positioned in that case, but would be completely superfluous. This board in itself is badly positioned in this room, in a lecture theatre belonging to the university. Its unfavourable position is precisely a property of this board itself. It does not pertain to it because a listener sitting on the right at the front has trouble seeing it. For even someone sitting directly in front of it would have to say that the board is badly positioned (in the room), and that it would be better if it were positioned where it usually stands for very good reasons, namely in the middle behind the lectern.

Yet all this has merely served to correct the false, though apparently eminently philosophical explanation of this property of the board. However, we were not meant to get into these discussions at all concerning what kind of property this is. Indeed not—we were to look at what it is about beings that is manifest to us in their pre-predicative manifestness. The concern of our assertion, what we merely explicitly take apart and examine and specifically point to in making our assertion, is the badly-positioned board. It is already manifest. The board alone? No, we are looking at the lectern, at the notebook in front of us, and so on. Many kinds of things—yet all these do not enter the question as far as this assertion and the grounds of its possibility are concerned. What does enter the question, however, is the very thing that is also already manifest in the board's bad position correctly considered—the lecture theatre as a whole. It is out of the manifestness of the lecture theatre that we experience the bad position of the board in the first place. Precisely this manifestness of the lecture theatre within which the board is badly positioned is what does not explicitly appear at all in the assertion. We do not first attain the manifestness of the lecture theatre via the assertion 'The board is badly positioned', rather this manifestness is the condition of the possibility of the board in general being something we can make judgements about. In our making what is apparently an isolated judgement about this particular thing, we therefore already speak out of a manifestness which—we may say provisionally—is not merely lots of things, but something as a whole. This fact that in every individual assertion, no matter how trivial or complicated, we always already speak out of beings that are manifest as a whole, and this 'as a whole' itself—the lecture theatre that we already understand as a whole—these are not in turn the result of a pointing out by way of assertion. Rather assertions can only ever be inserted into what is already there and manifest as a whole.

We thus see that the possibility of making an assertion depends not only on the assertion itself assigning the possibility of being binding to whatever it wishes to make a judgement about, and that it depends not only on whatever the judgement is about being conceived and grasped in advance as a being, but that it is equally necessary for every assertion to already speak into a manifestness as a whole from the outset, and at the same time to speak out of such a manifestness.