A GATHERING INTO BEING MINDFUL

thought here. Simply put, being is not thought here as the most general property that is extant in beings, but as the presencing which above all lets receiving resonate unto the presencing and belong to the presencing (φύσις as rising prevailing). Obviously, the designation "yoke" seems to come from the outside and appears to strengthen the opinion that two extant things, namely "a being" and a "soul", are under-yoked and harnessed together. This does not merely appears to be so. For the Greek's, [G316] representing has to clarify this too from out of the presencing, whereby obviously the sheltering-unconcealment is not validated with a view to openness. And yet, what do δῆλον and δηλοῦν? [They say] revealing, but indeed without inquiring into openness itself. Here openness is as little enquired (and is as little enquirable and question-worthy) as the sheltering-unconcealment that is represented along with sheltering-concealment.

And here just as little is inquired whether presencing as abandoning and relinquishing of sheltering-concealment is a specific "happening" in itself - something that cannot be put together and calculated from out of the properties of a being and "activities" of the "soul".

It remains outside Greek thinking that sheltering-unconcealment is presencing and this presencing is unconcealing and thus sheltering [Bergung] and concealing [Verbergung], and all this is what has thereby become experience able. Hence, in spite of the directives that one gathers, for example, from the simile of the cave, still grasping the sheltering-unconcealment as openness of beings is already un-Greek in the noteworthy sense that, with this grasping, what is inceptually Greek in the thinking of being, for the first time becomes actually ponderable as what is 'owned-over' to us. For if we do not preserve the beginning, then we fall out of history: we belong no longer to be-ing and its necessity, but merely to beings that are 'historically' planned in good order and abandoned by being.

For the Greeks the unconcealedness of beings and manifestness of beings mean presencing, that is, being, and that means beingness, and that means a being as such, that is, a being.

Later on, however, neither presencing (even in its inceptually concealed time-character) nor sheltering-concealing and openness are interrogated and become worthy of thinking.

And insofar as we specifically name this [that is, presencing, sheltering-concealing and openness] as question-worthy, we are no longer thinking metaphysically.


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Martin Heidegger (GA 66) Mindfulness