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Chapter 7 Life§ 35. In Hermeneutical Space We are three-dimensional; in all conduct and experience, in everything we do and what affects us we are freedom, language, and time. Insofar as a deliberation is at play in action, it has to do with language, and the enactment of action is at the same time a course of time. Speech can belong together with action. In the play of positions one also shows oneself to be someone who does or has done something, one shows others accordingly; one lets action show itself. There is written thought only in free contemplation. Speech, in turn, has to do with time; it is a temporal process. Moreover, nothing can come to language unless something enter and occurs; everything that is encountered is in time and abstraction receives its name because it disregards this even as it presupposes it. How one experiences time does not come into focus without language. Time is arranged ahead of time in language with temporal expressions and temporal forms, such as future, present, imperfect. Expectation and memory have to be put in words; without grasping them in the word, what still lies ahead or is past is not there in a graspable manner. That time is the openness of occurrence is proven particularly in action; without the freedom of action, something affecting one could not be an experience of unfreedom. This three-dimensionality concerns not only us, but also things; they, too, are in freedom, language, and time. They are free insofar as they are independent from us and are accessible in this independence. They are in language insofar as they show themselves, although also insofar as their indeterminacy is an appearance of texture. They belong in time because something occurs with them as with us, or because something affects us based on them. This indicates that our three-dimensionality belongs together with that of things. If we were not in common with things in time, nothing of them could affect us; in arriving, being there and passing by, we share with them the same fate. We could also not show things if we were not together with them in language. And, they do not show themselves fundamentally differently than we; we are not only beings that show things but also something that shows 299 300 Objectivity itself. Finally, we could do nothing with things and have no effect on them if we were not in freedom together with them. We are with the things, in some respects even like the things, we share the world with them in hermeneutical space. Life-world and thing-world are not two possibilities that somehow exist next to one another. Life-world is always at the same time thing-world. The difference between us and things is only that although they are in the lifeworld , they are not life-worldly. The question now is as follows: How is one supposed to signify, and, based on this signification, understand this three-dimensionality more precisely, that is, the life- and thing-worldliness that we are? The question has been answered time and again—just now and already earlier—with a word that offers itself; the word “life.” There are two reasons for the familiar obviousness with which this word appears: First, it is rather unspecific without saying nothing. The one thing, to which the living stands in opposition, is the inanimate, and even this is only intelligible based on life. Without life, there is nothing inanimate, and not at all death; the absolutely inanimate, a universe in which nothing lived, could not even be named inanimate. As unspecific as it is, the word proves to be preferable to others if one wishes to avoid significations with stronger and, additionally, more problematic connotations . “Subject” would be a signification of this kind, and, as a signification of what constitutes the subject, “subjectivity.” One will no longer want to use the word carelessly once one has gotten clear about its origin in subiectum and •ποχe√μeνον. Heidegger brought attention to the fact that “subject” resonates with the notion of what underlies, which Aristotle distinguished as the fundamental feature of whatever has qualities and can exist in changing states. “If it is not purified through a prior fundamental ontological determination,” “every idea of ‘subject’ ” still participates “ontologically in the claims of the subjectum (•ποχe√μeνον).”1 The word does not lose its problematic character, however, through the purification indicated by Heidegger. After this purification, and this means more...

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