THE AS-STRUCTURE is a constitutive feature of every experience of entities in the world – namely, the way they always present themselves in terms of a “for something.” According to Heidegger, the “as-structure” is a character of both INTERPRETATION and ASSERTION. He argues that it is only because all things are already discovered and articulated in what they are for – i.e., are already interpreted as something in our practical comportment – that we can formulate assertions about them. In making an assertion we no longer interpret something as something (“as” in the hermeneutical sense), that is, we do not deal with it in the totality of the situation. Rather, we determine something as simply OCCURRENT (“as” in the apophantical sense), thereby cutting it off from its context and discovering it in a theoretical attitude. The apophantical “as-structure” of assertion is founded on the hermeneutical as-structure of interpretation, and it is a derivative, privative modification of it.
The adjectives “hermeneutical” and “apophantical” are taken from the philosophical tradition. Specifically, the former comes from Schleiermacher’s idea of hermeneutics as the praxis of text-interpretation. The latter comes from Aristotle’s “logos apophantikos” which is a way of speaking of and at the same time of showing an entity (Sehenlassen des Seienden, GA21:163/137). Introducing the hermeneutical “as-structure” in Being and Time and in the lectures of this period, Heidegger points out that the assertion, which “has been accepted from ancient times as the primary and authentic ‘locus’ of truth” (SZ 154) is possible only because things are already manifest as what they are, interpreted as something in order to carry out a possibility in our practical concern. On the basis of a modification of our practical comportment, something that is simply occurrent shows up as “what” the statement is actually about, i.e. “the ‘object’ of an assertion” (SZ 157–58). Heidegger describes the genesis of the theoretical assertion phenomenologically as a decontextualization and devitalization of our interpretive practical comportments.
He elaborates completely the pivotal role of the hermeneutical “as-structure” in the 1925–26 lecture Logic: The Question of Truth (GA21) dealing with Aristotle’s concept of truth. The hermeneutic “as-structure” involves our way of coping with things, our praxis, i.e., our being in the world in the sense of being familiar and confident with it. AsHeidegger puts it in this lecture, for instance: “a chalkboard, if it were unintelligible, would, as such, not be present here. Unless it were understood as for-writing-on, it would be hidden. The same with a door unless it is understood as for-entering-and-exiting” (GA21:144/121). “That is, writing, entering-exiting, sitting, and the like are what we are a priori involved with.What we know and learn when we ‘know our way around’ are these uses-for-which we understand it. . . . Every act of having something before our eyes . . . is in and of itself a matter of ‘having’ something as something” (GA21:144/121).
That means: “In short, it has the as-structure”(GA21:144/121).
In Being and Time he points out that in the interpretation of these entities as “for writing,” “entering and exiting,” “sitting,” “hammering,” and so on, i.e., our knowing how to cope with things as well as the totality of their AFFORDANCES (Bewandnisganzheit), they get to be explicitly
64