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§129 [244-246]

The intimacy of this trembling requires the most abyssal fissure, and in the latter the inexhaustibility of beyng might be inventively thought by way of surmises.


128. Beyng and the human being


From what does the human being gain an intimation and representation of beyng? The ready answer is: from an experience of beings. But how is that to be understood? Does the experience of beings merely remain an occasion, indeed the occasion, for forming the representation of beyng? Or, instead, is beyng as beingness immediately grasped "on" beings and "in" beings? Furthermore, the often-repeated question immediately looms before us: how can beings be experienced as beings unless something is already known of beyng?

Or is it precisely not from beings that one gains an intimation of beyng but, rather, from that which alone is of equal rank with beyng, as constantly appertaining to beyng, namely, from nothingness? Yet how are we to understand nothingness here? (Cf. The leap, 129. Nothingness.) In the sense of an excess of pure refusal. As "nothingness" gains in richness, to that extent beyng gains in simplicity.

The first task, however, is to ground the truth of beyng. Only then do we take the negative from the insidious word "nothingness" and lend it the power of referring to the abyssal character of beyng.

Is it only the human being that has an intimation of beyng? How do we know of this exclusivity? And is this surmising of beyng the first, essential answer to the question of what the human being is? For the first answer to that question is the transformation of it into the form: who is the human being?

The human being has an intimation of beyng, is the surmiser of beyng, because beyng ap-propriates the human being and does so specifically such that the ap-propriation first needs something that is self-proper, i.e., a self This selfhood has to be withstood in that standing fast which allows the human being, by taking a stand in Da-sein, to become the being that can be encountered only in the who-question.


129. Nothingness


From the perspective of beings, beyng "is" not a being; it "is" a nonbeing and so, according to the usual conception, nothingness. This way of thinking is unassailable, especially if beings are taken in the sense


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