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Thesis of Modern Ontology [230-231]

so that we can bring to view its peculiarity exactly when we do not let disappear from the phenomenological field of vision this phenomenon that we have been discussing, inauthentic self-understanding. How does this apply to the "transposition" we are affirming?

We have a twofold task: (1) to conceive intentionality itself more radically, and then (2) to elucidate its consequences for what we have called the "transposition" of the Dasein over to things. in other words, what are we to understand by what is customarily called transcendence in philosophy? It is commonly taught in philosophy that what is transcendent is things, objects. But what is originally transcendent, what does the transcending, is not things as over against the Dasein; rather, it is the Dasein itself which is transcendent in the strict sense. Transcendence is a fundamental determination of the ontological structure of the Dasein. It belongs to the existentiality of existence. Transcendence is an existential concept. It will turn out that intentionality is founded in the Dasein' s transcendence and is possible solely for this reason—that transcendence cannot conversely be explained in terms of intentionality. The task of bringing to light the Dasein's existential constitution leads first of all to the twofold task, intrinsically one, of interpreting more radically the phenomena of intentionality and transcendence. With this task—of bringing to view, along with the more original conception of intentionality and transcendence, a basic determination of the Dasein's whole existence—we also run up against a central problem that has remained unknown to all previous philosophy and has involved it in remarkable, insoluble ἀποριαι. We may not hope to solve the central problem in a single attempt or indeed even to make it sufficiently transparent as a problem.

α) Equipment, equipmental contexture, and world. Being-in-the-world and intraworldliness

For the present we need only to realize clearly that the ontological distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, between ego and non-ego, to speak formally, cannot in any way be conceived directly and simply, as for instance in the form that Fichte uses to initiate the problem when he says, "Gentlemen, think the wall, and then think the one who thinks the wall." There is already a constructive violation of the facts, an unphenomenological onset, in the request 'Think the wall." For in our natural comportment toward things we never think a single thing, and whenever we seize upon it expressly for itself we are taking it out of a contexture to which it belongs in its real content: wall, room, surroundings. The request "Think the wall," understood as the beginning of a return to the one who is thinking the wall, as the beginning of the philosophical interpretation of the subject, is saying: Make yourselves blind to what is already given to you in the very first place and for all apprehending that is explicitly thinking. But what is


Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24) by Martin Heidegger