6
ON TIME AND BEING

However, the giving named above remains just as obscure for us as the It named here which gives.

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics. To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment, that is, in favor of the It gives. As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving. As a gift, Being is nm expelled from giving. Being, presencing is transmuted. As allowing-to-presence, it belongs to unconcealing; as the gift of unconcealing it is retained in the giving. Being is not. There is, Ir gives Being as the unconcealing; as the gift of unconcealing it is retained in the giving. Being is not. There is, It gives Being as the unconcealing of presencing.

This "It gives, there is Being" might emerge somewhat more clearly once we think out more decisively the giving we have in mind here. We can succeed by paying heed to the wealth of the transformation of what, indeterminately enough, is called Being, and at the same time is misunderstood in its core as long as it is taken for the emptiest of all empty concepts. Nor is this representation of Being as the abstractum par excellence given up in principle, but only confirmed, when Being as the abstractum par excellence is absorbed and elevated into the concreteness par excellence of the reality of the absolute Spirit—as was accomplished in the most powerful thinking of modern times, in Hegel"s speculative dialectic, and is presented in his Science of Logic.

An attempt to think upon the abundance of Being's transformations secures its first foothold—which also shows the way—when we think Being in the sense of presencing.

(I mean think, not just parrot the words and act as if the interpretation of Being as presencing were a matter of course.)

But what gives us the right to characterize Being as presencing? This question comes too late. For this character of Being has long since been decided without our contribution, let alone our merit. Thus we are bound to the characterization of Being as presencing.


Time and Being (GA 14) by Martin Heidegger