Everything I know falls within the subject-object dichotomy, it is object for me, it is phenomenon, not a thing in itself. But in the subject-object dichotomy object and subject are bound together. There can be no object without a subject, but neither can there be a subject without an object. Hence what I experience as being resides always in the whole of the subject-object dichotomy, not only in one term. ... What I know is therefore always object consciousness and hence limited; but though finite, it is a possible springboard toward Transcendence.
What is authentic [Being]? The answer is sought and found not by listing the many types of the existent that occur, but by apprehending that which is in itself, or is authentic [Being].
Since our inquiry always takes place within the subject-object dichotomy, but since Being must transcend or comprehend subject and object, the question of Being also bears upon the questioner. The answer must show what Being is for us inseparably from what we ourselves are; for Being must make possible the inquiry into it through the nature of our own being, and it must be accessible to this inquiry. ...
If that which authentically is, is not an object, that is, not an object for a subject, then it is beyond cognition, which denotes object knowledge of something. But since everything that is an object for us reveals to us its phenomenality in contrast to its being-in-itself, phenomenal being points to authentic Being, which speaks and is perceptible through it.
If authentic Being is not experience as subject for a focal point of consciousness observing it, then it also evades all psychological knowledge. But since Being is present in everything that is experienced, the subjective mode of Dasein is a basic manifestation of Being: experience and understanding are indispensable for the ascertainment of Being.
If authentic Being is not the thought structure of the categories, not logos, it also evades logical knowledge. But since everything that is for us must enter into some mode of thought, knowledge of the categories is a necessary condition of philosophical clarity.
The authentic Being, that is neither object nor subject, but that is manifested in the whole of the subject-object dichotomy, and that must fill the categories in order to give them purpose and meaning, we have called the Comprehensive.
The question of authentic Being must therefore find its answer through elucidation of the modes of the Comprehensive—of world and Transcendence—of Dasein, consciousness, mind, Existenz. But in so far as all these modes are rooted in one, the ultimate answer is that authentic Being is Transcendence (or God), a proposition the true understanding of which embraces all philosophical faith and all elucidating philosophical thought, but the path to which leads through all the modes of the Comprehensive. ...
For one wishing to philosophize, it is of particular, indeed of crucial importance to ascertain the difference between the object cognition that is achieved in the sciences, and the transcending thought that characterizes philosophy. A philosophical discussion may be said to have reached its goal when the matter under discussion becomes objectless, in the double sense that for the positivist nothing remains to be done, because he no longer sees an object, and that for the philosopher the light is just beginning to dawn. The philosopher cannot to be sure apprehend authentic Being in the vanishing of the object, but he can be filled by it.
Our four questions result in intellectual operations which transcend the limits of the knowable and of the world as a whole, so that through these limits we become aware of the phenomenality of empirical existence and hence of the Comprehensive nature of Being, thus entering into the area of faith. This transcendent thinking is a thinking that through method acquires a scientific character and yet, because in it the determinate object is dissolved, differs from scientific cognition.
— Karl Jaspers