or even theorein. This activity is also called aisthesis, aesthetic beholding in the proper sense, just as Kant still employs the expression "aesthetics," purely contemplative perception of the extant. In this purely intuitive activity, which is only a modification of seeing in the sense of circumspection, of productive behavior, the actuality of the actual is manifested. Parmenides, the true founder of ancient ontology, says: to gar auto noein estin te kai einai; noein, perceiving, simple apprehension, intuiting, and being, actuality, are the same. When Kant says that actuality is perception, his thesis is literally anticipated in the proposition of Parmenides.
We now see more clearly that the interpretation of essentia, and also exactly the interpretation of the basic concept for essentia, ousia, refer back to productive comportment toward beings, while pure beholding is fixed as the proper access to a being in its being-in-itself. We may observe incidentally that this interpretation of the basic ontological concepts of ancient philosophy does not by any means exhaust everything that would have to be said here. Above all, the Greek concept of the world, which could be set forth only by way of an interpretation of Greek existence, has been completely disregarded here.
For us there follows the task of showing that essentia and existentia have a common origin in the interpretative resort to productive comportment. In ancient ontology itself we discover nothing explicit about this recourse. Ancient ontology performs in a virtually naive way its interpretation of beings and its elaboration of the concepts mentioned. We do not discover anything about how to conceive the connection and the difference between the two and how to prove that they are necessarily valid for every being. But-it might be said—is this a defect and not rather an advantage? Is not naive inquiry superior in the certainty and importance of its results to all inquiry that is reflective and all too conscious? This can be affirmed but it must at the same time be taken as understood that naive ontology, too, if it is ontology at all, must already always, because necessarily, be reflective—reflective in the genuine sense that it seeks to conceive beings with respect to their being by having regard to the Dasein (psuche, nous, logos). Reference to the comportments of the Dasein in the matter of ontological interpretation can occur in such a way that what is referred to, the Dasein and its comportments, does not expressly become a problem but rather the naive ontological interpretation goes back to the Dasein's comportments in the same way in which it is acquainted with the Dasein' s everyday and natural self-understanding. Ontology is naive, then, not because it does not look back at all to the Dasein, not because it does no reflecting at all-this is excluded—but because this necessary looking back toward the Dasein does not get beyond a common conception of the Dasein and its comportments and thus—because they belong to the Dasein's general everydayness—