PATHMARKS


the development of "Spirit" is not untrue. Neither is it partly correct and partly false. It is as {GA 9: 336} true as metaphysics, which through Hegel first brings to language its essence — thought in terms of the absolute — in the system. Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions, belongs to the history of the truth of being. Whatever stems from it cannot be countered or even cast aside by refutations. It can only be taken up in such a way that its truth is more primordially sheltered in being itself [167] and removed from the domain of mere human opinion. All refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish. Strife among thinkers is the "lovers' quarrel" concerning the matter itself. It assists them mutually toward a simple belonging to the Same, from which they find what is fitting for them in the destiny of being.

Assuming that in the future the human being will be able to think the truth of being, he will think from ek-sistence. The human being stands ek-sistingly in the destiny of being. The ek-sistence of the human being is historical as such, but not only or primarily because so much happens to the human being and to things human in the course of time. Because it must think the ek-sistence of Da-sein, the thinking of Being and Time is essentially concerned that the historicity of Dasein be experienced.

But does not Being and Time say on p. 212, where the "there is I it gives" comes to language, "Only so long as Dasein is, is there [gibt es] being"? To be sure. It means that only so long as the clearing of being propriates does being convey itself to human beings. But the fact that the Da, the clearing as the truth of being itself, propriates is the dispensation of being itself. This is the destiny of the clearing. But the sentence does not mean that the Dasein of the human being in the traditional sense of existentia, and thought in modern philosophy as the actuality of the ego cogito, is that entity through which being is first fashioned. The sentence does not say that being is the product of the human being. The Introduction to Being and Time (p. 38) says simply and clearly, even in italics, "Being is the transcendens pure and simple." Just as the openness {GA 9: 337} of spatial nearness seen from the perspective of a particular thing exceeds all things near and far, so is being essentially broader than all beings, because it is the clearing itself. For all that, being is thought on the basis of beings, a consequence of the approach — at first unavoidable — within a metaphysics that is still dominant. Only from such a perspective does being show itself in and as a transcending.

The introductory definition, "Being is the transcendens [168] pure and simple," articulates in one simple sentence the way the essence of being hitherto has been cleared for the human being. This retrospective definition of the essence of the being of beings'.-; from the clearing of beings


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Martin Heidegger (GA 9) Pathmarks