is an act of concern—in fact, it is concern in an original and fundamental sense of the term. As being unto the world, this concern has a meaning fundamentally related to existence, a meaning that determines each of its concretions such as getting, using what has been gotten, or surrendering what has been gotten. I procure for myself some chalk—as something I can write with—for the specific act of writing. I do this writing in order to emphasize what I am saying, to facilitate your retention of it, to make it possible for you to write down what I am saying, to take notes on it. This reinforcement of what is being said is done in the service of communicating an analysis of phenomena. This communication has the function of letting you come to see the phenomena I am speaking about, of bringing you face-to-face with the subject matter. And this is being done so that from these phenomena you might form an understanding of them; and this, in turn, so that that you might understand the problematic of logic and the essence of truth.

So we have a series of comportments, [219] from a certain way of using chalk all the way up to understanding the essence of truth, all of them ordered successively in the unifying form of an um . . . zu, an “in-order-to.” But the “in-order-to” phenomenon comes to light inadequately by our pointing out these comportments. This ordering of comportments is merely a recognition of the comportments themselves. In fact, the order of the comportments, as we listed it, would be wrong if we understood it as the order of their being. That is not at all the case. In fact, the ontological relations [of these comportments] come in the exact opposite order.

It is from out of my purpose of acquiring the understanding of truth and preparing it [for communication to you], and it is in and for this purpose that my existence arrives at the chalk within this lived world and that my being unto the world enters into concern for these things in my lived world.

There is a network of comportments that precedes the activity in question. In turn, this network of comportments is and lives by intending something. This anticipation is one of the comportments of my existence in which I live in order to execute the task that has laid hold of this existence of mine. Living in this network of comportments, I comport myself to this task.

But this task is nothing but a way my very own existence can be. This is not just any possibility, but one into which my own existence has been placed as a possibility of itself. This possibility “is” my very existence—not something that could be met with or found elsewhere, whether with other people or in the lived world. Existence is this possibility in such a way that existence comports itself to it as its very own being. That is, insofar as existence is the way it is, it is concerned for its