STEPWISE UNFOLDING OF PERCEIVING IN ALL ITS CONNECTIONS
irrespective of their inner association with cult and ritual, no longer have their own being and effectiveness, but exist for the interest of American tourists, visitors to museums, and historians of art (who explain how art can be 'appreciated'). It is the journalist who decides what 'nature' is, so that e.g. a literary midget from Berlin presumes to advise us on this. When the familiarity of beings in their immediate power is uprooted to this degree, it is certainly difficult to awaken a real understanding for the unmediated perception of beings and their immediacy.
And yet, precisely because this familiarity of beings can be destroyed, it can also be saved and re-established. This is what we are concerned with. Instead of undertaking an irrelevant analysis of experiences, everything is attack and decision. The much-praised 'objectivity' of the sciences remains a self-deception as long as it does not involve a proper fundamental relationship to the object. This can only grow from a groundstance of Dasein; it can be neither attained nor preserved through scholarly pedantry. It is only the groundstance and force of the Dasein of man that can decide the meaning of the objectivity of objects. The primordiality of the understanding of being, and the power of familiarity of beings, are one and the same, they belong together. The more primordially the understanding of being arises from the depth of Dasein, the more grounded is the right to the concept of being, i.e. the necessity of philosophy to bring being to conceptual expression.
On the basis of what we have thus far shown, we can obtain a more precise inner view of the essence of the perceptual comportment. It is a non-regarding and non-conceptual perceiving of beings - which means that we occupy ourselves neither with beings as such (with the blue as existing, with the song as existing) nor do we grasp their being conceptually (e.g. being-different as a specific content of knowledge). Perception is not conceiving of beings in their being. In perception, beings are perceived, but not being. The latter is not anything perceived, not anything accepted and had. The relationship to being in the immediate perception of beings is therefore not at all a perceiving. But if the relationship to being is definitely not perceiving, thus also not conceiving, the way is clear for the possibility of a different kind of characterization of this relationship. So what kind of relationship is it? If the relationship to being is not one of having, the possibility remains that it is something else - Plato says that it is an £7copeyea6ai, a 'striving'.