Abstract

In the philosophical debate of the second half of the twentieth century, the theme of experience is usually divided into scientific, moral, aesthetic and religious experience. In his early writings Heidegger focusses, on the other hand, on “factical life experience”. This paper argues that to conceive the being of the Dasein mainly basing it on its facticity runs the risk of excluding any idea of normativity and universality. The author indicates some elements of a critique of experience basing them on Hermann Cohen’s critical idealism. This critique questions the supposed irreducibility of the Faktizität of life and underlines the centrality of moral experience, showing that experience is not a given fact but the product of pure thinking. A logic of cognition and a thinking of correlation that, as a critique of experience, can produce moral experience is therefore opposed to a philosophy in which factical life explains itself and is none other than hermeneutics of facticity.