degree such an act of dealing-with something by speaking about it somehow solidifies itself in such a way that the chalk is now simply there.
With the statement, the act of dealing-with something has now been [157] withdrawn from the primary function of, for example, writing. This means that, after this withdrawal from an immediate task, the understanding no longer really lives in a practical function, no longer lives into the task for which the given implement can be used. Concern-about and dealing-with are now restricted to the status of “there”: the chalk is just there. And regarding the focus of its way of showing things, the statement is now tied, so to speak, to what-is-there as just-being-there. Its sole orientation is to bring closer what-is-there as being-there, for the purpose of understanding it.
This entails that, in and through this process of thematization, the subject-matter-about-which (which we have already determined as the thematic means-whereby) gets covered-over to a certain extent as regards that-as-which it was properly understood. So now when I say “This chalk is white,” this statement about something that I might deal with is no longer a statement that, as such and in its very form, is primarily related to dealing-with. If I were to say as I am writing, “This chalk is too hard”—or “too scratchy,” or whatever—I would be making a statement within a practical function, namely that of writing. I would be making a statement that I simply could not interpret as:
This statement, “This chalk is too scratchy,” is an act of defining the chalk as well as spelling out my relation to the chalk—and inability to relate to it—i.e., my inability to write “properly” with it.
No, when I make the statement, “This chalk is too scratchy,” I do not mean to determine the thing I have in my hand as something possessed of the property of grittiness or scratchiness. Rather, what I mean to say with my statement is that it is an obstacle to my writing. The statement is interpretatively related to my writing activity, my primary concern to write. That is, the statement is a spelling-out of my being-in [the world] as a being-with [the chalk]. In a practical function, the means-whereby is necessarily co-understood: I live by being immersed in it. We must keep this in mind in order to understand the kinds of contradictions that run through traditional logic when the usual example of a determination comes up: “The roses are in bloom.” One then says that these things, the roses, have the property [158] or condition of blooming.
That is not what anyone means when he or she says, “The roses are in bloom.” The example is a pure construction taken from a statement that is simply oriented to giving a flat determination of something just-there. When a thing gets thematized in such a way that the means-whereby of