When we have to do with anything, the mere seeing of the Things which are closest to us
bears in itself the structure of interpretation, and in so primordial a manner that just to
grasp something free, as it were, of the “as”, requires a certain readjustment. When we
merely stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to
understand it any more. This grasping which is free of the ‘As”, is a privation of the kind
of seeing in which one merely understands. It is not more primordial than that kind of
seeing, but is derived from it.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927