and in the final analysis never can be. Care is being-unto, and what it is unto is the very being of existence, the being that existence always is not yet but can be. Thus, “at stake” entails a being-out-forone’s own being as ability-to-be.
This ability is determined not primarily in terms of incidental data, situations, and the like that sometimes hit existence one way, sometimes another. All of that is existentially possible only because existence, as care, is constantly its own ability in the form of being-out-for this ability. The “at stake” entails that existence has been a priori placed in its ability, in fact, already placed a priori face-to-face with itself. Care means: existence is ahead of itself. Care, as such, is concern. Care has the structure of 1. being ahead-of-oneself, along with 2. being a priori familiar-with-the-world. In a phrase: being a priori ahead of oneself and familiar with one’s world. With that, we have understood the ontological structure of concernful care.
In the investigation that follows we must limit ourselves to this issue alone. We intentionally do not treat being with others or care as concern. We omit them specifically because our chosen subject is only statements about the world, not statements about other people—even though (as is to be shown) the other is present in a certain way in statements about the world. Those other phenomena are essentially more difficult, and they would presuppose yet other reflections. And for our preliminary exposition of ur-temporal structures, the phenomena should not be developed in too complicated a fashion.
Let us remember that we are taking the analysis in a somewhat one-sided direction toward concernful care. But we also note that, as we have said, we cannot master the phenomena of concern-for and being-with either by simply broadening and modifying what [236] we have established about concern or by simply transferring being-untooneself and its structure over to being-unto-others as in that favorite argument:
1. Being-unto-others is very different from being unto a thing.
2. The other is itself also an existence.
3. In this case, therefore, we have the ontological relation of one existence to another.
4. But such a relation is already included in one’s own existence, in-so-far as existence as such relates to itself.
5. Therefore, being-unto-another is, so to speak, merely a projection of the ontological relation of existence to itself.
It is easy to see, however, that in being-unto-oneself, that self is precisely not someone else. Therefore, being-unto-others is an irreducible, independent way of being, one that is co-original in existence along with