example the house, the mountain, the tree, the sky, the night, the goat, the jug. By “knowing” [»Kennen«] I mean that we are familiar [bekannt] with them.
SCIENTIST: We know our way around with regard to what each one of the objects is.
SCHOLAR: This knowing one’s way around [Sichauskennen] with regard to what things are is what the Greeks named τέχνη.
GUIDE: About which we have already said a few things today. In τέχνη the outward look, into which individual things emerge, is brought into sight and is in this sense brought forward and produced [vor- und hervorgebracht].
SCHOLAR: By means of τέχνη a surrounding circle of the visible outward look of things, the circle-of-vision, is held open. When we, for example, stand before a tree and look at it—be it fleetingly or be it studiously—then we always catch sight of more than what we see in this tree. We catch sight of treeness [das Baumhafte].31 We look—at the moment I cannot say this otherwise—out into treeness and so look over and away from what we see, and yet in such a manner that it is only through this looking out beyond what is to be seen and what has been seen, that we see the individual tree.
SCIENTIST: But treeness is not something that grows somewhere next to or above individual trees. I don’t understand [87] why you then say of treeness that it, as it were, lies out beyond the individual tree. Treeness is after all simply the general representational idea that we make for ourselves of trees.
SCHOLAR: “Of trees,” you say. From where do you get “trees” unless you have already looked out into the nature of trees [das Baumartige]?
SCIENTIST: To be frank, I am also perplexed here.
GUIDE: We are all perplexed here. And I almost think that we are never yet perplexed enough, and accordingly are never yet sufficiently watchful. When you say that the nature of trees, from out of which we first see a tree as a tree, is a representational idea [Vorstellung], this is accurate to the extent that what is tree-like is set out before us; but it is in no way made by us. The nature of trees is brought forth in τέχνη, as we said. But this does not mean that it is manufactured. Something
31. The term “treeness” (das Baumhafte) is used here in the general sense of “what is characteristic of trees.” A Platonist would of course understand “treeness” as the metaphysical Form or Idea of a tree (see below, p. 58); the Demiurge creates trees with an eye to the Form of treeness, analogous to the way in which a carpenter makes a table by looking beyond the wood-material to his idea of what the table should look like. Heidegger, however, is not only raising again the question of the nature of this treeness that lets a tree show itself as a tree, but also critically reflecting on the manner in which transcendental-horizonal thinking and the metaphysics of production have responded to this question.—Tr.