The essential occurrence of beyng will remain closed to philosophy, as long as philosophy maintains that being could be known and, so to speak, assembled together by working out the various modal concepts. Apart from the problematic origin of the modalities, one thing is decisive here: the leap into beyng as event. Only thence does the fissure open up. Yet it is precisely this leap that requires the longest preparation, one which includes complete detachment from being as beingness and as the "most general" determination.
Will a better-equipped thinker venture the leap one day? Such a thinker must have forgotten, in a creative sense, the previous way of asking about being, i.e., about beingness. This forgetting is not the losing of something that is still to be possessed; it is the transformation into a more original stance of questioning.
Then someone must be equipped for the inexhaustibility of the simple, so that the simple no longer withdraws by being misinterpreted as the empty. The simple, in which all essential occurrence has gathered, must be found again in every being. No; it is the latter which must be found in the former. But we attain the former only by preserving the latter—i.e., each thing—in the playing field of its mystery and do not pretend that we can seize beyng by dissecting our already established cognitions of the properties of the thing.
This dissecting and the establishment of one experience as the experience were necessary once, so that Kant could first of all indicate what "transcendental" knowledge is supposed to grasp. Even for this indication to occur, along with its elaboration in Kant's work, there had to be accomplished centuries of preparation.
What are we then supposed to expect from our first gropings, if the matter at issue is completely different, for which Kant can be no more than a distant prelude and can even be that only if this prelude is already grasped in terms of our more originary task?
What is the significance of the fact that Kant treats the "modalities" at the end of the analytic of principles, thus retroactively determining everything that preceded?
157. The fissure and the "modalities"
The "modalities" pertain to beings (to beingness) and say nothing at all about the fissure of beyng itself. This fissure can come into question only if the truth of beyng as event lights up, specifically as that of which the god has need in such a way that the human being belongs intrinsically to the event (cf. The last god, 256. The last god). The modalities thereby fall short of the fissure, just as beingness falls