streets, baby buggies, people, the sky, geometric relations. Rather, our question is: What characterizes each of those things insofar as it is and can be a “toward-which” [Worauf] of knowing? We are asking about the toward-which of knowing as such—its (if you will allow the phrase) toward-which-ness [Woraufheit], so as to pin down what is intended. In order to answer this question from the phenomenon itself, let us follow the lead of a concrete act of knowing something ordinary that is close to us and familiar.

I follow the lead of my present looking around and about.⁷⁹ To put it naïvely, I find that my knowledge is directed to you the audience as well as the window, the walls, the chalkboard. These very things are what my cognitive self-directedness intends. My act of knowing does not intend them as “contents of consciousness.” When I look at the bench over there, I certainly do not participate in a content of consciousness to which I attribute value, as Rickert puts it. When I see this lamp, I do not apprehend sense-impressions but the lamp itself and the light; even less do I apprehend sense-impressions of red and gold. No, I apprehend the grey wall itself. Nor am I related to concepts. Even less so do I see something like an image in my consciousness—an image of the wall, which I then relate to the wall itself in order thereby to slip out of my consciousness, in which I am allegedly imprisoned. No, it is the wall itself that my looking intends. This does not seem to be a particularly deep insight, and in fact it is not. But it becomes a crucial insight in the face of the erroneous constructions of epistemology. Epistemology snaps to the ready, armed with a theory, and though blind to the phenomenon of knowledge, goes ahead and explains knowledge—instead of leaving its theory at home [101] and for once starting by examining what underlies its “explanation.”

As regards currently circulating theories, the crucial thing is, first, to establish inchoatively the toward-which, the entity itself, and then above all to hold on to it. Even the unbiased, when asked what it is they see, are inclined to think they have to say something learned. And since everyone seems to know that what is first given intentionally

79. [Moser (p. 211) records Heidegger as saying in place of the next few lines: “To put it naïvely, I find that my perception, in which I am now living, is directed to you the audience as well as to the wall and the window over there. My act of knowing does not intend them as ‘contents of consciousness.’ When I look at the bench over there, I certainly do not participate in a value-laden content of consciousness, as Rickert puts it. When I see this lamp, I do not apprehend senseimpressions but the lamp itself and the light that burns here in this auditorium. Even less so am I related to concepts, and least of all do I first know an image [of light] in my consciousness, with the help of which and with the help of the image of the wall, I somehow slip out to the wall out there. No, what I know is the audience, the wall, the window, and the chalkboard themselves.”]