102
The Third Directive [151-152]

"most natural," in the sense of "nature" as thought by the Greeks, i.e., in the sense of φύσις. The uncanny is that out of which all that is ordinary emerges, that in which all that is ordinary is suspended without surmising it ever in the least, and that into which everything ordinary falls back. Τὸ δαιμόνιον is the essence and essential ground of the uncanny. It is what presents itself in the ordinary and takes up its abode therein. To present oneself in the sense of pointing and showing is in Greek δαίω (δαίοντες—δαίμονες).

These are not "demons" conceived as evil spirits fluttering about; instead, they determine in advance what is ordinary, without deriving from the ordinary itself. They indicate the ordinary and point toward it. Τὸ δαιμόνιον is what shows itself in pointing at what is ordinary and in a certain way therefore what is also present everywhere as the perfectly ordinary, though nevertheless never the merely ordinary. For those who came later and for us, to whom the primordial Greek experience of Being is denied, the uncanny has to be the exception, in principle explainable, to the ordinary, we put the uncanny next to the ordinary, but, to be sure, only as the extraordinary. For us it is difficult to attain the fundamental Greek experience, whereby the ordinary itself, and only insofar as it is the ordinary, is the uncanny. The uncanny appears "only" in the form of the ordinary, because the uncanny makes allusion to the ordinary and is in the ordinary that which alludes and points and has. as it were, the same character as the ordinary itself.

It is only with difficulty that we attain this simple essence of the δαιμόνιον, since we do not experience the essence of ἀλήθεια. For the δαιμόνες, the self-showing ones, the pointing ones, are who they are and are the way they are only in the essential domain of disclosure and of the self-disclosing of Being itself. Night and day take their essence from what conceals and discloses itself and is self-lighting. That which is lighted, however, is not only what is visible and seeable, but prior to that—as the emerging—it is what surveys everything that comes into the light and stays in it and lies in it, i.e., everything normal and ordinary, and it is what gazes into everything ordinary, indeed in such a way that it precisely appears in the ordinary itself and only in it and out of it.



e) The looking (θεάω) that offers the sight of Being. The outward look (sight) of Being (εἶδος). The Greek god (δαίμων) that in looking presents itself in unconcealedness. What looks into the ordinary: the extraordinary, the uncanny. The appearance of the uncanny in human looking.


Martin Heidegger (GA 54) Parmenides