In order to ward off a fatal misunderstanding, we need a brief digression. Our aim is to give a fundamental clarification of the possibility of the understanding of being in general. With regard to the Dasein's comportment toward beings, our interpretation of the understanding of being in general has presented only a necessary but not a sufficient condition. For I can comport toward beings only if those beings can themselves be encountered in the brightness of the understanding of being. This is the necessary condition. In terms of fundamental ontology it can also be expressed by saying that all understanding is essentially related to an affective self-finding which belongs to understanding itself.2 To be affectively self-finding is the formal structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for all comportment toward beings, although they do not by themselves alone make such comportment possible but always only in one with understanding, which gives its light to each mood, each passion, each affect. Being itself, if indeed we understand it, must somehow or other be projected upon something. This does not mean that in this projection being must be objectively apprehended or interpreted and defined, conceptually comprehended, as something objectively apprehended. Being is projected upon something from which it becomes understandable, but in an unobjective way. It is understood as yet pre-conceptually, without a logos; we therefore call it the pre-ontological understanding of being. Pre-ontological understanding of being is a kind of understanding of being. It coincides so little with the ontical experience of beings that ontical experience necessarily presupposes a pre-ontological understanding of being as an essential condition. The experience of beings does not have any explicit ontology as a constituent, but, on the other hand, the understanding of being in general in the pre-conceptual sense is certainly the condition of possibility that being should be objectified, thematized at all. It is in the objectification of being as such that the basic act constitutive of ontology as a science is performed. The essential feature in every science, philosophy included, is that it constitutes itself in the objectification of something already in some way unveiled, antecedently given. What is given can be a being that lies present before us, but it can also be being itself in the pre-ontological understanding of being. The way in which being is given is fundamentally different from the way beings are given, but both can certainly become objects. They can become objects, however, only if they are unveiled in some way before the objectification and for it. On the other hand, if something becomes an object, and in fact just as it offers itself in its own self, this objectification does not signify a subjective apprehension and re-interpretation of what is laid hold of as object. The basic act of objectification,
2. Cf. Sein und Zeit, §29 ff.