into regarding the solution's premise and conditions as just as self-evidently given.
The theory of knowledge in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the last decades has repeatedly made the subjectobject relation the basis of its inquiries. But both idealist and realist explanations had to fail because the explicandum was not sufficiently definite. The extent to which the above clarification of the problem determines all efforts to pose the problem is evident in the fact that the consequences of the first refinement of our problem, where it is really carried out and achieved, lead to the disappearance of a possible problem in the sense of the idealistic or realistic theories of knowledge.
The most recent attempts conceive the subject-object relation as a "being relation." Here, in particular, we see the misguided incomprehension of the central problematic. Nothing is gained by the phrase "being relation," as long as it is not stated what sort of being is meant, and as long as there is vagueness about the sort of being of the beings between which this relation is supposed to obtain. But leaving indifferent the being of the relation as well as the mode of being of subject and object, one believes he can pose the problem with the greatest possible neutrality. The opposite is the case. The earlier formulation is more self-critical, insofar as it does not speak of a being relation, because being, even with Nicolai Hartmann and Max Scheler, is taken to mean being-onhand [Vorhandensein]. This relation is not nothing, but it is still not being as something on hand. Thus Hartmann too is pushed back into "critical realism," (probably the least philosophical of all approaches to the question).
One of the main preparatory tasks of Being and Time is to bring this "relation" radically to light in its primordial essence and to do so with full intent (cf. §§ 12 and 13 as the first introductory characterizations). Max Scheler came to similar insights by another path and with another purpose, and he ultimately planned, partially with reference to my investigations, a large treatise, "Idealism—Realism."4 But the plan for this exchange came to naught.
In our last long conversation in December 1927, we agreed on four points: 1) The problem of the subject-object relation needs to be raised completely afresh, free of the previous efforts to solve it. 2) It is not a question of so-called epistemology; that is, it is not to
4. Parts II and lIi appeared in Der philosophische Anzeiger, volume 2, issue 3, 1927-28, pp. 253-324. [Now to be found in Gesammelte Werke, volume 9, Späte Schriften, edited by Manfred Frings, Bern and Munich, 1976, pp. 185-241.]