question in the first direction we took, [234] namely, the a priori letting-the-world-encounter and the tendency to uncover. Now we must determine the ur-temporality of these phenomena as modes of the being of existence and thus as comportments that have the ontological character of care. If ur-temporality is a—or the—basic determination of being itself, then probably care itself in its whole structure must have an ur-temporal character. And for their part, the comportments of the whole will be ur-temporal insofar as they are comportments of existence, the phenomena of concern and care.17
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§18. The ur-temporality of care
Our goal is to secure a basic interpretation of the statement in terms of its ur-temporality. For that we have to clarify the ur-temporality of care as such. And for that we need we keep in mind the structures we have acquired up to this point.
We now understand concern about the world (and particularly fallen concern) as a matter of being already familiar with the world. We also characterized the care at the heart of concern as the form of being in which a being is concerned for its being. We need to understand the structure of care as “formally” as possible, not in the sense of emptying it out and reducing it to a mere relation of something to something else. We mean, rather, formally indicating a specific structure of existence. The peculiar thing we have to understand is the phenomenon that existence is always concerned about something.
We have said what existence is concerned about. We now leave aside two issues—the viewpoint whence existence grasps the being that it cares about, and the degree to which we explicitly enact that understanding, i.e., actually live in it or even care about it—in order to focus on our sole topic: the existential structure of being-concerned-aboutone’s-being, or having my being “at stake” for myself.
“Being at stake” entails that what I am concerned about is not a solid possession. And in fact, the “at stake” belongs to existence as such as long as existence is. Therefore, [235] the “what is at stake” is never a solid possession. However, having-something-at-stake means that existence is precisely a being-unto what is at stake. This being-unto is not a matter of being with something that is just there, but rather being with something that, of its ownmost being, is not yet a solid posses-
17. [Here (Moser, p. 492) Heidegger ends his lecture of Tuesday, 19 January 1926, to be followed by that of Thursday, 21 January, which opened with a 1,240-word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]