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playing with language here when we speak of the threefold sense of world-formation? Indeed we are, although more precisely speaking we are playing along with the play of language. The play of language here is not merely playful, but arises from a lawfulness that precedes all 'logic' and demands a deeper binding character than the observance of rules for the correct formation of definitions. Of course, when our philosophizing intrinsically plays along with language, the danger of playing games and becoming entangled in such games is also perilously close. Yet nevertheless we must dare to play if, as we shall later see, we want to escape from the entrancing spell of everyday discourse and its concepts. Yet even if we were to concede that world signifies the subjective form of our human conception of beings in themselves, so that in fact there would be no beings in themselves at all but rather everything would merely transpire within the subject—even if we were to concede this, then amongst many other questions we should also have to ask: How can man even come to a subjective conception of beings, unless beings are already manifest to him beforehand? How do things stand concerning this manifestness of beings as such? If the 'as a whole' indeed already belongs to this manifestness, is it not then withdrawn from the subjectivity of man, and that means here from his momentary caprice in each case?

Yet why all these false trails through all these confusing questions that have failed to bring us a single step closer to answering our guiding question concerning the essence of world? This is how ordinary understanding thinks. And it thinks this way because from the outset it takes the answer to the question concerning the essence of world in the same sense as the answer to the question concerning how the stock markets are doing today. We may perhaps be free of this all too primitive conception and yet still be tempted to demand that the question concerning the essence of world be answered through a straightforward ascertainment, answered for example by our interpreting the already examined fundamental attunement of boredom more extensively and thereby informing everyone what the manifestness of beings as a whole means. That we finally do wish to inquire back into this fundamental attunement is certainly true, for otherwise our interpretation of it in the context of these lectures would have been pointless. But whether we are already sufficiently equipped for this inquiring back is another question. It becomes a burning question if we recall that the interpretation of the fundamental attunement did not indeed present us with a subjective psychological experience, on the firm basis of some concept of man (soul or consciousness). On the contrary, it was precisely this fundamental attunement which opened up original perspectives on human Dasein for us. Our genuine preparation for the problem of world will accordingly have to consist in orienting the questions that have now emerged with regard to the manifestness of beings or manifestness as a whole in the direction of this single perspective—lest we