Science in general may be defined as
the totality established through an interconnection of true
propositions. The world is the totality of facts, not of things. Now
the entities within the world are Things—Things of Nature,
and Things `invested with value'. It is essential to a thing that it
can be a constituent part of an atomic fact. In logic nothing is
accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of
that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing. It would, so
to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist
alone on its own account, subsequently a state of affairs could be
made to fit. If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility
must already lie in them. In the projecting of the understanding,
entities are disclosed in their possibility. The character of the
possibility corresponds, on each occasion, with the kind of Being of
the entity which is understood. Just as we cannot think of spatial
objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time,
so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its
connexion with other things. Taken strictly, there `is' no such thing
as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always
belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment
that it is.
If I can think of an object in the
context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the
possibility of this context. The thing is independent, in so far as
it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of
independence is a form of connexion with the atomic fact, a form of
dependence. (It is impossible for words to occur in two different
ways, alone and in the proposition.) If I know an object, then I also
know all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts. (Every
such possibility must lie in the nature of the object.) A new
possibility cannot subsequently be found. The projecting of the
understanding has its own possibility—that of developing itself.
This development of the understanding we call “interpretation.”
In interpretation, understanding does not become something different.
It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in
understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. Nor is
interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood;
it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in
understanding.
Objects form the substance of the
world. The substance of the world can only determine a form
and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the
propositions—first formed by the configuration of the objects.
Roughly speaking: objects are colourless. Thus the ontological
grounds for defining the `world' as res extensa have been made
plain: they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains
unclarified in the meaning of it Being, but gets passed off as
something incapable of clarification, and gets represented indirectly
by way of whatever substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to
the particular substance. Substance is what exists independently of
what is the case.
If I wrote a book “The world as I
found it”, I
should also have therein to report on my body
and
say which members obey my will and which
do not, etc. This then
would be a method of
isolating the subject or rather of showing
that
in an important sense there is no subject: that
is to say, of
it alone in this book mention could
not be made.
Such a description
is always confined to entities. It is ontical. But what we are
seeking is Being. The subject does not belong to the world but is a
limit of the world. Only in some definite mode of its own
Being-in-the-world can Dasein discover entities as Nature. This
manner of knowing them has the character of depriving the world of
its worldhood in a definite way. We feel that even if all possible
scientific
questions be answered, the problems of life
have still
not been touched at all.
Idle talk is the possibility of
understanding everything without previously making the thing one's
own. Thus, by its very nature, idle talk is a closing-off, since to
go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which it
leaves undone. The way in which things have been interpreted
in idle talk has already established itself in Dasein. He must
surmount these propositions; then
he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must
be silent.
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