service of pure observation-the investigative discovery and disclosure of the 'things themselves'. 'Seeing', taken in the widest sense, regulates all 'procedures' and retains its priority. 'To whatever kind of objects one's knowledge may relate itself, and by whatever means it may do so, still that through which it relates itself to them immediately, and which all thinking as a means has as its goal (author's italics) is intuition.'xxi The idea of the intuitus has guided all Interpretation of knowledge from the beginnings of Greek ontology until today, whether or not that intuitus can be factically reached. If we are to exhibit the existential genesis of science in accordance with the priority of 'seeing', we must set out by characterizing the circumspection which is the guide for 'practical' concern.
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 circumspective deliberation has the existential meaning of a making present; for envisaging1 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'.
1 Here the familiar noun 'Vergegenwärtigung' ('envisaging') is printed with the first syllable in italics to draw attention to its connection with the special phenomenological verb 'Gegenwärtigen' ('making present').