If in the first place philosophy is not an artificial occupation that merely accompanies life and deals with “universals” of one sort or another and arbitrarily posited principles but rather is as a knowing that questions, that is, as research, simply the explicit and genuine actualizing of the tendency toward interpretation that belongs to the basic movements of life in which what is at issue is this life itself and its being; and if secondly philosophy is set on bringing into view and conceptually grasping factical life in terms of the decisive possibilities of its being, i.e., if relying upon its own resources and not looking to the hustle and bustle of worldviews, it has radically and clearly resolved to throw factical life back on itself as this is possible in this factical life itself and to let it fend for itself in terms of its own factical possibilities, i.e., if philosophy is in principle atheistic9 and understands such about itself—then it has resolutely chosen factical life with a view to its facticity and, in acquiring it as an object for itself, it has preserved it in its facticity. The how of its research is the interpretation of the sense of this being [Seinssinn] with respect to its basic categorial structures, i.e., the modes in which factical life temporalizes itself, unfolds itself, and speaks with itself (κατηγορεῖν [predicating in terms of categories]) in such temporalizing. As long as philosophical research has understood, simply on the basis of the object it has seized upon, that what this object entrusts it with as its topic of inquiry consists of those primordial ontological conditions of the possibility of any worldview that can be made visible only in the rigor of its research, it will have no need for the finery of worldviews and the zealous care about not arriving too late for the turmoil of some present times in which one wants to go along for the ride. These conditions are not “logical forms.” Rather, understood as categories, they are possibilities of the factical temporalizing and unfolding of existence that have been grasped in their genuine availability.
The basic problem of philosophy concerns the being of factical life. In this respect, philosophy is a fundamental ontology that deals with principles, so that this ontology of facticity provides the particular specialized regional ontologies of the world with a foundation for their problems and a clarification of the sense of these problems. The basic problem of philosophy has to do with the being of factical life in the how of its being-addressed and being-interpreted at particular times. In other words, as the ontology of facticity, philosophy is at the same time the interpretation [Interpretation] of the categories of this addressing and interpreting [Auslegen], i.e., it is logic.
Ontology and logic need to be brought back to their original unity in the problem of facticity and understood as offshoots of fundamental research into principles that can be described as “the phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity.”
The interpretations of factical life found in the circumspection of caring and the insight of worry are in each case concrete, and it is with a view to their forehaving (the basic sense of being into which life places itself ) and with reference to their foreconception (the modes of addressing and discussing in which factical life converses with itself and speaks about itself ) that philosophical research