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ZOLLIKON SEMINARS
a pure mystification. [This is so] because one is talking about matters not demonstrated [ausgewiesen] at all, pure inventions—constructs from a calculative, causal-theoretical, and explanatory comportment toward beings. It is a misinterpretation of the world.
When one begins to explain the perception of the blackboard from sensory stimuli, one has indeed seen the blackboard. In this theory of sensory stimuli, where is [there a place for] what is meant by "is" [being] ? Even the greatest possible accumulation and intensity of stimuli will never bring forth the "is." [What is meant by it] is already presupposed in every [act of] being stimulated.
Even imagining can only be seen as directed into a world [in eine Welt hinein] and can only happen into a world. To imagine a golden mountain can always really only happen in such a way that even this [mountain] is somehow situated in a world. Even in such imagining there is more there than just the isolated golden mountain. I do not imagine a golden mountain within my consciousness or within my brain, but rather I relate it to a world, to a landscape, which in turn is again related to the world in which I exist bodily. The golden mountain is present as something imagined which is a specific mode of presence and which has the character of a world. It is related to men, earth, sky, and the gods.*
The whole starting point within the psychic and the point of departure from a consciousness is an abstraction and a nondemonstrable construct [eine nicht ausweisbare Konstruktion]. The relationships of a thing to the surrounding world [Umwelt] do not require explanation; they must simply be seen [in a phenomenological sense].
The traditional, psychological theory that one perceives another human being through "empathy" and through "projection" of oneself into the other does not mean anything because the ideas of empathy and projection always already presuppose being-with the other and the being of the other with me. Both already presuppose that one has already [existentially] understood the other as another human being; otherwise, I would be projecting something into the void.
* See Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 323-39, concerning the contextual significance of the fourfold [das Geviert] of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities for the later Heidegger.—TRANSLATORS