understanding of being without conceiving it or grasping it as such. There is immediately present in productive comportment toward something the understanding of the being-in-itself of that to which the comportment relates. Therefore it is no accident that ancient ontology, in its specific naivete—in the good sense of that term—oriented itself, even though only implicitly, in accordance with this everyday and familiar behavior of the Dasein, for in productive behavior there is obviously suggested of itself, for the Dasein, an attitude toward beings within which a being's being-in-itself is immediately understood. But, after all, does not the interpretation of the being of a being as a product contain within itself an intolerable onesidedness? Can every being be taken as a product and can the concepts of being be attained and fixed by having regard to productive comportment? Surely not everything of which we say that it is is brought into being by the Dasein as producer. That very being which the Greeks especially made the starting point and theme of their ontological investigations, that which is as nature and cosmos, is surely not produced by the Dasein as producer. How is Greek ontology, which was oriented primarily to the cosmos, supposed to have understood the being of the cosmos in terms of production, especially when it is precisely ancient thought which is not in the least familiar with anything like a creation and production of the world but rather is convinced of the world's eternity? For it, the world is the aei on, the always already extant, agenetos, anolethros, unoriginated and imperishable. In the face of this being, the cosmos, what is the point of looking toward production? Does not our interpretation of ousia, einai, existere, as presence-at-hand and producedness run aground here? Is it not in any case un-Greek, even if it may otherwise be valid? If we were to concede to being impressed by such arguments and to grant that productive comportment obviously cannot be the guiding horizon for ancient ontology, then we would betray by this admission that, despite the analysis of the intentionality of production that has just been carried out, we have not yet seen this intentionality in a sufficiently phenomenological way. In the understanding of being that belongs to productive comportment, this comportment, as relating itself to something, releases just that to which it relates itself. It seems as though only a being that is produced could be understood in this sense. However, it only seems so.
If we bring to mind productive comportment in the scope of its full structure we see that it always makes use of what we call material, for instance, material for building a house. On its part this material is in the end not in turn produced but is already there. It is met with as a being that does not need to be produced. In production and its understanding of being, I thus comport myself toward a being that is not in need of being produced. I comport myself toward such a being not by accident but corresponding to