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§126 [242-243]

to ground the clearing itself as the open realm in which beyng gathers itself into its essence. Unlike something objectively present, such an essence cannot be proved; its essential occurrence must be expected to arrive like a jolt. What comes first and remains for a long time: to be able to wait in this clearing until the intimations arrive. For thinking no longer possesses the advantages of a "system"; thinking is historical in the peculiar sense that beyng itself as appropriating event bears all history and therefore can never be calculated. In place of systematics and deduction, there now stands historical preparedness for the truth of beyng.

Such preparedness above all requires that this truth itself already create, out of its scarcely resonating essence, the basic traits of its site (Da-sein). The human subject must be transformed into the builder and steward of that site.

At issue in the question of being is nothing other than the carrying out of this preparation for our history. All "contents," "opinions," and "itineraries" within the particulars of the first attempt (Being and Time) are contingent and can disappear.

What must remain, however, is the wide reach into the temporal-spatial playing field of beyng. This wide reach will take hold of everyone who has become strong enough to think through the first decisions. In the domain of these decisions and in conjunction with the era into which we are consigned, a knowing seriousness is appropriate. This seriousness no longer concerns itself with good and bad, decline and recovery of the tradition, amiability and violence, but merely sees and grasps the things that are, so as to help these beings (in which a distortion reigns as something essential) into beyng and to bring history to its native soil.

Therefore Being and Time does not present an "ideal" or a "program." Instead, it is the self-preparing beginning of the essential occurrence of beyng itself—not what we think up but what compels us (supposing we have become mature enough for it) into a thinking which neither teaches a doctrine, nor calls forth "moral" action, nor secures "existence" ["Existenz"], but which "merely" grounds truth as the temporal-spatial playing field wherein beings can again be beings, i.e., can be for the sake of the preservation of beyng

Because many of these preservations, and indeed exceptional ones, are required to let beings arise in themselves at all, there must be art, in whose work the truth is set.


126. Beyng, beings, and the gods


Beingness once became what is most eminently (ὄντως ὄv), and following this opinion beyng became the very essence of God, whereby


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger