Beilage XXIII, to section 651 //1. June 1936

With the human being biology is guided by his actual originally experienced humanity, for only in this way is life in general originally self-given and self-given in an authentic manner in the self-understanding of the biologist. That is the guide for the whole of biology and further for all the transformations in empathy, through which alone the animal can have a meaning. This subjective factor is however also the guide for that which, in the world, is called organic life, while it is not yet understood analogically as an actual "anima," thus as having "life" in an egoicity.[?] What is that with respect to the transformation-forms which refers back to the I and to myself, the present researcher, as primal mode? Only on the basis of that does the concept of organism in general have its ultimate meaning, also the construction of the organism out of part-organisms, but not freely and independently functioning for themselves, but rather precisely as mere and necessary elements of construction.2 //2. Of course we have from the beginning a biological apriori of human beings: here we have the apriori of instincts, of primal drives, to whose fulfillment (eating, mating etc.) the apriori ultimately leads. Of course one has it for animals as far as animality is actually experienced through empathy. One has thereby the generative apriori. Further the structure of the animal surrounding world, that each animal has as "social" horizon of its species - in the world of the dog exists the horizon of an open multiplicity of dogs in dog-connection. This apriori is anticipated as hypothesis within the hypothesis "other animal," where this is not directly experienceable as animal, and first correctly with plants. Of course we have with the animal the structure of the animal with-world (and not only of the species, but understanding of other animals and their species-sociality) and the opposing structure of the not-animal world, the things etc. One has already the beginnings of an actual, and not entire poor animal ontology of the outer and the inner - but what one has stands in an infinite horizon of an infinite predesignated unknown ontology. - c.f. teleology.//

Biology mirrors in its naive artistically employed method the intentional interpenetration which lies behind the mutual exteriority of biological investigations into ontogenesis and phylogenesis and that of single classes of animals and animal species. In its great generalities essential laws are revealed, it carries an ontology within itself, which is not to be read off in simple explicit fashion from the intuitive givennesses, and it is nothing less than an analogon of the ontology of nature, that is the mathematics of nature: as one which is complete in itself in advance and in this completion the knowledge of an accessible ontology.

Indeed biology is also - like all positive science - naive science and "work of art," the word understood as higher analogon of the artifact. The fact that it is higher consists in that it bears in itself a mysterious sense, the true and authentic ontic sense of that which it hopes to be able to work out in the form of knowledge, while it can never reach it in its type. Biology in particular however, as a concrete life-world theory, as descriptive science of the form of a mere work of art, can never become entirely rootless, like mathematics; instead its admirable buildings are not so vanishing - in countless levels and stories - buildings ascending into heaven like those of mathematics, though nevertheless the whole of the science is a powerful scientific achievement.

Its proximity to the sources of evidence gives it instead such a proximity to the depths of the things themselves, that the way to transcendental philosophy must be easy for it, and thereby the way to the true apriori, pointing to the comprehensive generalities pertaining to the world of living beings... What it finds through its universal and systematic disclosure of the generalities which are visible from the outside and meaningfully-methodically connected, produces repeated transcendental questions. Thus it will appear to me that biology, which apparently stands back behind mathematics and physics and thus far from physicalism, as an incomplete, merely descriptive preliminary stage of future physicalistic "explanation" would almost appear sympathetically, from the beginning it could remain closer to philosophy and true knowledge, because it was never threatened by the admirable symbolic art of a "logical" construction of its truths and theories, which mathematics and physics had made a wonder through actual achievement, but also like a wonder - unintelligible. The physicalistic prejudgement within it could only be disordered insofar as the physicalistic problems and investigations which belong to it within restricted limits were overvalued; the descriptive [factor] - its essential [factor] - for many biologists does not have the lead.

In truth the singularity of its essentially peculiar form of work exists for it in the pure objectivity of descriptivity, which as such a naive achievement has ontological but not disclosed generalities. Therefore it finds necessary concerning this no other clarifying tasks than those of the transcendental or, if you will, transcendental-psychological modes of observation of the life-world and its constitution. It thereby immediately attains the levels of explanation in the sense of an understanding on the basis of ultimate sources of evidence, while the "explanation" of the physicist, what he "knows" of the world, he knows in an unintelligibility wholly cut off from all actual knowledge...

Biology is concrete and genuine psychophysics. It has everywhere and necessarily universal tasks, and only apparently is it at a disadvantage therein with respect to physics, which reaches into astronomical infinity and comes to laws, which (even if in hypothetical Einschlage) nevertheless wishes to fulfill the sense of unconditioned generalities. It is only apparently confined to our insignificant earth, and as anthropology to this insignificant living being of the earth, which is called the human being. In view of the ultimate sources of evidence, which on the basis of this world in general according to sense and being signifies what it signifies, and from all essential necessities, which are produced from there, it shows that biology is not a contingent discipline for the insignificant earth like the zoology of Germany, the botany of the plant world of Baden, but that a general biology has the same world-universality as a physics. All meaning which a Venus-biology could have, of which we might speak as a possibility, it owes to the original meaning-formation of our life-world, and on the basis of that, the theoretical continuation of this sense-formation through our biology. It has of course with its universal task an infinite horizon, which is itself further articulated into horizons... But instead it is not merely formal like mathematics and also physics, related merely to an abstract world-structure. Rather as actual universal biology it encompasses the whole concrete world, also then implicating physics, and in the correlation-consideration it becomes wholly universal philosophy.