Concern-about can diversify itself as this or that kind of concern-about enacted in this or that particular way only if that which underlies such a factual “development” is itself, by its nature, already concern-about. Managing and dealing with things does not first occur when I begin to handle something. Rather, I can start to handle something only because my existence is already determined in the first place as concern-about and dealing-with. Existence as such “is” concern-about; and all I can do is develop certain degrees of it and directions that give expression to concern-about and fulfill it.

So, insofar as we are at all, we live existentially in concern-about, which is to say, in the understanding of an end-for-which. But in such dealings we never thematically understand or even thematically think about this end-for-which that makes understanding possible in the form of the “what-as.” Rather, in our direct dealings it is the means-whereby that is thematic. The means-whereby or means, is what gets understood as this-or-that thematically in the “as.” But while it is thematic, it is not thematic for theoretical understanding.

Now what about the statement? In the statement, the means-whereby of our dealings becomes the thing-about-which of an act of showing-as. Taken ontologically, such showing-as is also a dealing-with. We will have to interpret this more precisely, but in any case showing-as is a dealing-with, in which the means-whereby (which is already uncovered and understood in understanding) has to come to light. [155] And along with that, what is already uncovered must be further uncovered. So a dealing-with whose concern-about brings about an uncovering is itself an act of uncovering. The statement is an act of understanding in dealing-with, whose concern [Sorge] is the act of uncovering, which therefore necessarily has the as-structure in an emphatic sense.

If, in an act of dealing directly with something, we encounter the means-whereby in such a way that we make a statement about it, the means-whereby becomes that-about-which. The thematizing of the about-which at first does not change anything in the means-whereby—i.e., it does not change its intelligibility. We encounter the means-whereby as something that from the start was already understood in the structure of the primary “as.”

But what happens when we thematize in the form of making a statement and thematically speaking about the means-whereby? The thematizing performed by the statement works within the statement’s function, which is to show-something-as. In other words, the statement is purely concerned with ἀποφαίνεσθαι, uncovering-something-as. In a statement, the uncovering understands the means-whereby in terms of what-it-is, but it does not draw that “what-it-is” from anything else—from some practical function, for example—but only from the thing it is speaking about.