and unseduced by this way of interpreting, was ever confronted by the free land of a "world," so that it just looks at what it encounters. The [170] domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Dasein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."
Idle talk, which closes off in the way we described, is the mode of being of the uprooted understanding of Dasein. However, it does not occur as the objectively present condition of something objectively present, but it is existentially uprooted, and this uprooting is constant. Ontologically, this means that when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is, as being-in-the-world, cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Dasein-with, toward being-in itself. It keeps itself in suspension and yet in doing so it is still always together with the "world," with others, and toward itself. Only a being whose disclosedness is constituted by attuned and understanding discourse, that is, who in this ontological constitution is its there, who is "in-the-world," has the possibility of being of such uprooting which, far from constituting a nonbeing of Dasein, rather constitutes its most everyday and stubborn "reality."
However, it is in the nature of the obviousness and self-assurance of the average way of being interpreted that under its protection, the uncanniness of the suspension in which Dasein can drift toward an increasing groundlessness remains concealed to actual Dasein itself.
§ 36. Curiosity
In the analysis of understanding and the disclosedness of the there in general, we referred to the lumen naturale and called the disclosedness of being-in the clearing of Dasein in which something like sight first becomes possible. Sight was conceived with regard to the basic kind of disclosing characteristic of Dasein, namely, understanding, in the sense of the genuine appropriation of those beings to which Dasein can be related in accordance with its essential possibilities of being.
The basic constitution of the being of sight shows itself in a peculiar tendency of being which belongs to everydayness—the tendency toward "seeing." We designate it with the term curiosity, which is characteristically not limited to seeing and expresses the tendency toward a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered in perception. Our aim in interpreting this phenomenon is in principle existential and ontological. We do not restrict ourselves to an orientation toward cognition which even in the early stages of Greek philosophy, and not by accident, was conceived in terms of the "desire to see." The treatise [171] which stands first in the collection of Aristotle's treatises on ontology