handed out to the division commander the medal Pour le mérite. But no sooner did the crown prince leave the division headquarters than a messenger brought the news that everything was in error, the fort was still in French hands—and in fact it was.
Were the black-white-red banners, the soldiers marching around, and the rifles optical illusions? No—the ones who were looking through the binoculars saw very well, and they could not see otherwise. The mistake lay not in the seeing but in what they had in view in advance, the stormed fort, on the basis of which fore-sight they then interpreted in such and such a way what they saw.
Everything that we see in particulars is always determined by what we have in view in advance. The mistake did not reside in the seeing but in the imprecise dispatch of the cavalry officer, or in the faulty interpretation by division headquarters. “Have reached the fort” meant only “I am standing before the ramparts of the fort” and did not mean: “I took it.” This dispatch and its interpretation and circulation created that fore-sight on the fort which then became the ὑποκείμενον for the apparently “incorrect” seeing. What is essential is not what we presumably establish with exactness by means of instruments and gadgets; what is essential is the view in advance which first opens up the field for anything to be established. So it happens that we, lost as we usually are in the activities of observing and establishing, believe we “see” many things and yet do not see what really is.
§18. The Greek determination of the essence (whatness) in the horizon of an understanding of Being as constant presence {beständiger Anwesenheit}.
a) The determination of the essence (whatness) as the “beingness” (οὐσία) of beings. The understanding of Being as constant presence is the ground for the interpretation of beingness (οὐσία) as ἰδέα.
In Platonic terms, the view in advance of the aspect something offers, the view of its εἶδος, provides the ἰδέα, that which the thing is, its essence. Herewith the essentiality of the essence is indeed characterized quite unequivocally and beyond mere whatness: