297

Let us once again summarize the intervening methodological considerations we have been developing. We turned to an apparently purely methodological preparation for approaching the problem of world-formation. But this was not methodological in the sense of being simply a technical matter quite detached from the substantive question, but rather is a method that is intimately bound up with the substantive issue itself. I initially clarified the problem by referring to Kant's achievements in laying the foundations for metaphysics through his demonstration of dialectical illusion. As against this dialectical illusion, which relates to a particular kind of concept—and here to a particular aspect of such concepts, namely the impossibility of demonstrating them by way of intuition—we turned back to a more originary illusion, an illusion that can be grasped in its necessity from out of the essence of man. We cannot go into the grounds of this illusion here. We are merely concerned with the question as to how we might escape, relatively at least, from this illusion with respect to our concrete problem, the question concerning the essence of world. For this we need to reflect upon the thoroughgoing character of philosophical concepts, namely that they are all formally indicative concepts. That they are indicative implies the following: the meaning-content of these concepts does not directly intend or express what they refer to, but only gives an indication, a pointer to the fact that anyone who seeks to understand is called upon by this conceptual context to undertake a transformation of themselves into their Dasein. But as soon as one takes these concepts without reference to their indicative character, like a scientific concept according to the conception of ordinary understanding, then philosophical questioning gets led astray with respect to every single problem. We illustrated this very briefly with our interpretation of the 'as'. We said that it is a relation and thus points back toward the proposition, which is either true or false. We thereby have a connection between the 'as' and the truth of a proposition, and thereby that which we established in the concept of world as the manifestness of beings. With respect to the concrete example of death, we clarified further where the natural error of our ordinary understanding lies: namely in the fact that it takes any philosophical explication it encounters in its own terms, as an assertion about certain characteristic features of beings as present at hand. The inferences which suggest themselves as soon as we attempt to grasp death as a possible characteristic feature of man show that no possible understanding can be expected from this quarter. What I have suggested here with respect to death has just the same consequences with respect to the question concerning the essence of freedom, insofar as this problem in particular was forced in a completely wrong direction in Kant.

Now what we have briefly expounded here concerning formal indication is true in an exemplary sense for the concept of world. What we mean by world is certainly not a being which is intrinsically present at hand, but nor is it some