What Are Poets For? § 127

safeguards us in the innermost and most invisible region of the widest inner space of the world. Unshieldedness safeguards as such. For it gives to man's nature, as inward and invisible* the clue for a conversion of the parting against the Open. The conversion points to the innermost region of the interior. The conversion of consciousness, therefore, is an inner recalling of the immanence of the objects of representation into presence within the heart's space.

As long as man is wholly absorbed in nothing but purposeful self-assertion, not only is he himself unshielded, but so are things, because they have become objects. In this, to be sure, there also lies a transmutation of things into what is inward and invisible. But this transmutation replaces the frailties of things by the thought-contrived fabrications of calculated objects. These objects are produced to be used up. The more quickly they are used up, the greater becomes the necessity to replace them even more quickly and more readily. What is lasting in the presence of objective things is not their self-subsistence within the world that is their own. What is constant in things produced as objects merely for consumption is: the substitute—Ersatz.

Just as it is a part of our unshieldedness that the familiar things fade away under the predominance of objectness, so also our nature's safety demands the rescue of things from mere objectness. The rescue consists in this, that things, within the widest orbit of the whole draft, can be at rest within themselves, which means that they can rest without restriction within one another. Indeed, it may well be that the turning of our unshieldedness into worldly existence within the world's inner space must begin with this, that we turn the transient and therefore preliminary character of objectthings away from the inner and invisible region of the merely producing consciousness and toward the true interior of the heart's space, and there allow it to rise invisibly. Accordingly the letter of November 13,1925 (Briefe aus Muzot, p. 335), says:

". . . our task is to impress this preliminary, transient earth upon ourselves with so much suffering and so passionately that its nature rises up again 'invisibly' within us. We are the bees of the


Martin Heidegger (GA 7) Poetry, Language, Thought