is just as opaque. First, validity means the "form" of the reality which belongs to the content of the judgment insofar as it is unchangeable as opposed to the changeable "psychic" act of judgment. In light of the position of the question of being in general characterized in the introduction to this inquiry, we can hardly expect that "validity" as "ideal being" is going to be distinguished by any special ontological clarity. Second, validity means the validity of the meaning of the judgment which is valid for the "object" it has in view, and thus receives the significance of "objective validity" and objectivity in general. The meaning thus "valid" for beings, and which is valid "timelessly" in itself, is said to be "valid" also in the sense of being valid for every person who judges. rationally. Third, validity· means bindingness, "universal validity." If one then advocates a "critical" epistemology, according to which the subject does not "truly" "come out" to the object, then this valid character, as the validity of an object, objectivity, is based on the valid content of true {!) meaning. The three meanings of "validity" set forth, the way of being of the ideal, as objectivity, and as bindingness, are not only in themselves opaque, but constantly get confused with one another. Methodological caution requires that we do not choose such unstable concepts as the guide for our interpretation. We do not restrict the concept of meaning in advance to the signification of a "content of judgment," but we understand it as the existential phenomenon characterized in which the formal framework of what can be disclosed in understanding and articulated in interpretation becomes visible as such.
When we collect the three meanings of "statement" analyzed here in a unitary view of the complete phenomenon, the definition reads: Statement is a pointing out which communicates and defines. Now we must ask what right do we have at all to conceive the statement as a mode of interpretation? If it is something of this sort, the essential structures of interpretation must be repeated in it. The statement's pointing out is accomplished on the basis of what is already disclosed in understanding, or what is circumspectly discovered. The statement is not an unattached kind of behavior which could of itself primarily disclose beings in general, but always already maintains itself on the basis of being-in-the-world. What we showed earlier9 with regard to knowing the world is just as true of the statement. It needs a fore-having of something [157] disclosed in general which it points out in the mode of determining. Furthermore, when one begins to determine something, one has a directed viewpoint with respect to what is to be stated. In the act of determining something [Bestimmungsvollzug], the function of determining is taken over by that with regard to which beings that have
9. Cf. § 13.