the idea and its actuality, by operating (along with the entire tradition) within a fundamental obscurity about the question of being. In point of fact, affirmedness remains affirmedness whether we are investigating real or ideal being with regard to its actuality. “Sensible,” “nonsensible,” and “ideal” are not features of being. The affirmedness of the non-sensible says nothing about the kind of affirmedness as such.55
We emphasize that the genesis and possibility of these modes of actuality (being, happening, subsistence, validity) are not clarified, and that the legitimacy of the clue for getting actuality—viz., affirmedness—has been demonstrated. But Lotze could answer by saying that such demands are impossible. He writes:
And one should not ask further what this validity means, along with the presupposition that what it intelligibly means could be derived from some-thing else (p. 512) {in the sense of an increasing weakening in the form of actuality as we move from being to validity}. Just as no one can say how it happens that anything is or occurs, so neither can one say how it happens that a truth is valid. We must regard this latter concept, too, as a basic concept founded entirely upon itself alone, a concept which all of us can know what we mean by it, but which we cannot produce by constructing it out of components that do not already contain it. (p. 513)
Here Lotze is saying that if validity is a basic concept that cannot be further reduced, then it means something that we can comprehend. But at the same time [76] he emphasizes:
And finally I have to add that, when we distinguish between the actuality of ideas and laws taken as validity and the actuality of things taken as being, we have first of all (thanks to the superior resources of German over Greek) merely discovered a convenient way of speaking that can warn us against interchanging [the two notions]. But the issue we designate by the word “validity” has thereby lost none of its wondrousness. (p. 519)
So it is more a matter of a convenient expression; but the issue itself remains wondrous.
But if wonder (namely, about the “obvious”) is one element that motivates philosophical questioning, it can be only the occasion for asking a real question instead of getting thrown off by some prejudgment. For even here, Lotze is caught in a widespread prejudgment that remains just as dominant today, namely, that we must simply accept,
55. [At this point in the lecture Heidegger delivered a 225-word disquisition on being in Greek thought, followed by the next sentence (Moser, pp. 157.8–158.5).]