This is no less true of "psychology," whose anthropological tendencies are unmistakable today. Nor can the missing ontological foundations be replaced by building anthropology and psychology into a general biology. In the order of possible understanding and interpretation, biology as the "science of life" is rooted in the ontology of Dasein, [50] although not exclusively in it. Life has its own kind of being, but it is essentially accessible only in Dasein. The ontology of life takes place by way of a privative interpretation. It determines what must be the case if there can be anything like just-being-alive. Life is neither sheer being present, nor is it Dasein. On the other hand, Dasein should never be defined ontologically by regarding it as life-( ontologically undetermined) and then as something else on top of that.
In suggesting that anthropology, psychology, and biology all fail to give an unequivocal and ontologically adequate answer to the question of the kind of being of this being that we ourselves are, no judgment is being made about the positive work of these disciplines. But, on the other hand, we must continually be conscious of the fact that these ontological foundations can never be disclosed subsequently from empirical material by the use of hypotheses. Rather, they are always already "there," even when that empirical material is only collected. The fact that positivistic investigation. does not see these foundations and considers them to be self-evident is no proof of the fact that they do not lie at the basis of any thesis of positive science and are problematic in a more radical sense than such science can ever be.10
§ 11. The Existential Analytic and the Interpretation of Primitive
Dasein: The Difficulties in Securing a
"Natural Concept of World"
The interpretation of Dasein in its everydayness [Alltäglichkeit], however, is not identical with describing a primitive [primitiven] stage of Dasein, with which we can become acquainted empirically through the medium of anthropology. Everydayness is not the same as primitiveness. Rather, everydayness is also and precisely a mode of being of Dasein, even when Dasein moves in a highly developed and differentiated culture. On the other hand, primitive Dasein also has its possibilities [51] of noneveryday being, and it has its own specific everydayness. To orient the analysis of Dasein toward "the life of primitive peoples" can
10. But the discovery of the a priori is not an "a prioristic" construction. Through Husserl we have again learned not only to understand the meaning of all genuine philosophical "empiricism," but we have also learned to use the tools necessary for it. "A priorism" is the method of every scientific philosophy which understands itself. Because a priorism has nothing to do with construction, the investigation of the a priori requires the proper preparation of the phenomenal foundation. The nearest horizon which must be prepared for the analytic of Dasein lies in its average everydayness.