PATHMARKS
But ek-sistence thought in this way is not identical with the traditional concept of existentia, which means actuality in contrast to the meaning of essentia as possibility. In Being and Time (p. 42) this sentence is italicized: "The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence." However, here the opposition between existentia and essentia is not what is at issue, because neither of these metaphysical determinations of being, let alone their relationship, is yet in question. Still less does the sentence contain a universal statement [157] about Dasein, in the sense in which this word came into fashion in the eighteenth century, as a name for "object," intending to express the metaphysical concept of the actuality of the actual. On the contrary, the sentence says: the human being occurs essentially in such a way that he is the "there" [das "Da"], that is, the clearing of being. The "being" of the Da, and only it, has the fundamental character of ek-sistence, that is, of an ecstatic inherence in the truth of being. The ecstatic essence of the human being consists in ek-sistence, which is different from the metaphysically conceived existentia. Medieval philosophy conceives the latter as actualitas. Kant represents existentia as actuality in the sense of the objectivity of experience. Hegel defines existentia as the self-knowing Idea of absolute subjectivity. Nietzsche grasps existentia as the eternal recurrence of the same. Here it remains an open question whether through existentia — in these explanations of it as actuality that at first seem quite different — the being of a stone or even life as the being of plants and animals is adequately thought. In any case living creatures are as they are without standing outside {GA 9: 326} their being as such and within the truth of being, preserving in such standing the essential nature of their being. Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and on the other they are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss. However, it might also seem as though the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures, closer, namely, in an essential distance that, however distant, is nonetheless more familiar to our ek-sistent essence than is our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast. Such reflections cast a strange light upon the current and therefore always still premature designation of the human being as animal rationale. Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is "world," they lack language. [158] But in being denied language they are not thereby suspended worldlessly in their environment. Still, in this word "environment" converges all that is puzzling about living creatures. In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it
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