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Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics [439-41]

In the attempt to provide an initial interpretation of the 'as' we have been led to consider the propositional statement. We now see that this propositional statement is indeed a necessary form within human discourse and particularly within the discourse of everydayness, of Dasein's everyday comportment to what is present at hand. Yet precisely for that reason it is a form that bears within it all the dangers and temptations with which ordinary understanding besets our philosophizing. But then why should we investigate this form of discourse at all if, as we admit, it is not an originary one, not one that immediately displays the problem? Why do we not directly force the problem of the 'as' into its proper dimension? Because the task is to catch sight of this dimension as something entirely other, and this can only occur if we contrast it with that in which we self-evidently move. But we do not simply wish to set this entirely other, in which the 'as' and the 'as a whole' are grounded, over against the propositional structure, but rather to penetrate to the former through this structure. We wish to investigate the propositional statement because this form of statement belongs to the essence of everyday discourse and because we only really comprehend the peculiar and at the same time seductive character of this form of the statement if we are able to penetrate through it to something entirely other from out of which the essence of the statement in this sense can first be comprehended. But this means that the task is to show where the propositional structure itself stands, in accordance with its own inner possibility. The task is to reveal those relations within which the statement as such already moves and rests—relations which the statement as such does not first create, but which it rather requires for its own essence. With such an approach, the statement and the λόγος already enter into an entirely other dimension. The statement is now no longer the central focus of the problematic, but something that dissolves into a much more far-reaching dimension. Of course, this whole consideration of the problem of the statement must restrict itself here to those connections which are best fitted to lead us toward the problem of world.


§72. Outline of the propositional statement
(λόγος ἀποφαντικός) in Aristotle.


In order to ensure that our task maintains its intrinsic link with the tradition, as well as to make visible the elementary nature of the problem in all its simplicity, I shall add an outline of the propositional statement as provided by various treatises of Aristotle. First of all, however, we must recall the problem again: world is the manifestness of beings as such as a whole. Here we drew attention to the 'as' and the 'as a whole'. The two are connected to this manifestness. We grasped the 'as' in terms of a 'relation', introduced merely


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

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