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The Principle of Reason [109-110] {GA 10 90-91}

When on earth's rim in gentle fall
Dips down the fiery crimson ball:


The penultimate strophe reads:


My roof is tight, my hearth heats well
And yet a joy does not there dwell.
The fish nets I did fully point,
And room and kitchen well appoint.[39]


When we use the word Geschich in connection with being, then we mean that being hails us and clears and lights itself, and in clearing it furnishes the temporal play-space wherein beings can appear. In light of the Geschick of being, the history of being is not thought of in terms of a happening characterized by a passing away and a process. Rather, the essence of history is determined on the basis of the Geschich of being, of being as Geschich, of what as such proffers itself to us in withdrawing. Both—proffering and withdrawing—are one and the same, not two different things. In both there reigns, in a different manner, what a moment ago was called vouchsafing; in both—that is, even in the withdrawal, and there even still more essentially. The term "Geschich of being" is not an answer but a question, among others the question of the essence of history, insofar as we think history as being and essence in terms of being. At first the Geschich-character of being appears quite strange to us—apart from the constantly accompanying difficulty that we may too facilely understand the discussion of being and see this discussion as trailing off into the indeterminant—but at the same time we are at a loss for what, rigorously thought, this means: being. However, if there is some truth in saying that being always proffers itself to us, as such furnishes itself to us and is an offering, then it follows that "being" means something different from "being" as it occurs in the various epochs of its Geschich. Yet there reigns in the whole of the Geschich of being something that is the same which, however, does not allow itself to be represented by means of a general concept or to be extracted as a lineament from the manifold course of history. However, what is strangest of all is that being proffers itself to us while at the same time withdrawing its essence, concealing this essence in the withdrawal.

But this most strange character of being draws attention to itself early on in the history of Western thinking. It draws attention to itself insofar as the early thinking of the Greeks must, at that point where it completes itself—with Plato and Aristotle—pay special attention to a state of affairs that subsequent thinking held in view but whose implications it did not fathom. In order to bring this state of affairs essentially and briefly into view, we may choose one of many outstanding testimonies. It is found at the beginning of the first chapter of the first book of Aristotle's Physics. The Physics is a lecture in which


The Principle of Reason (GA 10) by Martin Heidegger