bring to mind what is meant by it, namely, the structure of comportments, and, by turning to the phenomena, to assure ourselves ever anew of the legitimacy of this assertion.
The misinterpretations are not accidental. They are not even exclusively and primarily grounded in a superficiality of thought and of philosophical argument. They have their ground instead in the natural conception of things itself, as they are present in the Dasein in conformity with its nature. The Dasein has this natural tendency to start by taking every being—whether something extant in the sense of a natural thing or something with the mode of being of the subject—as an extant entity and to understand it in the sense of being extant. This is the basic tendency of ancient ontology and one that has not yet been overcome down to the present day because it belongs with the Dasein's understanding of being and its mode of understanding being. Since, in this taking everything given to be something extant, intentionality is not discoverable as a relation among extant things, it must apparently be referred to the subject: if it is not objective then it is something subjective. The subject, again, is taken with the same ontological indeterminateness to be something extant; this is manifest, for instance, in Descartes' cogito sum. Thus intentionality—whether it is conceived objectively or subjectively—remains something that is in some way extant. On the contrary, precisely with the aid of intentionality and its peculiarity of being neither objective nor subjective, we should stop short and ask: Must not the being to which this phenomenon, neither objective nor subjective, obviously belongs be conceived differently than it thus far has been?
When Kant talks about a relation of the thing to the cognitive faculty, it now turns out that this way of speaking and the kind of inquiry that arises from it are full of confusion. The thing does not relate to a cognitive faculty interior to the subject; instead, the cognitive faculty itself and with it this subject are structured intentionally in their ontological constitution. The cognitive faculty is not the terminal member of the relation between an external thing and the internal subject; rather, its essence is the relating itself, and indeed in such a way that the intentional Dasein which thus relates itself as an existent is always already immediately dwelling among things. For the Dasein there is no outside, for which reason it is also absurd to talk about an inside.
If we modify Kant's ambiguous language about perception and attempt to secure independent standing for perception by distinguishing the perceptual intention and the perceived, then we are not simply correcting verbal meanings and terminologies but going back to the ontological nature of what is meant by perception. Because perception has intentional structure, not only can the ambiguity mentioned arise but it must necessarily arise with the failure to see this. Wherever he deals with perception Kant himself has