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§24. Reality of the external world [300-301]


more authentically this entity is explicated in its being, the more radically can knowing and entities as potentially knowable then be explicated. Because objects are independent of the subject, their being can be explicated only in subjectivity properly understood, but it cannot consist in being a subject.

d) Reality is not to be understood primarily
in terms of the bodily presence of the perceived

But reality is just as little to be understood primarily in terms of bodily presence. It must of course be admitted that bodily presence is a genuine phenomenal character to the extent that I keep to the particular kind of access to entities which perceives, merely looks at them. But precisely in this kind of access to worldhood, especially if I take perception to be the simple perception of a thing, the world is no longer accessible in its full worldhood, in its full meaningfulness as it encounters concern. In the pure perception of a thing, the world shows itself instead in a deficient meaningfulness. I am using the word 'deficient,' deficiens, in accordance with the old traditional term. Meaningfulness as it is encountered in perception is deficient, it lacks something which it actually has and would have to have as a world. It detracts from the originality of the world when we merely look at it as a manifold of things.

The traditional categories of thingness, which for definite reasons are also identified as the categories of being-thingness, substance, accident, property, causality-have their phenomenal genesis in this deficient meaningfulness. These categories are already drawn from a kind of access (a prepossession of presence and its fundamental determinations) which occurs in the process of a characteristic "unworlding." Now why are these categories really the first to be discovered? This is equivalent to the question which we already asked earlier and have not yet answered: Why does natural Dasein, in the elucidation of the world in which it is, simply pass over the environing world? Why, in the categorial characterization of the being of the world, does it always already apply developed categories like thingness as the basic determinations?

The Aristotelian categories: οὐσία, ποιόν, ποσόν, ποῦ, ποτέ, πρὸς τί (ὑποκείμενον-συμβεβηκότα-that which must always be together with extantness-the apriori possibilities of something as something), traditionally substance, quality, quantity, place, time, relation: these are all already obtained in this special dimension of merely apprehending a thing and a particular kind of discourse about it, that of the theoretical assertion. But already for Aristotle, these categories became the categories of being pure and simple. They were at the same time the


Martin Heidegger (GA 20) History of the Concept of Time