world of one’s concerns, is a constant inability-to-hold-on-to as well as a having-to-let-go-of the worldly things of one’s concerns as things that essentially change. In turn, holding-on-to has various modes, such as being deprived of; being unable to hold on to; letting slip away; no longer being concerned with something useful; forgetting; renouncing. These are modes of human existence’s being—modes of its being unto its ownmost having-been. And to that having-been there also belong the objects of one’s concern, insofar as human existence first and foremost understands itself in terms of them, even as things that have gotten away from it. In these modes of time that belong to making-present and expecting, qua retaining, as likewise with the future, we lack a corresponding term. “The past,” [414] on the contrary, means a now that is no longer there, the already [gone], the no-longer-present-ness of something that could be there.

The term “ahead” indicates expecting; “familiarity-with” indicates making-present and holding-on-to. But what about the “already” [das Schon]? That is an ur-temporal determination that pertains to all of human existence’s time and its ontological facticity. The “already” is the indication of the a priori of facticity. That means: The structures of human existence—temporality itself—are not at all like an ever-available framework for something that can be merely-present. Rather, in keeping with their most proper sense, these structures are possibilities for human existence to be, and only that.

And every human existence qua human has already personally decided, one way or the other, regarding this ability: either authentically, i.e., from out of oneself; or [inauthentically], by renouncing this possibility; or by just not yet being up to such a decision. Human existence is handed over to itself in its having-to-be [Zu-sein]. “Handed over”—that means: already in, already ahead-of-itself, already familiar with the world, never something just-there but always already a possibility that has been decided one way or the other. Such human existence is always already prior to what it de facto is at any given moment. But prior to every possible “prior” is time itself, which makes it possible that human existence can be the very possibility of its self.

To make a statement—to talk about something as something and thereby to let it be seen as something—that is a determinate possibility of pure making-present. It is letting an entity be present, and therefore is the uncovering of the presence of something that is there. That is the basic function of λόγος as ἀποφαίνεσθαι. The presence of something present, a presence that is discoverable only in a presenting, means nothing but the being of entities. Every statement that uncovers—i.e., makes-present—thereby says “is.” It makes no difference whether this “is” is expressed verbally or not, or how it is expressed. The “is” does not have the function of a copula, but is the index of the basic function of a