O insight da necessidade de uma familiaridade prévia com o caráter dado do todo assume frequentemente a forma de uma despromoção da percepção como fonte de verdade. Perceber, em termos gerais, é obter algo novo (um novo som ou cor ou, em geral, uma nova “informação”). Mas se, para obter algo de novo, já temos de ter algo de velho (o dado), então obter não é a totalidade do conhecimento nem o seu fundamento. O conhecimento que se conhece a si próprio tem de incluir o não-esquecimento. O conhecimento como não-esquecimento é aquilo a que tradicionalmente chamamos conhecimento a priori, o conhecimento do que já deve estar no lugar antes de podermos percecionar. O que é conhecido nesse tipo de conhecimento está lá de antemão. Podemos chamar-lhe simplesmente “o antecedente”.
When everydayness breaks down in an emergency, the givenness of the familiar emerges. But this givenness does not appear as something new; it is revealed as having already been in effect. We recognize that even while we were dwelling within the whole, the whole was there—it was simply in the background. Our experience is like remembering: it is not getting new information but unfor-getting what was established, rescuing it from oblivion.
In this an-amnesia, this re-collection, we gather up what we already had— but only now do we truly “get it.” Before, we for-got it as soon as we got it; now, in unfor-getting, we knowingly appropriate it for the first time. To recollect the givenness of the given is not to relive an old experience of something, but to become aware of a sense of the whole that must he in place before anything can be experienced. (We cannot remember infancy because an infant’s sense of the whole is still coming to be. Only after the whole is established can particular beings and happenings appear worthy or unworthy of remembrance. To “recollect” this fundamental sense of the whole is not to relive an inception—we never did have a lived experience of our inception, because there was no life-context for it yet—but to mature, to become “adult”)
We now recognize that our sense of givenness had to be in effect already, because it is a precondition for the first moment, the immersion in the whole. Now we have shattered the illusion of an immediate, automatic accessibility of beings (236). We could not have been pursuing and avoiding particular beings if beings as such had not already been granted to us. We could not have been seeking new and unfamiliar things if we had not already been familiar with the whole. It is not that without this prior familiarity we would he blind or paralyzed; we would not exist at all. Someone who has never had a sense of the whole is no one. Being someone requires a sense of one’s own “there” within which things can be given, pursued, and avoided. In order to be someone, one must have been thrust into a there. Unfor-getting means finding that one is there in the there. All further explanations and articulations of the sense of givenness rest on this primal recognition of sheer thrownness.
The insight into the need for prior familiarity with the givenness of the whole often takes the form of a demotion of perception as a source of truth. To perceive, broadly speaking, is to get something new (a new sound or color, or in general, new “information”). But if in order to get something new, we must already have something old (givenness), then getting is neither the whole of knowledge nor its foundation. Knowledge that knows itself must include unfor-getting. Knowing as unfor-getting is what we traditionally call a priori knowledge, knowledge of what must already be in place before we can perceive. What is known in such knowledge is there in advance. We could simply call it “the prior.”