non-objectifiable being-in-act and being-a-self (being enacted) and being that is gathered into itself and, further, being self-sustained as the manner of being a person. And I further oppose to objectifiable being the kind of being of "life," which in the immediacy of its being is constantly ( 1) in the state of becoming [Werde-sein] (which is not the same as "to become something" [Sein-werden], which can also be found in the sphere of the real); (2) non-objectifiable being, which can be found only in the state of "inwardness"; (3) being in absolute time in distinction to everything that is "really there." And when in a realontological sense I define being-real as image posited through vital urge [Drang], I do not mean to further impose realitas on the state of becoming of the vital urge itself. The "desire" ["Sucht"], the "thirst" for being-real is itself not at all real, precisely because it is not objectifiable but first of all "seeks" realization [Realsein]. I entirely agree with Heidegger that it is high time to finally stop transporting the categories and modes of being found in the narrow sphere of physical being over into life, consciousness, the ego, and so forth. Heidegger has done an admirable job in showing how Descartes' doctrine of the soul as a thinking thing ("res" cogitans) and his doctrine of the res extensa have arisen in this way. But whereas this reproach may fit other people, it does not fit me.

However, what I reject in Heidegger is the solipsism of existence which he takes as his point of departure. It represents a pure reversal of the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum" into a "sum ergo cogito." But even in Heidegger there persists the fundamental error of Descartes, namely, that that which, in the order of the being of entities, is in fact the farthest off of all (one's own ego; and basically this also holds in Heidegger's own doctrine of Dasein's "loss of the world") is held to be given as primary. What is Dasein and "being-in-the-world" supposed to mean? Here he introduces the word "world" which is not only very ambiguous (and world is actually not primarily given; according to Kant it is in fact only an "idea" of the progress of the understanding) but also pregnant with the whole theistic theology of the past, because world possesses a definite meaning only in opposition to "God." Furthermore what does it mean for the solus ipse [oneself alone] that its kind of being is Dasein and that Dasein is "being-in-the-world"? Here the "in" is not supposed to mean anything like "enclosed." According to Heidegger "world" itself precedes in being all spatiality, and temporality. Here "being-in" is supposed to mean something like "being caught up in something" or "being involved in something." Can this idea have any meaning at all unless the "solus ipse" also experiences itself as independent from the world—something Heidegger cannot admit? Aren't these the gloomy old theologoumena of Calvinist origin (cf. also "thrownness"), which are here translated into an apparently pure ontological language?

[261] No, we maintain that the first absolute wonder is the wonder about the state of affairs "that there is something at all and not nothing" (Cf. "Vom Wesen der Philosophie"2), rather than about the existence of the solus ipse. It


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Max Scheler (GA 16) Reality and Resistance: On Being and Time, Section 43 - Heidegger the Man and the Thinker