PATHMARKS
of being and of the human being; or can we obtain from such knowledge directives that can be readily applied to our active lives?
The answer is that such thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass [ereignet sich] before this distinction. Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of being and nothing else. Belonging to being, because thrown by being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is. But it is by saying its matter. Historically, only one saying [Sage] belongs to the matter of thinking, the one that is in each case appropriate to its matter. Its material relevance is essentially higher than the validity of the sciences, because it is freer. For it lets being be.
Thinking builds upon the house of being, the house in which the jointure of being, in its destinal unfolding, enjoins the essence of the human being in each case to dwell in the truth of being. [189] This dwelling is the essence of"being-in-the-world." The reference in Being and Time (p. 54) to "being-in" as "dwelling" is not some etymological play. The same reference in the 1936 essay on Hölderlin's word, "Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells upon this earth," is not the adornment of a thinking that rescues itself from science by means of poetry. The talk about the house of being is not the transfer of the image "house" onto being. But one day we will, by thinking the essence of being in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what "house" and "dwelling" are.
{GA 9: 359} And yet thinking never creates the house of being. Thinking conducts historical eksistence, that is, the humanitas of homo humanus, into the realm of the upsurgence of healing [des Heilen].
With healing, evil appears all the more in the clearing of being. The essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of human action, but rather in the malice of rage. Both of these, however, healing and the raging, can essentially occur in being only insofar as being itself is in strife. In it is concealed the essential provenance of nihilation. What nihilates comes to the clearing as the negative. This can be addressed in the "no." The "not" in no way arises from the no-saying of negation. Every "no" that does not mistake itself as willful assertion of the positing power of subjectivity, but rather remains a letting-be of ek-sistence, answers to the claim of the nihilation that has come to the clearing. Every "no" is simply the affirmation of the "not." Every affirmation consists in acknowledgment. Acknowledgment lets that toward which it goes come toward it. It is believed that nihilation is nowhere to he found in beings themselves. This is correct as long as one seeks nihilation as some kind of being, as an existing quality in beings. But
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