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§20. Sphere of Lived Experience

What is essential about the pre-worldly arid worldly signifying functions is that they express the characters of the appropriating event, i.e. they go together (experiencing and experiencing experienced) with experience itself, they live in life itself and, going along with life, they are at once originating and carry their provenance in themselves. They are at once preceptive and retroceptive, i.e. they express life in its motivated tendency or tending motivation.

The empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along is the understanding intuition, the hermeneutical intuition, the originary phenomenological back-and-forth formation of the recepts and precepts from which all theoretical objectification, indeed every transcendent positing, falls out. Universality of word meanings primarily indicates something originary: worldliness [Welthaftigkeit] of experienced experiencing.

At this point the puzzling presence of determination prior to all theoretical description is clarified. Theoretically I come out of experiencing as from a provenance; something experienceable is still brought along from this experiencing, with which one does not know what to do, and for which the convenient title of the irrational has been invented.

Problem of heterothesis, negation. Motivation — motivator and motive. Life is historical; no dissection into essential elements, but connection and context. Problem of material giving is not genuine, but comes only from theory.

Martin Heidegger (GA 56/57) Towards the Definition of Philosophy (2000)