From the sphere of basic metaphysical questions, we will choose one question in the following course of lectures. It runs, simply: “What is a thing?” The question is an ancient one. What is perpetually new about it is only that it must be raised again and again.
We could begin right away with a wide-ranging conversation about the question “What is a thing?” before we have properly posed it. In a sense, this would even be justified, since philosophy is the sort of thing that begins in an unfavorable situation. This is not true of the sciences; there is always an immediate transition to and entrance into the sciences on the basis of everyday representations, opinions, and thoughts. When one takes everyday representation to be the measure of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged. This derangement of the attitude [Haltung] of thought is only accomplished by way of a jolt. Scientific lectures, by contrast, can begin immediately with the presentation of their objects. And the chosen level of questioning [in the sciences] will not be abandoned, even when the questions grow more complex and more difficult.
By contrast, philosophy is a continual derangement of standpoint and level. Therefore, it often happens that for a long time one does not know where one stands. But in order that this unavoidable and frequently wholesome confusion does not overreach itself, we need a preliminary reflection on what should be asked. We otherwise run the risk of speaking at length about what philosophy is without considering the meaning of philosophy itself [2] more carefully. We shall, therefore, dedicate the first hour [of the present course of lectures], and only the first hour, to reflection upon what we have [in view] in advance [unser Vorhaben].
The question runs: “What is a thing?” A doubt surfaces immediately. One is tempted to say: it makes sense to use and to enjoy available things, to remove things that stand in the way, to provide [things that are] demanded, but with the question “What is a thing?” one can truly initiate [anfangen] nothing at all. And this is true. One cannot initiate anything with this question. It would be a serious misunderstanding of the question if we tried to prove that one could initiate something with it. No, one can initiate nothing with it. This assertion about our question is so true that we must understand it as a determination of its essence. “What is a thing?” That is a question with which one can initiate nothing; nothing more about the question really needs to be said.
Since the question is already rather old, as old as the inception [Anfang] of Western philosophy in Greece in the seventh century BC, it would be good to provide an outline of the question from a historical point of view. A short story has been handed down that pertains to our question. Plato has preserved it in his dialogue Theaetetus (174af.):
Ὥσπερ καὶ Θαλῆν ἀστρονομοῦντα . . . καὶ ἄνω βλέποντα, πεσόντα εἰς φρέαρ, Θρᾷττά τις ἐμμελὴς καὶ χαρίεσσα θεραπαινὶς ἀποσκῶψαι λέγεται ὡς τὰ μὲν ἐν οὐρανῷ προθυμοῖτο εἰδέναι, τὰ δ’ ἔμπροσθεν αὐτοῦ καὶ παρὰ πόδας λανθάνοι αὐτόν.
The story is that Thales, while occupied with studies of the heavens and gazing upward, fell into a well. A witty and attractive Thracian maid laughed at him and said that while he wished passionately to know something of heavenly things, that which stood before his very nose and beneath his feet remained concealed.
Plato added the following remark to this report of the story [3]:
ταὐτὸν δὲ ἀρκεῖ σκῶμμα ἐπὶ πάντας ὅσοι ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ διάγουσι.
This jest applies to all those who engage in philosophy.
The question “What is a thing?” must consequently be the sort of question that makes housemaids laugh. And proper housemaids must have something to laugh about.
Through the characterization of the question concerning the thing, we have suddenly acquired a hint about the distinctiveness of the philosophy that poses this question. Philosophy is that thinking with which one can essentially initiate nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh.
This definition of the concept of philosophy is no mere joke but something to consider carefully. We would do well to remind ourselves occasionally that by strolling we might sometimes fall into a well, and for a long while fail to hit bottom.
But we still need to say something about why we speak of the basic questions of metaphysics. This word “metaphysics” should indicate here only that the questions to be dealt with stand at the core and center of philosophy. By “metaphysics” we do not mean a particular field within philosophy, to be distinguished from logic and ethics. There are no fields in philosophy, because philosophy itself is not a field. Philosophy is not a field because, while scholastic learning is unavoidable within certain limits, it is never essential and, above all, because something like a division of labor in philosophy is senseless. We therefore wish to hold the term “metaphysics” at a distance from everything that attaches to it historically. For us it designates only that activity thanks to which one risks falling into a well. After this general preparation, we can now more closely characterize our question: what is a thing? [4]
We should ask, first: what are we thinking about when we say “a thing”? We mean a piece of wood, a stone, a knife, a clock, a ball, a spear, a screw, or a wire. But we also call a large train station and a towering fir-tree “prodigious things.” We speak, too, of many things in a summery meadow: grasses and herbs, butterflies and beetles. The thing over there on the wall—the painting—is also called a thing, and a sculptor has a variety of finished and unfinished things in his or her studio.
By contrast, we are reluctant to call the number 5 a thing. One cannot grasp or see or hear the number. In the same way, the sentence “The weather is bad” is not a thing any more than the single word “house” is. We distinguish precisely between the thing “house” and the word that names this thing. An attitude or disposition, too, which we preserve or lose on some occasion, we do not take to be a thing.
But when, for instance, something treacherous is stirring [am Werk] we say: “There are unsettling things in the air.” We do not mean by this such things as pieces of wood, utensils, and the like. And when a decision hangs “above all things” on this or that consideration, those things that fall out are not stones and the like, but other considerations and resolutions. So, too, when we think that things are not quite right: in this case, “thing” is now used in a broader sense than at the beginning [Beginn] of our enumeration, and with a meaning that our German word had from the very inception. “Thing” [Ding] means as much as “matter at hand” [“thing”]: a trial at court, negotiations, something of concern; similarly, when we manage somehow, somewhere to clear things up; so, too, in the proverb “good things take time.” Every thing, too, that is not wood or stone, but task and undertaking [5], requires time. And someone for whom things are faring well is someone whose affairs, wishes, and work are in order.
It is already becoming clear: we understand the word “thing” in a narrower and in a broader sense. “Thing” in the narrower sense means the graspable, the visible, and so forth: in short, the merely present [das Vorhandene]. “Thing” in the broader sense means as much as something of concern, something in such-and-such a condition, those things that happen in the “world,” occurrences, events. Finally, the word can be used in the widest sense; this meaning was long in the making and became something of a commonplace in eighteenth-century philosophy. Kant, for instance, speaks of the “thing in itself” as something distinct from the “thing for us,” that is as “appearance.” A thing in itself is something that is not accessible to us human beings by way of experience, as stones and plants and animals are. Every thing for us is, as a thing, also a thing in itself, that is, something known absolutely in the absolute knowledge of God; but not every thing in itself is a thing for us. God, for instance, is a thing in itself, as Kant understands the word, in keeping with Christian theology. When Kant calls God a thing, he does not mean that God is a gigantic gas-like formation that does its business somewhere in secret. According to a strict use of the word, “thing” means here only “something,” that which is not nothing. With the word and concept of “God,” we can think something, but we cannot experience God like this piece of chalk, about which we can assert and substantiate with one another statements such as “When released it falls with a definite velocity.”
God is a thing, insofar as God is something as such, an X. A number is also a thing, and faith and loyalty are things as well. Similarly, the sign > < is “something” and the “and” and “either/or.”
We now ask the question “What is a thing?” again. And we see at once that the question is not in order; for what [6] should be put into question (the “thing”) shifts in its meaning. What is to be questioned precisely must be sufficiently defined in order to be able to become questionable in the right way. “Where is the dog?” “The dog” cannot be sought out if I do not know whether it is the neighbor’s or my own. What is a thing? We ask: thing in what sense—in the narrower, the wider, or the widest? We distinguish between three senses, although the manner of delimitation remains indefinite still:
1.Thing in the sense of what is merely present: stone, a piece of wood, pliers, clock, an apple, a piece of bread; inanimate and animate things, a rose, shrub, beech tree, spruce, lizard, wasp, and the like.
2.Thing in the sense meant by what was just listed, but also including plans, loyalties, meditations, reflections, deeds, the historical, and the like.
3.All these and anything else that is something and not nothing.
The limits within which we confine the meaning of the word “thing” always remain arbitrary. The scope and direction of our question will correspondingly change.
It lies closer to current linguistic usage to understand the word “thing” in the first (narrower) sense. Then each of these things (stone, clock, apple, rose) is also always something, but not every something (the number 5, fortune, courage) is a thing.
In asking “What is a thing?” we shall stick to the first sense, not only in order to remain close to linguistic use, but also because the question usually aims at this narrower domain and initially begins from it, even when it is understood in the wider and widest senses. When we ask, “What is a thing?” we now mean those things that surround us. We fix our eyes on what lies closest to us, what the hand can grasp. In taking this to heart, we show that [7] we have learned something from the laughter of the housemaid. She believes that one should take a good look around at what surrounds us.
But as soon as we make our way toward a definition of these things, we grow embarrassed. For all these things were properly defined long ago, or if not, there are secure procedures (sciences) and modes of production by way of which this can be done. Mineralogy and chemistry can say best and most quickly what a stone is; botany teaches us reliably what a rose or a bush is; what a frog or a falcon is, is for zoology to tell; about what a shoe or a horseshoe or a clock is, the shoemaker and the blacksmith and the clockmaker give the best expert information.
As it turns out, we arrive too late with our question and are immediately referred to circles that have a far better answer handy or at the very least possess the experiences and methods to offer such answers readily. But this only confirms what we have already granted that one can initiate nothing with the question “What is a thing?” But since we intend to clarify this question, and in relation to those things that lie closest to us, it is necessary to clarify what we still wish to know, in contradistinction to the sciences.
In raising the question “What is a thing”? we apparently do not want to know what granite, a pebble, limestone, or sandstone is but rather what a stone is as a thing. We do not want to know how to distinguish in each case between mosses, ferns, grasses, shrubs, and trees but to know what a plant is as a thing, and similarly with animals. We [8] also do not want to know how pliers and hammers, clocks and keys are different, and how they are in each case, or in particular, but what these implements and tools are as things. What this is supposed to mean is of course not immediately clear. But if we allow the question to be asked in this way, then surely the following demand remains: namely that we hold ourselves to the facts and exact observation of them in order to make out what things are. What things are cannot be thought up at the desk and prescribed by general discourse. It can only be decided in the workshop and laboratory of investigative science. If we do not limit ourselves in this way, we expose ourselves to the laughter of housemaids. We are questioning things and yet we leap over all the data and occasions that, according to general judgment, provide adequate information about all these things.
In fact, that is how it looks. Our question “What is a thing?” leaps over not only particular stones and kinds of stone, particular plants and kinds of plant, particular animals and kinds of animal, implements and tools, but also the very domains of the lifeless, the living, and the instrumental in order only to know what a thing is. When we ask this sort of question we are seeking what in each case makes the thing a thing and not what makes something stone or wood, what conditions the thing [was das Ding be-dingt]. We are not asking about a thing of a certain kind but about the very thingness of the thing. That which conditions the thing as thing cannot itself be a thing, i.e., something conditioned [ein Bedingtes]. Thingness must be something unconditioned [etwas Un-bedingtes].1 The question “What is a thing?” asks about the unconditioned. We ask about what surrounds us and can be grasped by the hand, and yet we alienate ourselves from those things that lie closest to us even further than did Thales, who only looked toward the stars. We want to leap beyond these and over every thing toward the unconditioned, where there are no more things to provide a basis and ground. [9]
And yet we pose this question only in order to know what a stone is, and a lizard sunning himself upon it, what a blade of grass growing beside it is, and a knife, which we hold, perhaps, in our hand as we lie in the meadow. We want to know precisely this, something which the mineralogist, perhaps, and the botanist and zoologist and metallurgist do not at all want to know, something they only think they want to know, while they want, at bottom, something else: to further the progress of science or to take pleasure in discovery or to display the technical utility of things or to make a living. We would like to know not only what these individuals do not want to know but also what they perhaps can never know, despite all their scientific acumen and technical skills. This sounds presumptuous. It not only sounds presumptuous; it is presumptuous. Of course, this is not the presumptuousness of a particular individual, any more than our doubt about whether the desire and ability to know embedded in the sciences is directed against the attitude and disposition of particular individuals or even against the utility and necessity of science itself.
The knowledge claim of our question is a presumption of the sort that lies in every essential decision. Although we are already familiar with this decision, this does not mean that we have already gone through with it. It is the decision whether we want to know something with which one can initiate nothing. If we dispense with this knowledge and do not ask this question, everything remains just as it is. We will pass our exams without this question, too, perhaps even more easily. On the other hand, if we do ask this question, we will not become better botanists or zoologists or historians or jurists or physicians overnight. But, perhaps better or to speak more cautiously, in any event different teachers, doctors, and judges, although even then—in our professions—we can initiate nothing with the question. [10]
With our question, we would like neither to replace nor to improve the sciences. Instead, we would like to collaborate in the preparation of a decision, which runs: is science the measure for [all] knowing, or is there a [kind of] knowing in which the ground and the limits of science, and thereby its proper effectiveness, are determined? Is this authentic knowing necessary for a historical people, or can it be dispensed with or replaced by something else?
But decisions will not be worked out and made by talking about them, but by creating situations and taking positions in which the decision is unavoidable, in which the most essential decision becomes whether or not the decision is reached or instead circumvented.
The distinctiveness of such decisions remains that they are prepared for only by questions with which one can initiate nothing, according to the widely held opinions of housemaids. This question always invites the charge that it wishes to know better than the sciences. “Better”: that always means a difference in degree in one and the same domain. But we stand with our question outside the sciences, and the knowing to which our question aspires is neither better nor worse but wholly distinct: distinct not only from science but also from what one calls “worldview.”
The question “What is a thing?” now seems to be in order. We have at least decided, roughly: (1) what is put in question, and (2) what we are seeking in raising the question. What is put in question is the “thing” in the narrower sense, which designates what is merely present. What we are seeking in asking about and interrogating [11] the thing is thingness that which determines the thing as such to be a thing.
When we set about to establish the thingness of the thing, we find ourselves immediately at a loss, despite the well-ordered question. “Where” are we supposed to locate the thing? Surely, we do not discover the thing [as such] anywhere, but always only particular things, these things and those things. Why? Is it because, initially and usually [zunächst und zumeinst], we meet up with the particular and then only later extract and draw out (abstract) the universal, in this case thingness, from the particular? Or is it because we always only encounter particular things in the things themselves? And if it lies in things [to be encountered always only as particulars], is this only some caprice on their part to be encountered in this way, or do they meet us as particulars because they are in themselves particular, as the very things they are?
Our everyday experiences and opinions of things tend in this direction. But before we move further along the path of our question, it is necessary in the meantime to consider our everyday experience. At first, and subsequently too, there is no tenable reason to doubt our everyday experience. Of course, it is not enough simply to claim that what everyday experience shows of things is true, any more than it suffices to assert, in a seemingly more critical and cautious way, that we are, after all, only individuals, particular subjects and egos; that what we represent and intend are only subjective images which we carry around in ourselves; and that we never arrive at the things themselves. Nor will this interpretation be overcome, should it prove to be untrue, by saying “we” instead of “I” and taking into account the community rather than the individual. It still always remains possible that we exchange subjective images of things with one another, which may be no truer just because we have exchanged them communally. [12]
We shall now put out of play these various interpretations of our relationship to things and the truth of this relationship. On the other hand, we do not want to forget that it is in no way sufficient to appeal to the truth and certainty of everyday experience. If everyday experience bears a truth, and indeed an exceptional truth, within itself, this truth must be grounded, i.e., its ground must be laid, accepted, and taken over. This [grounding] becomes even more necessary when, as it turns out, everyday things show still another face. This they have done for a long while, and they do it for us today, to a degree and in a way that we have hardly grasped, let alone mastered.
A familiar example: the sun as it sets over the face of the mountain is a glowing disc with a diameter, at its peak, of between one-half and one full meter. Everything that the sun is for a shepherd returning home from the field with his herd need not now be described, but it is the real sun, the same one the shepherd awaits again the next morning. But the real [wirklich] sun has already set a few minutes earlier, and what we see is only a semblance caused by certain movements of light rays. But even this semblance is only a semblance, for “in reality,” as we say, the sun as such does not set; it does not move over or around the earth but rather the earth moves around the sun. And this sun, again, is not the ultimate center of the universe but belongs to larger systems, which we know today as the Milky Way Galaxy and the Spiral Nebula, which display an order of magnitude compared to which the extent of our solar system must be deemed paltry and insignificant. And the sun which daily rises and sets and gives light is growing ever colder; our earth must draw ever closer to it in order to retain the same degree of heat. And yet the earth is moving away from the sun, and rushing toward catastrophe, albeit in “timeframes” compared to which [13] the few thousand years of human history on earth signify not even one second.
Now, which of these is the real sun? Which thing is the true thing—the shepherd’s sun or the astrophysicist’s? Or is the question badly put? And if so, why? How should we decide? Clearly it is necessary to know what a thing is, what being a thing means, and how the truth of a thing is to be determined. Neither the shepherd nor the astrophysicist is able to answer these questions. Both cannot and need not raise these questions in order to be immediately who they are.
Another example: the English physicist and astronomer [Sir Arthur Stanley] Eddington [1882–1944] says of his table, and everything of this sort—table, chair, and the like—that it has a double. Table number 1 is the table known since childhood. Table number 2 is the “scientific table.” This scientific table, the table defined in its thingness by science, is not made up of wood but, according to current atomic physics, consists for the most part of empty space. In this emptiness, electrical charges are distributed here and there, which rush back and forth with great velocity. Now, which of these is the true table? Number 1 or number 2 or both? What sense of truth [is operative here]? Which truth mediates between the two? There must be a third truth in relation to which number 1 and number 2 are true in their own ways and present variations of the truth. We cannot save ourselves here by the preferred road and say: what is said of the scientific table number 2 and the Spiral Nebula and the dying sun are only perspectives and theories of physics. To this we must reply: this very physics grounds our gigantic power stations, our airplanes, radios, and televisions, and technology as a whole, which has altered the earth and the human being along with it more than he or she suspects. These are realities, not perspectives defended by some researcher “remote from life.” Does one want [14] science to be even “closer to life”? I think that science is already so close that it overwhelms and oppresses us. We need rather the right distance from life, a distance from which we can measure what is happening to us.
No one knows this today.2 Hence we all must ask, and ask again and again, in order to know it, or at least in order to know why and in what respects we do not know it. Has the human being, have peoples, only stumbled into this universe, only in order to be cast out of it again, or is it otherwise? We must ask. For a long while there is first something still more preliminary: we must first learn again to question. And that can only happen by asking questions, not just any questions, of course. We chose the question “What is a thing?” It now appears that things stand in different truths. What is the thing, if this is the case? From where are we supposed to decide the thing-being of things? We take our stand in everyday experience, with the reservation that its truth, too, calls for grounding.
In everyday experience, we always encounter particular things. With this hint, we take up the course of our question once again, after the preceding digression.
Things are particulars. This means, initially, the stone, the lizard, the blade of grass, and the knife are in each case for themselves. Moreover, the stone is altogether determinate, precisely this [one and not another]; the lizard is not a lizard in general, but precisely this one, and so, too, the blade of grass and the knife. There is no thing in general but only particular things, and the particulars are, moreover, in each case this [particular thing]. Each thing is in each case this and no other. [15]
Unexpectedly, we meet with what belongs to the thing as thing. It is a determination disregarded by the sciences, which, driven toward the facts, apparently come closest to things. For a botanist investigating the labial flower never preoccupies himself or herself with a particular plant as this particular individual; it serves always only as an example. This holds as well in the investigation of animals, the countless frogs and salamanders killed in a laboratory. Science leaps over the “in each case this,” that which distinguishes each thing [as a thing]. Should we now consider things in this light? But we would never come to an end with the countless number of particular things, and we would establish simple matters of indifference. However, we are not directed exclusively toward a series of particulars, in each case these things, but toward the universal determination of each of these things to be an “in each case this”: the “in-each-case-thisness,” if such an expression is permitted.
But is the proposition “Each thing is in each case this and no other” universally valid? There are things that do not differ from one another, exactly similar things, two buckets or pine needles, say, that we are unable to distinguish from one another. Now one could say: the fact that we are unable to distinguish between exactly similar things does not prove that they are not, in the end, still somehow different. And even if we assume that two things are absolutely similar, each one is still in each case this thing, because each of these two pine needles is in a different place, and if they are to occupy the same place, they can only do so at different temporal locations. Place and temporal location individuate and distinguish otherwise absolutely similar things. But insofar as each thing has its place and temporal location, there are never two [absolutely] similar things. The particularity [Jeweiligkeit] of places and their manifoldness is grounded in space, and the particularity of temporal locations is grounded in time. The basic [16] characteristic of the thing, i.e., that essential determination of the thingness of the thing, to be “in each case this,” is grounded in the essence of space and time.
Our question “What is a thing?” includes within itself the questions “What is space?” and “What is time?” It is, of course, customary for us to take both together. But how and why are space and time coupled? Are they coupled in a merely external way or are they originally one? Do they spring from a common root, a third thing, or, better, from something which comes before space and time because it is already both in a more original way? These and related questions will occupy us, i.e., we will not rest content that there is space, on the one hand, and there is time, on the other, and that one places them next to one another—space and time—with the patient word “and,” as in “dog and cat.” In order to keep hold of these questions with the help of a title, we will call them the question of the time-space [Zeitraum]. By time-space we understand a certain span or frame of time and say, for instance, “in the timeframe of one hundred years.” With this expression, we really mean only something temporal. Alongside this common linguistic usage, which is very instructive for reflection, we will give the composite word “time-space” a sense that points in the direction of the inner unity of time and space. In this way, we move toward the authentic question of the “and.” That we name time first, and speak of time-space rather than space-time, should indicate that time plays a special role in this question. But this does not mean that space can be deduced from time or that space is something secondary.
The question “What is a thing?” includes within itself the question: what is time-space, the puzzling unity of space and time in which, as it seems, the basic characteristic of things, to be in each case only this, is determined?
We cannot avoid the question concerning the essence of space and time, because our [17] characterization of the thingness of the thing immediately raises doubts. We said that place and temporal location individuate and distinguish otherwise absolutely similar things. But are space and time as such determinations of the things themselves? Things, one says, are indeed in space and time. Space and time provide a framework, an ordering domain, with whose help we fix and determine the place and temporal location of particular things. It may therefore be that each thing, if determined with respect to its place and time-point, is now in each case this, and so not mistakable for any other. But these are determinations imposed upon the thing from without, by way of the spatiotemporal relation. Nothing has been said about the thing itself and what constitutes its being in each case this. We readily see that beneath these difficulties there lies concealed the fundamental question: do space and time provide merely a framework for things, a system of coordinates which we lay out in an improvised way in order to arrive at precise information about things, or are space and time something else? Is the relation of the thing to them not an external one? (Cf. Descartes.)
We look at what surrounds us in accordance with the everyday, accustomed way. We can establish that this chalk is white, this piece of wood is hard, and the door is closed. But these sorts of claims do not lead us to our goal. We would like to observe things in their thingness, to see what characterizes each and every thing as such. When we observe them in this respect we find that things are particular—a door, a piece of chalk, a chalkboard, and so on. To be particular is clearly a universal characteristic of things. If we look more closely, then, we realize that these particular things are in each case this, this door, this piece of chalk, this here and now, not those of Classroom 6 and not the ones from last semester.
And so we now have an answer to our question “What is a thing?” A thing is always an “in each case this.” We are seeking [18] to understand more precisely wherein this essential characteristic of the thing consists. We have discovered that the distinctiveness of things named earlier, that each this has to be “in each case this,” is connected with space and time. Each thing is unmistakably in each case this and no other by way of its particular position in space and time [seine jeweilige Raum-und Zeitstelle]. And yet doubt surfaced regarding whether something about the thing itself is expressed by this reference to a particular position in space and time. After all, information regarding place and time-point concerns only the framework within which things stand and how, i.e., where and when they stand precisely therein. One could point out that each thing—as we know things—has its particular space-time-position [jeweilige Raum-Zeit-Stelle], and that this relation of the thing to space and time is nothing arbitrary. Do things stand necessarily in this space-time-relation [Raum-Zeit-Bezug], and [if so] what is the ground of this necessity? Does this ground lie in the things themselves? If this were the case, then the distinctiveness we noted earlier would have to assert something about the things themselves, their thing-being.
Initially, however, we have the impression that space and time are something external to things. Or does this impression deceive us? Let us look more closely! This piece of chalk: the space—better, the space of the classroom— lies around this thing, if we must speak of a “lying.” This piece of chalk, we say, takes up a space; the inhabited bit of space is delimited by the surface of the piece of chalk. Surface? Plane? The piece of chalk itself is extended; the space is not only around it but in it and within it as well. Only then is the space filled up, occupied. The chalk itself consists of space within itself. Indeed, we say that the chalk takes in space, encloses space within itself by its surface as its interior. Hence for the chalk space is no mere external framework. But what does interior mean here? How does this interior of the chalk look? Let us have a look. We break the chalk apart. Are we now in the interior? We are outside again, just as before. Nothing has [19] changed. The piece of chalk is smaller, but whether larger or smaller hardly matters. The broken surfaces are less smooth than the other surfaces, but that, too, is inconsequential. In the very moment when we wanted to break open the chalk in order to grasp its interior, the thing itself has already closed itself off, and we can always advance further until the piece of chalk is grounded into dust. We could break up these tiny grains even further under a magnifying glass or microscope. Where the practical limit of this mechanical division lies cannot be finally decided. In any case, this work of dividing apart never arrives, in principle, at anything but what was already there before it began: whether the piece of chalk is 4 cm long or only µ 0.004 mm remains only a difference in quantity [Wieviel], but not in essence [im Was (Wesen)].
We could now follow up this mechanical division with a chemical-molecular analysis; we could go even further than this, into the atomic structure of the molecules. But in keeping with the starting point of our question, we wish to remain within the nearest domain of those things that surround us. But even if we travel along the path of chemistry and physics, we never get beyond the mechanical domain, i.e., beyond that spatial circle within which something material moves from place to place or rests in one place. On the basis of the results of present-day atomic physics—since Niels Bohr postulated his model of the atom in 1913—the relations between matter and space are, to be sure, no longer so simple, but they are still fundamentally the same. What occupies a place or takes up space must itself be extended. We asked how the interior of an extended body looks or, more precisely, how it is situated “there” in space. We discovered that this interior is again always the exterior of increasingly small particles.
Meanwhile, our piece of chalk has become a small pile of dust. Even if we assume that quantity of matter has remained [20] constant, that all of [the chalk] is still there, it is still no longer our chalk, i.e., we can no longer write with it as usual on the board. We could accept that. But we cannot accept the fact that we could not find the space we sought in the interior of the chalk, the space belonging to the chalk itself. But perhaps we did not reach for it quickly enough. Let us break the piece of chalk again! The broken surfaces and the surfaces that delimit the new pieces are now external [to one another], but this surface, inside just a moment ago, is now precisely the surface that delimits the grains of chalk, and it was always already outside for this [particular] piece [of the original piece of chalk]. Where does the interior begin and the exterior end? Does the chalk consist of space? Or is the space always only the container, or the enclosure of which the chalk consists, of that which the chalk itself is? The chalk only takes up space; the thing is in each case granted a place. The clearing or granting of space means precisely that the space remains outside. What occupies space always forms the boundary between an outside and an inside. But the inside is really only an outside that lies further back. (In the strict sense, there is neither outside nor inside in space. But then where in the world should the outside and the inside be if not in space? Perhaps space is only the possibility of the outside and the inside, although it is itself neither the one nor the other. The assertion “Space is the possibility of the outside and the inside” may be true, but what we call “possibility” has not been properly defined. “Possibility” can mean many things. We do not believe that we have decided the question concerning the relation between thing and space with such a statement. Perhaps the question has still not been properly raised. We still have not yet considered that space which specifically concerns such things as this chalk, as well as writing utensils and implements in general, which we call equipment-space [Zeugraum].)
We were called upon to consider whether space and time are “external” to things or not. The following has become clear: [21] The space that seems to be within things is, when viewed in relation to the physical thing and its particles, something external.
Time is even more external to things. The chalk has its times, the time-point now when the chalk is here, a subsequent now, when the chalk is there. In the question concerning space, there still appeared to be some prospect of finding space in the thing itself. In the case of time, this is not the case. Time flows over things and away as the brook passes over the boulders; perhaps not even in this way, for in the movement of the waters, the stones are pushed about, run together, and polish each other. But the movement of time leaves everything entirely unperturbed. That the time advances from 5:15 to 6:00 does nothing to the chalk. We say that things change “with” time and “in the course” of time. The notorious “tooth” of time does indeed “nibble away” at things.3 It cannot be denied that things alter as they run their course in time. But has anyone ever observed how time nibbles away at things, i.e., how, generally speaking, time sets to work on things?
But perhaps the time of the thing is only identifiable in entirely distinctive things—clocks, for instance? They show the time. But consider this clock more closely: Where is time? We see the dial and the hands that move, but not time. We can open the clock and examine it. Where on it is time? But this clock does not give the time immediately; it is set according to the standard of the German Observatory in Hamburg. If we were to travel there and ask people where they are keeping time, we would be no wiser than we were before the trip.
If time cannot be discovered on the very thing that shows time, then time itself seems to have nothing to do with the things themselves. On the other hand, it is still no mere figure of speech to say that we fix time with the clock. If we deny this, where can we go? The arrangement of everyday life would fall apart, but so, too, every technical [22] calculation would be impossible; history and every memory and decision would vanish.
And yet in what relation do things stand to time? Every attempt to decide the question renews more strongly the impression that space and time are only receptacles for things, indifferent toward them but still useful in assigning to each thing its position in space-time. Where and how these receptacles really are still remain open. But this much is certain: things become just these only by virtue of this position. Hence, there is at least the possibility of more than one of the same [kind of] thing. Precisely, when we look at the question from the things themselves, and not from their framework, each thing is not necessarily an unmistakable “in each case this”; it is this only in respect to space and time.
Now it is true that Leibniz, one of the greatest German thinkers, has denied that there can be two identical things. Leibniz established in this respect a special principle that ruled throughout his entire philosophy, of which we today have scarcely a notion. It is the principium identitatis indiscernibilium, the principle of the identity of indiscernible things. The proposition runs: two indiscernible things, i.e., two identical things, cannot be two things but must be one and the same thing. Why? The grounding Leibniz offers is as essential for the principle itself as for his basic philosophical position as a whole. Two identical things cannot be two, i.e., each thing irreplaceably is in each case this, because two identical things cannot be at all. Why not? The very being of things is their being created by God, understood in the Christian theological sense. If there were two identical things, then God must have created the same thing twice, simply repeating something eternally. But a superficially mechanical deed of this sort contradicts the perfection of the absolute creator, the perfectio Dei. Hence, there can never be two identical things, by virtue of the essence of being as being-created. [23] This principle is grounded in more or less explicit principles and fundamental representations of entities as such, and their being, and in definite representations of the perfection of creation and production as such.
We are not now sufficiently prepared to adopt a position regarding Leibniz’s principle and its ground. It is always worthwhile to see again to what lengths the question “What is a thing?” immediately leads. It could be that this theological grounding of the principle is impossible for us, leaving aside entirely the question concerning the truth of Christianity for faith. However, one thing remains clear (in fact, it is only now first coming to light): the question concerning the character of being of the thing, to be something in particular and in each case this, is entirely bound up with the question concerning being. Does being for us still mean being created by God? If not, then what does it mean? Does being no longer mean anything at all for us, so that we stumble about in confusion? Who should decide how it stands with being and its determinability?
But we are asking initially only about those things that lie closest to us and surround us. They show themselves as particular and in each case these. Our reference to Leibniz led us to conclude that the character of things, to be in each case these, can be grounded in the being of things themselves and not merely with reference to their position in space-time.
But for now, we shall not pursue the question concerning the basis upon which the character of the thing, to be “in each case this,” is determined and pose a still more preliminary question, which is wrapped up in the previous one.
We said that the particular things lying around us are in each case just these. [24] When we say of something that encounters us that it is this, are we saying something about the thing itself as such? This, namely, that one there, i.e., that which we are now pointing out: in the “this” lies an indicating, a pointing out. In this way, we give a direction to others—to those who are with us, to those with whom we exist together. The “this” means, more precisely, here in the immediate neighborhood, while by “that” we mean something more remote, but still within the circle of the here and there—this here, that there. In Latin, even sharper distinctions can be made: hic means “this here,” iste “that there,” and ille “the altogether remote”: the Greek ἐκεῖ—by which the poets intend what lies on the other side—what we call the beyond.
In grammar, such words as “this” and “that” are called demonstratives: these words demonstrate, they point out. The universal characteristic of these demonstrative words comes to expression in the designation “demonstrative pronouns.” The Greeks said ἀντωνυμία [pronouns], which became the standard for the whole of Western grammar. Ἀντωνυμίαι δεικτικαί [demonstrative pronouns]. In this way of designating such words as “this” and “that” there lies a wholly definite interpretation and apprehension of their essence. This interpretation is significant for Western grammar, which, despite everything, still governs us today, although it leads us astray. The name “pronoun”— including nouns, names, and substantives—means that words like “this” take the place of substantives. Of course, they do this, too. We speak of the chalk and do not always employ the name, but use instead the expression “this,” but to play a substituting role of this sort is not the primordial essence of the pronoun. Its naming accomplishment is more primordial. We grasp it right away when we recall that the definite article “the” is derived from the demonstrative words. We customarily place the definite article before the substantive. The demonstrative naming of the definite article always reaches further than the substantive. [25] The naming of the substantive is always enacted on the basis of a pointing out. This is a “demonstrating,” letting something encountered and present be seen. The naming accomplishment enacted in the demonstrative belongs to the most original saying as such; it is no mere substitution, nothing secondary.
To consider what has been said is important for the correct evaluation of the “this.” It lies somehow in every naming as such. Insofar as things encounter us, they come [toward us] in the character of the “this.” But then we are still saying that the “this” is not a characteristic of the thing itself. The “this” takes the thing only insofar as it is an object of [an act of] pointing out. But those who speak and intend with the help of such demonstrative words—i.e., human beings—are always individual subjects. Instead of being a characteristic of the things themselves, the “this” is only a subjective contribution on our part.
But to see how little is expressed in the claim that the “this” is only a “subjective” determination of the thing, one need only recall that we can, with equal right, say that the “this” is “objective,” for obiectum means what is thrown against [das Entgegengeworfene]. The “this” means the thing, insofar as it stands over and against us, i.e., is objective. What a “this” is does not depend on our whim or our liking, and even if it does depend on us, it also depends likewise upon the thing. This alone is clear: determinations such as the “this,” which we employ in the everyday experience of things, are not as self-evident as they seem. It remains thoroughly questionable which sort of truth concerning the thing is contained in the determination “this.” [26] What sort of truth as such we have in the everyday experience of things, whether subjective or objective, or both at once and neither, remains questionable.
So far, we have seen only that things still stand in various truths, beyond the domain of everyday experience (the sun of the shepherd and the astro-physicist’s sun, the table of ordinary [life] and the [same] table for science). Now [the following] displays itself: the truth about the sun for the shepherd, the truth about the table of ordinary [life]—for example, the determination “this sun” and “this table”—this truth about the “this” remains opaque in its essence. How will we ever say something about the thing, without being adequately informed about the sort of truth proper to it? At the same time, we can pose the counterquestion: how are we to know something of the authentic truth concerning the thing if we are not acquainted with the thing itself, in order to decide which truth can and must be proper to it?
This is clear: to go directly toward the thing is impossible, not because we will be stopped along the way, but because the very determinations we arrive at and attribute to the things themselves—space, time, the “this”—give themselves as determinations which do not belong to the things themselves.
On the other hand, we cannot invoke the cheap claim, which runs: if the determinations are not “objective” they must be “subjective.” It could be the case that they are neither and that the distinction between subject and object and, along with it, the subject-object relation itself, is a supremely questionable, if frequently preferred, place for philosophy to retreat.
An unpleasant situation, it seems. There is no information about the thingness of the thing without knowledge of the sort of truth in which the thing stands, but there is no information about this truth of the thing without knowledge of the thingness of the thing, the truth of which stands in question. [27]
Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slides away under our feet. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well; in any case, the house-maids are already laughing, and perhaps we ourselves are these very house-maids, i.e., perhaps we have secretly discovered that all this talk about the “this” and the like is fantastical and empty.
But the worst, however—and not for our livelihood [Fortkommen] but for philosophy itself—would be if we wished to sneak away from the aforementioned serious difficulties on some clandestine path. We could say: but our everyday experience is still dependable; this chalk is this chalk, and I take it when I need it, and leave it alone when I do not need it. That is clear as day. Certainly, if it concerns everyday use. But now the question is what the thingness of the thing consists in, and whether the “this” is a true determination of the thing itself. Perhaps we still have not grasped the “this” sufficiently clearly. We ask anew, whence and how the truth about the thing as an “in each case this” is determined. And here we arrive at an observation made already by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit (WW II, 73ff.).4 To be sure, the approach, level, and intention of Hegel’s path of thought are different in kind.
The suspicion surfaced that the determination of the thing as an “in each case this” is only “subjective,” for this determination is dependent upon the standpoint of the one having the experience and the temporal location in which, on the side of the subject, the experience of the thing comes in each case to pass.
By virtue of what is the chalk here in each case this [piece of chalk] and no other? Only because it is precisely here and indeed here now. The Here and the Now make it this. With the demonstrative determination—this—we therefore take up a relation to the Here, i.e., to a place, i.e., to space, and likewise to the Now, to time. This we already know, at least in general. But now we pay special attention to the truth about [28] the chalk: “here is the chalk.” That is a truth; the Here and the Now thereby determine the chalk, which we emphasize by saying: the chalk, which means: this. Now this is all too obvious, almost insultingly self-evident. But we wish to go further still and to unpack still more of this self-evident truth about the chalk. We even wish to write down this truth about the chalk, so that we do not lose this great treasure.
To this end, we take a slip of paper and write down the truth: “Here is the chalk.” We lay this transcribed truth next to the thing, about which it is the truth. When the lecture is finished, both doors are opened, the lecture hall is aired, there is a draft and the slip of paper—let us suppose—will flutter out into the hallway. A student discovers the slip of paper on his or her way to the cafeteria, reads the statement “Here is the chalk,” and realizes that this does not hold at all. By way of the draft, the truth has become an untruth. Remarkable—that a truth depends upon a gust of wind. The philosophers usually tell themselves that the truth is something valid in itself, above time, and eternal, and woe to him who says that truth is not eternal. That signifies relativism, which teaches that everything is only relatively or partly true; nothing stands firm any longer. Such doctrines amount to nihilism. Nihilism, nothingness, philosophy of anxiety, tragedy, unheroic, philosophy of worry and care—the catalogue of these cheap labels is inexhaustible. Contemporary individuals shudder at such labels, and thanks to the shudder, the philosophy in question is refuted. Marvelous times, when even in philosophy one need no longer think carefully, but someone on occasion and with higher authority cares to shudder! And now the truth is supposed to depend upon a gust of wind! Should it? I ask whether perhaps it is not so.
But in the end, this simply lies in the fact that we wrote down only half the truth and entrusted it to a fleeting slip of paper. [29] “Here is the chalk, and right now.” We wish to determine the Now more precisely. In order to protect the transcribed truth from remaining exposed to a gust of wind, we want to put the truth about the Now, and so about the chalk as well, up on this sturdy blackboard. Now—when now? We write on the blackboard: “Now it’s afternoon.” Now, right now, on this afternoon. After the lecture—let us suppose—the lecture hall will be locked up, so that nobody can approach the transcribed truth and secretly falsify it. Early the next morning, the janitor may enter in order to clean the blackboard. He reads the truth: “Now it’s afternoon.” And he discovers that the statement is untrue, that this professor has made a mistake. Overnight the truth has become an untruth.
Remarkable truth! All the more remarkable, since each time we demand secure information about the chalk, it itself is here, and here right now, a here-now-thing [ein hiesiges und ein jetziges Ding]. What alters is always only the determination of the Here and Now, and the thing accordingly, but the chalk remains always only a “this.” In spite of everything, this determination consequently belongs to the very thing itself. The “this” is therefore a universal determination of the thing and belongs to its thingness. But the universality of the “this” always demands to be determined in each case as particular. The chalk could not be what it is for us, namely this chalk, this and no other, if it were not always something now and here [eine jetzige und hiesige]. Certainly—someone will say—the chalk is always a “this” for us; still, we wish finally to know what the chalk is for itself. To this end, we have made the truth about the chalk independent of us and entrusted it to the slip of paper and the chalkboard. And look: while in truth something about the chalk was supposed to be preserved, the truth [about it] changed into untruth.
This provides us with a hint to pursue the truth about the chalk along another path, namely, instead of entrusting truths to slips of paper and blackboards [30], we should keep them with us and preserve them more carefully than we have so far, and abandon, or even endure, our remarkable anxiety in the face of subjectivism. It could be the case that the more we understand the truth about the chalk as our own, the closer we come to what the chalk is for itself. We have been shown more than once that the truth about the thing is tied to space and time. We may therefore suspect, too, that we shall draw nearer to the thing itself if we penetrate further the essence of space and time, although it always seems as though space and time were only a framework for the thing.
Finally, the question arises whether the truth about the thing is only something added to the thing and attached [angehängt] to it with the help of a slip of paper—or whether, on the contrary, the thing itself hangs [hängt] in the truth, as it occurs in space and time, whether the truth is something that neither depends upon the thing nor lies in us nor stands somewhere in the sky.
All of our reflections so far have presumably led to nothing but this: that we still do not know the ins and outs of the thing and our head is spinning. Certainly, that was the intention. Not, of course, in order to leave us confused, but in order to help us get to know that this carefree advance toward things has its own relevance [Bewandtnis] in the moment, in which we would like to know how it stands with the thingness of the thing.
If we now recall our point of departure, we can, in light of our intentionally enacted and distinctive mode of questioning back and forth, gauge why we failed to come much closer to the thing itself. We began with the following claim: the things surrounding us are particulars, and these particulars are in each case this. With this latter characteristic, we reached the domain of reference to things or, conversely, the domain where things somehow encounter us. Reference and encounter—that means generally the [31] domain in which we, as alleged “subjects,” also reside. If we want to apprehend this domain, we always meet up with space and time. We called it time-space, which makes possible reference and encounter, the domain that surrounds things and announces itself always in the necessary display of space and time.
Perhaps we can never experience anything concerning things and make out something about them unless we remain in the domain within which things encounter us. And so, we cannot free ourselves from the question regarding whether we do not at least approach the things themselves within this domain, whether within it we always already dwell with them. If so, then we will make out from here something about the things themselves, i.e., gain a representation or conception of the way they themselves are constructed. It is therefore advisable for once to decide to disregard the framework surrounding things and to look exclusively at their construction. In any case, this path has a claim equal to the previous one.
Again, we ask: “What is a thing? How does a thing look?” Although we are seeking out the thingness of the thing, we now go cautiously to work, remaining at first with particular things, looking at them, and holding fast to what is seen. A stone—it is hard, gray, and rough on its surface; it has an irregular shape, is heavy, and consists of such-and-such material. A plant—it has roots, a stem, and leaves (these are green and notched); the stem is short, and so on. An animal has eyes and ears; it can move itself from place to place and has, besides instruments or organs for sensing, organs for digestion and reproduction as well—organs it uses, produces, and renews in certain ways. We call this thing, and plants, too [32]—insofar as they [both] have organs— an organism. A clock has gears, a spring, and a dial, and so on.
We could continue indefinitely. What we establish in this way is correct. The statements we make are taken from a faithful accounting of what the things themselves show us. We ask now more definitely: as what do the things show themselves to us? We disregard that this thing here is a stone, a rose, a dog, a clock, and so forth. We consider only what these things are universally: a thing is always something that possesses such-and-such properties, always something constituted in such-and-such a way. This Something is the bearer of the properties; the Something, as it were, underlies the qualities; this Something is what remains, the same [thing] to which we return again and again, in our attempt to determine [its] properties. The things themselves exist now in this way. What then is a thing? A core around which the many changing properties lie, or a bearer upon which the properties rest, something that possesses something else in itself. In whatever way we twist and turn it, the construction of the thing shows itself in this way, and space and time surrounds it as its framework. This is all so plausible and self-evident that one is almost tempted to avoid lecturing on such commonplaces. All of this lies so close to the obvious that one cannot understand why we make such a fuss about these things and still speak about the “this” and about metaphysical principles, about levels of truth and the like. We said that the investigation should move about in the circle of everyday experience. What lies closer than to take things just as they are? We could continue the description of things still further and say: if one thing changes its properties, this can have its effect upon another [thing]. Things affect one another, oppose and resist one another; from such relations between things further properties spring forth, which the things again also “have.”
This account of things and their context corresponds to what we call the “natural construal of the world.” [33] “Naturally”—since we remain completely “natural” and disregard all profound metaphysics and every extravagant and useless theory of knowledge. We remain “natural” and leave things themselves to their own “nature.”
If we now let philosophy join the conversation and make inquiries of it, it becomes clear that, since antiquity, philosophy too has not said anything different. What we said about the thing—that it is the bearer of many properties—was already announced by Plato and above all by Aristotle. Later on, perhaps, this position was expressed in different words and concepts, but at the bottom one always intends the same, even when the philosophical “standpoints” are as different as, for example, those of Aristotle and Kant. Thus, Kant asserts in the Critique of Pure Reason as a principle: “All appearances [i.e., all things for us] contain that which persists (substance) as the object itself, and that which can change as its mere determination, i.e., a way in which the object exists” (A182).
What then is a thing? Answer: a thing is the extant bearer of many extant and changeable properties.
This answer is so “natural” that it also dominates scientific thinking, and not only “theoretical” thinking but also all intercourse with things, their calculation and evaluation.
We can retain the traditional determination of the essence of the thingness of the thing in the familiar and usual titles:
1.ὑποκείμενον—συμβεβηκός
2.What underlies—what always already stands along and accompanies
3.substantia—accidens
4.Bearer—properties
5.Subject—predicate [34]
The question “What is a thing?” has long been decided to the satisfaction of everyone, i.e., the question is clearly no longer a question.
Furthermore, the answer to the question, i.e., the definition of the thing as the extant bearer of the extant properties belonging to it, has also been established, and in truth is always capable of being established in a way that cannot be surpassed. For the justification is also “natural,” and consequently so familiar, that one must, in fact, first set it into relief in order to notice it at all.
Wherein lies this justification for the truth of the familiar definition of the essence of the thing? Answer: [it lies] in nothing less than the essence of truth itself. Truth—what does that mean? Truth is what obtains, is valid. The valid is what corresponds to the facts. Something corresponds to the facts when it is directed toward them, i.e., when it takes its measure from the way the things themselves are. Truth is accordingly measuring up to things. Clearly, not only must particular truths measure up to particular things, but the essence of truth itself. If truth is correctness, a directing-oneself-toward something, then this must clearly hold good above all for the essential determination of truth as well: it must measure up to the essence of the thing (thingness). On the basis of the essence of truth as measuring up, it is necessary that the structure of truth and the structure of the thing mirror each other.
If we thus meet the same structure in both the essential structure of truth and the essential structure of the thing, then the truth of the familiar determination of the essential structure of the thing is demonstrated on the basis of the essence of truth itself.
Truth is measuring up to things, corresponding to them. But in what way is something supposed to measure itself up? What is corresponding? What is it that can be true or false? Just as it is “natural” [35] to understand truth as correspondence to things, so, too, is it natural to determine what is true or false. We grasp the true—which we discover, establish, disseminate, and defend—in words. But a single word—door, chalk, large, but, and—is neither true nor false. Only a combination of words can be true or false: the door is closed; the chalk is white. We call such a combination of words a simple assertion. The assertion is either true or false. The assertion is therefore the place and seat of truth. Therefore, we can also say, simply: this or that assertion is a truth. Truths and untruths are assertions.
How is such a truth as assertion constructed? What is an assertion? The word “assertion” is polysemous. We distinguish four meanings, all of which belong together, and only in this unity, as it were, does there result a complete outline of the structure of an assertion:
1.Assertions of—proposition
2.Assertions about—information
3.Assertions to—communication
4.Self-assertions—expression
Someone called before the court as a witness refuses to give a statement, i.e., he or she does not speak out, but keeps what he or she knows to himself or herself. In this case assertion means open communication, in contrast to keeping something secret. If a statement is made, it does not consist mostly of individual, disconnected words; the statement is a report. The witness who resolves to give a statement recounts something. In a report of this sort, the facts of the case are expressed. The assertions present the incident, for example, what happened and the circumstances of a recently observed burglary attempt. The witness asserts: the house lay in darkness, the shudders were closed, and so on.
Assertion in the wider sense of communication consists of “assertions” in the narrower sense, i.e., of propositions. Assertion [36] in this narrower sense does not mean speaking out but providing information about the house, its condition, and the entire situation of things. To assert now means: to say something about something, in light of the situation and circumstances from which the assertion draws—assertion, i.e., information about [something]. This information is given in such a way that assertions are made about that which the discourse and the information itself are about. Third, assertion means discourse drawn from the object of its concern, for example, to take what belongs to the house and announce it as something belonging properly to it. What is asserted in this sense is what we call the predicate. Assertion in the third sense is “predicative”; it is the proposition.
Assertion is accordingly threefold: a proposition that gives information and, when carried out in the face of others, becomes communication. The communication is in order when the information is correct, i.e., when the proposition is true. The assertion as a proposition, as the assertion of “a, b, or H”, for instance, is the seat of truth. In the structure of the proposition, i.e., in a simple truth, we distinguish between subject, predicate, and copula—the propositional object, what the proposition asserts, and the connective. Truth consists in the predicate’s belonging to the subject and is posited and affirmed in the proposition as belonging [to the subject]. The structure and the structural moments of the truth, i.e., the true proposition (propositional object and what the proposition asserts), are precisely tailored to what truth as such directs itself toward, to the thing as the bearer of its properties.
And so, one discovers in the essence of truth, i.e., in the structure of the true proposition, unambiguous evidence for the truth of the definition one gives of the structure of the thing.
If we now survey once again all that characterizes the answer to our question “What is a thing?” we can say:
1.The definition of the thing as the bearer of properties comes quite “naturally” out of everyday experience. [37]
2.This definition of thingness was established already in ancient philosophy, clearly because it suggests itself quite “naturally.”
3.The correctness of this definition of the essence of the thing is finally proved and grounded in the essence of truth itself, which is likewise self-evident, i.e., is “natural.”
A question that can be answered and whose answer can be established in such a natural way is in all seriousness no longer a question. If one still wished to maintain [the importance] of the question, this would be either blind stubbornness or a kind of insanity, which dares to run up against the “natural” and what stands altogether beyond question. We would do well, then, to give up this question “What is a thing?” as something settled. But before we explicitly renounce this settled question expressly, let us interject a further question.
We showed that the answer to the question “What is a thing?” runs: a thing is the bearer of properties, and the truth corresponding to this [conception of the thing] has its seat in the assertion, the proposition, a combination of subject and predicate. This answer, we said, is entirely natural; so, too, its justification [Begründung]. And so, we now ask only this: what does “natural” mean here?
We call “natural” what we understand without further ado in the sphere of everyday, immediate intelligibility. For an Italian engineer, for example, the internal makeup of a large aircraft bomber is readily understood. But for an Abyssinian from a remote mountain village, such a thing is not at all “natural”; it is not readily understood, i.e., not in comparison with what is clear to this man and his tribe without further ado, in keeping with everyday [38] acquaintance. In the age of Enlightenment, the “natural” was what allowed itself to be demonstrated and understood in accordance with determinate principles posed by reason from out of itself, and consequently suitable for every human being as such and for universal humanity. During the Middle Ages, everything was natural that possessed its essence, its natura, from God, but by virtue of this origin could form itself and, in a certain way, maintain itself without further divine intervention. What was natural to a man of the eighteenth century, the rationality of reason as such, released from all other attachments, would have seemed very unnatural to medieval men and women. But the contrary could also be the case, as we know from the French Revolution. It, therefore, follows that what is “natural” is not “natural” at all, where natural here means self-evident for any and every existing [existierenden] human being. The “natural” is always historical.
A suspicion rises up behind our backs: what if this seemingly so natural determination of the essence of the thing were not at all self-evident, were not “natural?” There must have been a time, then, when the essence of the thing was not yet defined in this way. Hence there must also have been a time when this determination of the essence of the thing was first elaborated. The establishment of this determination of the essence of the thing did not one fine day fall readymade from the sky but was grounded in very definite presuppositions.
This is in fact the case. We can trace the genesis of this determination of the essence of the thing in its principal features in Plato and Aristotle. Not only that, but at the same time and in the same connection with the discovery of the thing, the proposition as such was also first discovered and, along with this, that truth as correspondence or measuring up to the thing has its seat in the proposition. This so-called natural definition of the essence of truth—from which we have drawn evidence for the correctness of the determination of the essence of the thing—this [39] natural concept of truth is also not “natural” without further ado.
Hence the “natural perspective on the world,” to which we have constantly referred, is not self-evident. It remains questionable. This overworked [conception of] the “natural” is historical in a distinctive sense. So, it could be that in our natural perspective on the world we have been dominated by centuries-old interpretation of the thingness of the thing, while things encounter us, meanwhile and at bottom, quite differently. The answer to the question we interjected [earlier] concerning the meaning of the “natural” will prevent us from thoughtlessly taking the question “What is a thing?” as settled. The question seems only now to be more closely defined. The question itself has come to be historical. As we approach things and speak of them as the bearers of [their] properties, in a seemingly untroubled and unbiased way, we are not the ones seeing and speaking here, but rather an old historical tradition. But why do we not want to leave this history alone? It does not disturb us. We find ourselves comfortably fitted to this conception of the thing. And assuming we do take to heart the history of the discovery and interpretation of the thingness of the thing, this still changes nothing in the things. The electric streetcar moves about as it did before; chalk is still chalk, the rose a rose, the cat a cat.
We stressed in the first hour that philosophy is that form of thinking that can initiate nothing immediately. But perhaps it can do something indirectly, under conditions and along paths that one no longer assumes without further ado are blazed by philosophy and can only be blazed by philosophy.5
Under certain conditions, if, for example, we undertake the effort to think through the inner situation of the contemporary natural sciences, both non-biological and the biological, and if we also think through the relationship of machine [40] technology to our Dasein, then the following becomes clear: knowing and questioning have here reached limits, which show that a primor-dial relation to things is really lacking, that [an authentic relation to things] is only simulated by the progress of discovery and technical success. We sense that what zoology and botany investigate in animals and plants and how they go about it may very well be correct. But are they still animals and plants? Are they not well-made machines in advance, of which one subsequently even concedes that they are “more cunning than we are?”
We can of course spare ourselves the effort of thinking through these paths. Furthermore, we can stick to what we discover to be “natural,” i.e., those things to which one gives no further thought. We can take this thoughtlessness as the measure of things. The electric streetcar moves along as it did before. Decisions, whether made or avoided, do not come to pass on the streetcar or the motorcycle but somewhere else—namely, in the domain of historical freedom, i.e., where and how a historical Dasein decides about its ground, what level of the freedom of knowing it chooses for itself, and what it posits as freedom.
These decisions are different at different times and for different peoples. They cannot be forced. People always posit the rank of their Dasein by way of the freely chosen level of their particular freedom of knowing, i.e., by way of the inexorability of questioning. The Greeks saw the entire nobility of their Dasein in the ability to question; their ability to question furnished the standard for distinguishing themselves from those who could not or would not question. They called them barbarians.
We can leave alone the question concerning our knowledge of the thing and suppose that it will straighten itself out some day. We can admire the achievements of the contemporary natural sciences and technology without having to [41] know how they came about—that, for instance, modern science only became possible through a confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] carried on from out of [aus] the earliest passion for questioning with ancient science, its concepts and principles. We need know nothing of this and can believe that we are such glorious human beings, that the Lord must have given us [this truth about things] in our sleep.
But we can also be convinced of the absolute necessity of questioning, which must so far surpass everything in consequence, depth, and certainty, because only in this way will we become master over what otherwise rusts away in its self-evidence.
Decisions are not reached with slogans but only through work. We decide in favor of a laborious and protracted questioning, which remains for centuries only a questioning. Meanwhile, others can peacefully carry their truths to the marketplace. On one of his solitary hikes, Nietzsche once wrote: “Tremendous self-reflection: to become conscious of oneself, not as an individual but as mankind. Let us reflect and think back: let us pursue the highways and byways!” (The Will to Power, note 585).
Here we are pursuing only a byway [kleine Weg] of the small question “What is a thing?” We concluded that the seemingly self-evident determinations of the thing are not “natural.” The answers we give were already established in antiquity. When we ask about the thing in an apparently natural and unbiased way, the question expresses a prejudgment concerning the thingness of the thing. History is already speaking in the manner of the question. We therefore said that the question is a historical one. A definite directive for our task lies in this [insight], provided we wish to ask this question with sufficient understanding.
So, what should we do, if the question is a historical one? [42] What does “historical” mean here? Initially we only establish that the common answer to the question concerning the thing stems from an earlier, past time. We could establish that since then the treatment of the question has undergone various, if not groundbreaking, alterations and that different theories about the thing, the proposition, and the truth regarding the thing have surfaced over the course of centuries. It can, therefore, be shown that the question and the answer have, so to speak, their history, i.e., a past. But this is precisely what we do not mean when we say that the question “What is a thing?” is historical. For every report about the past, about the preliminary stages of the question concerning the thing, deals with something that stands still; this sort of historical reporting is an explicit closure of history—but history [Geschichte] is a happening [Geschehen]. We question historically when we ask [about] what is still happening, even if it seems to be past. We ask what is still happening and whether we remain equal to this happening, so that it can first unfold.
Hence, we do not ask about earlier opinions, views, and propositions about the thing in order to arrange them in a series, the way spears are arranged chronologically, by century, in a collection of weapons. We are not asking for the formula and the definition of the essence of the thing. These formulae are only the sediment and precipitate of basic positions that historical Dasein has taken up and adopted in the midst of beings as a whole. But we ask about these basic positions, about the happening in them, and the basic eventful movements of Dasein, movements that apparently no longer exist, since they belong to the past. But a movement that cannot be fixed and established need not for that reason be gone; it could also be in a dormant state.
What appears to us as past, i.e., as a happening that simply no longer exists, can be dormant. And this dormancy or latency [43] can possess a fullness of being and an actuality [Wirklichkeit] that in the end essentially surpasses the actuality of the actual, in the sense of what is current [Aktuellen].
This dormancy of happening is not the absence of history but the basic form of its presence. What we are acquainted with in an average way and initially represent as the past is for the most part only the formerly “current,” what once caused a stir or made the noise that always belongs to history, but is never authentic history. The mere past does not exhaust what has been. What has been still has essential being [west], and its way of being is a distinctive dormancy of happening, the mode of which is in turn determined by what happens. Dormancy is only a self-contained movement, and often more uncanny than movement itself.
The dormancy of the happenings of earlier ages can have its various forms and reasons. Let us see how things stand in this regard with our question [concerning the thing]. We heard that in the time of Plato and Aristotle the definition of the thing as the bearer of properties was developed. The discovery of the essence of the proposition came at the same time. Also, simultaneously, the characterization of truth as correspondence of apprehension to the thing emerged, where truth in this instance has its locus in the proposition. All of this can be presented thoroughly and unequivocally from the dialogues and treatises of Plato and Aristotle. We can also show how these doctrines concerning the thing, the proposition, and truth altered in Stoicism and, furthermore, how differences can again be met with in medieval Scholasticism, in the modern era, and in German Idealism. In this way, we would report a history, or tell a “story,” but we would not question historically at all, i.e., we would [44] allow the question “What is a thing?” to remain completely dormant. The movement would then consist in little more than a game of comparison and contrast, aided by a report on various theories. By contrast, we bring the question “What is a thing?” out of dormancy when we insert the Platonic-Aristotelian definitions of the thing, the proposition, and truth into [a field of] definite possibilities, and put them up for decision. We ask: are each of these definitions (of the thing and the proposition and truth) accomplished simultaneously only by accident, or do they all cohere among themselves and, indeed, necessarily? If the latter turns out to be the case, how do they cohere? Clearly, we have already answered this question (recall what was cited earlier as grounding the correctness of the determination of the essence of the thing). We saw that the definition of the essential structure of truth must correspond to the essential structure of things, on the basis of the essence of truth as correctness. This consequently establishes a certain connection between the essence of the thing, the essence of the proposition, and the essence of truth. This also shows itself externally in the ordering of the definition of the thing and of the proposition, according to which the relationship between subject and predicate occupies fourth place (cf. p. 33 earlier6). We certainly should not forget that we offered the opinion of the common and “natural” construal of the question as the clue to this perceived context. And this “natural” opinion is not entirely natural. This now means that its presumed firmness dissolves into a series of questions, including the following: was the essential structure of truth and of the proposition tailored to the structure of the thing? Or is it conversely the case that the essential structure of the thing as the bearer of properties was interpreted in accord with the structure of the proposition, as the unity of “subject” and “predicate”? Have we drawn the structure of the proposition from the structure of the thing, or have we projected the structure of the proposition onto the thing? [45]
If the latter proves to be the case, then the following question immediately arises: how does the proposition, the assertion, come to provide the measure and the model for how things in their thingness are to be determined? Since the proposition, the assertion, positing, and speaking are all human activities, it stands to reason that human beings do not conform themselves to things, but that things adjust themselves to human beings and to the human subject, or what one commonly construes as the “I.” But such an interpretation of the relations of derivation between the determinations of the thing and the proposition seems improbable, at least among the Greeks. For the standpoint of the “I” is something modern and therefore un-Greek. The polis provided the measure for the Greeks. Today, everyone around the world is talking about the Greek polis. Now, among the Greeks—the people of thinkers—someone coined the phrase πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν.7
“Man is the measure of all things, of the beings that are, that they are, of the beings that are not, that they are not.” The man who coined this dictum, Protagoras, is supposed to have written a book with the simple title ἡ Ἀλήθεια, The Truth. Chronologically speaking, the appearance of this proposition is not far removed from Plato’s era. Perhaps this means only that the structure of the thing conforms to the structure of the proposition and not the other way around, [hence] no “subjectivism” [would be implied in the dictum]. Only subsequent opinions about Greek thought are subjective. If indeed the proposition and the truth residing in the proposition, understood as correctness, provide the measure for the determination of the thing; and if matters now stand differently than, and contrary to, what natural opinion maintains, then the further question arises: what grounds and guarantees that we have now really hit upon the essence of the proposition? Whence is it determined what truth as such is?
And so, we see that what happened in the definition of the essence of the thing is in no way past and settled [46], but at most merely bogged down and therefore to be set newly in motion, and so still questionable today. If we do not want to simply repeat opinions but to grasp what we ourselves say and commonly mean, then we find ourselves caught in a whole whirlwind of questions.
Initially, the question pertaining to the thing now stands as follows: are the essence of the proposition and truth determined on the basis of the essence of the thing, or is the essence of the thing determined on the basis of the essence of the propositions? The question is posed as an either/or. But—and this is the decisive question—does this either/or itself suffice? Are the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition constructed as mirror images of one another because they are both determined out of a common but more deeply buried root? But what is the origin of this common ground of the essence of the thing and the proposition supposed to be, and where should it be located? The unconditioned? We said at the beginning that what conditions [bedingt] the essence of the thing in its thingness cannot itself be a mere thing or conditioned [bedingt]; it must be something unconditioned [eine Un-bedingtes]. But the essence of the unconditioned is codetermined by what has been established as a thing and as a condition [Be-dingung]. If the thing is taken as ens creatum, as something extant because it is divinely created, then the God of the Old Testament is the unconditioned. If the thing is considered as an object standing over and against the “I”—i.e., as the not-I—then the unconditioned turns out to be the “I,” more precisely, the absolute I of German Idealism. Whether the unconditioned is sought above or behind or in things depends upon what one understands a condition and being-conditioned to be.
Only with this question do we press ahead toward the possible ground of the definition of the thing and the proposition and its truth. But this unsettles the points of departure for the original question concerning the thing. That historical happening of the once-standard definition of the thing, which seemed long past, but in truth was only bogged down and dormant, is brought out of dormancy. The [47] question concerning the thing is set into motion again from out of its inception.
Thanks to this indication of the inner questionability of the question concerning the thing, we should now clarify the sense in which we take the question to be historical. To question historically means to liberate and set in motion the historical happening in which the question lies dormant and fixed.
To be sure, such a procedure is easily misunderstood. One could think that what mattered is to locate mistakes in the original definition of the thing, or at least to discover a certain insufficiency and incompleteness. But this remains the childish game of an empty and vain superiority, which all latecomers can at any time play against their predecessors, simply because they enter the scene later. Insofar as our questioning concerns criticism at all, it is not directed against the inception, but only against ourselves, insofar as we drag the inception along with us but no longer as one [possible] inception, but as something “natural,” i.e., in an indifferent falsification.
The construal of the question “What is a thing?” in historical terms is as far removed from the intention merely to report historically on earlier opinions about the thing as it is from the obsessive desire to criticize these opinions and, by cobbling together current directions and earlier opinions, to conjure up and put forward something novel. We intend rather to set in motion the original inner happening of this question in accordance with its simplest characteristic movements, dormant until now. This happening does not lie somewhere remote from us in some dim past but is present in every proposition and in everyday opinion, and in every approach to things. [48]
What was said about the historical character of the question “What is a thing?” holds of every philosophical question that we pose today and in future, provided that philosophy is a questioning that places itself in question and moves always and everywhere in a circle.
We saw at the beginning how the thing is initially determined for us as a particular and as a “this.” Aristotle calls it τόδε τι, the “this there.” But regarding its content, the determination of particularity depends upon how one grasps the universality of the universal, of which the particular is an instance and an example. In this respect, too, definite decisions set in with Plato and Aristotle, which still influence our present-day logic and grammar. We saw, further, that a closer delimitation of the “this” always involves the space-time relation. In relation to the determination of the essence of space and time as well, Aristotle and Plato set out the paths along which we still move today.
But in truth, our historical Dasein is already on the way toward a transformation that, if stifled, only experiences this [predicament as] fate because it fails to find its way back to its own self-laid grounds, in order to ground itself upon them anew. On the basis of everything that has been said, it is easy to surmise what our task must be, if we wish to set in motion the question “What is a thing?” as a historical question.
We would need first to set in motion the inception of the determination of the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition among the Greeks, not in order to take cognizance of how it was in an earlier era but in order to put forward for decision how matters still stand essentially today. But we must forego the execution of this fundamental task in this course of lectures for two reasons. The first is seemingly more [49] external. The task mentioned would not be fulfilled by seeking to combine a few references to what Plato and Aristotle said here and there about the thing and the proposition. Instead, we would have to bring into play the whole of Greek Dasein, its gods, its art, its state, its knowledge, in order to experience what it means to discover something like the thing. Within the framework of this lecture, the presuppositions for this path are altogether lacking. But even if we could fulfill this, we could not travel down this path now, in the face of the proposed task. We already saw that a mere definition of the thing does not say much, neither when we dig one up from the past nor when we ourselves have the ambition to cobble together a so-called new one. The answer to the question “What is a thing?” has a distinctive character. It is not a proposition, but a transformed basic stance or—better yet and more cautiously—the initial [beginnende] transformation of the stance we have heretofore taken toward things, a transformation of our questioning and evaluating, of seeing and deciding, in short, of our Dasein in the midst of beings.8 To determine the transformed basic stance within our relation to beings is the task of an entire generation. But this requires that we discern more precisely and with clearer eyes what holds us captive and makes us unfree in the experience and determination of things. It is modern science, insofar as it has come to be in accord with certain elements of a universal form of thinking. The Greek inception, although transformed, also governs this [i.e., modern natural science], but not by itself and not predominantly. The question concerning our basic comportments toward nature, our knowledge of nature as such, and our lordship over nature, is not a question of natural science—but this question is itself in question in the question concerning whether and how we are still addressed by beings as such and as a whole. A question of this sort is not resolved in a lecture, but at most in a century [50], and only then provided the century is not asleep and does not merely believe itself to be awake. The question becomes decisive only in confrontation.
In the context of the formation of modern science, a definite interpretation of the thing acquired a uniquely privileged status, according to which the thing is material, a point of mass in motion in the pure space-time order or a corresponding combination of such points. The thing defined in this way from then on obtains as the ground and basis of all things, their determination and the modes of questioning them. The living is also there, when one does not believe it possible one day to explain it on the basis of lifeless matter, with the help of colloidal chemistry. Even when the living is allowed its own character, it is grasped as a superstructure built upon the inanimate; similarly, the implement and tool are taken to be material things, subsequently prepared to have a special value attached to them. But this domination of the material thing as the authentic substructure of all things reaches beyond the domain of things as such and into the domain of the “spiritual” as well, as we crudely name it, for example, into the domains of language and its interpretation, history, the work of art, and so on. Why, for example, has the treatment and interpretation of the poets in our high schools for decades been so dismal? Answer: Because the teachers no longer know the difference between a thing and a poem, because they treat poems like things, and this they do because they have never worked their way through the question concerning what a thing is. That one today reads more Niebelungenlied and less Homer may have its reasons, but this alters nothing; it is the same dreariness, before in Greek, now in German. But the teachers are not to blame for this situation nor are the teachers of these teachers, but an entire generation, i.e., we ourselves—if we do not finally open our eyes.
The question “What is a thing?” is a historical question. [51] In its history, the definition of the thing as the materially extant has an unbroken priority. If we really ask the question, i.e., put up for decision the possibilities of defining the thing, then we are as little permitted to leap over the modern answer to the question as we can afford to forget the inception of the question.
But at the same time and above all else, we should ask the harmless question “What is a thing?” and we should ask it in such a way that we experience it as our own question, so that it no longer lets us alone, even when we have long since had no chance to listen to lectures on it, especially since the task is not to proclaim great revelations and to calm mental distress but only to enable us, perhaps, to wake up what has fallen asleep, perhaps to put something back in order that has been mixed up.
We now offer a brief summary in order, finally, to clarify our intention. We stressed at the beginning that in philosophy, in contrast to the sciences, immediate access to the questions is never possible. An introduction is always necessarily required in this case. The introductory reflections on our question “What is a thing?” have now reached their conclusion.
The question has been characterized in two essential respects: what is placed in question and how it is questioned.
First, with regard to what stands in question—the thing. We have illuminated, with, as it were, the help of an admittedly rather weak light, the horizon in which the thing and the determination of its thingness stand in keeping with the tradition. Two things came into view: first, the framework of the thing, time-space, and the thing’s way of encountering, the “this,” and then the structure of the thing itself as the bearer of properties, entirely general and empty, to form one for a many. [52]
Second, we attempted to characterize the question in regard to the way in which the question must be asked. We saw that the question is historical. And we explained what it means [to question historically]. The introductory reflection on our question makes clear that two guiding questions constantly accompany us and must therefore be asked, too. On the one hand, where does something like a thing, as such, belong? On the other, whence do we take the determination of its thingness? The clue and the path along which we must travel only emerge in light of these two questions, provided everything is not to tumble about in mere contingency and confusion and the question concerning the thing is not to remain stranded in a dead end.
But would that be unfortunate? This question amounts to the following: is posing such a question serious business? We know that one can initiate nothing with the exposition of the question. The consequences are consequently the same, whether we pose the question or not. If we ignore the warning sign on a high-power line and touch the wires, we will be killed. If we ignore the question “What is a thing?” then “nothing further happens.”
If a physician mistreats a series of patients, they run the risk of losing their lives. If a teacher misinterprets a poem for his or her students, “nothing further happens.” But perhaps we do well to speak more cautiously here: by ignoring the question concerning the thing or insufficiently interpreting a poem, it looks as though nothing further happens. One day—perhaps 50 or 100 years hence—something has nonetheless happened.
The question “What is a thing?” is a historical question. But it is more important to act in accordance with the historical character of the question than to talk about the historical character of the question. For now, and for the purposes and possibilities of the lecture course, we must be content with an expedient [Ausweg].
We cannot present the great inception of the question among the [53] Greeks nor is it possible to lay out in its full context the thing-determination that predominates throughout the course of modern science. On the other hand, the knowledge of that inception, and of the decisive periods of modern science, is indispensable, provided we wish to remain awake to the question as such.
1 Heidegger is here playing with the etymological connection in German, lost in English translation, between “thing” (Ding) and “condition” (Bedingung).
2 The reference is ambiguous. Presumably Heidegger means by “this” “which of the two tables is real.”
3 Heidegger may have Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in mind (Act I, Scene 5), but the expression “the tooth of time” (Der Zahn der Zeit) is a commonplace in German.
4 Heidegger is referring to Hegel’s account of sense-certainty and the “this” in §§90–110 of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
5 In the original, Heidegger ends this sentence with a question mark.
6 Here and in what follows, Heidegger’s references to earlier pages of the lecture course are to the German text provided in square brackets.
7 Fragment B1 from Sextus Empiricus. Adv. Math. 7.60 (The Beginning of His Refutations). A version of Protagoras’s dictum finds its way into Plato’s Theaetetus (152a).
8 This is the only occurrence in the lecture course of the hyphenated form of Dasein, which means being-there. The practice of hyphenation is common in Heidegger’s work after Being and Time as a way of drawing attention to human existence as a clearing within which being becomes manifest or comes to be there.