present-at-hand

vorhanden, Vorhandenheit, Vorhandensein The problematic of Greek ontology, like that of any other, must take its clues from Dasein itself. In both ordinary and philosophical usage, Dasein, man’s Being, is ‘defined’ as the zoon logon echon – as that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse. legein is the clue for arriving at those structures of Being which belong to the entities we encounter in addressing ourselves to anything or speaking about it [im Ansprechen und Besprechen]. (Cf. Section 7 b.) This is why the ancient ontology as developed by Plato turns into ‘dialectic’. As the ontological clue gets progressively worked out – namely, in the ‘hermeneutic’ of the logos – it becomes increasingly possible to grasp the problem of Being in a more radical fashion. The ‘dialectic’, which has been a genuine philosophical embarrassment, becomes superfluous. That is why Aristotle ‘no longer has any understanding’ of it, for he has put it on a more radical footing and raised it to a new level [aufhob]. legein itself – or rather noein, that simple awareness of something PRESENT-AT-HAND in its sheer presence-at-hand, which Parmenides had already taken to guide him in his own interpretation of Being – has the Temporal structure of a pure ‘making-present’ of something. Those entities which show themselves in this and for it, and which are understood as entities in the most authentic sense, thus get interpreted with regard to the Present; that is, they are conceived as presence (ousia). BTMR §6 And because the function of the logos lies in merely letting something be seen, in letting entities be perceived [im Vernehmenlassen des Seienden], logos can signify the reason [Vernunft]. And because, moreover, logos is used not only with the signification of legein but also with that of legomenon (that which is exhibited, as such), and because the latter is nothing else than the hypokeimenon which, as PRESENT-AT-HAND, already lies at the bottom [zum Grunde] of any procedure of addressing oneself to it or discussing it, logos qua legomenon means the ground, the ratio. And finally, because logos as legomenon can also signify that which, as something to which one addresses oneself, becomes visible in its relation to something in its ‘relatedness’, logos acquires the signification of relation and relationship. BTMR §7 The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ PRESENT-AT-HAND of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so and is itself PRESENT-AT-HAND; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that. All the Being-as-it-is [So-sein] which this entity possesses is primarily Being. So when we designate this entity with the term ‘Dasein’, we are expressing not its “what” (as if it were a table, house or tree) but its Being. BTMR §9 2. That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine. Thus Dasein is never to be taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are PRESENT-AT-HAND. To entities such as these, their Being is ‘a matter of indifference’; or more precisely, they ‘are’ such that their Being can be neither a matter of indifference to them, nor the opposite. Because Dasein has in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit], one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it: ‘I am’, ‘you are’. BTMR §9 Furthermore, in each case Dasein is mine to be in one way or another. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine [je meines]. That entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue, comports itself towards its Being as its ownmost possibility. In each case Dasein is its possibility, and it ‘has’ this possibility, but not just as a property [eigenschaftlich], as something PRESENT-AT-HAND would. And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, ‘choose’ itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself; or only ‘seem’ to do so. But only in so far as it is essentially something which can be authentic – that is, something of its own – can it have lost itself and not yet won itself. As modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity (these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense) are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mineness. But the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any ‘less’ Being or any ‘lower’ degree of Being. Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity – when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment. [SZ:43] BTMR §9 The two characteristics of Dasein which we have sketched – the priority of ‘existentia’ over essentia, and the fact that Dasein is in each case mine [die Jemeinigkeit] – have already indicated that in the analytic of this entity we are facing a peculiar phenomenal domain. Dasein does not have the kind of Being which belongs to something merely PRESENT-AT-HAND within the world, nor does it ever have it. So neither is it to be presented thematically as something we come across in the same way as we come across what is PRESENT-AT-HAND. The right way of presenting it is so far from self-evident that to determine what form it shall take is itself an essential part of the ontological analytic of this entity. Only by presenting this entity in the right way can we have any understanding of its Being. No matter how provisional our analysis may be, it always requires the assurance that we have started correctly. BTMR §9 What is meant by “Being-in”? Our proximal reaction is to round out this expression to “Being-in ‘in the world’”, and we are inclined to understand this Being-in as ‘Being in something’ (“Sein in ...”]. This latter term designates the kind of Being which an entity has when it is ‘in’ another one, as the water is ‘in’ the glass, or the garment is ‘in’ the cupboard. By this ‘in’ we mean the relationship of Being which two entities extended ‘in’ space have to each other with regard to their location in that space. Both water and glass, garment and cupboard, are ‘in’ space and ‘at’ a location, and both in the same way. This relationship of Being can be expanded: for instance, the bench is in the lecture-room, the lecture-room is in the university, the university is in the city, and so on, until we can say that the bench is ‘in world-space’. All entities whose Being ‘in’ one another can thus be described have the same kind of Being – that of Being-present-at-hand – as Things occurring ‘within’ the world. Being-present-at-hand ‘in’ something which is likewise PRESENT-AT-HAND, and Being-present-at-hand-along-with [Mitvorhandensein] in the sense of a definite location-relationship with something else which has the same kind of Being, are ontological characteristics which we call “categorial”: they are of such a sort as to belong to entities whose kind of Being is not of the character of Dasein. [SZ:54] BTMR §12 Being-in, on the other hand, is a state of Dasein’s Being; it is an existentiale. So one cannot think of it as the Being-presentat-hand of some corporeal Thing (such as a human body) ‘in’ an entity which is PRESENT-AT-HAND. Nor does the term “Being-in” mean a spatial ‘in-one-another-ness’ of things PRESENT-AT-HAND, any more than the word ‘in’ primordially signifies a spatial relationship of this kind. ‘In’ is derived from “innan” – “to reside”, “habitare”, “to dwell” [sich auf halten]. ‘An’ signifies “I am accustomed”, “I am familiar with”, “I look after something”. It has the signification of “colo” in the senses of “habito” and “diligo”. The entity to which Being-in in this signification belongs is one which we have characterized as that entity which in each case I myself am [bin]. The expression ‘bin’ is connected with ‘bei’, and so ‘ich bin’ [‘I am’] means in its turn “I reside” or “dwell alongside” the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such a way. “Being” [Sein], as the infinitive of ‘ich bin’ (that is to say, when it is understood as an existentiale), signifies “to reside alongside ...”, “to be familiar with ...”. “Being-in” is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-world as its essential state. BTMR §12 As an existentiale, ‘Being alongside’ the world never means anything like the Being-present-at-hand-together of Things that occur. There is no such thing as the ‘side-by-side-ness’ of an entity called ‘Dasein’ with another entity called ‘world’. Of course when two things are PRESENT-AT-HAND together alongside one another, we are accustomed to express this occasionally by something like ‘The table stands “by” [‘bei’] the door’ or ‘The chair “touches” [‘berührt’] the wall’. Taken strictly, ‘touching’ is never what we are talking about in such cases, not because accurate reexamination will always eventually establish that there is a space between the chair and the wall, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them should be equal to zero. If the chair could touch the wall, this would presuppose that the wall is the sort of thing ‘for’ which a chair would be encounterable. An entity PRESENT-AT-HAND within the world can be touched by another entity only if by its very nature the latter entity has Being-in as its own kind of Being – only if, with its Being-there [Da-sein], something like the world is already revealed to it, so that from out of that world another entity can manifest itself in touching, and thus become accessible in its Being-present-at-hand. When two entities are PRESENT-AT-HAND within the world, and furthermore are worldless in themselves, they can never ‘touch’ each other, nor can either of them ‘be’ ‘alongside’ the other. The clause ‘furthermore are worldless’ must not be left out; for even entities which are not worldless – Dasein itself, for example – are PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in’ the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely PRESENT-AT-HAND. To do this, one must completely disregard or just not see the existential state of Being-in. But the fact that ‘Dasein’ can be taken as something which is PRESENT-AT-HAND and just PRESENT-AT-HAND, is not to be confused with a certain way of ‘presence-at-hand’ which is Dasein’s own. This latter kind of presence-at-hand becomes accessible not by disregarding Dasein’s specific structures but only by understanding them in advance. Dasein understands its ownmost Being in the sense of a certain ‘factual Being-present-at-hand’. And yet the ‘factuality’ of the fact [Tatsache] of one’s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the factual occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example. Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s “facticity”. This is a definite way of Being [Seinsbestimmtheit], and it has a complicated structure which cannot even be grasped as a problem until Dasein’s basic existential states have been worked out. The concept of “facticity” implies that an entity ‘within-the-world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world. [SZ:56] BTMR §12 In the first instance it is enough to see the ontological difference between Being-in as an existentiale and the category of the ‘insideness’ which things PRESENT-AT-HAND can have with regard to one another. By thus delimiting Being-in, we are not denying every kind of ‘spatiality’ to Dasein. On the contrary, Dasein itself has a ‘Being-in-space’ of its own; but this in turn is possible only on the basis of Being-in-the-world in general. Hence Being-in is not to be explained ontologically by some ontical characterization, as if one were to say, for instance, that Being-in in a world is a spiritual property, and that man’s ‘spatiality’ is a result of his bodily nature (which, at the same time, always gets ‘founded’ upon corporeality). Here again we are faced with the Being-present-at-hand-together of some such spiritual Thing along with a corporeal Thing, while the Being of the entity thus compounded remains more obscure than ever. Not until we understand Being-in-the-world as an essential structure of Dasein can we have any insight into Dasein’s existential spatiality. Such an insight will keep us from failing to see this structure or from previously cancelling it out – a procedure motivated not ontologically but rather ‘metaphysically’ by the naïve supposition that man is, in the first instance, a spiritual Thing which subsequently gets misplaced ‘into’ a space. BTMR §12 From what we have been saying, it follows that Being-in is not a ‘property’ which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could be just as well as it could with it. It is not the case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’ – a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never ‘proximally’ an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a ‘relationship’ towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some other entity is PRESENT-AT-HAND outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ‘meet up with’ Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world. BTMR §12 Even if it were feasible to give an ontological definition of “Being-in” primarily in terms of a Being-in-the-world which knows, it would still be our first task to show that knowing has the phenomenal character of a Being which is in and towards the world. If one reflects upon this relationship of Being, an entity called “Nature” is given proximally as that which becomes known. Knowing, as such, is not to be met in this entity. If knowing ‘is’ at all, it belongs solely to those entities which know. But even in those entities, human-Things, knowing is not PRESENT-AT-HAND. In any case, it is not externally ascertainable as, let us say, bodily properties are. Now, inasmuch as knowing belongs to these entities and is not some external characteristic, it must be ‘inside’. Now the more unequivocally one maintains that knowing is proximally and really ‘inside’ and indeed has by no means the same kind of Being as entities which are both physical and psychical, the less one presupposes when one believes that one is making headway in the question of the essence of knowledge and in the clarification of the relationship between subject and Object. For only then can the problem arise of how this knowing subject comes out of its inner ‘sphere’ into one which is ‘other and external’, of how knowing can have any object at all, and of how one must think of the object itself so that eventually the subject knows it without needing to venture a leap into another sphere. But in any of the numerous varieties which this approach may take, the question of the kind of Being which belongs to this knowing subject is left entirely unasked, though whenever its knowing gets handled, its way of Being is already included tacitly in one’s theme. Of course we are sometimes assured that we are certainly not to think of the subject’s “inside” [Innen] and its ‘inner sphere’ as a sort of ‘box’ or ‘cabinet’. But when one asks for the positive signification of this ‘inside’ of immanence in which knowing is proximally enclosed, or when one inquires how this ‘Being inside’ [“Innenseins”] which knowing possesses has its own character of Being grounded in the kind of Being which belongs to the subject, then silence reigns. And no matter how this inner sphere may get interpreted, if one does no more than ask how knowing makes its way ‘out of’ it and achieves ‘transcendence’, it becomes evident that the knowing which presents such enigmas will remain problematical unless one has previously clarified, how it is and what it is. [SZ:61] BTMR §13 If we now ask what shows itself in the phenomenal findings about knowing, we must keep in mind that knowing is grounded beforehand in a Being-already-alongside-the-world, which is essentially constitutive for Dasein’s Being. Proximally, this Being-already-alongside is not just a fixed staring at something that is purely PRESENT-AT-HAND. Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned. If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the PRESENT-AT-HAND by observing it, then there must first be a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully. When concern holds back [Sichenthalten] from any kind of producing, manipulating, and the like, it puts itself into what is now the sole remaining mode of Being-in, the mode of just tarrying alongside... . [das Nur-noch-verweilen bei ...] This kind of Being towards the world is one which lets us encounter entities within-the-world purely in the way the look (eidos), just that; on the basis of this kind of Being, and as a mode of it, looking explicitly at what we encounter is possible. Looking at something in this way is sometimes a definite way of taking up a direction towards something – of setting our sights towards what is PRESENT-AT-HAND. It takes over a ‘view-point’ in advance from the entity which it encounters. Such looking-at enters the mode of dwelling autonomously alongside entities within-the-world. In this kind of ‘dwelling’ as a holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the PRESENT-AT-HAND is consummated. Perception is consummated when one addresses oneself to something as something and discusses it as such. This amounts to interpretation in the broadest sense; and on the basis of such interpretation, perception becomes an act of making determinate. What is thus perceived and made determinate can be expressed in propositions, and can be retained and preserved as what has thus been asserted. This perceptive retention of an assertion about something is itself a way of Being-in-the-world; it is not to be Interpreted as a ‘procedure’ by which a subject provides itself with representations [Vorstellungen] of something which remain stored up ‘inside’ as having been thus appropriated, and with regard to which the question of how they ‘agree’ with actuality can occasionally arise. [SZ:62] BTMR §13 Thus, to give a phenomenological description of the ‘world’ will mean to exhibit the Being of those entities which are PRESENT-AT-HAND within the world, and to fix it in concepts which are categorial. Now the entities within the world are Things – Things of Nature, and Things ‘invested with value’ [“wertbehaftete” Dinge]. Their Thinghood becomes a problem; and to the extent that the Thinghood of Things ‘invested with value’ is based upon the Thinghood of Nature, our primary theme is the Being of Things of Nature – Nature as such. That characteristic of Being which belongs to Things of Nature (substances), and upon which everything is founded, is substantiality. What is its ontological meaning? By asking this, we have given an unequivocal direction to our inquiry. BTMR §14 The derivative form ‘worldly’ will then apply terminologically to a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein, never to a kind which belongs to entities PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in’ the world. We shall designate these latter entities as “belonging to the world” or “within-the-world” [weltzugehörig oder innerweltlich]. BTMR §14 A glance at previous ontology shows that if one fails to see Being-in-the-world as a state of Dasein, the phenomenon of worldhood likewise gets passed over. One tries instead to Interpret the world in terms of the Being of those entities which are PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world but which are by no means proximally discovered – namely, in terms of Nature. If one understands Nature ontologico-categorially, one finds that Nature is a limiting case of the Being of possible entities within-the-world. Only in some definite mode of its own Being-in-the-world can Dasein discover entities as Nature. This manner of knowing them has the character of depriving the world of its worldhood in a definite way. ‘Nature’, as the categorial aggregate of those structures of Being which a definite entity encountered within-the-world may possess, can never make worldhood intelligible. But even the phenomenon of ‘Nature’, as it is conceived, for instance, in romanticism, can be grasped ontologically only in terms of the concept of the world – that is to say, in terms of the analytic of Dasein. BTMR §14 Here, however, “Nature” is not to be understood as that which is just PRESENT-AT-HAND, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’. As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the ‘source’ which the geographer establishes for a river is not the ‘springhead in the dale’. BTMR §15 The kind of Being which belongs to these entities is readiness-to-hand. But this characteristic is not to be understood as merely a way of taking them, as if we were talking such ‘aspects’ into the ‘entities’ which we proximally encounter, or as if some world-stuff which is proximally PRESENT-AT-HAND in itself were ‘given subjective colouring’ in this way. Such an Interpretation would overlook the fact that in this case these entities would have to be understood and discovered beforehand as something purely PRESENT-AT-HAND, and must have priority and take the lead in the sequence of those dealings with the ‘world’ in which something is discovered and made one’s own. But this already runs counter to the ontological meaning of cognition, which we have exhibited as a founded mode of Being-in-the-world. To lay bare what is just PRESENT-AT-HAND and no more, cognition must first penetrate beyond what is ready-to-hand in our concern. Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially. Yet only by reason of something PRESENT-AT-HAND, ‘is there’ anything ready-to-hand. Does it follow, however, granting this thesis for the nonce, that readiness-to-hand is ontologically founded upon presence-at-hand? BTMR §15 To the everydayness of Being-in-the-world there belong certain modes of concern. These permit the entities with which we concern ourselves to be encountered in such a way that the worldly character of what is within-the-world comes to the fore. When we concern ourselves with something, the entities which are most closely ready-to-hand may be met as something unusable, not properly adapted for the use we have decided upon. The tool turns out to be damaged, or the material unsuitable. In each of these cases equipment is here, ready-to-hand. We discover its unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the circumspection of the dealings in which we use it. When its unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. This conspicuousness [SZ:73] presents the ready-to-hand equipment as in a certain un-readiness-to-hand. But this implies that what cannot be used just lies there; it shows itself as an equipmental Thing which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been PRESENT-AT-HAND too. Pure presence-at-hand announces itself in such equipment, but only to withdraw to the readiness-to-hand of something with which one concerns oneself – that is to say, of the sort of thing we find when we put it back into repair. This presence-at-hand of something that cannot be used is still not devoid of all readiness-to-hand whatsoever; equipment which is PRESENT-AT-HAND in this way which is still not just a Thing which occurs somewhere. The damage to the equipment is still not a mere alteration of a Thing – not a change of properties which just occurs in something PRESENT-AT-HAND. BTMR §16 The modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy all have the function of bringing to the fore the characteristic of presence-at-hand in what is ready-to-hand. But the ready-to-hand is not thereby just observed and stared at as something PRESENT-AT-HAND; the presence-at-hand which makes itself known is still bound up in the readiness-to-hand of equipment. Such equipment still does not veil itself in the guise of mere Things. It becomes ‘equipment’ in the sense of something which one would like to shove out of the way. But in such a Tendency to shove things aside, the ready-to-hand shows itself as still ready-to-hand in its unswerving presence-at-hand. BTMR §16 Similarly, when something ready-to-hand is found missing, though its everyday presence [Zugegensein] has been so obvious that we have never taken any notice of it, this makes a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers. Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and now sees for the first time what the missing article was ready-to-hand with, and what it was ready-to-hand for. The environment announces itself afresh. What is thus lit up is not itself just one thing ready-to-hand among others; still less is it something PRESENT-AT-HAND upon which equipment ready-to-hand is somehow founded: it is in the ‘there’ before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection, so far as circumspection is always directed towards entities; but in each case it has already been disclosed for circumspection. ‘Disclose’ and ‘disclosedness’ will be used as technical terms in the passages that follow, and shall signify ‘to lay open’ and ‘the character of having been laid open.’ Thus ‘to disclose’ never means anything like ‘to obtain indirectly by inference’. BTMR §16 In such privative expressions as “inconspicuousness”, “unobtrusiveness”, and “non-obstinacy”, what we have in view is a positive phenomenal character of the Being of that which is proximally ready-to-hand. With these’ negative prefixes we have in view the character of the ready-to-hand as “holding itself in”; this is what we have our eye upon in the “Being-in-itself” of something, though ‘proximally’ we ascribe it to the PRESENT-AT-HAND – to the PRESENT-AT-HAND as that which can be thematically ascertained. As long as we take our orientation primarily and exclusively from the PRESENT-AT-HAND, the ‘in-itself’ can by no means be ontologically clarified. If, however, this talk about the ‘in-itself’ has any ontological importance, some interpretation must be called for. This “in-itself” of Being is something which gets invoked with considerable emphasis, mostly in an ontical way, and rightly so from a phenomenal standpoint. But if some ontological assertion is supposed to be given when this is ontically invoked, its claims are not fulfilled by such a procedure. As the foregoing analysis has already made clear, only on the basis of the phenomenon of the world can the Being-in-itself of entities within-the-world be grasped ontologically. [SZ:76] BTMR §16 What do we mean when we say that a sign “indicates”? We can answer this only by determining what kind of dealing is appropriate with equipment for indicating. And we must do this in such a way that the readiness-to-hand of that equipment can be genuinely grasped. What is the appropriate way of having-to-do with signs? Going back to our example of the arrow, we must say that the kind of behaving (Being) which corresponds to the sign we encounter, is either to ‘give way’ or to ‘stand still’ vis-à-vis the car with the arrow. Giving way, as taking a direction, belongs essentially to Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Dasein is always somehow directed [ausgerichtet] and on its way; standing and waiting are only limiting cases of this directional ‘on-its-way’. The sign addresses itself to a Being-in-the-world which is specifically ‘spatial’. The sign is not authentically ‘grasped’ [“erfasst”] if we just stare at it and identify it as an indicator-Thing which occurs. Even if we turn our glance in the direction which the arrow indicates, and look at something PRESENT-AT-HAND in the region indicated, even then the sign is not authentically encountered. Such a sign addresses itself to the circumspection of our concernful dealings, and it does so in such a way that the circumspection which goes along with it, following where it points, brings into an explicit ‘survey’ whatever aroundness the environment may have at the time. This circumspective survey does not grasp the ready-to-hand; what it achieves is rather an orientation within our environment. There is also another way in which we can experience equipment: we may encounter the arrow simply as equipment which belongs to the car. We can do this without discovering what character it specifically has as equipment: what the arrow is to indicate and how it is to do so, may remain completely undetermined; yet what we are encountering is not a mere Thing. The experiencing of a Thing requires a definiteness of its own [ihre eigene Bestimmtheit], and must be contrasted with coming across a manifold of equipment, which may often be quite indefinite, even when one comes across it as especially close. BTMR §17 The peculiar character of signs as equipment becomes ‘especially clear in ‘establishing a sign’ [“Zeichenstiftung”]. This activity is performed in a circumspective fore-sight [Vorsicht] out of which it arises, and which requires that it be possible for one’s particular environment to announce itself for circumspection at any time by means of something ready-to-hand, and that this possibility should itself be ready-to-hand. But the Being of what is most closely ready-to-hand within-the-world possesses the character of holding-itself-in and not emerging, which we have described above. Accordingly our circumspective dealings in the environment require some equipment ready-to-hand which in its character as equipment takes over the ‘work’ of letting something ready-to-hand become conspicuous. So when such equipment (signs) gets produced, its conspicuousness must be kept in mind. But even when signs are thus conspicuous, one does not let them be PRESENT-AT-HAND at random; they get ‘set up’ [“angebracht”] in a definite way with a view towards easy accessibility. BTMR §17 In establishing a sign, however, one does not necessarily have to produce equipment which is not yet ready-to-hand at all. Signs also arise when one takes as a sign [Zum-Zeichen-nehmen] something that is ready-to-hand already. In this mode, signs “get established” in a sense which is even more primordial. In indicating, a ready-to-hand equipment totality, and even the environment in general, can be provided with an availability which is circumspectively oriented; and not only this: establishing a sign can, above all, reveal. What gets taken as a sign becomes accessible only through its readiness-to-hand. If, for instance, the south wind ‘is accepted’ [“gilt”] by the farmer as a sign of rain, then this ‘acceptance’ [“Geltung”] – or the ‘value’ with which the entity is ‘invested’ – is not a sort of bonus over and above what is already PRESENT-AT-HAND in itself – viz, the flow of air in a definite geographical direction. The south wind may be meteorologically accessible as something which just occurs; but it is never PRESENT-AT-HAND proximally in such a way as this, only occasionally taking over the function of a warning signal. On the contrary, only by the circumspection with which one takes account of things in farming, is the south wind discovered in its Being. [SZ:81] BTMR §17 But, one will protest, that which gets taken as a sign must first have become accessible in itself and been apprehended before the sign gets established. Certainly it must in any case be such that in some way we can come across it. The question simply remains as to how entities are discovered in this previous encountering, whether as mere Things which occur, or rather as equipment which has not been understood – as something ready-to-hand with which we have hitherto not known ‘how to begin’, and which has accordingly kept itself veiled from the purview of circumspection. And here again, when the equipmental characters of the ready-to-hand are still circumspectively undiscovered, they are not to be Interpreted as bare Thinghood presented for an apprehension of what is just PRESENT-AT-HAND and no more. BTMR §17 One might be tempted to cite the abundant use of ‘signs’ in primitive Dasein, as in fetishism and magic, to illustrate the remarkable role which they play in everyday concern when it comes to our understanding of the world. Certainly the establishment of signs which underlies this way of using them is not performed with any theoretical aim or in the course of theoretical speculation. This way of using them always remains completely within a Being-in-the-world which is ‘immediate’. But on closer inspection it becomes plain that to interpret fetishism and magic by taking our clue from the idea of signs in general, is not enough to enable us to grasp the kind of ‘Being-ready-to-hand’ which belongs to entities encountered in the primitive world. With regard to the signphenomenon, the following Interpretation may be given: for primitive man, the sign coincides with that which is indicated. Not only can the sign represent this in the sense of serving as a substitute for what it indicates, but it can do so in such a way that the sign itself always is what it indicates. This remarkable coinciding does not mean, however, that the sign-Thing has already undergone a certain ‘Objectification’ – that it has been experienced as a mere Thing and misplaced into the same realm of Being of the PRESENT-AT-HAND as what it indicates. This ‘coinciding’ is not an identification of things which have hitherto been isolated from each other: it consists rather in the fact that the sign has not as yet become free from that of which it is a sign. Such a use of signs is still absorbed completely in Being-towards what is indicated, so that a sign as such cannot detach itself at all. This coinciding is based not on a prior Objectification but on the fact that such Objectification is completely lacking. This means, however, that signs are not discovered as equipment at all – that ultimately what is ‘ready-to-hand’ within-the-world just does not have the kind of Being that belongs to equipment. Perhaps even readiness-to-hand and equipment have nothing to contribute [nichts auszurichten] as ontological clues in Interpreting the primitive world; and certainly the ontology of Thinghood does even less. But if an understanding of Being is constitutive for primitive Dasein and for the primitive world in general, then it is all the more urgent to work out the ‘formal’ idea of worldhood – or at least the idea of a phenomenon modifiable in such a way that all ontological assertions to the effect that in a given phenomenal context something is not yet such-and-such or no longer such-and-such, may acquire a positive phenomenal meaning in terms of what it is not. BTMR §17 When we speak of having already let something be involved, so that it has been freed for that involvement, we are using a perfect tense a priori which characterizes the kind of Being belonging to Dasein itself. Letting an entity be involved, ‘if we understand this ontologicailly, consists in previously freeing it for [auf] its readiness-to-hand within the environment. When we let something be involved, it must be involved in something; and in terms of this “in-which”, the “with-which” of this involvement is freed. Our concern encounters it as this thing that is ready-to-hand. To the extent that any entity shows itself to concern – that is, to the extent that it is discovered in its Being – it is already something ready-to-hand environmentally; it just is not ‘proximally’ a ‘world-stuff’ that is merely PRESENT-AT-HAND. BTMR §18 – the “in-order-to”, the “for-the-sake-of”, and the “with-which” of an involvement – is such that they resist any sort of mathematical functionalization; nor are they merely something thought, first posited in an ‘act of thinking.’ They are rather relationships in which concernful circumspection as such already dwells. This ‘system of Relations’, as something constitutive for worldhood, is so far from volatilizing the Being of the ready-to-hand within-the-world, that the worldhood of the world provides the basis on which such entities can for the first time be discovered as they are ‘substantially’ ‘in themselves’. And only if entities within-the-world can be encountered at all, is it possible, in the field of such entities, to make accessible what is just PRESENT-AT-HAND and no more. By reason of their Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more, these latter entities can have their ‘properties’ defined mathematically in ‘functional concepts.’ Ontologically, such concepts are possible only in relation to entities whose Being has the character of pure substantiality. Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts. BTMR §18 Substantiality is the idea of Being to which the ontological characterization of the res extensa harks back. “Per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae ita existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum.” “By substance we can understand nothing else than’ an entity which is in such a way that it needs no other entity in order to be.” The Being of a ‘substance’ is characterized by not needing anything. That whose Being is such that it has no need at all for any other entity satisfies the idea of substance in the authentic sense; this entity is the ens perfectissimum. “... substantia quae nulla plane re indigeat, unica tantum potest intelligi, nempe Deus.” Here ‘God’ is a purely ontological term, if it is to be understood as ens perfectissimum. At the same time, the ‘self-evident’ connotation of the concept of God is such as to permit an ontological interpretation for the characteristic of not needing anything – a constitutive item in Substantiality. “Alias vero omnes , non nisi ope concursus Dei; existere posse percipirnus.” All entities other than God need to be “produced” in the widest sense and also to be sustained. ‘Being’ is to be understood within a horizon which ranges from the production of what is to be PRESENT-AT-HAND to something which has no need of being produced. Every entity which is not God is an ens creature. The Being which belongs to one of these entities is ‘infinitely’ different from that which belongs to the other; yet we still consider creation and creator alike as entities. We are thus using “Being” in so wide a sense that its meaning embraces an ‘infinite’ difference. So even created entities can be called “substance” with some right. Relative to God, of course, these entities need to be produced and sustained; but within the realm of created entities – the ‘world’ in the sense of ens crealum – there are things which ‘are in need of no other entity’ relatively to the creaturely production and sustentation that we find, for instance, in man. Of these substances there are two kinds: the res cogitans and the res extensa. BTMR §20 Hardness gets taken as resistance. But neither hardness nor resistance is understood in a phenomenal sense, as something experienced in itself whose nature can be determined in such an experience. For Descartes, resistance amounts to no more than not yielding place – that is, not undergoing any change of location. So if a Thing resists, this means that it stays in a definite location relatively to some other Thing which is changing its location, or that it is changing its own location with a velocity which permits the other Thing to ‘catch up’ with it. But when the experience of hardness is Interpreted this way, the kind of Being which belongs to sensory perception is obliterated, and so is any possibility that the entities encountered in such perception should be grasped in their Being. Descartes takes the kind of Being which belongs to the perception of something, and translates it into the only kind he knows: the perception of something becomes a definite way of Being-present-at-hand-side-byside of two res extensae which are PRESENT-AT-HAND; the way in which their movements are related is itself a mode of that extensio by which the presence-at-hand of the corporeal Thing is primarily characterized. Of course no behaviour in which one feels one’s way by touch [eines tastenden Verhaltens] can be ‘completed’ unless what can thus be felt [des Betastbaren] has ‘closeness’ of a very special kind. But this does not mean that touching [ Berührung] and the hardness which makes itself known in touching consist ontologically in different velocities of two corporeal Things. Hardness and resistance do not show themselves at all unless an entity has the kind of Being which Dasein – or at least something living – possesses. BTMR §21 But quite apart from the specific problem of the world itself, can the Being of what we encounter proximally within-the-world be reached ontologically by this procedure? When we speak of material Thinghood, have we not tacitly posited a kind of Being – the constant presence-at hand of Things – which is so far from having been rounded out ontologically by subsequently endowing entities with value-predicates, that these value-characters themselves are rather just ontical characteristics of those entities which have the kind of Being possessed by Things? Adding on value-predicates cannot tell us anything at all new about the Being of goods, but would merely presuppose again that goods have pure presence-at-hand as their kind of Being. Values would then be determinate characteristics which a Thing possesses, and they would be PRESENT-AT-HAND. They would have their sole ultimate ontological source in our previously laying down the actuality of Things as the fundamental stratum. But even prephenomenological experience shows that in an entity which is supposedly a Thing, there is something that will not become fully intelligible through Thinghood alone. Thus the Being of Things has to be rounded out. What, then does the Being of values or their ‘validity’ [“Geltung”] (which Lotze took as a mode of ‘affirmation’) really amount to ontologically? And what does it signify ontologically for Things to be ‘invested’ with values in this way? As long as these matters remain obscure, to reconstruct the Thing of use in terms of the Thing of Nature is an ontologically questionable undertaking, even if one disregards the way in which the problematic has been perverted in principle. And if we are to reconstruct this Thing of use, which supposedly comes to us in the first instance ‘with its skin off’, does not this always require that we previously take a positive look at the phenomenon whose totality such a reconstruction is to restore? But if we have not given a proper explanation beforehand of its ownmost state of Being, are we not building our reconstruction without a plan? Inasmuch as this reconstruction and ‘rounding-out’ of the traditional ontology of the ‘world’ results in our reaching the same entities with which we started when we analysed the readiness-to-hand of equipment and the totality of [SZ:100] involvements, it seems as if the Being of these entities ‘has in fact been clarified or has at least become a problem. But by taking extensio as a proprietas, Descartes can hardly reach the Being of substance; and by taking refuge in ‘value’-characteristics (“wertlichen” Beschaffenheiten] we are just as far from even catching a glimpse of Being as readiness-to-hand, let alone permitting it to become an ontological theme.Descartes has narrowed down the question of the world to that of Things of Nature [Naturdinglichkeit] as those entities within-the-world’ which are proximally accessible. He has confirmed the opinion that to know an entity in what is supposedly the most rigorous ontical manner is our only possible access to the primary Being of the entity which such knowledge reveals. But at the same time we must have the insight to see that in principle the ‘roundings-out’ of the Thing-ontology also operate on the same dogmatic basis as that which Descartes has adopted.We have already intimated in Section 14 that passing over the world and those ‘entities which we proximally encounter is not accidental, not an oversight which it would be’ simple to correct, but that it is grounded in a kind of Being which belongs essentially to Dasein itself. When our analytic of Dasein has given some transparency to those main structures of Dasein which are of the most importance in the framework of this problematic, and when we have assigned [zugewiesen] to the concept of Being in general the horizon within which its intelligibility becomes possible, so that readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand also become primordially intelligible ontologically for the first time, only then can our critique of the Cartesian ontology of the world (an ontology which, in principle, is still the usual one today) come philosophically into its own.To do this, we must show several things. (See Part One, Division Three.) BTMR §21 In connection with our first preliminary sketch of Being-in (See Section 12) , we had to contrast Dasein with a way of Being in space which we call “insideness” [Inwendigkeit]. This expression means that an entity which is itself extended is closed round [umschlossen] by the extended boundaries of something that is likewise extended. The entity inside [Das inwendig Seiende] and that which closes it round are both PRESENT-AT-HAND in space. Yet even if we delay that Dasein has any such insidencss in a spatial receptacle, this does not in principle exclude it from having any spatiality at all, but merely keeps open the way for seeing the kind of spatiality which is constitutive for Dasein. This must now be set forth. But inasmuch as any entity within-the-world is likewise in space, its spatiality will have an ontological connection with the world. We must therefore determine in what sense space is a constituent for that world which has in turn been characterized as an item in the structure of Being-in-the-world. In particular we must show how the aroundness of the environment, the specific spatiality of entities encountered in the environment, is founded upon the worldhood of the world, while contrariwise the world, on its part, is not PRESENT-AT-HAND in space. Our study of Dasein’s spatiality and the way in which the world is spatially determined will take its departure from an analysis of what is ready-to-hand in space within-the-world. We shall consider three topics: 1. the spatiality of the ready-to-hand within-the-world (Section 22); 2. the spatiality of Being-in-the-world (Section 23); 3. space and the spatiality of Dasein (Section 24). [SZ:102] BTMR §21 To what extent has our characterization of the ready-to-hand already come up against its spatiality? We have been talking about what is proximalty ready-to-hand. This means not only those entities which we encounter first before any others, but also those which are ‘close by’. What is ready-to-hand in our everyday dealings has the character of closeness. To be exact, this closeness of equipment has already been intimated in the term ‘readiness-to-hand’, which expresses the Being of equipment. Every entity that is ‘to hand’ has a different closeness, which is not to be ascertained by measuring distances. This closeness regulates itself in terms of circumspectively ‘calculative’ manipulating and using. At the same time what is close in this way gets established by the circumspection of concern, with regard to the direction in which the equipment is accessible at any time. When this closeness of the equipment has been given directionality, this signifies not merely that the equipment has its position [Stelle] in space as PRESENT-AT-HAND somewhere, but also that as equipment it has been essentially fitted up and installed, set up, and put to rights. Equipment has its place [Platz], or else it ‘lies around’; this must be distinguished in principle from just occurring at random in some spatial position. When equipment for something or other has its place, this place defines itself as the place of this equipment – as one place out of a whole totality; of places directionally lined up with each other and belonging to the context of equipment that is environmentally ready-to-hand. Such a place and such a muliplicity of places are not to be interpreted as the “where” of some random Being-present-at-hand of Things. In each case the place is the definite ‘there’ or ‘yonder’ [“Dort” und “Da”] of an item of equipment which belongs somewhere. Its belonging-somewhere at the time [Die jeweilige Hingehörigheit] corresponds to the equipmental character of what is ready-to-hand; that is, it corresponds to the belonging-to [Zugehörigkeit] which the ready-to-hand has towards a totality of equipment in accordance with its involvements. But in general the “whither” to which the totality of places for a context of equipment gets allotted, is the underlying condition which makes possible the belonging-somewhere of an equipmental totality as something that can be placed. This “whither”, which makes it possible for equipment to belong somewhere, and which we circumspectively keep in view ahead of us in our concernful dealings, we call the “region”. BTMR §22 ‘In the region of’ means not only ‘in the direction of’ but also within the range [Umkreis] of something that lies in that direction. The kind of place which is constituted by direction and remoteness (and closeness is only a mode of the latter) is already oriented towards a region and oriented within it. Something like a region must first be discovered if there is to be any possibility of allotting or coming across places for a totality of equipment that is circumspectively at one’s disposal. The regional orientation of the multiplicity of places belonging to the ready-to-hand goes to make up the aroundness – the “round-about-us” [das Um-uns-herum] – of those entities which we encounter as closest environmentally. A three-dimensional multiplicity of possible positions which gets filled up with Things PRESENT-AT-HAND is never proximally given. This dimensionality of space is still veiled in the spatiality of the ready-to-hand. The ‘above’ is what is ‘on the ceiling’; the ‘below’ is what is ‘on the floor’; [SZ:103] the ‘behind’ is what is ‘at the door’; all “wheres” are discovered and circumspectively interpreted as we go our ways in everyday dealings; they are not ascertained and catalogued by the observational measurement of space. BTMR §22 Regions are not first formed by things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND together; they always are ready-to-hand already in individual places. Places themselves either get allotted to the ready-to-hand in the circumspection of concern, or we come across them. Thus anything constantly ready-to-hand of which circumspective Being-in-the-world takes account beforehand, has its place. The “where” of its readiness-to-hand is put,to account as a matter for concern, and oriented towards the rest of what is ready-to-hand. Thus the sun, whose light and warmth are in everyday use, has its own places – sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight; these are discovered in circumspection and treated distinctively in terms of changes in the usability of what the sun bestows. Here we have something which is ready-to-hand with uniform constancy, although it keeps changing; its places become accentuated ‘indicators’ of the regions which lie in them. These celestial regions, which need not have any geographical meaning as yet, provide the “whither” beforehand for every special way of giving form to the regions which places can occupy. The house has its sunny side and its shady side; the way it is divided up into ‘rooms’ [“Räume”] is oriented towards these, and so is the ‘arrangement’ [“Einrichtung”] within them, according to their character as equipment. Churches and graves, for instance, are laid out according to the rising and the setting of the sun – the regions of life and death, which are determinative for Dasein itself with regard to its ownmost possibilities of Being in the world. Dasein, in its very Being, has this Being as an issue; and its concern discovers beforehand those regions in which some involvement is decisive. This discovery of regions beforehand is co-determined [mitbestimint] by ,the totality of involvements for which the ready-to-hand, as something encountered, is freed. [SZ:104] BTMR §22 De-severing does not necessarily imply any explicit estimation of the fatness of something ready-to-hand in relation to Dasein. Above all, remoteness never gets taken as a distance. If farness is to be estimated, this is done relatively to deseverances in which everyday Dasein maintains itself. Though these estimates may be imprecise and variable if we try to compute them, in the everydayness of Dasein they have their own definiteness which is thoroughly intelligible. We say that to go over yonder is “a good walk”, “a stone’s throw”, or ‘as long as it takes to smoke a pipe’. These measures express not only that they are not intended to ‘measure’ anything but also that the remoteness here estimated belongs to some entity to which one goes with concernful circumspection. But even when we avail ourselves of a fixed measure and say ‘it is half an hour to the house’, this measure must be taken as an estimate. ‘Half an hour’ is not-thirty minutes, but a duration [Dauer] which has no ‘length’ at all in the sense of a quantitative stretch. Such a duration is always interpreted in terms of well-accustomed everyday ways in which we ‘make provision’ [“Besorgungen”]. Remotenesses are estimated proximally by circumspection, even when one is quite familiar with ‘officially’ calculated measures. Since what is de-severed in such estimates is ready-to-hand, it retains its character as specifically within-the-world. This even implies that the pathways we take towards desevered entities in the course of our dealings will vary in their length from day to day. What is ready-to-hand in the environment is certainly not PRESENT-AT-HAND for an eternal observer exempt from Dasein: but it is encountered in Dasein’s circumspectively concernful everydayness. As Dasein goes along its ways, it does not measure off a stretch of space as a corporeal Thing which is PRESENT-AT-HAND; it does not ‘devour the kilometres’; bringing-close or de-severance is always a kind of concernful Being towards what is brought close and de-severed. A pathway which is long ‘Objectively’ can be much shorter than one which is ‘Objectively’ shorter still but which is perhaps ‘hard going’ and comes [SZ:106] before us as interminably long. Yet only in thus ‘coming before us is the current world authentically ready-to-hand. The Objective distances of Things PRESENT-AT-HAND do not coincide with the remoteness and closeness of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world. Though we may know these distances exactly, this knowledge still remains blind; it does not have the function of discovering the environment circumspectively and bringing it close; this knowledge is used only in and for a concernful Being which does not measure stretches – a Being towards the world that ‘matters’ to one [... Sein zu der einen “angehenden” Welt]. BTMR §23 If Dasein, in its concern, brings something close by, this does not signify that it fixes something at a spatial position with a minimal distance from some point of the body. When something is close by, this means that it is within the range of what is proximally ready-to-hand for circumspection. Bringing-close is not oriented towards the I-Thing encumbered with a body, but towards concernful Being-in-the-world – that is, towards whatever is proximally encountered in such Being. It follows, moreover, that Dasein’s spatiality is not to be defined by citing the position at which some corporeal Thing is PRESENT-AT-HAND. Of course we say that even Dasein always occupies a place. But this ‘occupying’ must be distinguished in principle’ from Being-ready-to-hand at a place in some particular region. Occupying a place must be conceived as a desevering of the environmentally ready-to-hand into a region which has been circumspectively discovered in advance. Dasein understands its “here” [Hier] in terms of its environmental “yonder”. The “here” does not mean the “where” of something PRESENT-AT-HAND, but rather the “whereat” [Wobei) of a de-severant Being-alongside, together with this de-severance. Dasein, in accordance with its spatiality, is proximally never here but yonder; from this “yonder” it comes back to its “here”; and it comes back to its “here” only in the way in which it interprets its concernful Being-towards in terms of what is ready-to-hand yonder. This becomes quite plain if we consider a certain phenomenal peculiarity of tlae de-severance structure of Being-in. [SZ:108] BTMR §23 As Being-in-the-world, Dasein maintains itself essentially in a desevering. This de-severance – the farness of the ready-to-hand from Dasein itself – is something that Dasein can never cross over. Of course the remoteness of something ready-to-hand from Dasein can show up as a distance from it, if this remoteness is determined by a relation to some Thing which gets thought of as PRESENT-AT-HAND at the place Dasein has formerly occupied. Dasein can subsequently traverse the “between” of this distance, but only in such a way that the distance itself becomes one which has been desevered. So little has Dasein crossed over its de-severance that it has rather taken it along with it and keeps doing so constantly; for Dasein is essentially de-severance – that is, it is spatial. It cannot wander about within the current range of its de-severances; it can never do more than change them. Dasein is spatial in that it discovers space circumspectively, so that indeed it constantly comports itself de-severantly towards the entities thus spatially encountered. BTMR §23 When space is discovered non-circumspectively by just looking at it, the environmental regions get neutralized to pure dimensions. Places – and indeed the whole circumspectively oriented totality of places belonging to equipment ready-to-hand – get reduced to a multiplicity of positions for random Things. The spatiality of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world loses its involvement-character, and so does the ready-to-hand. The world loses its specific aroundness; the environment becomes the world of Nature. The ‘world’, as a totality of equipment ready-to-hand, becomes spatialized [vcrraumlicht] to a context of extended Things which are just PRESENT-AT-HAND and no more. The homogeneous space of Nature shows itself only when the entities we encounter are discovered in such a way that the worldly character of the ready-to-hand gets specifically deprived of its worldhood. BTMR §24 In accordance with its Being-in-the-world, Dasein always has space presented as already discovered, though not thematically. On the other hand, space in itself, so far as it embraces the mere possibilities of the pure spatiail Being of something, remains proximally still concealed. The fact that space essentially shows itself in a world is not yet decisive for the kind of Being which it possesses. It need not have the kind of Being characteristic of something which is itself spatially ready-to-hand or PRESENT-AT-HAND. Nor does the Being of space have the kind of Being which belongs to Dasein. Though the Being of space itself cannot be conceived as the kind of Being which belongs to a res extensa, it does not follow that it must be defined ontologically as a ‘phenomenon’ of such a res. (In its Being, it would not be distinguished from such a res.) Nor does it follow that the Being of space can be equated to that of the res cogilans and conceived as merely ‘subjective’, quite apart from the questionable character of the Being of such a subject. [SZ:113] BTMR §24 The answer to the question of who Dasein is, is one that was seemingly given in Section 9, where we indicated formally the basic characteristics of Dasein. Dasein is an entity which is in each case I myself; its Being is in each case mine. This definition indicates an ontologically constitutive state, but it does no more than indicate it. At the same time this tells us ontically (though in a rough and ready fashion) that in each case an “I” – not Others – is this entity. The question of the “who” answers itself in terms of the “I” itself, the ‘subject’, the ‘Self’. The “who” is what maintains itself as something identical throughout changes in its Experiences and ways of behaviour, and which relates itself to this changing multiplicity in so doing. Ontologically we understand it as something which is in each case already constantly PRESENT-AT-HAND, both in and for a closed realm, and which lies at the basis, in a very special sense, as the subjectum. As something selfsame in ‘manifold otherness, it has the character of the Self. Even if one rejects the “soul substance” and the Thinghood of consciousness, or denies that a person is an object, ontologically one is still positing something whose Being retains the meaning of PRESENT-AT-HAND, whether it does so explicitly or not. Substantiality is the ontological clue for determining which entity is to provide the answer to the question of the “who”. Dasein is tacitly conceived in advance as something presentat-hand. This meaning of Being is always implicated in any case where the Being of Dasein has been left indefinite. Yet presence-at-hand is the kind of Being which belongs to entities whose character is not that of Dasein. [SZ:115] BTMR §25 But if the Self is conceived ‘only’ as a way of Being of this entity, this seems tantamount to volatilizing the real ‘core’ of Dasein. Any apprehensiveness however which one may have about this gets its nourishment from the perverse assumption that the entity in question has at bottom the kind of Being which belongs to something PRESENT-AT-HAND, even if one is far from attributing to it the solidity of an occurrent corporeal Thing. Yet man’s ‘substance’ is not spirit as a synthesis of soul and body; it is rather existence. BTMR §25 In our ‘description’ of that environment which is closest to us – the work-world of the craftsman, for example, – the outcome was that along with the equipment to be found when one is at work [in Arbeit], those Others for whom the ‘work’ [“Werk”] is destined are ‘encountered too’. If this is ready-to-hand, then there lies in the kind of Being which belongs to it (that is, in its involvement) an essential assignment or reference to possible wearers, for instance, for whom it should be ‘cut to the figure’. Similarly, when material is put to use, we encounter its producer or ‘supplier,’ as one who ‘serves’ well or badly. When, for example, we walk along the edge of a field but ‘outside it’, the field shows itself as belonging to such-and-such a person, and decently kept up by him; the book we have used was bought at So-and-so’s shop and given by such-and-such [SZ:118] a person, and so forth. The boat anchored at the shore is assigned in its Being-in-itself to an acquaintance who undertakes voyages with it; but even if it is a ‘boat which is strange to us’, it still is indicative of Others. The Others who are thus ‘encountered’ in a ready-to-hand, environmental context of equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just PRESENT-AT-HAND; such ‘Things’ are encountered from out of the world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others – a world which is always mine too in advance. In our previous analysis, the range of what is encountered within-the-world was, in the first instance, narrowed down to equipment ready-to-hand or Nature PRESENT-AT-HAND, and thus to entities with a’ character other than that of Dasein. This restriction was necessary not only for the purpose of simplifying our explication but above all because the kind of Being which belongs to the Dasein of Others, as we encounter it within-the-world, differs from readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. Thus Dasein’s world frees entities which not only are quite distinct from equipment and Things, but which also – in accordance with their kind of Being as Dasein themselves – are ‘in’ the world in which they are at the same time encountered within-the-world, and are ‘in’ it by way of Being-in-the-world. These entities are neither PRESENT-AT-HAND nor ready-to-hand; on the contrary, they are like the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are there too, and there with it. So if one should want to identify the world in general with entities within-the-world, one would have to say that Dasein too is ‘world’. BTMR §26 When Others are encountered, it is not the case that one’s own subject is proximally PRESENT-AT-HAND and that the rest of the subjects, which are likewise occurrents, get discriminated beforehand and then apprehended; nor are they encountered by a primary act of looking at oneself in such a way that the opposite pole of a distinction first gets ascertained. They are encountered from out of the world, in which concernfully circumspective Dasein essentially dwells. Theoretically concocted ‘explanations’ of the Being-present-at-hand of Others urge themselves upon us all too easily; but over against such explanations we must hold fast to the phenomenal facts of the case which we have pointed out, namely, that Others are encountered environmentally. This elemental worldly kind of encountering, which belongs to Dasein and is closest to it, goes so far that even one’s own Dasein becomes something that it can itself proximally ‘come across’ only when it looks away from ‘Experiences’ and the ‘centre of its actions’, or does not as yet ‘see’ them at all. Dasein finds ‘itself’ proximally in what it does, uses, expects, avoids – in those things environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is proximally concerned. [SZ:119] BTMR §26 W. von Humboldt has alluded to certain languages which express the ‘I’ by ‘here’, the ‘thou’ by ‘there’, the ‘he’ by ‘yonder’, thus rendering the personal pronouns by locative adverbs, to put it grammatically. It is controversial whether indeed the primordial signification of locative expressions is adverbial or pronominal. But this dispute loses its basis if one notes that locative adverbs have a relationship to the “I” qua Dasein. The ‘here’ and the ‘there’ and the ‘yonder’ are primarily not mere ways of designating the location of entities PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world at positions in space; they are rather characteristics of Dasein’s primordial spatiality. These supposedly locative adverbs are Dasein-designations; they have a signification which is primarily existential, not categorial. But they are not pronouns either; their signification is prior to the differentiation of locative adverbs and personal pronouns: these expressions have a Dasein-signification which is authentically spatial, and which serves as evidence that when we interpret Dasein without any theoretical distortions we can see it immediately as ‘Being-alongside’ the world with which it concerns itself, and as Being-alongside it spatially – that is to say, as desevering and giving directionality. In the ‘here’, the Dasein which is absorbed in its world speaks not towards itself but away from itself towards the ‘yonder’ of something circumspectively ready-to-hand; yet it still has itself in view in its existential spatiality. [SZ:120] BTMR §26 Dasein understands itself proximally and for the most part in terms of its world; and the Dasein-with of Others’is often encountered in terms of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world. But even if Others become themes for study, as it were, in their own Dasien, they are not encountered as person-Things PRESENT-AT-HAND: we meet them ‘at work’, that is, primarily in their Being-in-the-world. Even if we see the Other ‘just standing around’, he is never apprehended as a human-Thing PRESENT-AT-HAND, but his ‘standing-around’ is an existential mode of Being – an unconcerned, uncircumspective tarrying alongside everything and nothing [Verweilen bei Allem und Keinem]. The Other is encountered in his Dasein-with in the world. BTMR §26 The expression ‘Dasein’, however, shows plainly that ‘in the first instance’ this entity is unrelated to Others, and that of course it can still be ‘with’ Others afterwards. Yet one must not fail to notice that we use the term “Dasein-with” to designate that Being for which the Others who are [die scienden Anderen] are freed within-the-world. This Dasein-with of the Others is disclosed within-the-world for a Dasein, and so too for those who are Daseins with us [die Mitdaseienden], only because Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with. The phenomenological assertion that “Dasein is essentially Being-with” has an existential-ontological meaning. It does not seek to establish ontically that factically I am not PRESENT-AT-HAND alone, and that Others of my kind occur. If this were what is meant by the proposition that Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is essentially constituted by Being-with, then Being-with would not be an existential attribute which Dasein, of its own accord, has coming to it from its own kind of Being. It would rather be something which turns up in every case by reason of the occurrence of Others. Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no Other is PRESENT-AT-HAND or perceived. Even Dasein’s Being-alone is Being-with in the world. The Other can be missing only in and for a Being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with; its very possibility is the proof of this. On the other hand, factical Being-alone is not obviated by the occurrence of a second example of a human being ‘beside’ me, or by ten such examples. Even if these and more are PRESENT-AT-HAND, Dasein can still be alone. So Being-with and the facticity of Being with one another are not based on the occurrence together of several ‘subjects’. Yet Being-alone ‘among’ many does not mean that with regard to their Being they are merely PRESENT-AT-HAND there alongside us. Even in our Being ‘among them’ they are there with us; their Dasein-with is encountered in a mode in which they are indifferent and alien. Being missing and ‘Being away’ [Das Fehlen und “Fortsein”] are modes of Dasein-with, and are possible only because Dasein as Being-with lets the Dasein of Others be encountered in its world. Being-with is in every case a characteristic of one’s own Dasein; Dasein-with characterizes the Dasein of Others to the extent that it is freed by its world for a Being-with. Only so far as one’s own Dasein has the essential structure of Being-with, is it Dasein-with as encounterable for Others. BTMR §26 According to the analysis which we have now completed, Being with Others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for Dasein in its very Being. Thus as Being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of Others. This must be understood as an existential statement as to its essence. Even if the particular factical Dasein does not turn to Others, and supposes that it has no need of them or manages to get along without them, it is in the way of Being-with. In Being-with, as the existential “forthe-sake-of” of Others, these have already been disclosed in their Dasein. With their Being-with, their disclosedness has been constituted beforehand; accordingly, this disclosedness also goes to make up significancethat is to say, worldhood. And, significance, as worldhood, is tied up with the existential “for-the-sake-of-which”. Since the worldhood of that world in which every Dasein essentially is already, is thus constituted, it accordingly lets us encounter what is environmentally ready-to-hand as something with which we are circumspectively concerned, and it does so in such a way that together with it we encounter the Dasein-with of Others. The structure of the world’s worldhood is such that Others are not proximally PRESENT-AT-HAND as free-floating subjects along with other Things, but show themselves in the world in their special environmental Being, and do so in terms of what is ready-to-hand in that world. BTMR §26 Of course Being towards Others is ontologically different from Being towards Things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND. The entity which is ‘other’ has itself the same kind of Being as Dasein. In Being with and towards Others, there is thus a relationship of Being [Seinsverhältnis] from Dasein to Dasein. But it might be said that this relationship is already constitutive for one’s own Dasein, which, in its own right, has an understanding of Being, and which thus relates itself towards Dasein. The relationship-of-Being which one has towards Others would then become a Projection of one’s own Being-towards-oneself ‘into something else’. The Other would be a duplicate of the Self. BTMR §26 Of course, the “they” is as little PRESENT-AT-HAND as Dasein itself. The more openly the “they” behaves, the harder it is to grasp, and the slier it is, but the less is it nothing at all. If we ‘see’ it ontico-ontologically with an unprejudiced eye, it reveals itself as the ‘Realest subject’ of everydayness. And even if it is not accessible like a stone that is PRESENT-AT-HAND, this is not in the least decisive as to its kind of Being. One may neither decree prematurely that this “they” is ‘really’ nothing, nor profess the opinion that one can Interpret this phenomenon ontologically by somehow ‘explaining’ it as what results from taking the Being-present-at-hand-together of several subjects and then fitting them together. On the contrary, in working out concepts of Being one must direct one’s course by these phenomena, which cannot be pushed aside. BTMR §27 Furthermore, the “they” is not something like a ‘universal subject’ which a plurality of subjects have hovering above them. One can come to take it this way only if the Being of such ‘subjects’ is understood as having a character other than that of Dasein, and if these are regarded as cases of a genus of occurrents – cases which are factually PRESENT-AT-HAND. With this approach, the only possibility ontologically is that everything which is not a case of this sort is to be understood in the sense of genus and species. The “they” is not the genus to which the individual Dasein belongs, nor can we come across it in such entities as an abiding characteristic. That even the traditional logic fails us when confronted with these phenomena, is not surprising if we bear in mind that it has its foundation in an [SZ:129] ontology of the PRESENT-AT-HAND – an ontology which, moreover, is still a rough one. So no matter in how many ways this logic may be improved and expanded, it cannot in principle be made any more flexible. Such reforms of logic, oriented towards the ‘humane sciences’, only increase the ontological confusion. BTMR §27 From the kind of Being which belongs to the “they” – the kind which is closest – everyday Dasein draws its pre-ontological way of interpreting its Being. In the first instance ontological Interpretation follows the tendency to interpret it this way: it understands Dasein in terms of the world and comes across it as an entity within-the-world. But that is not all: even that meaning of Being on the basis of which these ‘subject’ entities [diese scienden “Subjekte”] get understood, is one, which that ontology of Dasein which is ‘closest’ to us lets itself present in terms of the ‘world’. But because the phenomenon of the world itself gets gassed over in this absorption in the world, its place gets taken [tritt an seine Stelle] by what is PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world, namely, Things. The Being of those entities which are there with us, gets conceived as presence-at-hand. Thus by exhibiting the positive phenomenon of the closest everyday Being-in-the-world, we have made it possible to get an insight into the reason why an ontological Interpretation of this state of Being has been missing. This very state of Being, in its everyday kind of Being, is what proximally misses itself and covers itself up. [SZ:130] BTMR §27 In which direction must we look, if we are to characterize Being-in, as such, phenomenally? We get the answer to this question by recalling what we were charged with keeping phenomenologically in view when we called attention to this phenomenon: Being-in is distinct from the presentat-hand insideness of something PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in’ something else that is PRESENT-AT-HAND; Being-in is not a characteristic that is effected, or even just elicited, in a PRESENT-AT-HAND subject by the ‘world’s’ Being-presentat-hand; Being-in is rather an essential kind of Being of this entity itself. But in that case, what else is presented with this phenomenon than the commercium which is PRESENT-AT-HAND between a subject PRESENT-AT-HAND and an Object PRESENT-AT-HAND? Such an interpretation would come closer to the phenomenal content if we were to say that Dasein is the Being of this ‘between’. Yet to take our orientation from this ‘between’ would still be misleading. For with such an orientation we would also be covertly assuming the entities between which this “between”, as such, ‘is’, and we would be doing so in a way which is ontologically vague. The “between” is already conceived as the result of the convenientia of two things that are PRESENT-AT-HAND. But to assume these beforehand always splits the phenomenon asunder, and there is no prospect of putting it together again from the fragments. Not only do we lack the ‘cement’; even the ‘schema’ in accordance with which this joining-together is to be accomplished, has been split asunder, or never as yet unveiled. What is decisive for ontology is to prevent the splitting of the phenomenon – in other words, to hold its positive phenomenal content secure. To say that for this we need farreaching and detailed study, is simply to express the fact that something which was ontically self-evident in the traditional way of treating the [SZ:132] BTMR §28 When we talk in an ontically figurative way of the lumen naturale in man, we have in mind nothing other than the existential-ontological structure of this entity, that it is in such a way as to be its “there”. To say that it is ‘illuminated’ [“erleuchtet”] means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared [gelichtet] in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing. Only for an entity which is existentially cleared in this way does that which is PRESENT-AT-HAND become accessible in the light or hidden in the dark. By its very nature, Dasein brings its “there” along with it. ‘If it lacks its “there”, it is not factically the entity which is essentially Dasein; indeed, it is not this entity at all. Dasein is its disclosedness. [SZ:133] BTMR §28 The analysis of the characteristics of the Being of Being-there is an existential one. This means that the characteristics are not properties of something PRESENT-AT-HAND, but essentially existential ways to be. We must therefore set forth their kind of Being in everydayness. BTMR §28 This characteristic of Dasein’s Being – this ‘that it is’ – is veiled in its “whence” and “whither”, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the “thrownness” of this entity into its “there”; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the “there”. The expression “thrownness” is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over. The ‘that it is and has to be’ which is disclosed in Dasein’s state-of-mind is not the same ‘that-it-is’ which expresses ontologico-categorially the factuality belonging to presence-at-hand. This factuality becomes accessible only if we ascertain it by looking at it. The “that-it-is” which is disclosed in Dasein’s state-of-mind must rather be conceived as an existential attribute of the entity which has Being-in-the-world as its way of Being. Facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something PRESENT-AT-HAND, but a characteristic of Dasein’s Being – one which has been taken up into existence, even if proximally it has been thrust aside. The “that-it-is” of facticity never becomes something that we can come across by beholding it. BTMR §29 Phenomenally, we would wholly fail to recognize both what mood discloses and how it discloses, if that which is disclosed were to be compared with what Dasein is acquainted with, knows, and believes ‘at the same time’ when it has such a mood. Even if Dasein is ‘assured’ in its belief about its ‘whither’, or if, in rational enlightenment, it supposes itself to know about its “whence”, all this counts for nothing as against the phenomenal facts of the case: for the mood brings Dasein before the “that-it-is” of its “there”, which, as such, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma. From the existential-ontological point of view, there is not the slightest justification for minimizing what is ‘evident’ in states-of-mind, by measuring it against the apodictic certainty of a theoretical cognition of something which is purely PRESENT-AT-HAND. However the phenomena are no less falsified when they are banished to the sanctuary of the irrational. When irrationalism, as the counterplay of rationalism, talks about the things to which rationalism is blind, it does so only with a squint. [SZ:136] BTMR §29 And only because the ‘senses’ [die “Sinne”] belong ontologically to an entity whose kind of Being is Being-in-the-world with a state-of-mind, can they be ‘touched’ by anything or ‘have a sense for’ [“Sinn haben für”] something in such a way that what touches them shows itself in an affect. Under the strongest pressure and resistance, nothing like an affect would come about, and the resistance itself would remain essentially undiscovered, if Being-in-the-world, with its state-of-mind, had not already submitted itself [sich schon angewiesen] to having entities within-the-world “matter” to it in a way which its moods have outlined in advance. Existentially, a state-of-mind implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us. Indeed from the ontological point of view we must as a general principle leave the primary discovery of the world to ‘bare mood’. Pure beholding, even if it were to penetrate to the innermost core of the Being of something PRESENT-AT-HAND, could never discover anything like that which is threatening. [SZ:138] BTMR §29 The fact that, even though states-of-mind are primarily disclosive, everyday circumspection goes wrong and to a large extent succumbs to delusion because of them, is a me òn [non-being] when measured against the idea of knowing the ‘world’ absolutely. But if we make evaluations which are so unjustified ontologically, we shall completely fail to recognize the existentially positive character of the capacity for delusion. It is precisely when we see the ‘world’ unsteadily and fitfully in accordance with our moods, that the ready-to-hand shows itself in its specific worldhood, which is never the same from day to day. By looking at the world theoretically, we have already dimmed it down to the uniformity of what is purely PRESENT-AT-HAND, though admittedly this uniformity comprises a new abundance of things which can be discovered by simply characterizing them. Yet even the purest theoria [theory] has not left all moods behind it; even when we look theoretically at what is just PRESENT-AT-HAND, it does not show itself purely as it looks unless this theoria lets it come towards us in a tranquil tarrying alongside ..., in rastone and diagoge. Any cognitive determining has its existential-ontological Constitution in the state-of-mind of Being-in-the-world; but pointing this out is not to be confused with attempting to surrender science ontically to ‘feeling’. BTMR §29 When we are talking ontically we sometimes use the expression ‘understanding something’ with the signification of ‘being able to manage something’, ‘being a match for it’, ‘being competent to do something’. In understanding, as an existentiale, that which we have such competence over is not a “what”, but Being as existing. The kind of Being which Dasein has, as potentiality-for-Being, lies existentially in understanding. Dasein is not something PRESENT-AT-HAND which possesses its competence for something by way of an extra; it is primarily Being-possible. Dasein is in every case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility. The Being-possible which is essential for Dasein, pertains to the ways of its solicitude for Others and of its concern with the ‘world’, as we have characterized them; and in all these, and always, it pertains to Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being towards itself, for the sake of itself. The Being-possible which Dasein is existentially in every case, is to be sharply distinguished both from empty logical possibility and from the contingency of something PRESENT-AT-HAND, so far as with the PRESENT-AT-HAND this or that can ‘come to pass’. As a modal category of presence-at-hand, possibility signifies what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary. It characterizes the merely possible. Ontologically it is on a lower level than actuality and necessity. On the other hand, possibility as an existentiale is the most primordial and ultimate positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically. As with existentiality in general, we can, in the first instance, only prepare for the problem of possibility. The phenomenal basis for seeing it at all is provided by the understanding as a disclosive potentiality-for-Being. [SZ:144] BTMR §31 Understanding is the Being of such potentiality-for-Being, which is never something still outstanding as not yet PRESENT-AT-HAND, but which, as something which is essentially never PRESENT-AT-HAND, ‘is’ with the Being of Dasein, in the sense of existence. Dasein is such that in every case it has understood (or alternatively, not understood) that ‘it is to be thus or thus. As such understanding it ‘knows’ what it is capable of – that is, what its potentiality-for-Being is capable of. This ‘knowing’ does not first arise from an immanent self-perception, but belongs to the Being of the “there”, which is essentially understanding. And only because Dasein, in understanding, is its “there”, can it go astray and fail to recognize itself. And in so far as understanding is accompanied by state-of-mind and as such is existentially surrendered to thrownness, Dasein has in every case already gone astray and failed to recognize itself. In its potentiality-for-Being it is therefore delivered over to the possibility of first finding itself again in its possibilities. BTMR §31 As a disclosure, understanding always pertains to the whole basic state of Being-in-the-world. As a potentiality-for-Being, any Being-in is a potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world. Not only is the world, qua world, disclosed as possible significance, but when that which is within-the-world is itself freed, this entity is freed for its own possibilities. That which is ready-to-hand is discovered as such in its serviceability, its usability, and its detrimentality. The totality of involvements is revealed as the categorial whole of a possible interconnection of the ready-to-hand. But even the ‘unity’ of the manifold PRESENT-AT-HAND, of Nature, can be discovered only if a possibility of it has been disclosed. Is it accidental that the question about the Being of Nature aims at the ‘conditions of its possibility’? On what is such an inquiry based? When confronted with this inquiry, we cannot leave aside the question: why are entities which are not of the character of Dasein understood in their Being, if they are disclosed in accordance with the conditions of their possibility? Kant presupposes something of the sort, perhaps rightly. But this presupposition itself is something that cannot be left without demonstrating how it is justified. [SZ:145] BTMR §31 We must, to be sure, guard against a misunderstanding of the expression ‘sight’. It corresponds to the “clearedness” [Gelichtetheit] which we took as characterizing the disclosedness of the “there”. ‘Seeing’ does not mean just perceiving with the bodily eyes, but neither does it mean pure nonsensory awareness of something PRESENT-AT-HAND in its presence-at-hand. In giving an existential signification to “sight”, we have merely drawn upon the peculiar feature of seeing, that it lets entities which are accessible to it be encountered unconcealedly in themselves. Of course, every ‘sense’ does this within that domain of discovery which is genuinely its own. But from the beginning onwards the tradition of philosophy has been oriented primarily towards ‘seeing’ as a way of access to entities and to Being. To keep the connection with this tradition, we may formalize “sight” and “seeing” enough to obtain therewith a universal term for characterizing any access to entities or to Being, as access in general. [SZ:147] BTMR §31 By showing how all sight is grounded primarily in understanding (the circumspection of concern is understanding as common sense [Verständigkeit]), we have deprived pure intuition [Anschauen] of its priority, which corresponds noetically to the priority of the PRESENT-AT-HAND in traditional ontology. ‘Intuition’ and ‘thinking’ are both derivatives of understanding, and already rather remote ones. Even the phenomenological ‘intuition of essences’ [“Wesensschau”] is grounded in existential understanding. We can decide about this kind of seeing only if we have obtained explicit conceptions of Being and of the structure of Being, such as only phenomena in the phenomenological sense can become. BTMR §31 But if we never perceive equipment that is ready-to-hand without already understanding and interpreting it, and if such perception lets us circumspectively encounter something as something, does this not mean that in the first instance we have experienced something purely presentat-hand, and then taken it as a door, as a house? This would be a misunderstanding of the specific way in which interpretation functions as disclosure. In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is PRESENT-AT-HAND, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the [SZ:150] thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation. BTMR §32 This Interpretation of the concept of ‘meaning’ is one which is ontologico-existential in principle; if we adhere to it, then all entities whose kind of Being is of a character other than Dasein’s must be conceived as unmeaning [unsinniges], essentially devoid of any meaning at all. Here ‘unmeaning’ does not signify that we are saying anything about the value of such entities, but it gives expression to an ontological characteristic. And only that which is unmeaning can be absurd [widersinnig]. The PRESENT-AT-HAND, as Dasein encounters it, can, as it were, assault Dasein’s Being; natural events, for instance, can break in upon us and destroy us. [SZ:152] BTMR §32 But if we see this circle as a vicious one and look out for ways of avoiding it, even if we just ‘sense’ it as an inevitable imperfection, then the act of understanding has been misunderstood from the ground up. The assimilation of understanding and interpretation to a definite ideal of knowledge is not the issue here. Such an ideal is itself only a subspecies of understanding – a subspecies which has strayed into the legitimate task of grasping the PRESENT-AT-HAND in its essential unintelligibility [Unverständlichkeit]. If the basic conditions which make interpretation possible are to be fulfilled, this must [SZ:153] rather be done by not failing to recognize beforehand the essential conditions under which it can be performed. What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way. This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself. It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves. Because understanding, in accordance with its existential meaning, is Dasein’s own potentiality-for-Being, the ontological presuppositions of historiological knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigour held in the most exact sciences. Mathematics is not more rigorous than historiology, but only narrower, because the existential foundations relevant for it lie within a narrower range. BTMR §32 The ‘circle’ in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning, and the latter phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein – that is, in the understanding which interprets. An entity for which, as Being-in-the-world, its Being is itself an issue, has, ontologically, a circular structure. If, however, we note that ‘circularity’ belongs ontologically to a kind of Being which is PRESENT-AT-HAND (namely, to subsistence [Bestand]), we must altogether avoid using this phenomenon to characterize anything like Dasein ontologically. BTMR §32 The entity which is held in our fore-having – for instance, the hammer – is proximally ready-to-hand as equipment. If this entity becomes the ‘object’ of an assertion, then as soon as we begin this assertion, there is already a change-over in the fore-having. Something ready-to-hand with which we have to do or perform something, turns into something ‘about which’ the assertion that points it out is made. Our fore-sight is aimed at something PRESENT-AT-HAND in what is ready-to-hand. Both by and for this way of looking at it [Hin-sicht], the ready-to-hand becomes veiled as ready-to-hand. Within this discovering of presence-at-hand, which is at the same time a covering-up of read mess-to-hand, something PRESENT-AT-HAND which we encounter is given a definite character in its Being-presentat-hand-in-such-and-such-a-manner. Only now are we given any access to properties or the like. When an assertion has given a definite character to something PRESENT-AT-HAND, it says something about it as a “what”; and this “what” is drawn from that which is PRESENT-AT-HAND as such. The as-structure of interpretation has undergone a modification. In its function of appropriating what is understood, the ‘as’ no longer reaches out into a totality of involvements. As regards its possibilities for Articulating reference-relations, it has been cut off from that significance which, as such, constitutes environmentality. The ‘as’ gets pushed back into the [SZ:158] uniform plane of that which is merely PRESENT-AT-HAND. It dwindles to the structure of just letting one see what is PRESENT-AT-HAND, and letting one see it in a definite way. This levelling of the primordial ‘as’ of circumspective interpretation to the “as” with which presence-at-hand is given a definite character is the specialty of assertion. Only so does it obtain the possibility of exhibiting something in such a way that we just look at it. BTMR §33 Between the kind of interpretation which is still wholly wrapped up in concernful understanding and the extreme opposite case of a theoretical assertion about something PRESENT-AT-HAND, there are many intermediate gradations: ‘assertions about the happenings in the environment, accounts of the ready-to-hand, ‘reports on the Situation’, the recording and fixing of the ‘facts of the case’, the description of a state of affairs, the narration of something that has befallen. We cannot trace back these ‘sentences’ to theoretical statements without essentially perverting their meaning. Like the theoretical statements themselves, they have their ‘source’ in circumspective interpretation. BTMR §33 When considered philosophically, the logos itself is an entity, and, according to the orientation of ancient ontology, it is something presentat-hand. Words are proximally PRESENT-AT-HAND; that is to say, we come across them just as we come across Things; and this holds for any sequence of words, as that in which the logos expresses itself. In this first search for the structure of the logos as thus PRESENT-AT-HAND, what was found was the Being-present-at-hand-together of several words. What establishes the unity of this “together”? As Plato knew, this unity lies in the fact that the logos is always logos. In the tinos an entity is manifest, and with a view to this entity, the words are put together in one verbal whole. Aristotle saw this more radically: every logos is both synthesis and diairesis, not just the one (call it ‘affirmative judgment’) or the other (call it ‘negative judgment’). Rather, every assertion, whether it affirms or denies, whether it is true or false, is synthesis and diairesis equiprimordially. To exhibit anything is to take it together and take it apart. It is [SZ:159] true, of course, that Aristotle did not pursue the analytical question as far as the problem of which phenomenon within the structure of the logos is the one that permits and indeed obliges us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diacresis. BTMR §33 By demonstrating that assertion is derived from interpretation and understanding, we have made it plain that the ‘logic’ of the logos is rooted in the existential analytic of Dasein; and provisionally this has been sufficient. At the same time, by knowing that the logos has been Interpreted in a way which is ontologically inadequate, we have gained a sharper insight into the fact that the methodological basis on which ancient ontology arose was not a primordial one. The logos gets experienced as something PRESENT-AT-HAND and Interpreted as such, while at the same time the entities which it points out have the meaning of presence-at-hand. This meaning of Being is left undifferentiated and uncontrasted with other possibilities of Being, so that Being in the sense of a formal Being-something becomes fused with it simultaneously, and we are unable even to obtain a clear-cut division between these two realms. BTMR §33 The way in which discourse gets expressed is language. Language is a totality of words – a totality in which discourse has a ‘worldly’ Being of its own; and as an entity within-the-world, this totality thus becomes something which we may come across as ready-to-hand. Language can be broken up into word-Things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND. Discourse is existentially language, because that entity whose disclosedness it Articulates according to significations, has, as its kind of Being, Being-in-the-world – a Being which has been thrown and submitted to the ‘world’. BTMR §34 Because discourse is constititutive for the Being of the “there” (that is, for states-of-mind and understanding), while “Dasein” means Being-in-the-world, Dasein as discursive Being-in, has already expressed itself. Dasein has language. Among the Greeks, their everyday existing was largely diverted into talking with one another, but at the same time they ‘had eyes’ to see. Is it an accident that in both their pre-philosophical and their philosophical ways of interpreting Dasein, they defined the essence of man as zoon logon echon? The later way of interpreting this definition of man in the sense of the animal rationale, ‘something living which has reason’, is not indeed ‘false’, but it covers up the phenomenal basis for this definition of “Dasein”. Man shows himself as the entity which talks. This does not signify that the possibility of vocal utterance is peculiar to him, but rather that he is the entity which is such as to discover the world and Dasein itself. The Greeks had no word for “language”; they understood this phenomenon ‘in the first instance’ as discourse. But because the logos came into their philosophical ken primarily as assertion, this was the kind of logos which they took as their clue for working out the basic structures of the forms of discourse and its components. Grammar sought its foundations in the ‘logic’ of this logos. But this logic was based upon the ontology of the PRESENT-AT-HAND. The basic stock of ‘categories of signification’, which passed over into the subsequent science of language, and which in principle is still accepted as the standard today, is oriented towards discourse as assertion. But if on the contrary we take this phenomenon to have in principle the primordiality and breadth of an existentiale, then there emerges the necessity of re-establishing the science of language on foundations which are ontologically more primordial. The task of liberating grammar from logic requires beforehand a positive understanding of the basic a priori structure of discourse in general as an existentiale. It is not a task that can be carried through later on by improving and rounding out what has been handed down. Bearing this in mind, we must inquire into the basic forms in which it is possible to articulate anything understandable, and to do so in accordance with significations; and this articulation must not be confined to entities within-the-world which we cognize by considering them theoretically, and which we express in sentences. A doctrine of signification will not emerge automatically even if we make a comprehensive comparison of as many languages as possible, and those which are most exotic. To accept, let us say, the philosophical horizon within which W. von Humboldt made language a problem, would be no less inadequate. The doctrine of signification is rooted in the ontology of Dasein. Whether it prospers or decays depends on the fate of this ontology. BTMR §34 The expression ‘idle talk’ [“Gerede”] is not to be used here in a ‘disparaging’ signification. Terminologically, it signifies a positive phenomenon which constitutes the kind of Being of everyday Dasein’s understanding and interpreting. For the most part, discourse is expressed by being spoken out, and has always been so expressed; it is language. But in that case understanding and interpretation already lie in what has thus been expressed. In language, as a way things have been expressed or spoken out [Ausgesprochenheit], there is hidden a way in which the understanding of Dasein has been interpreted. This way of interpreting it is no more just PRESENT-AT-HAND than language is; on the contrary, its Being is itself of the character of Dasein. Proximally, and with certain limits, Dasein is constantly delivered over to this interpretedness, which controls and distributes the possibilities of average understanding and of the state-of-mind belonging to it. The way things have been expressed or spoken out is such that in the totality of contexts of signification into which it has been articulated, it preserves an understanding of the disclosed world and therewith, equiprimordially, an understanding of the Dasein-with of Others and of one’s own Being-in. The understanding which has thus already been “deposited” in the way things have been expressed, pertains just as much to any traditional discoveredness of entities which may have been reached, as it does to one’s current understanding of Being and to whatever possibilities and horizons for fresh interpretation and conceptual Articulation may be available. But now we must go beyond a bare allusion to the Fact of this interpretedness of Dasein, and must inquire about the existential kind of Being of that discourse which is expressed and which expresses itself. If this cannot be conceived as something PRESENT-AT-HAND, what is its Being, and what does this tell us in principle about Dasein’s everyday kind of Being? [SZ:168] BTMR §35 Idle talk, which closes things off in the way we have designated, is the kind of Being which belongs to Dasein’s understanding when that understanding has been uprooted. But idle talk does not occur as a condition which is PRESENT-AT-HAND in something PRESENT-AT-HAND: idle talk has been uprooted existentially, and this uprooting is constant. Ontologically this means that when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is – as Being-in-the-world – cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in. Such a Dasein keeps floating unattached [in einer Schwebe]; yet in so doing, it is always alongside the world, with Others, and towards itself. To be uprooted in this manner is a possibility-of-Being only for an entity whose disclosedness is constituted by discourse as characterized by understanding and states-of-mind – that is to say, for an entity whose discloscdness, in such an ontologically constitutive state, is its “there”, its ‘in-the-world’. Far from amounting to a “not-Being” of Dasein, this uprooting is rather Dasein’s most everyday and most stubborn ‘Reality’. BTMR §35 Idle talk controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one “must” have read and seen. In being everywhere and nowhere, curiosity is delivered over to idle talk. These two everyday modes of Being for discourse and sight are not just PRESENT-AT-HAND side by side in their tendency to uproot, but either of these ways-to-be drags the other one with it. Curiosity, for which nothing is closed off, and idle talk, for which there is nothing that is not understood, provide themselves (that is, the Dasein which is in this manner [dem so seienden Dasein]) with the guarantee of a ‘life’ which, supposedly, is genuinely ‘lively’. But with this supposition a third phenomenon now shows itself, by which the disclosedness of everyday Dasein is characterized. BTMR §36 Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its ‘there’ – the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world. As definite existential characteristics, these are not PRESENT-AT-HAND in Dasein, but help to make up its Being. In these, and in the way they are interconnected in their Being, there is revealed a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the “falling” of Dasein. BTMR §38 In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has already fallen away. And it has not fallen into some entity which it comes upon for the first time in the course of its Being, or even one which it has not come upon at all; it has fallen into the world, which itself belongs to its Being. Falling is a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself. It makes no assertion about Dasein as something presentat-hand, or about PRESENT-AT-HAND relations to entities from which Dasein ‘is descended’ or with which Dasein has subsequently wound up in some sort of commercium. BTMR §38 Idle talk and the way things have been publicly interpreted (which idle talk includes) constitute themselves in Being-with-one-another. Idle talk is not something PRESENT-AT-HAND for itself within the world, as a product detached from Being-with-one-another. And it is just as far from letting itself be volatilized to something ‘universal’ which, because it belongs essentially to nobody, is ‘really’ nothing and occurs as ‘Real’ only in the individual Dasein which speaks. Idle talk is the kind of Being that belongs to Being-with-one-another itself; it does not first arise through certain circumstances which have effects upon Dasein ‘from outside’. But if Dasein itself, in idle talk and in the way things have been publicly interpreted, presents to itself the possibility of losing itself in the “they” and falling into groundlessness, this tells us that Dasein prepares for itself a constant temptation towards falling. Being-in-the-world is in itself tempting [versucherisch]. BTMR §38 To put it negatively, it is beyond question that the totality of the structural whole is not to be reached by building it up out of elements, For this we would need an architect’s plan. The Being of Dasein, upon which the structural whole as such is ontologically supported, becomes accessible to us when we look all the way through this whole to a single primordially unitary phenomenon which is already in this whole in such a way that it provides the ontological foundation for each structural item in its structural possibility. Thus we cannot Interpret this ‘comprehensively’ by a process of gathering up what we have hitherto gained and taking it all together. The question of Dasein’s basic existential character is essentially different from that of the Being of something PRESENT-AT-HAND. Our everyday environmental experiencing [Erfahren], which remains directed both ontically and ontologically towards entities within-the-world, is not the sort of thing which can present Dasein in an ontically primordial manner for ontological analysis. Similarly our immanent perception of Experiences [Erlebnissen] fails to provide a clue which is ontologically adequate. On the other hand, Dasein’s Being is not be to deduced from an idea of man. Does the Interpretation of Dasein which we have hitherto given permit us to infer what Dasein, from its own standpoint, demands as the only appropriate ontico-ontological way of access to itself? [SZ:182] BTMR §39 To understand this talk about Dasein’s fleeing in the face of itself in falling, we must recall that Being-in-the-world is a basic state of Dasein. That in the face of which one has anxiety [das Wovor der Angst] is Being-in-the-world as such. What is the difference phenomenally between that in the face of which anxiety is anxious [sich ängstet] and that in the face of which fear is afraid? That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world. Thus it is essentially incapable of having an involvement. This threatening does not have the character of a definite detrimentality which reaches what is threatened, and which reaches it with definite regard to a special factical potentiality-for-Being. That in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite. Not only does this indefiniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or PRESENT-AT-HAND within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the presentat-hand discovered within-the-world, is, as such, of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance. In anxiety one does not encounter this thing or that thing which, as something threatening, must have an involvement. BTMR §40 What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything PRESENT-AT-HAND; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself. When anxiety has subsided, then in our everyday way of talking we are accustomed to say that ‘it was really nothing’. And what it was, indeed, does get reached ontically by such a way of talking. Everyday discourse tends towards concerning itself with the ready-to-hand and talking about it. That in the face of which anxiety is anxious is nothing ready-to-hand within-the-world. But this “nothing ready-to-hand”, which only our everyday circumspective discourse understands, is not totally nothing. The “nothing” of readiness-to-hand is grounded in the most primordial ‘something’ – in the world. Ontologically, however, the world belongs essentially to Dasein’s Being as Being-in-the-world. So if the “nothing” – that is, the world as such – exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. BTMR §40 If we Interpret Dasein’s uncanniness from an existential-ontological point of view as a threat which reaches Dasein itself and which comes from Dasein itself, we are not contending that in factical anxiety too it has always been understood in this sense. When Dasein “understands” uncanniness in the everyday manner, it does so by turning away from it in falling; in this turning-away, the “not-at-home” gets ‘dimmed down’. Yet the everydayness of this fleeing shows phenomenally that anxiety, as a basic state-of-mind, belongs to Dasein’s essential state of Being-in-the-world, which, as one that is existential, is never PRESENT-AT-HAND but is itself always in a mode of factical Being-there – that is, in the mode of a state-of-mind. That kind of Being-in-the-world which is tranquillized and familiar is a mode of Dasein’s uncanniness, not the reverse. From an existential-ontological point of view, the “not-at-home” must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon. BTMR §40 But this structure pertains to the whole of Dasein’s constitution. “Being-ahead-of-itself” does not signify ‘anything like an isolated tendency in a worldless ‘subject’, but characterizes Being-in-the-world. To Being-in-the-world, however, belongs the fact that it has been delivered over to itself – that it has in each case already been thrown into a world. The abandonment of Dasein to itself is shown with primordial concreteness in anxiety. “Being-ahead-of-itself” means, if we grasp it more fully, “ahead-of-itselfin-already-being-in-a-world”. As soon as this essentially unitary structure is seen as a phenomenon, what we have set forth earlier in our analysis of worldhood also becomes plain. The upshot of that analysis was that the referential totality of significance (which as such is constitutive for worldhood) has been ‘tied up’ with a “for-the-sake-of-which”. The fact that this referential totality of the manifold relations of the ‘in-order-to’ has been bound up with that which is an issue for Dasein, does not signify that a ‘world’ of Objects which is PRESENT-AT-HAND has been welded together with a subject. It is rather the phenomenal expression of the fact that the constitution of Dasein, whose totality is now brought out explicitly as aheadof-itself-in-Being-already-in ..., is primordially a whole. To put it otherwise, existing is always factical. Existentiality is essentially determined by facticity. BTMR §41 Care, as a primordial structural totality, lies ‘before’ [“vor”] every. factical ‘attitude’ and ‘situation’ of Dasein, and it does so existentially a priori; this means that it always lies in them. So this phenomenon by no means expresses a priority of the ‘practical’ attitude over the theoretical. When we ascertain something PRESENT-AT-HAND by merely beholding it, this activity has the character of care just as much as does a ‘political action’ or taking a rest and enjoying oneself. ‘Theory’ and ‘practice’ are possibilities of Being for an entity whose Being must be defined as “care”. BTMR §41 In hankering, Being-already-alongside ... takes priority. The “aheadof-itself-in-Being-already-in ...” is correspondingly modified. Dasein’s hankering as it falls makes manifest its addiction to becoming ‘lived’ by whatever world it is in. This addiction shows the character of Being out for something [Ausseins auf ...]. Being-ahead-of-oneself has lost itself in a ‘just-always-already-alongside?’. What one is addicted ‘towards’ [Das “Hin-zu” des Hanges] is to let oneself be drawn by the sort of thing for which the addiction hankers. If Dasein, as it were, sinks into an addiction then there is not merely an addiction PRESENT-AT-HAND, but the entire structure of care has been modified. Dasein has become blind, and puts all possibilities into the service of the addiction. BTMR §41 At the same time our interpretation of understanding has shown that, in accordance with its falling kind of Being, it has, proximally and for the most part, diverted itself [sich ... verlegt] into an understanding of the ‘world’. Even where the issue is not only one of ontical experience but also one of ontological understanding, the interpretation of Being takes its orientation in the first instance from the Being of entities within-the-world. Thereby the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand gets passed over, and entities are first conceived as a context of Things (res) which are PRESENT-AT-HAND. “Being” acquires the meaning of “Reality”. Substantiality becomes the basic characteristic of Being. Corresponding to this way in which the understanding of Being has been diverted, even the ontological understanding of Dasein moves into the horizon of this conception of Being. Like any other entity, Dasein too is PRESENT-AT-HAND as Real. In this way “Being in general” acquires the meaning of “Reality”. Accordingly the concept of Reality has a peculiar priority in the ontological problematic. By this priority the route to a genuine existential analytic of Dasein gets diverted, and so too does our very view of the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand within-the-world. It finally forces the general problematic of Being into a direction that lies off the course. The other modes of Being become defined negatively and privatively with regard to Reality. BTMR §43 The question of whether there is a world at all and whether its Being can be proved, makes no sense if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-world; and who else would raise it? Furthermore, it is encumbered with a double signification. The world as the “wherein” [das Worin] of Being-in, and the ‘world’ as entities within-the-world (that in which [das Wobei] one is concernfully absorbed) either have been confused or are not distinguished at all. But the world is disclosed essentially along with the Being of Dasein; with the disclosedness of the world, the ‘world’ has in each case been discovered too. Of course entities within-the-world in the sense of the Real as merely PRESENT-AT-HAND, are the very things that can remain concealed. But even the Real can be discovered only on the basis of a world which has already been disclosed. And only on this basis can anything Real still remain hidden. The question of the ‘Reality’ of the ‘external world’ gets raised without any previous clarification of the phenomenon of the world as such. Factically, the ‘problem of the external world’ is constantly oriented with regard to entities within-the-world (Things and Objects). So these discussions drift along into a problematic which it is almost impossible to disentangle ontologically. [SZ:203] BTMR §43 The proof for the ‘Dasein of Things outside of me’ is supported by the fact that both change and performance belong, with equal primordiality, to the’ essence of time. My own Being-present-at-hand – that is, the Being-present-at-hand of a multiplicity of representations, which has been given in the inner sense – is a process of change which is PRESENT-AT-HAND. To have a determinate temporal character [Zeitbestimmtheit], however, presupposes something PRESENT-AT-HAND which is permanent. But this cannot be ‘in us’, ‘for only through what is thus permanent can my Dasein in time be determined’. Thus if changes which are PRESENT-AT-HAND have been posited empirically ‘in me’, it is necessary that along with these something permanent which is PRESENT-AT-HAND should be posited empirically ‘outside of me’. What is thus permanent is the condition which makes it possible for the changes ‘in me’ to be PRESENT-AT-HAND. The experience of the Being-in-time of representations posits something changing ‘in me’ and something permanent ‘outside of me’, and it posits both with equal primordiality. [SZ:204] BTMR §43 But even if the ontical priority of the isolated subject and inner experience should be given up, Descartes’ position would still be retained ontologically. What Kant proves – if we may suppose that his proof is correct and correctly based – is that entities which are changing and entities which are permanent are necessarily PRESENT-AT-HAND together. But when two things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND are thus put on the same level, this does not as yet mean that subject and Object are PRESENT-AT-HAND together. And even if this were proved, what is ontologically decisive would still be covered up – namely, the basic state of the ‘subject’, Dasein, as Being-in-the-world. The Being-present-at-hand-together of the physical and the psychical is completely different onticaly and ontologicaly from the phenomenon of Being-in-the-world. BTMR §43 The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. Such expectations, aims, and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with something of such a character that independently of it and ‘outside’ of it a ‘world’ is to be proved as PRESENT-AT-HAND. It is not that the proofs are inadequate, but that the kind of Being of the entity which does the proving and makes requests for proofs has not been made definite enough. This is why a demonstration that two things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND are necessarily PRESENT-AT-HAND together, can give rise to the illusion that something has been proved, or even can be proved, about Dasein as Being-in-the-world. If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it. BTMR §43 Even if one should invoke the doctrine that the subject must presuppose and indeed always does unconsciously presuppose the presence-at-hand of the ‘external world’, one would still be starting with the construct of an isolated subject. The phenomenon of Being-in-the-world is something that one would no more meet in this way than one would by demonstrating that the physical and the psychical are PRESENT-AT-HAND together. With such presuppositions, Dasein always comes ‘too late’; for in so far as it does this presupposing as an entity (and otherwise this would be impossible), it is, as an entity, already in a world. ‘Earlier’ than any presupposition which Dasein makes, or any of its ways of behaving, is the ‘a priori’ character of its state of Being as one whose kind of Being is care. [SZ:206] BTMR §43 The ‘problem of Reality’ in the sense of the question whether an external world is PRESENT-AT-HAND and whether such a world can be proved, turns out to be an impossible one, not because its consequences lead to inextricable impasses, but because the very entity which serves as its theme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of the question. Our task is not to prove that an ‘external world’ is PRESENT-AT-HAND or to show how it is PRESENT-AT-HAND, but to point out why Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, has the tendency to bury the ‘external world’ in nullity ‘epistemologically’ before going on to prove it. The reason for this lies in Dasein’s falling and in the way in which the primary understanding of Being has been diverted to Being as presence-at-hand – a diversion which is motivated by that falling itself. If one formulates the question ‘critically’ with such an ontological orientation, then what one finds PRESENT-AT-HAND as proximally and solely certain, is something merely ‘inner’. After the primordial phenomenon of Being-in-the-world has been shattered, the isolated subject is all that remains, and this becomes the basis on which it gets joined together with a ‘world’. BTMR §43 Along with Dasein as Being-in-the-world, entities within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed. This existential-ontological assertion seems to accord with the thesis of realism that the external world is Really PRESENT-AT-HAND. In so far as this existential assertion does not deny that entities within-the-world are PRESENT-AT-HAND, it agrees – doxographically, as it were – with the thesis of realism in its results. But it differs in principle from every kind of realism; for realism holds that. the Reality of the ‘world’ not only needs to be proved but also is capable of proof. In the existential assertion both of these positions are directly negated. But what distinguishes this assertion from realism altogether, is the fact that in realism there is a lack of ontological understanding. Indeed realism tries to explain Reality ontically by Real connections of interaction between things that are Real. BTMR §43 If the ‘cogito sum’ is to serve as the point of departure for the existential analytic of Dasein, then it needs to be turned around, and furthermore its content needs new ontologico-phenomenal confirmation. The ‘sum’ is then asserted first, and indeed in the sense that “I am in a world”. As such an entity, ‘I am’ in the possibility of Being towards various ways of comporting myself – namely, cogitationes – as ways of Being alongside entities within-the-world. Descartes, on the contrary, says that cogitationes are PRESENT-AT-HAND, and that in these an ego is PRESENT-AT-HAND too as a worldless res cogitans. BTMR §43 ”Reality”, as an ontological term, is one which we have related to entities within-the-world. If it serves to designate this kind of Being in general, then readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand function as modes of Reality. If, however, one lets this word have its traditional signification, then it stands for Being in the sense of the pure presence-at-hand of Things. But not all presence-at-hand is the presence-at-hand of Things. The ‘Nature’ by which we are ‘surrounded’ is, of course, an entity within-the-world; but the kind of Being which it shows belongs neither to the ready-to-hand nor to what is PRESENT-AT-HAND as ‘Things of Nature’. No matter how this Being of ‘Nature’ may be Interpreted, all the modes of Being of entities within-the-world are founded ontologically upon the worldhood of the world, and accordingly upon the phenomenon of Being-in-the-world. From this there arises the insight that among the modes of Being of entities within-the-world, Reality has no priority, and that Reality is a kind of Being which cannot even characterize anything like the world or Dasein in a way which is ontologically appropriate. BTMR §43 Must we, however, bring up here the ‘epistemological’ problematic as regards the subject-Object relation, or can our analysis restrict itself to Interpreting the ‘immanent consciousness of truth’, and thus remain ‘within the sphere’ of the subject? According to the general opinion, what is true is knowledge. But knowledge is judging. In judgment one must distinguish between the judging as a Real psychical process, and that which is judged, as an ideal content. It will be said of the latter that it is ‘true’. The Real psychical process, however, is either PRESENT-AT-HAND or not. According to this opinion, the ideal content of judgment stands in a relationship of agreement. This relationship thus pertains to a connection between an ideal content of judgment and the Real Thing as that which is judged about. Is this agreement Real or ideal in its kind of Being, or neither of these? How are we to take ontologicalty the relation between an ideal entity and something that is Real and PRESENT-AT-HAND? Such a relation indeed subsists [besteht]; and in factical judgments it subsists not only as a relation between the content of judgment and the Real Object, but likewise as a relation between the ideal content and the Real act of judgment. And does it manifestly subsist ‘more inwardly’ in this latter case? BTMR §44 Absorption in something that has been said belongs to the kind of Being which the “they” possesses. That which has been expressed as such takes over Being-towards those entities which have been uncovered in the assertion. If, however, these entities are to be appropriated explicitly with regard to their uncoveredness, this amounts to saying that the assertion is to be demonstrated as one that uncovers. But the assertion expressed is something ready-to-hand, and indeed in such a way that, as something by which uncoveredness is preserved, it has in itself a relation to the entities uncovered. Now to demonstrate that it is something which uncovers [ihres Entdeckend-seins] means to demonstrate how the assertion by which the uncoveredness is preserved is related to these entities. The assertion is something ready-to-hand. The entities to which it is related as something that uncovers, are either ready-to-hand or presentat-hand within-the-world. The relation itself presents itself thus, as one that is PRESENT-AT-HAND. But this relation lies in the fact that the uncoveredncss preserved in the assertion is in each case an uncoveredness o f something. The judgment ‘contains something which holds for the objects’ (Kant). But the relation itself now acquires the character of presence-at-hand by getting switched over to a relationship between things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND. The uncovcredness of something becomes the presentat-hand conformity of one thing which is PRESENT-AT-HAND – the assertion expressed – to something else which is PRESENT-AT-HAND – the entity under discussion. And if this conformity is seen only as a relationship between things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND – that is, if the kind of Being which belongs to the terms of this relationship has not been discriminated and is understood as something merely PRESENT-AT-HAND – then the relation shows itself as an agreement of two things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND, an agreement which is PRESENT-AT-HAND itself. BTMR §44 When the assertion has been expressed, the uncoveredness of the entity moves into the kind of Being of that which is ready-to-hand within-the-world. But now to the extent that in this uncoveredness, as an uncoveredness of something, a relationship to something PRESENT-AT-HAND persists, the uncoveredness (truth) becomes, for its part, a relationship between things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND (intellectus and res) – a relationship that is PRESENT-AT-HAND itself. [SZ:225] BTMR §44 Though it is founded upon Dasein’s disclosedness, the existential phenomenon of uncoveredness becomes a property which is PRESENT-AT-HAND but in which there still lurks a relational character; and as such a property, it gets broken asunder into a relationship which is PRESENT-AT-HAND. Truth as disclosedness and as a Being-towards uncovered entities – a Being which itself uncovers – has become truth as agreement between things which are PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world. And thus we have pointed out the ontologically derivative character of the traditional conception of truth. BTMR §44 Yet that which is last in the order of the way things are connected in their foundations existentially and ontologically, is regarded ontically and factically as that which is first and closest to us. The necessity of this Fact, however, is based in turn upon the kind of Being which Dasein itself possesses. Dasein, in its concernful absorption, understands itself in terms of what it encounters within-the-world. The uncoveredncss which belongs to uncovering, is something that we come across proximally within-the-world in that which has been expressed [im Ausgesprochenen]. Not only truth, however, is encountered as PRESENT-AT-HAND: in general our understanding of Being is such that every entity is understood in the first instance as PRESENT-AT-HAND. If the ‘truth’ which we encounter proximally in an ontical manner is considered ontologically in the way that is closest to us, then the logos (the assertion) gets understood as logos tinos – as an assertion about something, an uncoveredness of something; but the phenomenon gets Interpreted as something PRESENT-AT-HAND with regard to its possible presence-at-hand. Yet because presence-at-hand has been equated with the meaning of Being in general, the question of whether this kind of Being of truth is a primordial one, and whether there is anything primordial in that structure of it which we encounter as closest to us, can not come alive at all. The primordial phenomenon of truth has been covered up by Dasein’s very understanding of Being – that understanding which is proximally the one that prevails, and which even today has not been surmounted explicitly and in principle. BTMR §44 We cannot cross out the ‘ahead-of-itself’ as an essential item in the structure of care. But how sound are the conclusions which we have drawn from this? Has not the impossibility of getting the whole of Dasein into our grasp been inferred by an argument which is merely formal? Or have we not at bottom inadvertently posited that Dasein is something presentat-hand, ahead of which something that is not yet PRESENT-AT-HAND is constantly shoving itself? Have we, in our argument, taken “Being-not-yet” and the ‘ahead’ in a sense that is genuinely existential? Has our talk of the ‘end’ and ‘totality’ been phenomenally appropriate to Dasein? Has the expression ‘death’ had a biological signification or one that is existential-ontological, or indeed any signification that has been ade. quately and surely delimited? Have we indeed exhausted all the possibilities for making Dasein accessible in its wholeness? [SZ:237] BTMR §46 Even the Dasein of Others, when it has reached its wholeness in death, is no-longer-Dasein, in the sense of Being-no-longer-in-the-world. Does not dying mean going-out-of-the-world, and losing one’s Being-in-the-world? Yet when someone has died, his Being-no-longer-in-the-world (if we understand it in an extreme way) is still a Being, but in the sense of the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of a corporeal Thing which we encounter. In the dying of the Other we can experience that remarkable phenomenon of Being which may be defined as the change-over of an entity from Dasein’s kind of Being (or life) to no-longer-Dasein. The end of the entity qua Dasein is the beginning of the same entity qua something PRESENT-AT-HAND. BTMR §47 However, in this way of Interpreting the change-over from Dasein to Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more, the phenomenal content is missed, inasmuch as in the entity which still remains we are not presented with a mere corporeal Thing. From a theoretical point of view, even the corpse which is PRESENT-AT-HAND is still a possible object for the student of pathological anatomy, whose understanding tends to be oriented to the idea of life. This something which is just-present-at-hand-and-no-more is ‘more’ than a lifeless material Thing. In it we encounter something unalive, which has lost its life. BTMR §47 For instance, we can say, “The last quarter is still outstanding until the moon gets full”. The “not-yet” diminishes as the concealing shadow disappears. But here the moon is always PRESENT-AT-HAND as a whole already. Leaving aside the fact that we can never get the moon wholly in our grasp even when it is full, this “not-yet” does not in any way signify a not-yet-Being-together of the parts which belongs to the moon, but pertains only to the way we get it in our grasp perceptually. The “not-yet” which belongs to Dasein, however, is not just something which is provisionally and occasionally inaccessible to one’s own experience or even to that of a stranger; it ‘is’ not yet ‘actual’ at all. Our problem does not pertain to getting into our grasp the “not-yet’ which is of the character of Dasein; it pertains to the possible Being or not-Being of this “not-yet”. Dasein must, as itself, become – that is to say, be – what it is not yet. Thus if we are to be able, by comparison, to define that Being of the “not-yet” which is of the character of Dasein, we must take into conslderation entities. to whose kind of Being becoming belongs. BTMR §48 When, for instance, a fruit is unripe, it “goes towards” its ripeness. In this process of ripening, that which the fruit is not yet, is by no means pieced on as something not yet PRESENT-AT-HAND. The fruit brings itself to ripeness, and such a bringing of itself is a characteristic of its Being as a fruit. Nothing imaginable which one might contribute to it, would elimihate the unripeness of the fruit, if this entity did not come to ripeness of its own accord. When we speak of the “not-yet” of the unripeness, we do not have in view something else which stands outside [ausscnstchcndes], and which – with utter indifference to the fruit – might be PRESENT-AT-HAND in it and with it. What we have in view is the fruit itself in its specific kind of Being. The sum which is not yet complete is, as something ready-to-hand, ‘a matter of indifference’ as regards the remainder which is lacking and un-ready-to-hand, though, taken strictly, it can neither be indifferent to that remainder nor not be indifferent to it. The ripening fruit, however, not only is not indifferent to its unripeness as something other than itself, but it is that unripeness as it ripens. The “not-yet” has already been included in the very Being of the fruit, not as some random characteristic, but as something constitutive. Correspondingly, as long as any Dasein is, it too is already its “not-yet”. BTMR §48 In the first instance, “ending” signifies “stopping”, and it signifies this in senses which are ontologically different. The rain stops. It is no longer PRESENT-AT-HAND. The road stops. Such an ending does not make the road disappear, but such a stopping is determinative for the road as this one, which is PRESENT-AT-HAND. Hence ending, as stopping, can signify either “passing over into non-presence-at-hand” or else “Being-present-at-hand only when the end comes”. The latter kind of ending, in turn, may either be determinative for something which is PRESENT-AT-HAND in an unfinished way, as a road breaks off when one finds it under construction; or it may rather constitute the ‘finishedness” of something PRESENT-AT-HAND, as the painting is finished with the last stroke of the brush. [SZ:245] BTMR §48 But ending as “getting finished” does not include fulfilling. On the other hand, whatever has got to be fulfilled must indeed reach the finishedness that is possible for it. Fulfilling is a mode of ‘finishedness’, and is founded upon it. Finishedness is itself possible only as a determinate form of something PRESENT-AT-HAND or ready-to-hand. BTMR §48 By none of these modes of ending can death be suitably characterized as the “end” of Dasein. If dying, as Being-at-an-end, were understood in’ the sense of an ending of the kind we have discussed, then Dasein would thereby be treated as something PRESENT-AT-HAND or ready-to-hand. In death, Dasein has not been fulfilled nor has it simply disappeared; it has not become finished nor is it wholly at one’s disposal as something ready-to-hand. BTMR §48 Methodologically, the existential analysis is superordinate to the questions of a biology, psychology, theodicy, or theology of death. Taken ontically, the results of the analysis show the peculiar formality and emptiness of any ontological characterization. However, that must not blind us to the rich and complicated structure of the phenomenon. If Dasein in general never becomes accessible as something PRESENT-AT-HAND, because Being-possible belongs in its own way to Dasein’s kind of Being, even less may we expect that we can simply read off the ontological structure of death, if death is indeed a distinctive possibility of Dasein. BTMR §49 The Interpretation in which the “not-yet – and with it even the uttermost “not-yet”, the end of Dasein – was taken in the sense of something still outstanding, has been rejected as inappropriate in that it included the ontological perversion of making Dasein something PRESENT-AT-HAND. Being-at-an-end implies existentially Being-towards-the-end. The uttermost “not-yet” has the character of something towards which Dasein comports itself. The end is impending [stelit ... bevor] for Dasein. Death is not something not yet PRESENT-AT-HAND, nor is it that which is ultimately still outstanding but which has been reduced to a minimum. Death is something that stands before us – something impending. BTMR §50 However, there is much that can impend for Dasein as Being-in-the-world. The character of impendence is not distinctive of death. On the contrary, this Interpretation could even lead us to suppose that death must be understood in the sense of some impending event encountered environmentally. For instance, a storm, the remodelling of the house, or the arrival of a friend, may be impending; and these are entities which are respectively PRESENT-AT-HAND, ready-to-hand, and there-with-us. The death which impends does not have this kind of Being. BTMR §50 The analysis of the phrase ‘one dies’ reveals unambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to everyday Being-towards-death. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet PRESENT-AT-HAND for oneself, and is therefore no threat. The expression ‘one dies’ spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the “they”. In Dasein’s public way of interpreting, it is said that ‘one dies’, because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that “in no case is it I myself”, for this “one” is the “nobody”. ‘Dying’ is levelled off to an occurrence which reaches Dasein, to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular. If idle talk is always ambiguous, so is this manner of talking about death. Dying, which is essentially mine in such a way that no one can be my representative, is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the “they” encounters. In the way of talking which we have characterized, death is spoken of as a ‘case’ which is constantly occurring. Death gets passed off as always something ‘actual’; its character as a possibility gets concealed, and so are the other two items that belong to it – the fact that it is non-relational and that it is not to be outstripped. By such ambiguity, Dasein puts itself in the position of losing itself in the “they,” as regards a distinctive potentiality-for-Being which belongs to Dasein’s owninost Self. The “they” gives its approval, and aggravates the temptation to cover up from oneself one’s ownmost Being-towards-death. This evasive concealment in the face of death dominates everydayness so stubbornly that, in Being with one another, the ‘neighbours’ often still keep talking the ‘dying person’ into the belief that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillized everydayness of the world of his concern. Such ‘solicitude’ is meant to ‘console’ him. It insists upon bringing him back into Dasein, while in addition it helps him to keep his ownmost non-relational possibility-of-Being completely concealed. In this manner the “they” provides [besorgt] a constant tranquillizalion about death. At bottom, however, this is a tranquillization not only for him who is ‘dying’ but just as much for those who ‘console’ him. And even in the case of a demise, the public is still not to have its own tranquillity upset by such an event, or be disturbed in the carefreeness with which it concerns itself. Indeed the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social inconvenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded. BTMR §51 In the first instance, we must characterize Being-towards-death as a Being towards a possibility – indeed, towards a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself. “Being towards” a possibility – that is to say, towards something possible – may signify “Being out for” something possible, as in concerning ourselves with its actualization. Such possibilities are constantly encountered in the field of what is ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND – what is attainable, controllable, practicable, and the like. In concernfully Being out for something possible, there is a tendency to annihilate the possibility of the possible by making it available to us. But the concernful actualization of equipment which is ready-to-hand (as in producing it, getting it ready, readjusting it, and so on) is always merely relative, since even that which has been actualized is still characterized in terms of some involvements – indeed this is precisely what characterizes its Being. Even though actualized, it remains, as actual, something possible for doing something; it is characterized by an “in-order-to”. What our analysis is to make plain is simply how Being out for something concernfully, comports itself towards the possible: it does so not by the theoretico-thematical consideration of the possible as possible, and by having regard for its possibility as such, but rather by looking circumspectively away from the possible and looking at that for which it is possible [das Wofür-möglich]. [SZ:261] BTMR §53 Manifestly Being-towards-death, which is now in question, cannot have the character of concernfully Being out to get itself actualized. For one thing, death as possible is not something possible which is ready-to-hand or PRESENT-AT-HAND, but a possibility of Dasein’s Being. So to concern oneself with actualizing what is thus possible would have to signify, “bringing about one’s demise”. But if this were done, Dasein would deprive itself of the very ground for an existing Being-towards-death. BTMR §53 However, Dasein comports itself towards something possible in its possibility by expecting it [im Erwarten]. Anyone who is intent on something possible, may encounter it unimpeded and undiminished in its ‘whether it comes or does not, or whether it comes after all’. But with this phenomenon of expecting, has not our analysis reached the same kind of Being towards the possible to which we have already called attention in our description of “Being out for something” concernfully? To expect something possible is always to understand it and to ‘have’ it with regard to whether and when and how it will be actually PRESENT-AT-HAND. Expecting is not just an occasional looking-away from the possible to its possible actualization, but is essentially a waiting for that actualization [ein Warten auf diese]. Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a foothold in the actual. It is for its actuality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the actual, arising out of the actual and returning to it. BTMR §53 The ownmost, non-relational possibility, which is not to be outstripped, is certain. The way to be certain of it is determined by the kind of truth which corresponds to it (disclosedness). The certain possibility of death, however, discloses Dasein as a possibility, but does so only in such a way that, in anticipating this possibility, Dasein makes this possibility possible for itself as its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. The possibility is disclosed because it is made possible in anticipation. To maintain oneself in this truth – that is, to be certain of what has been disclosed – demands all the more that one should anticipate. We cannot compute the certainty of death by ascertaining how many cases of death we encounter. This certainty is by no means of the kind which maintains itself in the truth of the PRESENT-AT-HAND. When something PRESENT-AT-HAND has been uncovered, it is encountered most purely if we just look at the entity and let it be encountered in itself. Dasein must first have lost itself in the factual circumstances [Sachverhalte] (this can be one of care’s own tasks and possibilities) if it is to obtain the pure objectivity – that is to say, the indifference – of apodictic evidence. If Being-certain in relation to death does not have this character, this does not mean that it is of a lower grade, but that it does not belong at all to the graded order of the kinds of evidence we can have about the PRESENT-AT-HAND. [SZ:265] BTMR §53 In this attestation an authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self is to be given us to understand. The question of the “who” of Dasein has been answered with the expression ‘Self’. Dasein’s Selfhood has been defined formally as a way of existing, and therefore not as an entity PRESENT-AT-HAND. For the most part I myself am not the “who” of Dasein; the they-self is its “who”. Authentic Being-one’s-Self takes the definite form of an existentiell modification of the “they”; and this modification must be defined existentially. What does this modification imply, and what are the ontological conditions for its possibility? BTMR §54 Nevertheless, even when our investigation of conscience is thus restricted,,we must neither exaggerate its outcome nor make perverse claims about it and lessen its worth. As a phenomenon of Dasein, conscience is not just a fact which occurs and is occasionally PRESENT-AT-HAND. It ‘is’ only in Dasein’s kind of Being, and it makes itself known as a Fact only with factical existence and in it. The demand that an ‘inductive empirical proof’ should’ be given for the ‘factuality’ of conscience and for the legitimacy of its ‘voice’, rests upon an ontological perversion of the phenomenon. This perversion, however, is one that is shared by every “superior” criticism in which conscience is taken as something just occurring from time to time rather than as a ‘universally established and ascertainable fact’. Among such proofs and counterproofs, the Fact of conscience cannot present itself at all. This is no lack in it, but merely a sign by which we can recognize it as ontologically of a different kind from what is environmentally PRESENT-AT-HAND. BTMR §54 These phenomenal findings are not to be explained away. After all, they have been taken as a starting-point for explaining the voice of conscience as an alien power by which Dasein is dominated. If the interpretation continues in this direction, one supplies a possessor for the power thus posited, or one takes the power itself as a person who makes himself known – namely God. On the other hand one may try to reject this explanation in which the caller is taken as an alien manifestation of such a power, and to explain away the conscience ‘biologically’ at the same time. Both these explanations pass over the phenomenal findings too hastily. Such procedures are facilitated by the unexpressed but ontologically dogmatic guiding thesis that what is (in other words, anything so factual as the call) must be PRESENT-AT-HAND, and that what does not let itself be Objectively demonstrated as PRESENT-AT-HAND, just is not at all. BTMR §57 Does our previous analysis of Dasein’s state of Being show us a way of making ontologically intelligible the kind of Being which belongs to the caller, and, along with it, that which belongs to the calling? The fact that the call is not something which is explicitly performed by me, but that rather ‘it’ does the calling, does not justify seeking the caller in some entity with a character other than that of Dasein. Yet.every Dasein always exists factically. It is not a free-floating self-projection; but its character is determined by thrownness as a Fact of the entity which it is; and, as so determined, it has in each case already been delivered over to existence, and it constantly so remains. Dasein’s facticity, however, is essentially distinct from the factuality of something PRESENT-AT-HAND. Existent Dasein does not encounter itself as something PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world. But neither does thrownness adhere to Dasein as an inaccessible characteristic which is of no importance for its existence. As something thrown, Dasein has been thrown into existence. It exists as an entity which has to be as it is and as it can be. BTMR §57 If this is our goal, the idea of ‘Guilty!’ must be sufficiently formalized so that those ordinary phenomena of “guilt” which are related to our concernful Being with Others, will drop out. The idea of guilt must not only be raised above the domain of that concern in which we reckon things up, but it must also be detached from relationship to any law or “ought” such that by failing to comply with it one loads himself with guilt. For here too “guilt” is still necessarily defined as a lack – when something which ought to be and which can be is missing. To be missing, however, means not-Being-present-at-hand. A lack, as the not-Being-present-at-hand of something which ought to be, is a definite sort of Being which goes with the PRESENT-AT-HAND. In this sense it is essential that in existence there can be nothing lacking, not’ because it would then be perfect, but because its character of Being remains distinct from any presence-at-hand. BTMR §58 Nevertheless, in the idea of ‘Guilty there lies the character of the “not”. If the ‘Guilty!’ is something that can definitely apply to existence, then this raises the ontological problem of clarifying existentially the character of this “not” as a “not”. Moreover, to the idea of ‘Guilty!’ belongs what is expressed without further differentiation in the conception of guilt as ‘having responsibility for’ – that is, as Being-the-basis for ... Hence we define the formally existential idea of the ‘Guilty!’ as “Being-the-basis for a Being which has been defined by a ‘not” – that is to say, as “Being-the-basis of a nullity”. The idea of the “not” which lies in the concept of guilt as understood existentially, excludes relatedness to anything presentat-hand which is possible or which may have been required; furthermore, Dasein is altogether incommensurable with anything PRESENT-AT-HAND or generally accepted [Geltenden] which is not it itself, or which is not in the way Dasein is – namely, existing; so any possibility that, with regard to Being-the-basis for a lack, the entity which is itself such a basis might be reckoned up as ‘lacking in some manner’, is a possibility which drops out. If a lack, such as failure to fulfil some requirement, has been ‘caused’ in a manner characteristic of Dasein, we cannot simply reckon back to there being something lacking [Mangelhaftigkeit] in the ‘cause’. Being-the-basis-for-something need not have the same “not”-character as the privativum which is based upon it and which arises from it. The basis need not acquire a nullity of its own from that for which it is the basis [seinern Begründeten]. This implies, however, that Being-guilty does not first result from an indebtedness [Verschuldung], but that, on the contrary, indebtedness becomes possible only ‘on the basis’ of a primordial Being-guilty. Can something like this be exhibited in Dasein’s Being, and how is it at all possible existentially? [SZ:284] BTMR §58 The concepts of privation and lack – which, moreover, are not very transparent – are already insufficient for the ontological Interpretation of the phenomenon of guilt, though if we take them formally enough, we can put them to considerable use. Least of all can we come any closer to the existential phenomenon of guilt by taking our orientation from the idea of evil, the malum as privatio boni. Just as the bonum and its privatio have the same ontological origin in the ontology of the PRESENT-AT-HAND, this ontology also applies to the idea of ‘value’, which has been ‘abstracted’ from these. BTMR §58 But does the ‘fact’ that the voice comes afterwards, prevent the call from being basically a calling-forth? That the voice gets taken as a stirring of conscience which follows after is not enough to prove that we understand the phenomenon of conscience primordially. What if factical indebtedness were only the occasion for the factical calling of conscience? What if that Interpretation of the ‘evil’ conscience which we have described goes only half way? That such is the case is evident from the ontological fore-having within whose scope the phenomenon has been brought by this Interpretation. The voice is something that turns up; it has its position in the sequence of Experiences which are PRESENT-AT-HAND, and it follows after the Experience of the deed. But neither the call, nor the deed which has happened, nor the guilt with which one is laden, is an occurrence with the character of something PRESENT-AT-HAND which runs its course. The call has the kind of Being which belongs to care. In the call Dasein ‘is’ ahead of itself in such a way that at the same time it directs itself back to its thrownness. Only by first positing that Dasein is an interconnected sequence of successive Experiences, is it possible to take the voice as something which comes afterwards, something later, which therefore necessarily refers back. The voice does call back, but it calls beyond the deed which has happened, and back to the Being-guilty into which one has been thrown, which is ‘earlier’ than any indebtedness. But at the same time, this calling-back calls forth to Being-guilty, as something to be seized upon in one’s own existence, so that authentic existentiell Being-guilty only ‘follows after’ the call, not vice versa. Bad conscience is basically so far from just reproving and pointing back that it rather points forward as it calls one back into one’s thrownness. The order of the sequence in which Experiences run their course does not give us the phenomenal structure of existing. [SZ:291] BTMR §59 It cannot be denied that the call is often experienced as having such a tendency. It remains questionable only whether this experience of the call permits it to ‘proclaim’ itself fully. In the common-sense interpretation, one may suppose that one is sticking to the ‘facts’; but in the end, by its very common sense, this interpretation has restricted the call’s disclosive range. As little as the ‘good’ conscience lets itself be put in the service of a ‘Pharisaism’, just as little may the function of the ‘bad’ conscience be reduced to indicating indebtednesses which are PRESENT-AT-HAND or thrusting aside those which are possible. This would be as if Dasein were a ‘household’ whose indebtednesses simply need to be balanced off in an orderly manner so that the Self may stand ‘by’ as a disinterested spectator while these Experiences run their course. BTMR §59 If, however, that which is primary in the call is not a relatedness to a guilt which is factically ‘PRESENT-AT-HAND” or to some guilt-charged deed which has been factically willed, and if accordingly the ‘reproving’ and ‘warning’ types of conscience express no primordial call-functions, then we have also undermined the consideration we mentioned first, that the existential Interpretation fails to recognize the ‘essentially’ critical character of what the conscience does. This consideration too is one that springs from catching sight of the phenomenon in a manner which, within certain limits, is genuine; for in the content of the call, one can indeed point to nothing which the voice ‘positively’ recommends and imposes. But how are we to understand this positivity which is missing in what the conscience does? Does it follow from this that conscience has a ‘negative’ character? [SZ:294] BTMR §59 The common-sense way of interpreting the conscience, which ‘sticks rigorously to the facts’, takes the silent discourse of the conscience as an occasion for passing it off as something which is not at all ascertainable or PRESENT-AT-HAND. The fact that “they”, who hear and understand nothing but loud idle talk, cannot ‘report’ any call, is held against the conscience on the subterfuge that it is ‘dumb’ and manifestly not presentat-hand. With this kind of interpretation the “they” merely covers up its own failure to hear the call and the fact that its ‘hearing’ does not reach very far. BTMR §60 In resoluteness we have now arrived at that truth of Dasein which is most primordial because it is authentic. Whenever a “there” is disclosed, its whole Being-in-the-world – that is to say, the world, Being-in, and the Self which, as an ‘I am’, this entity is – is disclosed with equal primordiality. Whenever the world is disclosed, entities within-the-world have been discovered already. The discoveredness of the ready-to-hand and the PRESENT-AT-HAND is based on the disclosedness of the world for if the current totality of involvements is to be freed, this requires that significance be understood beforehand. In understanding significance, concernful Dasein submits itself circumspectively to what it encounters as ready-to-hand. Any discovering of a totality of involvements goes back to a “for-the-sake-of-which”; and on the understanding of such a “for-the-sake-of-which” is based in turn the understanding of significance as the disclosedness of the current world. In seeking shelter, sustenance, livelihood, we do so “for the sake of” constant possibilities of Dasein which are very close to it; upon these the entity for which its own Being is an issue, has already projected itself. Thrown into its ‘there’, every Dasein has been factically submitted to a definite ‘world’ – its ‘world’. At the same time those factical projections which are closest to it, have been guided by its concernful lostness in the “they”. To this lostness, one’s own Dasein can appeal, and this appeal can be understood in the way of resoluteness. But in that case this authentic disclosedness modifies with equal primordiality both the way in which the ‘world’ is discovered (and this is founded upon that disclosedness) and the way in which the Dasein-with of Others is disclosed. The ‘world’ which is ready-to-hand does not become another one ‘in its content’, nor does the circle of Others get exchanged for a new one; but both one’s Being towards the ready-to-hand understandingly and concernfully, and one’s solicitous Being with Others, are now given a definite character in terms of their ownmost potentiality-for-Being-their-Selves. [SZ:298] BTMR §60 In the term “Situation” (“situation” – ‘to be in a situation’) there is an overtone of a signification that is spatial. We shall not try to eliminate this from the existential conception, for such an overtone is also implied in the ‘there’ of Dasein. Being-in-the-world has a spatiality of its own, characterized by the phenomena of de-severance and directionality. Dasein ‘makes room’ in so far as it factically exists. But spatiality of the kind which belongs to Dasein, and on the basis of which existence always determines its ‘location’, is grounded in the state of Being-in-the-world, for which disclosedness is primarily constitutive. Just as the spatiality of the “there” is grounded in disclosedness, the Situation has its foundations in resoluteness. The Situation is the “there” which is disclosed in resoluteness – the “there” as which the existent entity is there. It is not a framework PRESENT-AT-HAND in which Dasein occurs, or into which it might even just bring itself. Far removed from any PRESENT-AT-HAND mixture of circumstances and accidents which we encounter, the Situation is only through resoluteness and in it. The current factical involvement-character of the circumstances discloses itself to the Self only when that involvementcharacter is such that one has resolved upon the “there” as which that Self, in existing, has to be. When what we call “accidents” befall from the with-world and the environment, they can be-fall only resoluteness. BTMR §60 In our existential Interpretation, the entity which has been presented to us as our theme has Dasein’s kind of Being, and cannot be pieced together into something PRESENT-AT-HAND out of pieces’ which are PRESENT-AT-HAND. So long as we do not forget this, every step in our Interpretation must be guided by the idea of existence. What this signifies for the question of the possible connection between anticipation and resoluteness, is nothing less than the demand that we should project these existential phenomena upon the existentiell possibilities which have been delineated in them, and ‘think these possibilities through to the end’ in an existential manner. If we do this, the working-out of anticipatory resoluteness as a potentiality-for-Being-a-whole such that this potentiality is authentic and is possible in an existentiell way, will lose the character of an arbitrary construction. It will have become a way of Interpreting whereby Dasein is liberated for its uttermost possibility of existence. [SZ:303] BTMR §61 Ontologically, Dasein is in principle different from everything that is PRESENT-AT-HAND or Real. Its ‘subsistence’ is not based on the substantiality of a substance but on the ‘Self-subsistence’ of the existing Self, whose Being has been conceived as care. The phenomenon of the Self – a phenomenon which is included in care – needs to be defined existentially in a way which is primordial and authentic, in contrast to our preparatory exhibition of the inauthentic they-self. Along with this, we must establish what possible ontological questions are to be directed towards the ‘Self’, if indeed it is neither substance nor subject. BTMR §61 By “resoluteness” we mean “letting onself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty”. Being-guilty belongs to the Being of Dasein itself, and we have determined that this is primarily a potentiality-for-Being. To say that Dasein ‘is’ constantly guilty can only mean that in every case Dasein maintains itself in this Being and does so as either authentic or inauthentic existing. Being-guilty is not just an abiding property of something constantly PRESENT-AT-HAND, but the existentiell possibility of being authentically or inauthentically guilty. In every case, the ‘guilty’ is only in the current factical potentiality-for-Being. Thus because Being-guilty belongs to the Being of Dasein, it must be conceived as a potentiality-for-Being-guilty. Resoluteness projects itself upon this potentiality-for-Being [SZ:306] BTMR §62 The phenomenon of resoluteness has brought us before the primordial truth of existence. As resolute, Dasein is revealed to itself in its current factical potentiality-for-Being, and in such a way that Dasein itself is this revealing and Being-revealed. To any truth, there belongs a corresponding holding-for-true. The explicit appropriating of what has been disclosed or discovered is Being-certain. The primordial truth of existence demands an equiprimordial Being-certain, in which one maintains oneself in what resoluteness discloses. It gives itself the current factical Situation, and brings itself into that Situation. The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something PRESENT-AT-HAND which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It merely gets disclosed in a free resolving which has not been determined beforehand but is open to the possibility of such determination. What, then, does the certainty which belongs to such resoluteness signify? Such certainty must maintain itself in what is disclosed by the resolution. But this means that it simply cannot become rigid as regards the Situation, but must understand that the resolution, in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure, must be held open and free for the current factical possibility. The certainty of the resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it back – a possibility which is factically necessary. However, such holding-for-true in resoluteness (as the truth of existence) by no means lets us fall back into irresoluteness. On the contrary, this holding-for-true, as a resolute holding-oneself-free for taking back, is authentic resoluteness which resolves to keep repeating itself. Thus, in [SZ:308] an existentiell manner, one’s very lostness in irresoluteness gets undermined. The holding-for-true which belongs to resoluteness, tends, in accordance with its meaning, to hold itself free constantly – that is, to hold itself free for Dasein’s whole potentiality-for-Being. This constant certainty is guaranteed to resoluteness only so that it will relate itself to that possibility of which it can be utterly certain. In its death, Dasein must simply ‘take back’ everything. Since resoluteness is constantly certain of death – in other words, since it anticipates it – resoluteness thus attains a certainty which is authentic and whole. BTMR §62 In its anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein has now been made phenomenally visible with regard to its possible authenticity and totality. The hermencutical Situation which was previously inadequate for interpreting the meaning of the Being of care, now has the required primordiality. Dasein has been put into that which we have in advance, and this has been done primordially – that is to say, this has been done with regard to its authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole; the idea of existence, which guides us as that which we see in advance, has been made definite by the clarification of our ownmost potentiality-for-Being; and, now that we have concretely worked out the structure of Dasein’s Being, its peculiar ontological character has become so plain as compared with everything PRESENT-AT-HAND, that Dasein’s existentiality has been grasped in advance [SZ:311] with sufficient Articulation to give sure guidance for working out the existentialia conceptually. BTMR §63 In indicating the formal aspects of the idea of existence we have been guided by the understanding-of-Being which lies in Dasein itself. Without any ontological transparency, it has nevertheless been revealed that in every case I am myself the entity which we call Dasein, and that I am so as a potentiality-for-Being for which to be this entity is an issue. Dasein understands itself as Being-in-the-world, even if it does so without adequate ontological definiteness. Being thus, it encounters entities which have the kind of Being of what is ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND. No matter how far removed from an ontological concept the distinction between existence and Reality may be, no matter even if Dasein proximally understands existence as Reality, Dasein is not just PRESENT-AT-HAND but has already understood itself, however mythical or magical the interpretation which it gives may be. For otherwise, Dasein would never ‘live’ in a myth and would not be concerned with magic in ritual and cult. The idea of existence which we have posited gives us an outline of the formal structure of the understanding of Dasein and does so in a way which is not binding from an existentiell point of view. BTMR §63 Kant’s analysis has two positive aspects. For one thing, he sees the impossibility of ontically reducing the “I” to a substance; for another thing, he holds fast to the “I” as ‘I think’. Nevertheless, he takes this “I” as subject again, and he does so in a sense which is ontologically inappropriate. For the ontological concept of the subject characterizes not the Selfhood of the “I” qua Self, but the selfsameness and steadiness of something that is always PRESENT-AT-HAND. To define the “I” ontologically as “subject” means to regard it as something always PRESENT-AT-HAND. The Being of the “I” is understood as the Reality of the res cogitans. BTMR §64 Being-already-in-a-world, however, as Being-alongside-the-ready-to-hand-within-the-world, means, equiprimordially that one is ahead of oneself. With the ‘I’, what we have in view is that entity for which the issue is the Being of the entity that it is. With the ‘I’, care expresses itself, though proximally and for the most part in the ‘fugitive’ way in which the “I” talks when it concerns itself with something. The they-self keeps on saying “I” most loudly and most frequently because at bottom it is not authentically itself, and evades its authentic potentiality-for-Being. If the ontological constitution of the Self is not to be traced back either to an “I”-substance or to a ‘subject’, but if, on the contrary, the everyday fugitive way in which we keep on saying “I” must be understood in terms of our authentic potentiality-for-Being, then the proposition that the Self is the basis of care and constantly PRESENT-AT-HAND, is one that still does not follow. Self hood is to be discerned existentially only in one’s authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self – that is to say, in the authenticity of Dasein’s Being as care. In terms of care the constancy of the Self, as the supposed persistence of the subjectum, gets clarified. But the phenomenon of this authentic potentiality-for-Being also opens our eyes for the constancy of the Self in the sense of its having achieved some sort of position. The constancy of the Self, in the double sense of steadiness and steadfastness, is the authentic counter-possibility to the non-Self-constancy which is characteristic of irresolute falling. Existentially, “Self-constancy” signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness. The ontological structure of such resoluteness reveals the existentiality of the Self’s Selfhood. BTMR §64 Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial individualization of the reticent resoluteness which exacts anxiety of itself. As something that keepssilent, [SZ:323] silent, authentic Being-one’s-Self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying ‘I’; but in its reticence it ‘is’ that thrown entity as which it can authentically be. The Self which the reticence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the Being of the ‘I’. Only if we are oriented phenomenally by the meaning of the Being of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self are we put in a position to discuss what ontological justification there is for treating substantiality, simplicity, and personality as characteristics of Selfhood. In the prevalent way of saying “I”, it is constantly suggested that what we have in advance is a Self-Thing, persistently PRESENT-AT-HAND; the ontological question of the Being of the Self must turn away from any such suggestion. BTMR §64 The “ahead-of-itself” is grounded in the future. In the “Being-already-in ...”, the character of “having been” is made known. “Being-alongside ...” becomes possible in making present. While the “ahead” includes the notion of a “before”, neither the ‘before’ in the ‘ahead’ nor the ‘already’ is to be taken in terms of the way time is ordinarily understood; this has been automatically ruled out by what has been said above. With this ‘before’ we do not have in mind ‘in advance of something’ [das “Vorher”] in the sense of ‘not yet now – but later’; the ‘already’ is just as far from signifying ‘no longer now – but earlier’. If the expressions ‘before’ and ‘already’ were to have a time-oriented [zeithafte] signification such as this (and they can have this signification too), then to say that care has temporality would be to say that it is something which is ‘earlier’ and ‘later’, ‘not yet’ and ‘no longer’. Care would then be conceived as an entity which occurs and runs its course ‘in time’. The Being of an entity having the character of Dasein would become something PRESENT-AT-HAND. If this sort of thing is impossible, then any time-oriented signification which the expressions we have mentioned may have, must be different from this. The ‘before’ and the ‘ahead’ indicate the future as of a sort which would make it possible for Dasein to be such that its potentiality-for-Being is an issue. Self-projection upon the ‘for-the-sake-of-oneself’ is grounded in the future and is an essential characteristic of existentiality.The primary meaning of existentiality is the future. BTMR §65 Likewise, with the ‘already’ we have in view the existential temporal meaning of the Being of that entity which, in so far as it is, is already something that has been thrown. Only because care is based on the character of “having been”, can Dasein exist as the thrown entity which it is. ‘As long as’ Dasein factically exists, it is never past [vergangen], but it always is indeed as already having been, in the sense of the “I am-as-having-been”. And only as long as Dasein is, can it be as having been. On the other hand, we call an entity “past”, when it is no longer PRESENT-AT-HAND. Therefore Dasein, in existing, can never establish itself as a fact which is PRESENT-AT-HAND, arising and passing away ‘in the course of time’, with a bit of it past already. Dasein never ‘finds itself’ except as a thrown Fact. In the state-of-mind in which it finds itself, Dasein is assailed by itself as the entity which it still is and already was – that is to say, which it constantly is as having been. The primary existential meaning of facticity lies in the character of “having been”. In our formulation of the structure of care, the temporal meaning of existentiality and facticity is indicated by the expressions ‘before’ and ‘already’. [SZ:328] BTMR §65 On the other hand, we lack such an indication for the third item which is constitutive for care – the Being-alongside which falls. This should not signify that falling is not also grounded in temporality; it should instead give us a hint that making-present, as the primary basis for falling into the ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND with which’ we concern ourselves, remains included in the future and in having been, and is included in these in the mode of primordial temporality. When resolute, Dasein has brought itself back from falling, and has done so precisely in order to be more authentically ‘there’ in the moment of vision’ as regards the Situation which has been disclosed. BTMR §65 By Interpreting everydayness and historicality temporally we shall get a steady enough view of primordial time to expose it as the condition which makes the everyday experience of time both possible and necessary. As an entity for which its Being is an issue, Dasein utilizes itself primarily for itself [verwendet sich ... für sich selbst], whether it does so explicitly or not. Proximally and for the most part, care is circumspective concern. In utilizing itself for the sake of itself, Dasein ‘uses itself up’. In using itself up, Dasein uses itself – that is to say, its time. In using time, Dasein reckons with it. Time is first discovered in the concern which reckons [SZ:333] circumspectively, and this concern leads to the development of a time-reckoning. Reckoning with time is constitutive for Being-in-the-world. Concernful circumspective discovering, in reckoning with its time, permits those things which we have discovered, and which are ready-to-hand or PRESENT-AT-HAND, to be encountered in time. Thus entities within-the-world become accessible as ‘being in time’. We call the temporal attribute of entities within-the-world “within-time-ness” [die Innerzeitkeit]. The kind of ‘time’ which is first found ontically in within-time-ness, becomes the basis on which the ordinary traditional conception of time takes form. But time, as within-time-ness, arises from an essential kind of temporalizing of primordial temporality. The fact that this is its source, tells us that the time ‘in which’ what is PRESENT-AT-HAND arises and passes away, is a genuine phenomenon of time; it is not an externalization of a ‘qualitative time’ into space, as Bergson’s Interpretation of time – which is ontologically quite indefinite and inadequate – would have us believe. BTMR §66 In working out the temporality of Dasein as everydayness, historicality, and within-time-ness, we shall be getting for the first time a relentless insight into the complications of a primordial ontology of Dasein. As Being-in-the-world, Dasein exists factically with and alongside entities which it encounters within-the-world. Thus Dasein’s Being becomes ontologically transparent in a comprehensive way only within the horizon in which the Being of entities other than Dasein – and this means even of those which are neither ready-to-hand nor PRESENT-AT-HAND but just ‘Subsist’ – has been clarified. But if the variations of Being are to be Interpreted for everything of which we say, “It is”, we need an idea of Being in general, and this idea needs to have been adequately illumined in advance. So long as this idea is one at which we have not yet arrived, then the temporal analysis of Dasein, even if we repeat it, will remain incomplete and fraught with obscurities; we shall not go on to talk about the objective difficulties. The existential-temporal analysis of Dasein demands, for its part, that it be repeated anew within a framework in which the concept of Being is discussed in principle. BTMR §66 If we are to bring back into our phenomenological purview the phenomena at which we have arrived in our preparatory analysis, an allusion to the stages through which we have passed must be sufficient. Our definition of “care” emerged from our analysis of the disclosedness which constitutes the Being of the ‘there’. The clarification of this phenomenon signified that we must give a provisional Interpretation of Being-in-the-world – the basic state of Dasein. Our investigation set out to describe Being-in-the-world, so that from the beginning we could secure an adequate phenomenological horizon as opposed to those inappropriate and mostly inexplicit ways in which the, nature of Dasein has been determined beforehand ontologically. Being-in-the-world was first characterized with regard to the phenomenon of the world. And in our explication this was done by characterizing ontico-ontologically what is ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in’ the environment, and then bringing within-the-world-ness into relief, so that by this the phenomenon of worldhood in general could be made visible. But understanding belongs essentially to disclosedness; and the structure of worldhood, significance, turned out to be bound up with that upon which understanding projects itself – namely that potentiality-for-Being for the sake of which Dasein exists. BTMR §67 Understanding, as existing in the potentiality-for-Being, however it may have been projected, is primarily futural. But it would not temporalize itself if it were not temporal – that is, determined with equal primordiality by having been and by the Present. The way in which the latter ecstasis helps constitute inauthentic understanding, has already been made plain in a rough and ready fashion. Everyday concern understands itself in terms of that potentiality-for-Being which confronts it as coming from its possible success or failure with regard to whatever its object of concern may be. Corresponding to the inauthentic future (awaiting), there is a special way of Being-alongside the things with which one concerns oneself. This way of Being-alongside is the Present – the “waiting-towards”; this ecstatical mode reveals itself if we adduce for comparison this very same ecstasis, but in the mode of authentic temporality. To the anticipation which goes with resoluteness, there belongs a Present in accordance with which a resolution discloses the Situation. In resoluteness, the Present is not only brought back from distraction with the objects of one’s closest concern, but it gets held in the future and in having been. That Present Which is held in authentic temporality and which thus is authentic itself, we call the “moment of vision”. This term must be understood in the active sense as an ecstasis. It means the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern, but a rapture which is held in resoluteness. The moment of vision is a phenomenon which in principle [SZ:338] can not be clarified in terms of the “now” [dem Jetzt]. The “now” is a temporal phenomenon which belongs to time as within-time-ness: the “now” ‘in which’ something arises, passes away, or is PRESENT-AT-HAND. ‘In the moment of vision’ nothing can occur; but as an authentic Present or waiting-towards, the moment of vision permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time’ as ready-to-hand or PRESENT-AT-HAND. BTMR §68 We shall begin our analysis by exhibiting the temporality of fear. Fear has been characterized as an inauthentic state-of-mind. To what extent does the existential meaning which makes such a state-of-mind possible lie in what has been? Which mode of this ecstasis designates the specific temporality of fear? Fear is a fearing in the face of something threatening – of something which is detrimental to Dasein’s factical potentiality-for-Being, and which brings itself close in the way we have described, within the range of the ready-to-hand and the PRESENT-AT-HAND with which we concern ourselves. Fearing discloses something threatening, and it does so by way of everyday circumspection. A subject which merely beholds would never be able to discover anything of the sort. But if something is disclosed when one fears in the face of it, is not this disclosure a letting-something-come-towards-oneself [ein Auf-sich-zukommenlassen]? Has not “fear” been rightly defined as “the expectation of some oncoming evil” [eines ankommenden Übels] (“malum futurum”)? Is not the primary meaning of fear the future, and least of all, one’s having been? Not only does fearing ‘relate’ itself to ‘something future’ in the signification of something which first comes on ‘in time’; but this self-relating is itself futural in the primordially temporal sense. All this is incontestable. Manifestly an awaiting is one of the things that belong to the existential-temporal Constitution of fear. But proximally this just means that the temporality of fear is one that is inauthentic. Is fearing in the face of something merely an expecting of something threatening which is coming on? Such an expectation need not be fear already, and it is so far from being fear that the specific character which fear as a ‘mood possesses is missing. This character lies in the fact that in fear the awaiting lets what is threatening come back [zurückkommen] to one’s factically concernful potentiality-for-Being. Only if that to which this comes back is already ecstatically open, can that which threatens be awaited right back to the entity which I myself am; only so can my Dasein be threatened. The awaiting which fears is one which is afraid ‘for itself’; that is to say, fearing in the face of something, is in each case, a fearing about; therein lies the character of fear as mood and as affect. When one’s Being-in-the-world has been threatened and it concerns itself with the ready-to-hand, it does so as a factical potentiality-for-Being of its own. In the face of this potentiality one backs away in bewilderment, and this kind of forgetting oneself is what constitutes the existential-temporal meaning of fear. Aristotle rightly defines “fear” as lype tis he tarache – as “a kind of depression or bewilderment”. This depression forces Dasein back to its thrownness, but in such a way that this thrownness gets quite closed off. The bewilderment is based upon a forgetting. When one forgets and backs away in the face of a factical potentiality-for-Being which is resolute, one clings to those possibilities of self-preservation and evasion which one has already discovered circumspectively beforehand. When concern is afraid, it leaps from next to next, because it forgets itself and therefore does not take hold of any definite possibility. Every ‘possible’ possibility offers itself, and this means that the impossible ones do so too. The man who fears, does not stop with any of these; his ‘environment’ does not disappear, but it is encountered without his knowing his way about in it any longer. This bewildered making-present of the first thing that comes into one’s head, is something that belongs with forgetting oneself in fear. It is well known, for instance, that the inhabitants of a burning house will often ‘save’ the most indifferent things that are most closely ready-to-hand. When one has forgotten oneself and makes present a jumble of hovering possibilities, one thus makes possible that bewilderment which goes to make up the mood-character of fear. The having forgotten which goes with such bewilderment modifies the awaiting too and gives it the character of a depressed or bewildered awaiting which is distinct from any pure expectation. [SZ:342] BTMR §68 How is the temporality of anxiety related to that of fear? We have called the phenomenon of anxiety a basic state-of-mind. Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its ownmost Being-thrown and reveals the uncanniness of everyday familiar Being-in-the-world. Anxiety, like fear, has its character formally determined by something in the face of which one is anxious and something about which one is anxious. But our analysis has shown that these two phenomena coincide. This does not mean that their structural characters are melted away into one another, as if anxiety were anxious neither in the face of anything nor about anything. Their coinciding means rather that the entity by which both these structures are filled in [das sie erfüllende Seiende] is the same – namely Dasein. In particular, that in the face of which one has anxiety is not encountered as something definite with which one can concern oneself; the threatening does not come from what is ready-to-hand or PRESENT-AT-HAND, but rather from the fact that neither of these ‘says’ anything any longer. Environmental entities no longer have any involvement. The world in which I exist has sunk into insignificance; and the world which is thus disclosed is one in which entities can be freed only in the character of having no involvement. Anxiety is anxious in the face of the “nothing” of the world; but this does not mean that in anxiety we experience something like the absence of what is PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world. The PRESENT-AT-HAND must be encountered in just such a way that it does not have any involvement whatsoever, but can show itself in an empty mercilessness. This implies, however, that our concernful awaiting finds nothing in terms of which it might be able to understand itself; it clutches at the “nothing” of the world; but when our understanding has come up against the world, it is brought to Being-in-the-world as such through anxiety. Being-in-the-world, however, is both what anxiety is anxious in-the-face-of and what it is anxious about. To be anxious in-the-face-of ... does not have the character of an expecting or of any kind of awaiting. That in-the-face-of which one has anxiety is indeed already ‘there’ – namely, Dasein itself. In that case, does not anxiety get constituted by a future? Certainly; but not by the inauthentic future of awaiting. [SZ:343] BTMR §68 Curiosity is a distinctive tendency of Dasein’s Being, in accordance with which Dasein concerns itself with a potentiality-for-seeing. Like the concept of sight, ‘seeing’ will not be restricted to awareness through ‘the eyes of the body’. Awareness in the broader sense lets what is ready-to-hand and what is PRESENT-AT-HAND be encountered ‘bodily’ in themselves with regard to the way they look. Letting them be thus encountered is grounded in a Present. This Present gives us in general the ecstatical horizon within which entities can have bodily presence. Curiosity, however, does not make present the PRESENT-AT-HAND in order to tarry alongside it and understand it; it seeks to see only in order to see and to have seen. As this making-present which gets entangled in itself, curiosity has an ecstatical unity with a corresponding future and a corresponding having been. The craving for the new is of course a way of proceeding towards something not yet seen, but in such a manner that the making-present seeks to extricate itself from awaiting. Curiosity is futural in a way which is altogether inauthentic, and in such a manner, moreover, that it does not await a possibility, but, in its craving, just desires such a possibility as something that is actual. Curiosity gets constituted by a making-present which is not held on to, but which, in merely making present,’ thereby seeks constantly to run away from the awaiting in which it is nevertheless ‘held’, though not held on to. The Present ‘arises or leaps away’ from the awaiting which belongs to it, and it does so in the sense [SZ:347] of running away from it, as we have just emphasized. But the making-present which ‘leaps away’ in curiosity is so little devoted to the ‘thing’ it is curious about, that when it obtains sight of anything it already looks away to what is coming next. The making-present which ‘arises or leaps away’ from the awaiting of a definite possibility which one has taken hold of, makes possible ontologically that not-tarrying which is distinctive of curiosity. The making-present does not ‘leap away’ from the awaiting in such a manner, as it were, that it detaches itself from that awaiting and abandons it to itself (if we understand this ontically). This ‘leaping-away’ is rather an ecstatical modification of awaiting, and of such a kind that the awaiting leaps after the making-present. The awaiting gives itself up, as it were; nor does it any longer let any inauthentic possibilities of concern come towards it from that with which it concerns itself, unless these are possibilities only for a making-present which is not held on to. When the awaiting is ecstatically modified by the making-present which leaps away, so that it becomes an awaiting which leaps after, this modification is the existential-temporal condition for the possibility of distraction. BTMR §68 The ecstatical unity of temporality – that is, the unity of the ‘outsideof-itself’ in the raptures of the future, of what has been, and of the Present – is the condition for the possibility that there can be an entity which exists as its “there”. The entity which bears the title “Being-there” is one that has been ‘cleared’. The light which constitutes this clearedness [Gelichtetheit] of Dasein, is not something ontically PRESENT-AT-HAND as a power or source for a radiant brightness occurring in the entity on occasion. That by which this entity is essentially cleared – in other words, that which makes it both ‘open’ for itself and ‘bright’ for itself – is what we have defined as “care”, in advance of any ‘temporal’ Interpretation. In care is grounded the full disclosedness of the “there”. Only by this clearedness is any illuminating or illumining, any awareness, ‘seeing’, or having of something, made possible. We understand the light of this clearedness only if we are not seeking some power implanted in us and PRESENT-AT-HAND, but are interrogating the whole constitution of Dasein’sBeing – namely, care – and are interrogating it as to the unitary basis for its existential possibility. Ecstatical temporality clears the “there” primordially. It is what primarily regulates the possible unity of all Dasein’s existential structures. [SZ:351] BTMR §69 In the first instance our analysis of the temporality of concern sticks to the mode of having to do with the ready-to-hand circumspectively. Our analysis then pursues the existential-temporal possibility that circumspective concern may be modified into a discovering of entities within-the-world in the sense of certain possibilities of scientific research, and discovering them ‘merely’ by looking at them. Our Interpretation of the temporality of Being alongside what is ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world – Being alongside circumspectively as well as with theoretical concern – shows us at the same time how this temporality is already the advance condition for that possibility of Being-in-the-world in which Being alongside entities within-the-world is grounded. If we take the temporal Constitution of Being-in-the-world as a theme for analysis, we are led to the following questions: in what way is anything like a world possible at all? in what sense is the world? what does the world transcend, and how does it do so? how are ‘independent’ [“unabhängige”) entities within-the-world ‘connected’ [“hängt” ... “zusammen”] with the transcending world? To expound these questions ontologically is not to answer them. On the contrary, what such an exposition accomplishes is the clarification of those structures with regard to which the problem of transcendence must be raised – a clarification which is necessary beforehand. In the existential-temporal Interpretation of Being-in-the-world, three things will be considered: (a) the temporality of circumspective concern; (b) the temporal meaning of the way in which circumspective concern becomes modified into theoretical knowledge of what is PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world; (c) the temporal problem of the transcendence of the world. [SZ:352] BTMR §69 How are we to obtain the right point of view for analysing the temporality of concern? We have called concernful Being alongside the ‘world’ our “dealings in and with the environment”. As phenomena which are examples of Being alongside, we have chosen the using, manipulation, and producing of the ready-to-hand, and the deficient and undifferentiated modes of these; that is, we have chosen ways of Being alongside what belongs to one’s everyday needs. In.this kind of concern Dasein’s authentic existence too maintains itself, even when for such existence this concern is ‘a matter of indifference’. The ready-to-hand things with which we concern ourselves are not the causes of our concern, as if this were to arise only by the effects of entities within-the-world. Being alongside the ready-to-hand cannot be explained ontically in terms of the ready-to-hand itself, nor can the ready-to-hand be derived contrariwise from this kind of Being. But neither are concern, as a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein, and that with which we concern ourselves, as something ready-to-hand within-the-world, just PRESENT-AT-HAND together. All the same, a ‘connection’ subsists between them. That which is dealt with, if rightly understood, sheds light upon concernful dealings themselves. And furthermore, if we miss the phenomenal structure of what is dealt with, then we fail to recognize the existential constitution of dealing. Of course we have already made an essential gain for the analysis of those entities which we encounter as closest to us, if their specific character as equipment does not get passed over. But we must understand further that concernful dealings never dwell with any individual item of equipment. Our using and manipulating of any definite item of equipment still remains oriented towards some equipmental context. If, for instance, we are searching for some equipment which we have ‘misplaced’, then what we have in mind is not merely what we are searching for, or even primarily this; nor do we have it in mind in an isolated ‘act’; but the range of the equipmental totality has already been discovered beforehand. Whenever we ‘go to work’ and seize hold of something, we do not push out from the “nothing” and come upon some item of equipment which has been presented to us in isolation; in laying hold of an item of equipment, we come back to it from whatever work-world has already been disclosed. BTMR §69 [SZ:355] And how is it possible to ‘ascertain’ what is missing [Fehlendem] – that is to say, un-ready-to-hand, not just ready-to-hand in an unmanageable way? That which is un-ready-to-hand is discovered circumspectively when we miss it [im Vermissen]. The ‘affirmation’ that something is not PRESENT-AT-HAND, is founded upon our missing it; and both our missing it and our affirmation have their own existential presuppositions. Such missing is by no means a not-making-present [Nichtgegenwärtigen]; it is rather a deficient mode of the Present in the sense of the making-unpresent [Ungegenwärtigens] of something which one has expected or which one has’ always had at one’s disposal. If, when one circumspectively lets something be involved, one were not ‘from the outset’ awaiting the object of one’s concern, and if such awaiting did not temporalize itself in a unity with a making-present, then Dasein could never ‘find’ that something is missing [fehlt]. BTMR §69 [SZ:357] Corresponding to the stage of our study at which we have now arrived, a further restriction will be imposed upon our Interpretation of the theoretical attitude. We shall investigate only the way in which circumspective concern with the ready-to-hand changes over into an exploration of what we come across as PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world; and we shall be guided by the aim of penetrating to the temporal Constitution of Being-in-the-world in general. BTMR §69 Circumspection operates in the involvement-relationships of the context of equipment which is ready-to-hand. Moreover, it is subordinate to the guidance of a more or less explicit survey of the equipmental totality of the current equipment-world and of the public environment which belongs to it. This survey is not just one in which things that are PRESENT-AT-HAND are subsequently scraped together. What is essential to it is that one should have a primary understanding of the totality of involvements within which factical concern always takes its start. Such a survey illumines one’s concern, and receives its ‘light’ from that potentiality-for-Being on the part of Dasein for the sake of which concern exists as care. In one’s current using and manipulating, the concernful circumspection which does this ‘surveying’, brings the ready-to-hand closer to Dasein, and does so by interpreting what has been sighted. This specific way of bringing the object of concern close by interpreting it circumspectively, we call “deliberating” [Überlegung]. The scheme peculiar to this is the ‘if – then’; if this or that, for instance, is to be produced, put to use, or averted, then some ways and means, circumstances, or opportunities will be needed. Circumspective deliberation illumines Dasein’s current factical situation in the environment with which it concerns itself. Accordingly, such deliberation never merely ‘affirms’ that some entity is PRESENT-AT-HAND or has such and such properties. Moreover, deliberation can be performed even when that which is brought close in it circumspectively is not palpably ready-to-hand and does not have presence within the closest range. Bringing the environment closer in circumispective deliberation has the existential meaning of a making present; for envisaging is only a mode of this. In envisaging, one’s deliberation catches sight directly of that which is needed but which is un-ready-to-hand. Circumspection which envisages does not relate itself to ‘mere representations’. [SZ:359] BTMR §69 Why is it that what we are talking about – the heavy hammer – shows itself differently when our way of talking is thus modified? Not because we are keeping our distance from manipulation, nor because we are just looking away [absehen] from the equipmental character of this entity, but rather because we are looking at [ansehen] the ready-to-hand thing which we encounter, and looking at it “in a new way’ as something presentat-hand. The understanding of Being by which our concernful dealings with entities within-the-world have been guided has changed over. But if, instead of deliberating circumspectively about something ready-to-hand, we ‘take’ it as something PRESENT-AT-HAND, has a scientific attitude thus constituted itself? Moreover, even that which is ready-to-hand can be made a theme for scientific investigation and determination, for instance when one studies someone’s environment – his milieu – in the context of a historiological biography. The context of equipment that is ready-to-hand in an everyday manner, its historical emergence and utilization, and its factical role in Dasein – all these are objects for the science of economics. The ready-to-hand can become the ‘Object’ of a science without having to lose its character as equipment. A modification of our understanding of Being does not seem to be necessarily constitutive for the genesis of the theoretical attitude ‘towards Things’. Certainly not, if this “modification” is to imply a change in the kind of Being which, in understanding the entity before us, we understand it to possess. BTMR §69 In our first description of the genesis of the theoretical attitude out of circumspection, we have made basic a way of theoretically grasping entities within-the-world – physical Nature – in which the modification of our understanding of Being is tantamount to a change-over. In the ‘physical’ assertion that ‘the hammer is heavy’ we overlook not only the tool-character of the entity we encounter, but also something that belongs to any ready-to-hand equipment: its place. Its place becomes a matter of indifference. This does not mean that what is PRESENT-AT-HAND loses its ‘location’ altogether. But its place becomes a spatio-temporal position, a ‘world-point’, which is in no way distinguished from any other. This implies not only that the multiplicity of places of equipment ready-to-hand within the confines of the environment becomes modified to a pure multiplicity of positions, but that the entities of the environment are altogether released from such confinement [entschränkt]. The aggregate of the PRESENT-AT-HAND becomes the theme. [SZ:362] BTMR §69 The classical example for the historical development of a science and even for its ontological genesis, is the rise of mathematical physics. What is decisive for its development does not lie in its rather high esteem for the observation of ‘facts’, nor in its ‘application’ of mathematics in determining the character of natural processes; it lies rather in the way in which Nature herself is mathematically projected. In this projection something constantly PRESENT-AT-HAND (matter) is uncovered beforehand, and the horizon is opened so that one may be guided by looking at those constitutive items in it which are quantitatively determinable (motion, force, location, and time). Only ‘in the light’ of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a ‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and delimited in terms of this projection. The ‘grounding’ of ‘factual science’ was possible only because the researchers understood that in principle there are no ‘bare facts’. In the mathematical projection of Nature, moreover, what is decisive is not primarily the mathematical as such; what is decisive is that this projection discloses something that is a priori. Thus the paradigmatic character of mathematical natural science does not lie in its exactitude or in the fact that it is binding for ‘Everyman’; it consists rather in the fact that the entities which it takes as its theme are discovered in it in the only way in which entities can be discovered – by the prior projection of their state of Being. When the basic concepts of that understanding of Being by which we are guided have been worked out, the clues of its methods, the structure of its way of conceiving things, the possibility of truth and certainty which belongs to it, the ways in which things get grounded or proved, the mode in which it is binding for us, and the way it is communicated – all these will be Determined. The totality of these items constitutes the full existential conception of science. [SZ:363] BTMR §69 The scientific projection of any entities which we have somehow encountered already lets their kind of Being be understood explicitly and in such a manner that it thus becomes manifest what ways are possible for the pure discovery of entities within-the-world. The Articulation of the understanding of Being, the delimitation of an area of subject-matter (a delimitation guided by this understanding), and the sketching-out of the way of conceiving which is appropriate to such entities – all these belong to the totality of this projecting; and this totality is what we call “thematizing”. Its aim is to free the entities we encounter within-the-world, and to free them in such a way that they can ‘throw themselves against’ a pure discovering – that is, that they can become “Objects”. Thematizing Objectifies. It does not first ‘posit’ the entities, but frees them so that one can interrogate them and determine their character ‘Objectively’. Being which Objectifies and which is alongside the PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world, is characterized by a distinctive kind of making-present. This making-present is distinguished from the Present of circumspection in that – above all – the kind of discovering which belongs to the science in question awaits solely the discoveredness of the PRESENT-AT-HAND. This awaiting of discoveredness has its existentiell basis in a resoluteness by which Dasein projects itself towards its potentiality-for-Being in the ‘truth’. This projection is possible because Being-in-the-truth makes up a definite way in which Dasein may exist. We shall not trace further how science has its source in authentic existence. It is enough now if we understand that the thematizing of entities within-the-world presupposes Being-in-the-world as the basic state of Dasein, and if we understand how it does so. BTMR §69 If the thematizing of the PRESENT-AT-HAND – the scientific projection of Nature – is to become possible, Dasein must transcend the entities thematized. Transcendence does not consist in Objectifying, but is presupposed by it. If, however, the thematizing of the PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world is a change-over from the concern which discovers by circumspection, then one’s ‘practical’ Being alongside the ready-to-hand is something which a transcendence of Dasein must already underlie. [SZ:364] BTMR §69 Just as the Present arises in the unity of the temporalizing of temporality out of the future and having been, the horizon of a Present temporalizes itself equiprimordially with those of the future and of having been. In so far as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too. In temporalizing itself with regard to its Being as temporality, Dasrin is essentially ‘in a world’, by reason of the ecstatico-horizonal constitution of that temporality. The world is neither PRESENT-AT-HAND nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality. It ‘is’, with the “outside-of-itself” of the ecstases, ‘there’. If no Dasein exists, no world is ‘there’ either. BTMR §69 The world is already presupposed in one’s Being alongside the ready-to-hand concernfully and factically, in one’s thematizing of the PRESENT-AT-HAND, and in one’s discovering of this latter entity by Objectification; that is to say, all these are possible only as ways of Being-in-the-world. Having its ground [gründend] in the horizonal unity of ecstatical temporality, the world is transcendent. It must already have been ecstatically disclosed so that in terms of it entities within-the-world can be encountered. Temporality already maintains itself ecstatically within the horizons of its ecstases; and in temporalizing itself, it comes back to those entities which are encountered in the “there”. With Dasein’s factical existence, entities within-the-world are already encountered too. The fact that such entities are discovered along with Dasein’s own “there” of existence, is not left to Dasein’s discretion. Only what it discovers and discloses on occasion, in what direction it does so, how and how far it does so – only these are matters for Dasein’s freedom, even if always within the limitations of its thrownness. [SZ:366] BTMR §69 [SZ:367] If in the course of our existential Interpretation we were to talk about Dasein’s having a ‘spatio-temporal’ character, we could not mean that this entity is PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in space and also in time’; this needs no further discussion. Temporality is the meaning of the Being of care. Dasein’s constitution and its ways to be are possible ontologically only on the basis of temporality, regardless of whether this entity occurs ‘in time’ or not. Hence Dasein’s specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality. On the other hand, the demonstration that this spatiality is existentially possible only through temporality, cannot aim either at deducing space from time or at dissolving it into pure time. If Dasein’s spatiality is ‘embraced’ by temporality in the sense of being existentially founded upon it, then this connection between them (which is to be clarified in what follows) is also different from the priority of time over space in Kant’s sense. To say that our empirical representations of what is PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in space’ run their course ‘in time’ as psychical occurrences, so that the ‘physical’ occurs mediately ‘in time’ also, is not to give an existential-ontological Interpretation of space as a form of intuition, but rather to establish ontically that what is psychically PRESENT-AT-HAND runs its course ‘in time’. BTMR §70 We must now make an existential-analytical inquiry as to the temporal conditions, for the possibility of the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein – the spatiality upon which in turn is founded the uncovering of space within-the-world. We must first remember in what way Dasein is spatial. Dasein can be spatial only as care, in the sense of existing as factically falling. Negatively this means that Dasein is never PRESENT-AT-HAND in space, not even proximally. Dasein does not fill up a bit of space as a Real Thing or item of equipment would, so that the boundaries dividing it from the surrounding space would themselves just define that space spatially. Dasein takes space in; this is to be understood literally. It is by no means just PRESENT-AT-HAND in a bit of space which its body fills up. In existing, it has already made room for its own leeway. It determines its own location in such a manner that it comes back from the space it has made room for to the ‘place’ which it has reserved. To be able to say that Dasein is PRESENT-AT-HAND at a position in space, we must first take [auffassen] this entity in a way which is ontologically inappropriate. Nor does the distinction between the ‘spatiality’ of an extended Thing and that of Dasein lie in the fact that Dasein knows about space; for taking space in [das Raum-einnehmen] is so far from identical with a ‘representing’ of the spatial, that it is presupposed by it instead. Neither may Dasein’s spatiality be interpreted as an imperfection which adheres to existence by reason of the fatal ‘linkage of the spirit to a body’. On the contrary, because Dasein is ‘spiritual’, and only because of this, it can be spatial in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal Thing. [SZ:368] BTMR §70 Dasein’s making room for itself is constituted by directionality and de-severance. How is anything of this sort existentially possible on the basis of Dasein’s temporality? The function of temporality as the foundation for Dasein’s spatiality will be indicated briefly, but no more than is necessary for our later discussions of the ontological meaning of the ‘coupling together’ of space and time. To Dasein’s making room for itself belongs the self-directive discovery of something like a region. By this expression what we have in mind in the first instance is the “whither” for the possible belonging-somewhere of equipment which is ready-to-hand environmentally and which can be placed. Whenever one comes across equipment, handles it, or moves it around or out of the way, some region has already been discovered. Concernful Being-in-the-world is directional – self-directive. Belonging-somewhere has an essential relationship to involvement. It always Determines itself factically in terms of the involvement-context of the equipment with which one concerns oneself. Relationships of involvement are intelligible only within the horizon of a world that has been disclosed. Their horizonal character, moreover, is what first makes possible the specific horizon of the “whither” of belonging-somewhere regionally. The self-directive discovery of a region is grounded in an ecstatically retentive awaiting of the “hither” and “thither” that are possible. Making room for oneself is a directional awaiting of a region, and as such it is equiprimordially a bringing-close (de-severing) of the ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND. Out of the region that has been discovered beforehand, concern comes back deseverantly to that which is closest. Both bringing-close and the estimating and measurement of distances within that which has been de-severed and is PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world, are grounded in a making-present belonging to the unity of that temporality in which directionality too becomes possible. [SZ:369] BTMR §70 Bringing-close makes possible the kind of handling and Being-busy which is ‘absorbed in the thing one is handling’ [“in der Sache aufgehende”]; and in such bringing-close, the essential structure of care – falling – makes itself known. In falling, and therefore also in the bringing-close which is founded ‘in the present’, the forgetting which awaits, leaps after the Present; this is what is distinctive in the existential-temporal Constitution of falling. When we make something present by bringing it close from its “thence” [seinem Dorther], the making-present forgets the “yonder” [das Dort] and loses itself in itself. Thus it comes about that if ‘observation’ of entities within-the-world commences in such a making-present, the illusion arises that ‘at first’ only a Thing is PRESENT-AT-HAND, here of course, but indefinitely – in a space in general. BTMR §70 Only on the basis of its ecstatico-horizonal temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space. The world is not PRESENT-AT-HAND in space; yet only within a world does space let itself be discovered. The ecstatical temporality of the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein, makes it intelligible that space is independent of time; but on the other hand, this same temporality also makes intelligible Dasein’s ‘dependence’ on space – a ‘dependence’ which manifests itself in the well-known phenomenon that both Dasein’s interpretation of itself and the whole stock of significations which belong to language in general are dominated through and through by ‘spatial representations’. This priority of the spatial in the Articulation of concepts and significations has its basis not in some specific power which space possesses, but in Dasein’s kind of Being. Temporality is essentially falling, and it loses itself in making present; not only does it understand itself circumspectively in terms of objects of concern which are ready-to-hand, but from those spatial relationships which making-present is constantly meeting in the ready-to-hand as having presence, it takes its clues for Articulating that which has been understood and can be interpreted in the understanding in general. BTMR §70 The Being of this perseveringly changing connectedness of Experiences remains indefinite. But at bottom, whether one likes it or not, in this way of characterizing the connectedness of life, one has posited something PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in time’, though something that is obviously ‘un-Thinglike’. BTMR §72 Dasein does not exist as the sum of the momentary actualities of Experiences which come along successively and disappear. Nor is there a sort of framework which this succession gradually fills up. For how is such a framework to be PRESENT-AT-HAND, where, in each case, only the Experience one is having ‘right now’ is ‘actual’, and the boundaries of the framework – the birth which is past and the death which is only oncoming – lack actuality? At bottom, even in the ordinary way of taking the ‘connectedness of life’, one does not think of this as a framework drawn tense ‘outside’ of Dasein and spanning it round, but one rightly seeks this connectedness in Dasein itself. When, however, one tacitly regards this entity ontologically as something PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in time’, any attempt at an ontological characterization of the Being ‘between’ birth and death will break down. BTMR §72 Dasein does not fill up a track or stretch ‘of life’ – one which is somehow PRESENT-AT-HAND – with the phases of its momentary actualities. It stretches itself along in such a way that its own Being is constituted in advance as a stretching-along. The ‘between’ which relates to birth and death already lies in the Being of Dasein. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that Dasein ‘is’ actual in a point of time, and that, apart from this, it is ‘surrounded’ by the non-actuality of its birth and death. Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer PRESENT-AT-HAND; and death is just as far from having the kind of Being of something still outstanding, not yet PRESENT-AT-HAND but coming along. Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the ‘ends’ and their ‘between’ are, and they are in the only way which is possible on the basis of Dasein’s Being as care. Thrownness and that Being towards death in which one either flees it or anticipates it, form a unity; and in this unity birth and death are ‘connected’ in a manner characteristic of Dasein. As care, Dasein is the ‘between’. BTMR §72 In temporality, however, the constitutive totality of care has a possible basis for its unity. Accordingly it is within the horizon of Dasein’s temporal constitution that we must approach the ontological clarification of the ‘connectedness of life’ – that is to say, the stretching-along, the movement, and the persistence which are specific for Dasein. The movement [Bewegtheit] of existence is not the motion [Bewegung] of something PRESENT-AT-HAND. It is definable in terms of the way Dasein stretches along. The specific movement in which Dasein is stretched along and stretches itself along, we call its “historizing”. The question of Dasein’s ‘connectedness’ is the ontological problem of Dasein’s historizing. To lay bare the structure of historizing, and the existential-temporal conditions of its possibility, signifies that one has achieved an ontological understanding of historicality. BTMR §72 The expression ‘history’ has various significations with which one has in view neither the science of history nor even history as an Object, but this very entity itself, not necessarily Objectified. Among such significations, that in which this entity is understood as something past, may well be the pre-eminent usage. This signification is evinced in the kind of talk in which we say that something or other “already belongs to history”. Here ‘past’ means “no longer PRESENT-AT-HAND”, or even “still PRESENT-AT-HAND indeed, but without having any ‘effect’ on the ‘Present’”. Of course, the historical as that which is past has also the opposite signification, when we say, “One cannot get away from history.” Here, by “history”, we have in view that which is past, but which nevertheless is still having effects. Howsoever, the historical, as that which is past, is understood to be related to the ‘Present’ in the sense of what is actual ‘now’ and ‘today’, and to be related to it, either positively or privatively, in such a way as to have effects upon it. Thus ‘the past’ has a remarkable double meaning; the past belongs irretrievably to an earlier time; it belonged to the events of that time; and in spite of that, it can still be PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘now’ – for instance, the remains of a Greek temple. With the temple, a ‘bit of the past’ is still ‘in the present’. BTMR §73 The four significations are connected in that they relate to man as the ‘subject’ of events. How is the historizing character of such events to be defined? Is historizing a sequence of processes, an ever-changing emergence and disappearance of events? In what way does this historizing of history belong to Dasein? Is Dasein already factically ‘PRESENT-AT-HAND’ to begin with, so that on occasion it can get ‘into a history’? Does Dasein first become historical by getting intertwined with events and circumstances? Or is the Being of Dasein constituted first of all by historizing, so that anything like circumstances, events, and vicissitudes is ontologically possible only because Dasein is historical in its Being? Why is it that the function of the past gets particularly stressed when the Dasein which historizes ‘in time’ is characterized ‘temporally’? BTMR §73 The ‘antiquities’ preserved in museums (household gear, for example) belong to a ‘time which is past’; yet they are still PRESENT-AT-HAND in the ‘Present’. How far is such equipment historical, when it is not yet past? Is it historical, let us say, only because it has become an object of historiological interest, of antiquarian study or national lore? But such equipment can be a historiological object only because it is in itself somehow historical. We repeat the question: by what right do we call this entity “historical”, when it is not yet past? Or do these ‘Things’ have ‘in ‘themselves’ ‘something past’, even though they are still PRESENT-AT-HAND today? Then are these, which are PRESENT-AT-HAND, still what they were? [SZ:380] BTMR §73 Manifestly these ‘Things’ have altered. The gear has become fragile or worm-eaten ‘in the course of time’. But that specific character of the past which makes it something historical, does not lie in this transience, which continues even during the Being-present-at-hand of the equipment in the museum. What, then, is past in this equipment? What were these ‘Things’ which today they are no longer? They are still definite items of equipment for use; but they are out of use. Suppose, however, that they were still in use today, like many a household heirloom; would they then be not yet historical? All the same, whether they are in use or out of use, they are no longer, what they were. What is ‘past’? Nothing else than that world within which they belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world. That world is no longer. But what was formerly within-the-world with respect to that world is still PRESENT-AT-HAND. As equipment belonging to a world, that which is now still PRESENT-AT-HAND can belong nevertheless to the ‘past’. But what do we signify by saying of a world that it is no longer? A world is only in the manner of existing Dasein, which factically is as Being-in-the-world. BTMR §73 Thus the historical character of the antiquities that are still preserved is grounded in the ‘past’ of that Dasein to whose world they belonged. But according to this, only ‘past’ Dasein would be historical, not Dasein ‘in the present’. However, can Dasein be past at all, if we define ‘past’ as ‘now no longer either PRESENT-AT-HAND or ready-to-hand’? Manifestly, Dasein can never be past, not because Dasein is non-transient, but because it essentially can never be PRESENT-AT-HAND. Rather, if it is, it exists. A Dasein which no longer exists, however, is not past, in the ontologically strict sense; it is rather “having-been-there” [da-gewesen]. The antiquities which are still PRESENT-AT-HAND have a character of ‘the past,’ and of history by reason of the fact that they have belonged as equipment to a world that has been – the world of a Dasein that has been there – and that they have been derived from that world. This Dasein is what is primarily historical. But does Dasein first become historical in that it is no longer there? Or is it not historical precisely in so far as it factically exists? Is Dasein just something that “has been” in the sense of “having been there”, or has it been as something futural which is making present – that is to say, in the temporalizing of its temporality? [SZ:381] BTMR §73 From this provisional analysis of equipment which belongs to history and which is still PRESENT-AT-HAND though somehow ‘past’, it becomes plain that such entities are historical only by reason of their belonging to the world. But the world has an historical kind of Being because it makes up an ontological attribute of Dasein. It may be shown further that when one designates a time as ‘the past’, the meaning of this is not unequivocal; but ‘the past’ is manifestly distinct from one’s having been, with which we have become acquainted as something constitutive for the ecstatical unity of Dasein’s temporality. This, however, only makes the enigma ultimately more acute; why is it that the historical is determined predominantly by the ‘past’, or, to speak more appropriately, by the character of having-been, when that character is one that temporalizes itself equiprimordially with the Present and the future? BTMR §73 In analysing the historical character of equipment which is still presentat-hand, we have not only been led back to Dasein as that which is primarily historical; but at the same time we have been made to doubt whether the temporal characterization of the historical in general may be oriented primarily to the Being-in-time of anything PRESENT-AT-HAND. Entities do not become ‘more historical’ by being moved off into a past which is always farther and farther away, so that the oldest of them would be the most authentically historical. On the other hand, if the ‘temporal’ distance from “now and today” is of no primary constitutive significance for the historicality of entities that arc authentically historical, this is not because these entities are not ‘in time’ and are timeless, but because they exist temporally in so primordial a manner that nothing PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in time’, whether passing away or still coming along, could ever – by its ontological essence – be temporal in such a way. [SZ:382] BTMR §73 Indeed history is ‘neither the connectedness of motions in the alterations of Objects, nor a free-floating sequence of Experiences which ‘subjects’ have had. Does the historizing of history then pertain to the way subject and Object are ‘linked together’? Even if one assigns [zuweist] historizing to the subject-Object relation, we then have to ask what kind of Being belongs to this linkage as such, if this is what basically ‘historizes’. The thesis of Dasein’s historicality does not say that the worldless subject is historical, but that what is historical is the entity that exists as Being-in-the-world. The historizing of history is the historizing of Being-in-the-world. Dasein’s historicality is essentially the historicality of the world, which, on the basis of ecstatico-horizontal temporality, belongs to the temporalizing of that temporality. In so far as Dasein exists factically, it already encounters that which has been discovered within-the-world. With the existence of historical Being-in-the-world, what is ready-to-hand and what is PRESENT-AT-HAND have already, in every case, been incorporated into the history of the world. Equipment and work – for instance, books – have their fates’; buildings and institutions have their history. And even Nature is historical. It is not historical, to be sure, in so far as we speak of ‘natural history’; but Nature is historical as a countryside, as an area that has been colonized or exploited, as a battlefield, or as the site of a cult. These entities within-the-world are historical as such, and their history does not signify something ‘external’ which merely accompanies the ‘inner’ history of the ‘soul’. We call such entities “the world-historical”. Here we must notice that the expression ‘world-history’ which we have chosen and which is here understood ontologically, has a double signification. The expression signifies, for one thing, the historizing of the world in its essential existent unity with Dasein. At the same time, we have here in view the ‘historizing’ [SZ:389] within-the-world of what is ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND, in so far as entities within-the-world are, in every case, discovered with the factically existent world. The historical world is factical only as the world of entities within-the-world. That which ‘happens’ with equipment and work as such has its own character of movement, and this character has been completely obscure up till now. When, for instance, a ring gets ‘handed over’ to someone and ‘worn’, this is a kind of Being in which it does not simply suffer changes of location. The movement of historizing in which something ‘happens to something’ is not to be grasped in terms of motion as change of location. This holds for all worldhistorical ‘processes’, and events, and even, in a certain manner, for ‘natural catastrophes’. Quite apart from the fact that if we were to follow up the problem of the ontological structure of world-historical historizing, we would necessarily be transgressing the limits of our theme, we can refrain from this all the more because the very aim of this exposition is to lead us face to face with the ontological enigma of the movement of historizing in general. BTMR §75 We need only delimit that phenomenal range which we necessarily must also have in view ontologically when we talk of Dasein’s historicality. The transcendence of the world has a temporal foundation; and by reason of this, the world-historical is, in every case, already ‘Objectively’ there in the historizing of existing Being-in-the-world, without being grasped historiologically. And because factical Dasein, in falling, is absorbed in that with which it concerns itself, it understands its history worldhistorically in the first instance. And because, further, the ordinary understanding of Being understands ‘Being’ as presence-at-hand without further differentiation, the Being of the world-historical is experienced and interpreted in the sense of something PRESENT-AT-HAND which comes along, has presence, and then disappears. And finally, because the meaning of Being in general is held to be something simply self-evident, the question about the kind of Being of the world-historical and about the movement of historizing in general has ‘really’ just the barren circumstantiality of a verbal sophistry. BTMR §75 Everyday Dasein has been dispersed into the many kinds of things which daily ‘come to pass’. The opportunities and circumstances which concern keeps ‘tactically’ awaiting in advance, have ‘fate’ as their outcome. In terms of that with which inauthentically existing Dasein concerns itself, it first computes its history. In so doing, it is driven about by its ‘affairs’. So if it wants to come to itself, it must first pull itself together from the dispersion and disconnectedness of the very things that have ‘come to [SZ:390] pass’; and because of this, it is only then that there at last arises from the horizon of the understanding which belongs to inauthentic historicality, the question of how one is to establish a ‘connectedness’ of Dasein if one does so in the sense of ‘Experiences’ of a subject – Experiences which are ‘also’ PRESENT-AT-HAND. The possibility that this horizon for the question should be the dominant one is grounded in the irresoluteness which goes to make up the essence of the Self’s in-constancy. BTMR §75 Remains, monuments, and records that are still PRESENT-AT-HAND, are possible ‘material’ for the concrete disclosure of the Dasein which has-been-there. Such things can turn into historiological material only because, in accordance with their own kind of Being, they have a world-historical character. And they become such material only when they have been understood in advance with regard to their within-the-world-ness. The world that has already been projected is given a definite character by way of an Interpretation of the world-historical material we have ‘received’. Our going back to ‘the past’ does not first get its start from the acquisition, sifting, and securing of such material; these activities presuppose historical Being towards the Dasein that has-been-there – that is to say, they presuppose the historicality of the historian’s existence. This is the existential foundation for historiology as a science, even for its most trivial and ‘mechanical’ procedures. BTMR §76 If one has an interest in understanding historicality, one is brought to the task of working out a ‘generic differentiation between the ontical and the Historical’. The fundamental aim of the ‘philosophy of life’ 1 is tied up with this. Nevertheless, the formulation of the question needs to be radicalized in principle. How are we to get historicality into our grasp philosophically as distinguished from the ontical, and conceive it ‘categorially’, except by bringing both the ‘ontical’ and the ‘Historical’ into a more primordial unity, so that they can be compared and distinguished? But that is possible only if we attain the following insights: (1) that the question of historicality is an ontological question about the state of Being of historical entities; (2) that the question of the ontical is the ontological question of the state of Being of entities other than Dasein – of what is PRESENT-AT-HAND in the widest sense; (3) that the ontical is only one domain of entities. The idea of Being embraces both the ‘ontical’ and the ‘Historical’. It is this idea which must let itself be ‘generically differentiated’. BTMR §77 Everyday Dasein, the Dasein which takes time, comes across time proximally in what it encounters within-the-world as ready-to-hand and PRESENT-AT-HAND. The time which it has thus ‘experienced’ is understood within the horizon of that way of understanding Being which is the closest for Dasein; that is, it is understood as something which is itself somehow PRESENT-AT-HAND. How and why Dasein comes to develop the ordinary conception of time, must be clarified in terms of its state-of-Being as concerning itself with time – a state-of-Being with a temporal foundation. The ordinary conception of time owes its origin to a way in which primordial time has been levelled off. By demonstrating that this is the source of the ordinary conception, we shall justify our earlier Interpretation of temporality as primordial time. BTMR §78 Wherein is such datability grounded, and to what does it essentially belong? Can any more superfluous question indeed be raised? It is ‘well known’ that what we have in mind with the ‘now that ...’ is a ‘point of time’. The ‘now’ is time. Incontestably, the ‘now that ...’, the ‘then, when ...’, and the ‘on that former occasion’ are things that we understand. And we also understand in a certain way that these are all connected with ‘time’. But that with this sort of thing one has ‘time’ itself in mind, and how this is possible, and what ‘time’ signifies – these are matters of which we have no conception in our ‘natural’ understanding of the ‘now’ and so forth. Is it indeed obvious, then, that something like the ‘then’, the ‘now’, and the ‘on that former occasion’, is something we ‘understand without further ado’, and ‘quite naturally’ bring to expression? Where do we get this ‘now that ...’? Have we found this sort of thing among entities within-the-world – among those that are PRESENT-AT-HAND? Manifestly not. Then have we found it at all? Have we ever set ourselves to search for this and establish its character? We avail ourselves of it ‘at any time’ without having taken it over explicitly, and we constantly make use of it even though we do not always make utterances about it. Even in the most trivial, offhand kind of everyday talk (‘It’s cold’, for instance) we also have in mind a ‘now that ...’. Why is it that when Dasein addresses itself to the objects of its concern, it also expresses a ‘now that ...’, a ‘then, when...’, or an ‘on that former occasion, when...’, even though it does so mostly without uttering it? First, because in addressing itself to something interpretatively, it expresses itself too; that is to say, it expresses its Being alongside the ready-to-hand – a Being which understands circumspectively and which uncovers the ready-to-hand and lets it be encountered. And secondly, because this very addressing and discussing – which interprets itself also – is based upon a making-present and is possible only as such. BTMR §79 ‘Public time’ turns out to be the kind of time ‘in which’ the ready-to-hand and the PRESENT-AT-HAND within-the-world are encountered. This requires that these entities which are not of the character of Dasein, shall be called entities “within-time”. The Interpretation of within-time-ness gives us a more primordial insight into the essence of ‘public time’ and likewise makes it possible to define its ‘Being’. BTMR §80 The Being of Dasein is care. This entity exists fallingly as something that has been thrown. Abandoned to the ‘world’ which is discovered with its factical “there”, and concernfully submitted to it, Dasein awaits its potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world; it awaits it in such a manner that it ‘reckons’ on and ‘reckons’ with whatever has an involvement for the sake of this potentiality-for-Being – an involvement which, in the end, is a distinctive one. Everyday circumspective Being-in-the-world needs the possibility of sight (and this means that it needs brightness) if it is to deal concerrifully with what is ready-to-hand within the PRESENT-AT-HAND. With the factical disclosedness of Dasein’s world, Nature has been uncovered for Dasein. In its thrownness Dasein has been surrendered to the changes of day and night. Day with its brightness gives it the possibility of sight; night takes this away. BTMR §80 Saying “now”, however, is the discursive Articulation of a making-present which temporalizes itself in a unity with a retentive awaiting. The dating which is performed when one uses a clock, turns out to be a distinctive way in which something PRESENT-AT-HAND is made present. Dating does not simply relate to something PRESENT-AT-HAND; this kind of relating has itself the character of measuring. Of course the number which we get by measuring can be read off immediately. But this implies that when a [SZ:417] stretch is to be measured, we understand that our standard is, in a way, contained in it; that is, we determine the frequency of its presence in that stretch. Measuring is constituted temporally when a standard which has presence is made present in a stretch which has presence. The idea of a standard implies unchangingness; this means that for everyone at any time the standard, in its stability, must be PRESENT-AT-HAND. When the time with which one concerns oneself is dated by measuring, one interprets it by looking at something PRESENT-AT-HAND and making it present – something which would not become accessible as a standard or as something measured except by our making it present in this distinctive manner. Because the making-present of something having presence has a special priority in dating by measuring, the measurement in which one reads off the time by the clock also expresses itself with special emphasis in the “now”. Thus when time is measured, it is made public in such a way that it is encountered on each occasion and at any time for everyone as ‘now and now and now’. This time which is ‘universally’ accessible in clocks is something that we come across as a PRESENT-AT-HAND multiplicity of “nows”, so to speak, though the measuring of time is not directed thematically towards time as such. BTMR §80 The time which is made public by our measuring it, does not by any means turn into space because we date it in terms of spatial measurementrelations. Still less is what is existential-ontologically essential in the measuring of time to be sought in the fact that dated ‘time’ is determined numerically in terms of spatial stretches and in changes in the location of some spatial Thing. What is ontologically decisive lies rather in the specific kind of making-present which makes measurement possible. Dating [SZ:418] in terms of what is ‘spatially’ PRESENT-AT-HAND is so far from a spatializing of time that this supposed spatialization signifies nothing else than that an entity which is PRESENT-AT-HAND for everyone in every “now” is made present in its own presence. Measuring time is essentially such that it is. necessary to say “now”; but in obtaining the measurement, we, as it were, forget what has been measured as such, so that nothing is to be found except a number and a stretch. BTMR §80 The time ‘in which’ the PRESENT-AT-HAND is in motion or at rest is not ‘Objective’, if what we mean by that is the Being-present-at-hand-in-itself of entities encountered within-the-world. But just as little is time ‘subjective’, if by this we understand Being-present-at-hand and occurring in a ‘subject’. World-time is ‘more Objective’ than any possible Object because, with the disclosedness of the world, it already becomes ‘Objectified’ in an ecstatico-horizonal manner as the condition for the possibility of entities within-the-world. Thus, contrary to Kant’s opinion, one comes across world-time. just as immediately in the physical as in the psychical, and not just roundabout by way of the psychical. ‘Time’ first shows itself in the sky – precisely where one comes across it when one regulates oneself naturally according to it – so that ‘time’ even becomes identified with the sky. BTMR §80 World-time, moreover, is also ‘more subjective’ than any possible subject; for it is what first makes possible the Being of the factically existing Self – that Being which, as is now well understood, is the meaning of care. ‘Time’ is PRESENT-AT-HAND neither in the ‘subject’ nor in the ‘Object’, neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’; and it ‘is’ ‘earlier’ than any subjectivity or Objectivity, because it presents the condition for the very possibility of this ‘earlier’. Has it then any ‘Being’? And if not, is it then a mere phantom, or is it something that has ‘more Being’ [“sciender”] than any possible entity? Any investigation which goes further in the direction of questions such as these, will come up against the same ‘boundary’ which has already set itself up to our provisional discussion of the connection between truth and Being. In whatever way these questions may be answered in what follows – or in whatever way they may first of all get primordially formulated – we must first understand that temporality, as ecstatico-horizonal, temporalizes something like world-time, which constitutes a within-time-ness of the ready-to-hand and the PRESENT-AT-HAND. But in that case such entities can never be designated as ‘temporal’ in the strict sense. Like every entity with a character other than that of Dasein, they are non-temporal, whether they Really occur, arise and pass away, or subsist ‘ideally’. [SZ:420] BTMR §80 When the concern which gives itself time reckons with time, the more ‘naturally’ it does so, the less it dwells at the expressed time as such; on the contrary, it is lost in the equipment with which it concerns itself, which in each case has a time of its own. When concern determines the time and assigns it, the more ‘naturally’ it does so – that is, the less it is directed towards treating time as such thematically – all the more does the Being which is alongside the object of concern (the Being which falls as it makes present) say unhesitatingly (whether or not anything is uttered) “now” or “then” or “on that former occasion”. Thus for the ordinary understanding of time, time shows itself as a sequence of “nows” which are constantly ‘PRESENT-AT-HAND’, simultaneously passing away and coming along. Time is understood as a succession, as a ‘flowing stream’ of “nows”, as the ‘course of time’. What is implied by such an interpretation of the world-time with which we concern ourselves? [SZ:422] BTMR §81 It is no accident that world-time thus gets levelled off and covered up by the way time is ordinarily understood. But just because the everyday interpretation of time maintains itself by looking solely in the direction of concernful common sense, and understands only what ‘shows’ itself within the common-sense horizon, these structures must escape it. That which gets counted when one measures time concernfully, the “now”, gets co-understood in one’s concern with the PRESENT-AT-HAND and the ready-to-hand. Now so far as this concern with time comes back to the time itself which has been co-understood, and in so far as it ‘considers’ that time, it sees the “nows” (which indeed are also somehow ‘there’) within the horizon of that understanding-of-Being by which this concern is itself constantly guided. Thus the “nows” are in a certain manner co-present-at-hand: that is, entities are encountered, and so too is the “now”. Although it is not said explicitly that the “nows” are PRESENT-AT-HAND in the same way as Things, they still get ‘seen’ ontologically within the horizon of the idea of presence-at-hand. The “nows” pass away, and those which have passed away make up the past. The “nows” come along, and those which are coming along define the ‘future’. The ordinary interpretation of world-time as now-time never avails itself of the horizon by which such things as world, significance, and datability can be made accessible. These structures necessarily remain covered up, all the more so because this covering-up is reinforced by the way in which the ordinary interpretation develops its characterization of time conceptually. [SZ:423] BTMR §81 The sequence of “nows” is uninterrupted and has no gaps. No matter how ‘far’ we proceed in ‘dividing up’ the “now”, it is always now. The continuity of time is seen within the horizon of something which is indissolubly PRESENT-AT-HAND. When one takes one’s ontological orientation from something that is constantly PRESENT-AT-HAND, one either looks for the problem of the Continuity of time or one leaves this impasse alone. In either case the specific structure of world-time must remain covered up. Together with datability (which has an ecstatical foundation) it has been spanned. The spannedness of time is not to be understood in terms of the horizonal stretching-along of the ecstatical unity of that temporality which has made itself public in one’s concern with time. The fact that in every “now”, no matter how momentary, it is in each case already now, must be conceived in terms of something which is ‘earlier’ still and from which every “now” stems: that is to say, it must be conceived in terms of the ecstatical stretching-along of that temporality which is alien to any Continuity of something PRESENT-AT-HAND but which, for its part, presents the condition for the possibility of access to anything continuous that is PRESENT-AT-HAND. BTMR §81 [SZ:424] The principal thesis of the ordinary way of interpreting time – namely, that time is ‘infinite’ – makes manifest most impressively the way in which world-time and accordingly temporality in general have been levelled off and covered up by such an interpretation. It is held that time presents itself proximally as an uninterrupted sequence of “nows”. Every “now”, moreover, is already either a “just-now” or a “forthwith”. If in characterizing time we stick primarily and exclusively to such a sequence, then in principle neither beginning nor end can be found in it. Every last “now”, as “now”, is always already a “forthwith” that is no longer [ein Sofort-nicht-mehr]; thus it is time in the sense of the “no-longer-now” – in the sense of the past. Every first “now” is a “just-now” that is not yet [ein Soeben-noch-nicht]; thus it is time in the sense of the “not-yetnow” – in the sense of the ‘future’. Hence time is endless ‘on both sides’. This thesis becomes possible only on the basis of an orientation towards a free-floating “in-itself” of a course of “nows” which is PRESENT-AT-HAND – an orientation in which the full phenomenon of the “now” has been covered up with regard to its datability, its worldhood, its spannedness, and its character of having a location of the same kind as Dasein’s, so that it has dwindled to an unrecognizable fragment. If one directs one’s glance towards Being-present-at-hand and not-Being-present-at-hand, and thus ‘thinks’ the sequence of “nows” through ‘to the end’, then an end can never be found. In this way of thinking time through to the end, one must always think more time; from this one infers that time is infinite. BTMR §81 But wherein are grounded this levelling-off of world-time and this covering-up of temporality? In the Being of Dasein itself, which we have, in a preparatory manner, Interpreted as care. Thrown and falling, Dasein is proximally and for the most part lost in that with which it concerns itself. In this lostness, however, Dasein’s fleeing in the face of that authentic existence which has been characterized as “anticipatory resoluteness”, has made itself known; and this is a fleeing which covers up. In this concernful fleeing lies a fleeing in the face of death – that is, a looking-away from the end of Being-in-the-world. This looking-away from it, is in itself a mode of that Being-towards-the-end which is ecstatically futural. The inauthentic temporality of everyday Dasein as it falls, must, as such a looking-away from finitude, fail to recognize authentic futurity and therewith temporality in general. And if indeed the way in which Dasein is ordinarily understood is guided by the “they”, only so can the selfforgetful ‘representation’ of the ‘infinity’ of public time be strengthened. The “they” never dies because it cannot die; for death is in each case mine, and only in anticipatory resoluteness does it get authentically understood in an existentiell manner. Nevertheless, the “they”, which never dies and which misunderstands Being-towards-the-end, gives a characteristic interpretation to fleeing in the face of death. To the very end ‘it always has more time’. Here a way of “having time” in the sense that one can lose it makes itself known. ‘Right now, this! then that! And that is barely over, when ...’ Here it is not as if the finitude of time were getting understood; quite the contrary, for concern sets out to snatch as much as possible from the time which still keeps coming and ‘goes on’. Publicly, time is something which everyone takes and can take. In the everyday way in which we are with one another, the levelled-off sequence of “nows” remains completely unrecognizable as regards its origin in the temporality of the individual Dasein. How is ‘time’ in its course to be touched even the least bit when a man who has been PRESENT-AT-HAND ‘in time’ no longer exists? Time goes on, just as indeed it already ‘was’ when a man ‘came into life’. The only time one knows is the public time which has been levelled off and which belongs to everyone – and that means, to nobody. [SZ:425] BTMR §81 No detailed discussion is needed to make plain that in Hegel’s Interpretation of time he is moving wholly in the direction of the way time is ordinarily understood. When he characterizes time in terms of the “now”, this presupposes that in its full structure the “now” remains levelled off and covered up, so that it can be intuited as something PRESENT-AT-HAND, though PRESENT-AT-HAND only ‘ideally’. BTMR §82 Time is ‘abstract’ negativity. As ‘intuited becoming’, it is the differentiated self-differentiation which one comes across immediately; it is the concept which ‘is there’ [“daseiende”] – but this means PRESENT-AT-HAND. As something PRESENT-AT-HAND and thus external to spirit, time has no power over the concept, but the concept is rather ‘the power of time’. BTMR §82 [SZ:435] By going back to the selfsameness of the formal structure which both spirit and time possess as the negation of a negation, Hegel shows how it is possible for spirit to be actualized, historically ‘in time’. Spirit and time get disposed of with the very emptiest of formal-ontological and formal-apophantical abstractions, and this makes it possible to produce a kinship between them. But because time simultaneously gets conceived in the sense of a world-time which has been utterly levelled off, so that its origin remains completely concealed, it simply gets contrasted with spirit – contrasted as something that is PRESENT-AT-HAND. Because of this, spirit must first of all fall ‘into time’. It remains obscure what indeed is signified ontologically by this ‘falling’ or by the ‘actualizing,’ of a spirit which has power over time and really ‘is’ [“seienden”] outside of it. Just as Hegel casts little light on the source of the time which has thus been levelled off, he leaves totally unexamined the question of whether the way in which spirit is essentially constituted as the negating of a negation, is possible in any other manner than on the basis of primordial temporality. BTMR §82 The distinction between the Being of existing Dasein and the Being of entities, such as Reality, which do not have the character of Dasein, may appear very illuminating; but it is still only the point of departure for the ontological problematic; it is nothing with which philosophy may tranquillize itself. It has long been known that ancient ontology works with ‘Thing-concepts’ and that there is a danger of ‘reifying consciousness’. But what does this “reifying” signify? Where does it arise? Why does Being get ‘conceived’ ‘proximally’ in terms of the PRESENT-AT-HAND and not in terms of the ready-to-hand, which indeed lies closer to us? Why does this reifying always keep coming back to exercise its dominion? What positive structure does the Being of ‘consciousness’ have, if reification remains inappropriate to it? Is the ‘distinction’ between ‘consciousness’ and ‘Thing’ sufficient for tackling the ontological problematic in a primordial manner? Do the answers to these questions lie along our way? And can we even seek the answer as long as the question of the meaning of Being remains unformulated and unclarified? [SZ:437] BTMR §83