fashioning of pigeonholes for the faded "generality" of the categories. Accordingly, however, those who know know that the preparation of this history of beyng (preparation in the sense of the grounding of the readiness for the preservation of the truth of beyng in beings, which thereby first come to be) will take a very long time and will remain unrecognized far into the future. The preparers must still be able to stand quite apart from the ones who ground, provided these preparers want to be touched even obliquely by the thrust of the refusal of beyng and thereby become surmisers. The saying of the inventive thinking of beyng remains something bold and so is called a way of procuring both the lodging of the gods and the alienation of humans (cf. beyng as event).
266. Beyng and the "ontological difference"
The "differentiation"
This differentiation bears the guiding question of metaphysics: What are beings? But this differentiation is not expressly raised to the level of knowledge in the course of asking the guiding question and is even less held fast as question-worthy. Does the differentiation bear the guiding question, or does the guiding question first carry out, although not explicitly, the differentiation? Obviously the latter. For the differentiation appears in the horizon of the guiding question, and also in a first clarifying meditation on the guiding question, as something ultimate. Yet the differentiation should indeed only be something prefatory (Why?), wherein an establishing of the basic question (the question of the truth of beyng) can be clarified in a conducive way.
The question of beyng, as the basic question, would have grasped nothing of its own most question-worthy character if it had not been driven immediately to the question of the origin of the "ontological difference." The differentiation between "being" and "beings," the fact that beyng sets itself off in relief over and against beings, can originate only in the essential occurrence of beyng, if on the other hand beings as such are also grounded by beyng. The essence and the ground of this setting in relief consist in the obscurity harbored in all metaphysics in a way that is the more strange the more decisively metaphysics is entrenched in the view of thinking (especially in the sense of absolute thinking) as the measure of beingness. Beyng as appropriating event is the essence and the ground of this setting in relief. Beyng, as the "between" which clears, moves itself into this clearing and therefore, though never recognized or surmised as appropriation, is for representational thinking something generally differentiable, and differentiated, as being. This applies already to the way beyng essentially occurs