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The fundamental experience of phenomenology is the reduction to subjectivity. I must reduce myself to my self, to that by which I am "alive," to that which is my Erlebnis, to the experience I have in the first person (in prima persona). Subjectivity has nothing to do with abstraction or with "categories." When I say "subject," I employ an anonymous term. In reality the subject, as unique, is myself, here and now, I who am writing. For reasons of method (but in the end not only of method) I have to begin with myself, and I can commence only with myself. It is not a question of giving an exposé of someone's thought or of constructing a philosophy; rather, I have to subject myself to an exercise that in a certain sense is against nature. It is "natural" for me to think of myself and to regard myself as a "thing" in the world, as an object in the world. My natural situation hides me from my self, "obscures" me. I live obscured as an object among objects in the world and am opaque to myself. If I have recourse to the sciences, they also treat me like an object, for they have forgotten their own origins, their own subjective "operations." If the sciences are "in crisis," it is particularly because of their much touted objectivity, their naturalism, because of that "mundane" naturalism, that characterizes for me my very being as lost amidst the mundane, my Weltverlorenheit.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-2387-0_1

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