PATHMARKS
only on particular occasions and at particular moments. Rather, the human essence resides in the fact that at all times it endures and dwells in one way or another within such turning or turning away. We always say too little of "being itself' when, in saying "being," we omit its essential presencing in the direction of the human essence and thereby fail to see that this essence itself is part of "being." We also always say too little of the human being when, in saying "being" (not being human) we posit the human being as independent and then first bring what we have thus posited into a relation to "being." Yet we also always say too much when we mean being as the all-encompassing, and in so doing represent the human being only as one particular entity among others (such as plant and animal), and place them in relation to one another. For there already lies within the human essence the relation to that which — through a relation, a relating in the sense of needful usage [Brauchen] — is determined as "being" and so through this relation is removed from its supposed "self-independence." The talk of "being" drives [236] representation from one perplexity to another, without the source of such being at a loss becoming manifest.
Yet everything comes to be in the best of order, or so it appears, if we do not purposely fail to attend to something long since thought of: the subject-object relation. This relation says that to every subject (human being) there belongs an object (being), and vice versa. Certainly; were it not for the fact that all of this — the relation, the subject, and the object — already resides within the essence of what we are representing, quite inadequately as has been shown, as the relation between being and human being. Subjectivity and objectivity are for their part already grounded in a peculiar manifestness of "being" and of the "human essence." Such manifestness establishes representation in terms of the distinction between the two as subject and object. This distinction henceforth becomes absolute and banishes thinking into a dead end. Any positing of "being" that would seek to name "being" from the perspective of the subject-object relation fails to ponder something worthy of question that it has left unthought. Thus the talk of a "turning of being" remains a makeshift measure that is thoroughly worthy of question, because being resides within the turning, so that the latter can never first come to "being" from the outside.
Presencing ("being") is, as presencing, on each and every occasion a presencing directed toward the human essence, insofar as presencing is a call [Geheiß] that on each occasion calls upon the human essence. The human essence as such is a hearing, because the essence of human beings belongs to the calling of this call, to the approach of presencing [ins Anwesen]. That which is the Same each time, the belonging together of call and
308