THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH
in advance, we understand this being of the being [dieses Sein des Seienden] in a non-conceptual way. Precisely because we do not grasp being (most people never obtain a concept of being and yet they live at every moment in the understanding of being) we also cannot say how this being belongs to the being to which we attribute it. We are unable to specify the manner in which the being stands in its being. But despite this non-conceptual mode of understanding, we can accept, take in, and intend the beings in diverse aspects of their being and so-being.
Immediate self-losing perception, carried along by what is perceived, is both non-conceptual (in respect of the being understood therein) and non-regarding. By paying no explicit attention to being, nor grasping it conceptually, we are free to lose ourselves in what we encounter. But all this does not mean we lack an understanding of being. On the contrary, our understanding of 'is' and 'being' is not in the least diminished by the fact that we do not occupy ourselves with their meaning. Instead, this understanding of being is always already there with our Dasein; only for this reason is it possible for us to perceive a being as a being and make it into an object. A being does not first become a being due to our occupying ourselves with it as such. How could we ever occupy ourselves with a being as such, if beings were not already given in advance and familiar to us? Yet this familiarity of beings occurs in a non-conceptual and non-regarding understanding of being.
To be sure, this familiarity of beings in the Dasein of man has its own history. It is never just simply present, as neutral and constant throughout the history of humanity, but is itself rooted in what we call the groundstance of man: in what nature, history, and reality as a whole are to man, and how they are this. This groundstance of man's Dasein can be lost, and for contemporary man not only is it largely lost, it is already no longer comprehensible. The familiarity of beings is itself uprooted, but this rootlessness itself is not just something negative: it has organized itself as it were, and has now gained domination, i.e. it has taken over the regulation and legislation for the relationship of man to being and beings. Whether something 'is something', whether there is 'anything in it' as we say, is no longer decided by the being itself and the power with which it can immediately speak to man, but something only is something, or is nothing, depending on whether one talks about it or not, depending on whether people take an interest in it or not. So, in both great and small things, contemporary man lives according to what is prescribed by journalism in the broadest sense. There exist 'literary interests'. Works of art,