275
§65. The undifferentiated manifestness of the various
kinds of beings that are present at hand. The
slumbering of the fundamental relationships of
Dasein toward beings in everydayness.
We shall proceed from what is already familiar. Where there is world, there beings are manifest. Thus we shall first have to ask how beings are manifest, what it is that we 'have before us' here as beings. Now precisely the discussion of our thesis concerning animality showed us that manifold kinds of beings are manifest to us: material things, lifeless nature, living nature, history, products of human work, culture. But all of this is not merely uniformly presented to us on the world-stage as a confused manifold of juxtaposed items. On the contrary, within beings there are certain fundamentally diverse 'kinds' of beings, which prescribe certain contexts in respect of which we take up a fundamentally different position, even if we do not become conscious of this diversity as a matter of course. On the contrary, at first and for the most part in the everydayness of our Dasein we let beings come toward us and present themselves before us in a remarkable undifferentiatedness. It is not as though all things simply get conflated with one another for us without distinction—on the contrary, we are very sensitive to the substantive manifoldness of those beings that surround us, we can never have enough variety and eagerly look out for what is new and different. And yet here the beings that surround us are uniformly manifest as simply something present at hand in the broadest sense—the presence of land and sea, the mountains and forests, and within this the presence of animals and plants and the presence of human beings and the products of human work, and amongst all this the presence of ourselves as well. This character of beings as something simply present at hand in the broadest sense cannot be insisted upon too strongly, because this is an essential character of beings as they spread themselves before us in our everydayness and we ourselves are also drawn into this widespread presence at hand. It is the fact that beings can be manifest in this leveled out uniformity of the present at hand which gives to human everydayness its peculiar security, dependency, and almost inevitability, and which facilitates the ease with which we necessarily turn from one being to another in everydayness, and yet the specific manner of being that is in each case entirely essential to beings is never acknowledged in its importance. We board the tram, talk to other people, call the dog, look up at the stars, all in the same way—humans, vehicles, human beings, animals, heavenly bodies, everything in the same uniformity of what is present at hand. These are characteristics of our everyday Dasein that philosophy has hitherto neglected, because this all too self-evident phenomenon is what is most powerful in our Dasein, and because that which is most powerful is therefore the deadly enemy of philosophy. Consequently, the way and manner