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intrinsically as something negative, and certainly never as something simply present at hand, as some persisting state which would be interrupted by the moments of vision proper to authentic action. The whole connection between authentic and inauthentic existence, between the moment of vision and the absence of such a moment, is not something present at hand which transpires within man, but one which belongs to Dasein. We can only understand the concepts that open up this connection as long as they are not taken to signify characteristic features or properties of something present at hand, but are taken rather as indications that show how our understanding must first twist free from our ordinary conceptions of beings and properly transform itself into the Da-sein in us. The challenge to such a transformation lies within each one of these concepts—death, resolute disclosedness, history, existence—yet not as some additional, so-called ethical application of what is conceptualized, but rather as a prior opening up of the dimension of what is to be comprehended. These concepts are indicative because, insofar as they have been genuinely acquired, they can only ever address the challenge of such a transformation to us, but can never bring about this transformation themselves. They point into Dasein itself. But Da-sein—as I understand it—is always mine. These concepts are formally indicative because in accordance with the essence of such indication they indeed point into a concretion of the individual Dasein in man in each case, yet never already bring this concretion along with them in their content.
Now it is always possible to take up the content of these concepts without their indicative character. But then the concepts not only fail to provide what they intend but rather—and this is the truly fateful thing—they become a supposedly genuine and rigorously defined starting point for groundless questions. One characteristic example of this is the problem of human freedom and the way in which this is investigated in the context of a concept of causality oriented toward the specific manner of being of that which is present at hand. Even where something other than natural causality was sought in or as freedom, it was still precisely a causality that was sought from the outset; that is, freedom was turned into a problem without following the indications about the character of the existence and Dasein pertaining to the beings we call free. With respect to this problem it could be shown how Kant certainly sees an illusion here, but still falls victim precisely to an original metaphysical illusion himself in this connection. Precisely the fate which befell the problem of freedom within the transcendental dialectic clearly shows that the philosopher is never safely protected from this metaphysical illusion, and that every philosophy must fall victim to such illusion the more it strives to develop its problematic in a radical manner. This concrete example surely reveals the peculiar difficulty facing us when we attempt to grasp what we mean by the problem of world and by the thesis that man is world-forming.