[In its meaningfulness, genuine philosophy is measured according to its nearness to the origin and the vitality of the origin.]18
Life is not a chaotic confusion of dark floodings, it is not a dull principle of power, it is not a terrible monster [Unwesen], unlimited and devouring everything. Rather, it is what it is, only as concrete, meaningful form.
Since life in all its forms somehow expresses itself and thereby succumbs to a deformation, which, as living, experiences its vitality, its questionableness, its excitement, and so forth, the basic sense of the phenomenological method and in general of the philosophical method is saying-no, the productivity of the not (the sense of Hegel's dialectic).
Origin is not a universal principle, a source of power. It is rather the form of production of life in all its situations, the form, which I always understand and reach only in a particular quality of form.
Objective and subjective sciences are genuine forms [149] of life, which lead out of it itself. As genuine productions they have their original sense and are themselves to be understood from out of the origin.
Phenomenology and philosophy are not simply a science, even if placed in [ ... r new dimension. The objectivity or subjectivity of the sciences—the laws of lawfulness are distinct from these [sciences] only through a (so-called) dimension. (Dimensions—several hold themselves in the same medium of objectivity or subjectivity).
Having been miseducated by the objectivization of the individual sciences, the reifying assessment, and the comparison of object-forms, we do not see that the supposed final alternatives guiding us are by themselves, in the final decision, mostly erroneous formalizations of such an object-attitude:
rationalism—irrationalism
science—mysticism
clarity (theoretically objective)—unclarity
inner—outer
or
absolute rational validity—relative validity
absolute truth—skepticism
dogmatism—skepticism
rational genuine knowledge—disingenuous knowledge, on hand through
experience
transcendence—immanence
114 BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY