75
§14 Further essential determinations of human beings [91-93]

excluded from it and without any way out that could allow it to enter the center of its own essence. The one who is properly unhomely relates back precisely to the homely. and to this alone. yet does so in the manner of not attaining it. The adventurer, by contrast. finds the homely precisely in what is constantly and merely not-homely. in the foreign taken in itself. To put it more precisely: For the heart that seeks adventure. this distinction between the homely and the unhomely is altogether lost. The wilderness becomes the absolute itself and counts as the "fullness of being." And to ascribe romantically a particular toughness to the adventurer would be to forget that where danger is posited as the absolute. danger has lost its entire dangerousness.

The unhomely one is deprived of the homely; deprivation is the way in which the unhomely one possesses the homely. or to put it more precisely. the way in which whatever is homely possesses the unhomely one. What becomes manifest in these relations is the essence of uncanniness itself. namely. presencing in the manner of an absencing, and in such a way that whatever presences and absences here is itself simultaneously the open realm of all presencing and absencing. Initially. we can certainly grasp most readily the counterturning character within the uncanny without any immediate or clear comprehension of what this counterturning moves between. or on what grounds it persists. What is counterturning in the &tv6v is also enunciated purely and poetically. παντοπόρος ἄπόρος—placed abruptly alongside one another, and yet interwoven and admitted into one another, these words name the essence of the δεινόν from the side of πόρος. πόρος means that irruption of autonomous power that ventures forth in all directions. everywhere finds its way through. reaches everywhere. and thus becomes acquainted with everything. παντοπόρος is a being that experiences everything and yet remains without experience. insofar as it is unable to transform that which it has made its way through into an experience that would let it attain any insight into its own essence. Instead. ἐπ' οὐδὲν ἔρχεται—human beings come to nothing. This is not meant as a denial of their success. nor is it meant to deny success in the mastery of things. in capturing prey or the spoils of the hunt. What becomes manifest. presumably. is that all these things that are attained, taken by themselves, merely incite and drive one to further hunting, and, taken by themselves. do not have the propensity for bringing human beings into what is by essence their own. For no skillfulness. no acts of violence. and no artfulness can stave off death. Death is not some state of affairs like others, that can be circumvented. Nor is it something that first "comes to" human beings from without; rather. the being of humans in itself proceeds toward its death. Human beings. however. mostly know of this essential trait of themselves only in the manner of evading it and thereby


Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (GA 53) by Martin Heidegger