192
IV. The Leap [243-244]


God was conceived as the producing cause of all beings (the source of "being" and thus itself necessarily the highest "beyng," what is most eminently).

That makes it seem as if beyng (because transferred into this that is most eminently) is valued the highest and thus also grasped in its essence. Yet this is a misunderstanding of beyng and an avoidance of the question of beyng.

Beyng attains its greatness only if it is recognized as that which both the god of gods and all divinization need. What is "needed" is opposed to all mere utilization. For it is the appropriating event of the ap-propriation of Da-sein in which, as the essential occurrence of truth, the stillest site is grounded, namely, the temporal-spatial playing field of the passing-by, the unprotected "amidst" which unleashes the storm of ap-propriation

Beyng never is more fully than beings but also never less fully than the gods, because these latter "are" not at all. Beyng "is" the "between" amidst beings and the gods, utterly and in every respect incomparable, "needed" by the gods and withdrawn from beings.

Therefore attainable only through the leap into the abandonment by being as divinization (refusal).


127. The fissure


is the self-contained unfolding of the intimacy of beyng itself, to the extent that we "experience" beyng as refusal and as the encompassing refusal. If one wanted to attempt the impossible and grasp the essence of beyng with the help of the "modalities" of "metaphysics," then one might say: refusal (the essential occurrence of beyng) is the highest actuality of the highest possibility as possibility and is thereby the first necessity (prescinding of course from the question of the derivation of "modalities" out of οὐσία). This "clarification" of beyng tears it from its truth (the clearing of Da-sein) and degrades it to a pure and simple objectively present thing in itself. That is the worst devastation which can befall a being. And here it is transferred to beyng itself. Instead, we must try to think the fissure on the basis of the fundamental essence of beyng, in virtue of which beyng is the realm of decision for the battle among the gods. This battle is waged over their advent and absconding; it is the battle in which the gods first divinize and bring their god into a decision.

Beyng is the trembling of this divinization, trembling as the expanding of the temporal-spatial playing field in which the trembling itself, as refusal, appropriates to itself its clearing (the "there").


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger