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Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics [399-401]

in which the undifferentiated manifoldness of beings initially and predominantly becomes accessible to us in each case lies in that familiar acquaintance that belongs to the undifferentiated way in which we talk about things and communicate information about them. That means that a comportment [Verhalten] toward beings transpires without first awakening any fundamental relationship [Grundverhältnis] of man toward beings—whether toward lifeless beings, living beings, or human beings themselves—as demanded by these beings themselves in each case. Our everyday comportment toward all beings does not move within those fundamental relationships that correspond to the peculiar character proper to the beings in question. It moves rather within a comportment which, from the perspective of those beings themselves, is uprooted and for that very reason is rampant and successful everywhere. We cannot here identify the reason why this everydayness in various forms and to a variable degree is necessary for human Dasein, and why therefore it should not be disparaged as something purely negative. We should merely learn to see that from out of this everydayness—although certainly not grounded or sustained by it—fundamental relationships of human Dasein toward beings, amongst which man himself belongs, are possible, i.e., are capable of being awakened. Accordingly there are fundamental kinds of manifestness of beings, and thus kinds of beings as such. An understanding for the fact that there are fundamentally different specific manners of being itself, and accordingly fundamentally different species of beings, was precisely sharpened for us through our interpretation of animality. Thus our entire preliminary investigation suddenly takes on a new function. The task is to reveal the significance of what we acquired there in its entire import for the question concerning the manifestness of beings as such, a manifestness which was indeed supposed to constitute one moment of the essence of world. In this connection we should remember this: animality no longer stands in view with respect to poverty in world as such, but rather as a realm of beings which are manifest and thus call for a specific fundamental relationship toward them on our part, one in which at least initially we do not move.


§66. The manifestness proper to living nature, and the
transposedness of Dasein into the encircling contextual ring
of living beings as our peculiar fundamental relationship
toward them. The manifoldness of the specific manners of
being, their possible unity, and the problem of world.


First of all we must recall the different ways in which man can be transposed into another human being, into animals, into living beings in general, and into lifeless things. With respect to the possibility of man's transposedness into the


Martin Heidegger (GA 29/30) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

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