15. Ex-sistential sight vs. intellectual intuition. All forms of “sight” are based on ex-sistence as aheadness. Common sense, for example, is simply fore-sight regarding things that happen to be familiar. This deprives intellectual intuition of its alleged priority, which comes from philosophy’s traditional prejudice in favor of our relation to mere objects. o Both intellectual intuition and dis-cursive thinking + are derived, albeit remotely, from ex-sistential aheadness. Even the “intuition of essences” in Husserl’s phenomenology is based on such aheadness. Full confirmation of this thesis will come in SZ I.3, when we explicitly work out the concept of significance.
16. Summary (1): Aheadness as ability and openness. Aheadness, as holding open the field of intelligibility, is one element of ex-sistential ability. Being projected unto my final purpose, together with understanding the world of meaning, is where the intelligibility of being-in-general occurs. + Projecting a possible meaning for something presumes that I already understand significance/being + without necessarily having a thematic concept of it. That is so because my ex-sistence is a priori projected ahead as involved in meaning. o By showing that ex-sistence as aheadness is the field of intelligibility we have demonstrated what we earlier stated as a dogmatic thesis.25 Nonetheless, a full explanation of how ex-sistence understands being must await the “temporal” interpretation of being in SZ I.3.
17. Summary (2): Affect and aheadness. As two sides of the same coin, affect and aheadness are ex-sistentials that characterize how we are open and involved in meaning. In their unity they complement one another. As affect, I “see” the possibilities in terms of which I ex-sist; and as ahead and opening up those possibilities, I am affected by them. The reason I can personally project the ability to ex-sist authentically is that I am a priori delivered over to the ultimate factum: my thrown-openness as the field of intelligibility. o
This section has shown that the field of intelligibility is ex-sistence as thrown and projective—which has made ex-sistence all the more enigmatic. We must let that enigma trouble us more and more until, as we try to resolve it, we hit a wall and have to start over again by asking how ex-sistence is projectively involved in meaning. o
18. Transition to §32. In the next three sections we delve further into how affective aheadness functions. That will prepare the ground for Subdivision B, which investigates how we live out the field of intelligibility in our everyday absorbed activities.