1 · The world’s phenomenal nature

128The world men are born into contains many things, natural and artificial, living and dead, transient短暂的 and sempiternal绵延不息的, all of which have in common that they appear and hence are meant to be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, to be perceived by sentient creatures有感知能力的生物 endowed with the appropriate sense organs.

129Nothing could appear, the word “appearance” would make no sense, if recipients of appearances显现的接受者 did not exist—living creatures able to acknowledge, recognize, and react to—in flight or desire, approval or disapproval, blame or praise—what is not merely there but appears to them and is meant for their perception.

130In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.

131Dead matter, natural and artificial, changing and unchanging, depends in its being, that is, in its appearingness显现性, on the presence of living creatures.

132Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose预设 a spectator.

133In other words, nothing that is, insofar as就……而言 it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody.

134Not Man but men inhabit this planet.

135Plurality复数性 is the law of the earth.

136Since sentient beings—men and animals, to whom things appear and who as recipients guarantee their reality—are themselves also appearances, meant and able both to see and be seen, hear and be heard, touch and be touched, they are never mere subjects and can never be understood as such; they are no less “objective” than stone and bridge.

137The worldliness属世性、世界性 of living things means that there is no subject that is not also an object and appears as such to somebody else, who guarantees its “objective” reality.

138What we usually call “consciousness,” the fact that I am aware of myself and therefore in a sense can appear to myself, would never suffice足以 to guarantee reality.

139(Descartes’ Cogito me cogitare ergo sum is a non sequitur不合逻辑的推论 for the simple reason that this res cogitans never appears at all unless its cogitationes are made manifest in sounding-out or written-down speech, which is already meant for and presupposes auditors and readers as its recipients.)

140Seen from the perspective of the world, every creature born into it arrives well equipped to deal with a world in which Being and Appearing coincide; they are fit for适合于 worldly existence.

141Living beings, men and animals, are not just in the world, they are of the world, and this precisely because they are subjects and objects—perceiving and being perceived—at the same time.

142Nothing perhaps is more surprising in this world of ours than the almost infinite diversity of its appearances, the sheer entertainment value供观赏的丰富趣味 of its views, sounds, and smells, something that is hardly ever mentioned by the thinkers and philosophers.

143(Only Aristotle at least incidentally顺带地 counted the life of passive enjoyment of the pleasures our bodily organs provide as among the three ways of life that can be elected by those who, not being subject to necessity, can devote themselves to the kalon, to what is beautiful in opposition to what is necessary and useful.¹)

144This diversity is matched by an equally astounding diverseness差异繁多 of sense organs among the animal species, so that what actually appears to living creatures assumes the greatest variety of form and shape: every animal species lives in a world of its own.

145Still, all sense-endowed creatures have appearance as such in common, first, an appearing world and second, and perhaps even more important, the fact that they themselves are appearing and disappearing creatures, that there always was a world before their arrival and there always will be a world after their departure.

146To be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s own departure.

147On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance, as they follow upon each other, are the primordial events原初事件, which as such mark out time, the time span between birth and death.

148The finite life span allotted to each living creature determines not merely its life expectancy but also its time experience; it provides the secret prototype原型 for all time measurements no matter how far these then may transcend the allotted life span into past and future.

149Thus, the lived experience of the length of a year changes radically throughout our life.

150A year that to a five-year-old constitutes a full fifth of his existence must seem much longer than when it will constitute a mere twentieth or thirtieth of his time on earth.

151We all know how the years revolve循环流转 quicker and quicker as we get older, until, with the approach of old age, they slow down again because we begin to measure them against the psychologically and somatically身体上 anticipated date of our departure.

152Against this clock, inherent in living beings who are born and die, stands “objective” time, according to which the length of a year never changes.

153This is the time of the world, and its underlying assumption—regardless of any religious or scientific beliefs—is that the world has neither beginning nor end, an assumption that seems only natural for beings who always come into a world that preceded them and will survive them.

154In contrast to the inorganic thereness单纯在那里 of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances.

155To be alive means to be possessed by被……支配 an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness.

156Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them.

157The stage is common to all who are alive, but it seems different to each species, different also to each individual specimen.

158Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived.

159To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators.

160In other words, every appearing thing acquires, by virtue of its appearingness, a kind of disguise伪装、外衣 that may indeed—but does not have to—hide or disfigure it.

161Seeming corresponds to the fact that every appearance, its identity notwithstanding, is perceived by a plurality of spectators.

162The urge toward self-display—to respond by showing to the overwhelming effect of being shown—seems to be common to men and animals.

163And just as the actor depends upon stage, fellow-actors, and spectators, to make his entrance, every living thing depends upon a world that solidly appears as the location for its own appearance, on fellow-creatures to play with, and on spectators to acknowledge and recognize its existence.

164Seen from the viewpoint of the spectators to whom it appears and from whose view it finally disappears, each individual life, its growth and decline, is a developmental process in which an entity unfolds itself in an upward movement until all its properties are fully exposed; this phase is followed by a period of standstill—its bloom or epiphany盛放、完整显现, as it were—which in turn is succeeded by the downward movement of disintegration that is terminated by complete disappearance.

165There are many perspectives in which this process can be seen, examined, and understood, but our criterion for what a living thing essentially is remains the same: in everyday life as well as in scientific study, it is determined by the relatively short time span of its full appearance, its epiphany.

166The choice, guided by the sole criteria of completeness and perfection in appearance, would be entirely arbitrary任意的 if reality were not first of all of a phenomenal nature.

167The primacy首要地位 of appearance for all living creatures to whom the world appears in the mode of an it-seems-to-me is of great relevance to the topic we are going to deal with—those mental activities by which we distinguish ourselves from other animal species.

168For although there are great differences among these activities, they all have in common a withdrawal退离 from the world as it appears and a bending back toward the self.

169This would cause no great problem if we were mere spectators, godlike creatures thrown into the world to look after it or enjoy it and be entertained by it, but still in possession of some other region as our natural habitat.

170However, we are of the world and not merely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving and departing, of appearing and disappearing; and while we come from a nowhere, we arrive well equipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play of the world.

171These properties do not vanish when we happen to be engaged in mental activities and close the eyes of our body, to use the Platonic metaphor, in order to be able to open the eyes of the mind.

172The two-world theory belongs among the metaphysical fallacies but it would never have been able to survive for so many centuries if it had not so plausibly corresponded to some basic experiences.

173As Merleau-Ponty once put it, “I can flee being only into being,”² and since Being and Appearing coincide for men, this means that I can flee appearance only into appearance.

174And that does not solve the problem, for the problem concerns the fitness适合性 of thought to appear at all, and the question is whether thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether in fact they can never find an adequate home in the world.