complex. One has to grasp the concrete sciences themselves in their enactment, and the scientific process must be laid out in its foundations as historical. This is what contemporary philosophy not only overlooks but intentionally rejects; [this historicality] is allowed no role. We defend the thesis that science is different in principle from philosophy. This must be considered.
All great philosophers have wished to elevate philosophy to the rank of a science, which implies the admission of a deficiency of the respective philosophy—namely, that it is not yet science. One therefore orients oneself toward a rigorous scientific philosophy. Is rigor a super-scientific concept? Originally, the concept and sense of rigor is philosophical and not scientific; originally, only philosophy is rigorous; it possesses a rigor in the face of which the rigor of science is merely derivative.
Philosophy’s constant effort to determine its own concept belongs to its authentic motive. For a scientific philosophy, on the contrary, it is never possible to reject the reproach of ever tarrying with the “epistemological,” preliminary