have the structure of a statement about the world. But its primary sense qua statement is not a matter of pointing out something that is merely-present, but rather, is a matter of letting human existence be understood. All statements about the being of human existence, all propositions about time, all propositions within the problematic of the essence of ur-temporality have, as expressed propositions, the character of indication. But they indicate only human existence, even though, as expressed propositions, they nonetheless first refer to something merely-present.¹⁵³ They indicate human existence and the structures of human existence and of time. They indicate the possible understanding of the structure of human existence, and, to the degree that it is available in such understanding, the possible conceptualizability of that structure. (Insofar as these propositions are indicative of a ἑρμηνεύειν, they have the character of hermeneutic indication.) [411] By their very meaning, statements about time are never statements about the world; but first and foremost, we do operate within the orientation and mind-set [Verstehenstendenz] of statements about the world. And to that extent, when statements deal with time, time is rendered inaccessible in its proper temporality. What gets formed is a concept of time by which temporality is not so much determined or even just indicated, but rather is covered-over, so much so that even the possibility of understanding time differently is disavowed. The abiding example of this orientation in interpreting time is the first philosophical interpretation of time that we have: that of Aristotle.

But the difficulty in apprehending time goes hand-in-hand with the peculiar temporality of time itself: the fact that first and foremost time conceals itself and gets recognized only in and as the non-authentic forms it takes. We look at the world and find that time is that within which all processes run their course. Whenever we try to understand

153. A worldly statement about something present, even when it is performed as a simple naming, can refer directly to the said. On the other hand, a statement about human existence as well as every statement about being (every statement about the categorial), in order to be intelligible, requires an overhaul and reorganization of the understanding in terms of what the statement is pointing out. In the aforementioned cases, what is being pointed out is, by its very essence, never something present.

The difference between a statement about the categorial and a statement about things that are present in the world remained hidden for the Greeks—for Plato as well as Aristotle—and all statements were understood as statements directly about the world. For that reason it has happened that being itself, insofar as it came into view, was conceived of as an entity. The hiddenness of this difference [between the two kinds of statement] and the hiddenness of the corresponding ways of talking about and interpreting [the two kinds of statements] is one of the roots of the split between Aristotelian metaphysics as a pure formal ontology and as a theology of νοῦς.