And what is the ground? It is that which veils itself and also takes up, because it bears and does so as the protruding of what is to be grounded. Ground: self-concealing in a protruding that bears.
Abyssal ground: staying away; as ground in self-concealing, a self-concealing in the mode of the withholding of the ground. Yet withholding is not nothing; instead, it is a preeminent and originary kind of leaving unfulfilled, leaving empty. It is thereby a preeminent kind of opening up.
The abyss, however, as the essential occurrence of the ground, is not sheer self-withholding in the sense of simple withdrawal and going away. The lack of the ground is the lack of the ground [Der Abgrund ist Ab-grund]. In withholding itself, the ground preeminently brings into the open, namely into the first opening of that emptiness which is thereby a determinate one. Inasmuch as the ground, even and precisely as abyss, still grounds and yet does not properly ground, it abides in hesitancy.
The abyssal ground is the hesitant self-withholding of the ground. In this withholding, the originary emptiness opens up and the originary clearing occurs, but this clearing is such that, at the same time, hesitation is manifest in it.
The abyssal ground is the primessential clearing concealment, the essential occurrence of truth.
Since truth is the clearing concealment of beyng, however, it is as abyssal ground chiefly a ground that grounds only as bearing and allowing the protruding of the event. For the hesitant withholding is the intimation that beckons Da-sein, and this latter is precisely the constancy of clearing concealment. This occurrence is the oscillation of the turning between call and belonging; it is ap-propriation, beyng itself.
Truth grounds as the truth of the event. The event, grasped from the perspective of truth as ground, is therefore the primordial ground [Ur-grund]. The primordial ground opens itself, as what is self-concealing, only in the abyssal ground [Ab-grund]. Yet the abyss is completely disguised through the distorted ground [Un-grund] (cf. below).
The primordial ground, the one that grounds, is beyng, but in each case as essentially occurring in its truth.
The more groundingly the ground (the essence of truth) is fathomed, the more essentially does beyng occur.
Yet the fathoming of the ground must venture the leap into the abyssal ground and must fathom the abyssal ground itself and endureit.
The abyssal ground, as the staying away of the ground in the indicated sense, is the first clearing of the open as "emptiness."