LETTER ON "HUMANISM"
being itself. The "gives" names the essence of being that is giving, granting its truth. The self-giving into the open, along with the open region itself, is being itself.
At the same time "it gives" is used preliminarily to avoid the locution "being is"; for "is" is commonly said of some thing that is. We call such a thing a being. But being "is" precisely not "a being." If "is" is spoken without a closer interpretation of being, then being is all too easily represented as a "being" after the fashion of the familiar sorts of beings that act as causes and are actualized as effects. And yet Parmenides, in the early age of thinking, says, ἕστι γὰρ εἶναι, "for there is being." The primal mystery for all thinking is concealed in this phrase. Perhaps "is" can be said only {GA 9: 335} of being in an appropriate way, so that no individual being ever properly "is." But because thinking should be directed only toward saying being in its truth, instead of explaining it as a particular being in terms of beings, whether and how being is must remain an open question for the careful attention of thinking.
The ἕστι γὰρ εἶναι of Parmenides is still unthought today. That allows us to gauge how things stand with the progress of philosophy. [166] When philosophy attends to its essence it does not make forward strides at all. It remains where it is in order constantly to think the Same. Progression, that is, progression forward from this place, is a mistake that follows thinking as the shadow that thinking itself casts. Because being is still unthought, Being and Time too says of it, "there is / it gives." Yet one cannot speculate about this il y a precipitately and without a foothold. This "there is / it gives" rules as the destiny of being. Its history comes to language in the words of essential thinkers. Therefore the thinking that thinks into the truth of being is, as thinking, historical. There is not a "systematic" thinking and next to it an illustrative history of past opinions. Nor is there, as Hegel thought, only a systematics that can fashion the law of its thinking into the law of history and simultaneously subsume history into the system. Thought in a more primordial way, there is the history of being to which thinking belongs as recollection of this history, propriated by it. Such recollective thought differs essentially from the subsequent presentation of history in the sense of an evanescent past. History does not take place primarily as a happening. And its happening is not evanescence. The happening of history occurs essentially as the destiny of the truth of being and from it (cf. the lecture on Hölderlin's hymn "As when on feast day ..." [1941], p. 31). Being comes to its destiny in that It, being, gives itself. But thought in terms of such destiny this says: It gives itself and refuses itself simultaneously. Nonetheless, Hegel's definition of history as
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