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ZOLLIKON SEMINARS
pure invention.* When I tell a child, "This is a table," it awakens the child to the intuition of essence—to a glimpse of the essence "table." He/she will immediately recognize the next table as a table.† The phenomenon is the essence of what shows itself. The phenomenon as what shows itself from itself always means the being of beings and not a particular being.
The worldliness of the world is constituted from the contexts of reference [Verweisungszusammenhänge] of what shows itself. Spatiality, the space "made room for" [eingeräumte Raum], also belongs to these contexts of reference.
Being and Dasein
Being, the manifestness of being, is only given through the presence of beings. In order that beings can come to presence and, therefore, that being, the manifestness of being, can be given at all, what is needed is the [ecstatic] standing-in [Innestehen] of the human being in the Da [there], in the clearing, in the clearedness [Gelichtethät] of being as which the human being exists. Therefore, there cannot be the being of beings at all without the human being.
This assertion stands in gross contradiction to the [following] statement of natural science: Due to the absolutely uniform rate of atomic decay in radioactive substances present in the earth's crust, it can be calculated and therefore proved that the earth has already existed for about four billion years, whereas the first man appeared only about two million years ago. At the very least, the being we call earth was already here long before human beings appeared. Therefore, beings and the manifestness of being, and therefore being can also exist entirely independently of human beings.
* In contrast to this "invention," Heidegger is referring to the famous "categorical intuition" in Husserl's Logical Investigations, vol. 6, which Heidegger reinterpreted in an ontological sense (M. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], pp. 47-72). See also Jiro Watanabe, "Categorial Intuition and the Understanding of Being in Husserl and Heidegger," in Reading Heidegger. Commemorations, pp. 109-117; also see Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time, pp. 368-72.-TRANSLATORS
† Language is the presupposition for "saying" and "showing" something as something. See ZS 19-20.-TRANSLATORS