PATHMARKS
in all experience, but only those who make a claim to deciding, or even to asking, about nature, history, art, human beings, or beings as a whole. Certainly not every one of us who through action or thinking dwells in these regions of beings needs to consider explicitly what is already seen. But of course neither may we overlook it or toss it off as insignificant, as something merely "abstract" — that is, if we really want to stand where we stand.
What appears in advance, the current being of a being, is not something abstracted from beings later on, something depleted and thinned out, finally no more than a vapor, [334 {GA 9: 264}] nor is it something that becomes accessible only when we who are thinking "reflect" on ourselves. On the contrary, the way to what is already seen but not yet understood, much less conceptualized, is the leading-toward that we already mentioned, namely, ἐπαγωγή. This is what lets us see ahead into the distance, into what we ourselves are not and least of all could ever be, into something far off that nevertheless is most near, nearer than everything that lies in our hand or resounds in our ear or lies before our eyes. In order not to overlook what is nearest yet likewise farthest, we must stand above the obvious and the "factual." Differentiating between what appears of and by itself from what does not appear of and by itself is a κρίνειν in the genuinely Greek sense: separating out what is superior from what is inferior. Through this "critical" ability for differentiating, which is always decision, the human being is lifted out of mere captivation by what presses upon and preoccupies him or her and is placed out beyond it, into the relation to being. In the real sense of the word, one becomes ek-sistent, one ek-sists instead of merely "living" and snatching at "reality" in the so-called "concern for real life," where "reality" is only a refuge in the long-standing flight from being. According to Aristotle, those who cannot make such a distinction live like people blind from birth who work at making colors accessible to themselves by reasoning about the names they have heard them called. They choose a way that can never bring them to their goal, because the only road leading there is "seeing," and that is precisely what is denied to the blind. Just as there are people blind to colors, so there are people blind to φύσις. And if we recall that φύσις has been defined as only one kind of οὐσία (beingness), then those blind to φύσις are merely one type of people blind to being. Presumably those blind to being far outnumber those blind to color, and what is more, the power of their blindness is even stronger and more obstinate, for they are less obvious and mostly go unrecognized. As a consequence they even pass for the only ones who really see. [335 {GA 9: 265}] But obviously our relation to that which, of and by itself, appears in advance and eludes all plans for proof
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