taken in the broad sense of what we now call “conscious processes” or “lived experiences,” and all of these terms naturally already harbor a certain conception of the structure of existence. Traditional epistemology, ethics, and so forth have done a lot for the analysis of these phenomena, but the truly crucial investigations [211] have been lacking up until now. These investigations precede every concrete analysis, and once and for all they determine, in terms of itself, the being [Seiende] whose comportments are especially to be studied. For the most part, when analyzing existence, philosophers work with categories that are indifferent to existence or that are drawn from contexts of being that genuinely have nothing to do with it.
Given the aim and particularly the limitation of our project, our analysis of existence now confronts us with particular and principled difficulties. One could say, of course, that this existence—which we ourselves are, each one of us—is truly and properly the closest thing to us. As Augustine has already asked in his Confessions, book 10, chapter 16:
Quid autem propinquius meipso mihi?
What is closer to me than myself?
And in the same chapter where he poses that question, he also says:
Ego certe laboro hic et laboro in meipso: factus sum mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii.
I work hard here, I word hard on myself {when I study consciousness, the soul}, and I have become to myself a field of hard labor and immense personal struggle.
Let us keep these thoughts present to mind as we take up the analysis of existence in an effort to really see at least some of its structures. In this context it is not a matter of providing definitions or descriptions that can be understood in a very general way. It’s a matter of really bringing structures out into the clear so that we can then see, within the horizon of those structures, what we have been calling ur-temporality.
With the letting-encounter and already-having of something, we have met up with the clarification of deception. In order for me to be able to be deceived, in order for something to misrepresent itself to me and to appear as something it is not, the thing that so appears has to have already encountered me. It has to appear, in some way or other, precisely «during» the misrepresentation. To put it concretely: I have to be moving in the forest, for example, or if not in the forest [212] then someplace else, if I am to be able to be deceived about things in the world and in the knowledge of the world. That need not mean that such