7
TIME AND BEING

It derives its binding force from the beginning of the unconcealment of Being as something that can be said, that is, can be thought. Ever since the beginning of Western thinking with the Greeks, all saying of "Being" and "Is" is held in remembrance of the determination of Being as presencing which is binding for thinking. This also holds true of the thinking that directs the most modern technology and industry, though by now only in a certain sense. Now that modern technology has arranged its expansion and rule over the whole earth, it is not just the sputniks and their by-products that are circling around our planet; it is rather Being as presencing in the sense of calculable material that claims all the inhabitants of the earth in a uniform manner without the inhabitants of the non-European continents explicitly knowing this or even being able or wanting to know of the origin of this determination of Being. (Evidently those who desire such a knowledge least of all are those busy developers who today are urging the so-called underdeveloped countries into the realm of hearing of that claim of Being which speaks from the innermost core of modern technology.)

But we do not by any means perceive Being as presencing exclusively, primarily in the remembrance of the early presentation of the unconcealment of Being accomplished by the Greeks. We perceive presencing in every simple, sufficiently unprejudiced reflection on things of nature (Vorhandenheit) and artifacts (Zuhandenheit). Things of nature and artifacts are both modes of presencing. The vast reach of presencing shows itself most oppressively when we consider that absence, too, indeed absence most particularly, remains determined by a presenting which at times reaches uncanny proportions.

However, we can also note historically the abundance of transformations of presencing by pointing out that presencing shows itself as the hen, the unifying unique One, as the logos, the gathering that preserves the All, as ἰδέα, οὐσία, ἐνέργεια, substantia, actualitas, perceptio, monad, as objectivity, as the being posited of self-positing in the sense of the will of reason, of love, of the spirit, of power, as the will to will in the eternal recurrence of the same. Whatever can be


On Time and Being (GA 14) by Martin Heidegger