respect to being in general nothing serious can be asked. Thus it remains true: only beings "are."
To be sure—only beings, but what "is" with them? They, beings, "are." But what does it mean, they "are"? What does being consist of? What is the proposition "beings are" supposed to mean if we heed the above mentioned misgivings, cast being aside as an abstraction, even obliterate it, and then only allow beings to count? Then only "beings" remain. But what does it mean that beings "remain"—does it mean anything other than that beings and only "beings" "are"? And if we want only to hold fast to beings, to avoid the "abstraction" of being, to remain steadfast and exclusively with beings, and accordingly say beings are beings, then we also still say the "is" and thus still think in terms of being. Being continually overtakes us as that which we can never not think.
So we stand between two equally unavoidable limits. On the one side, we immediately make being into a being when we think it and say of it "being 'is,'" thus disavowing the proper work of being: we cast being away from us. On the other side, however, we can never disavow "being" and the "is" wherever we experience a being. For how should a being be in each case a being for us without our experiencing it as a being, without our experiencing it in respect to its being?
Being has already cast itself over us and toward us. Being: casting itself toward us and cast away by us. This looks like a "contradiction." However, we do not wish to capture what opens up here in a formal schema of formal thinking. Everything would merely become weakened in its essence, and essence-less, under the appearance of a "paradoxical" formula. On the other hand, we must attempt to experience that, located between both limits, we are placed into a peculiar abode from which there is no way out. But in finding ourselves placed into this impasse, we also become aware that such an extreme impasse could perhaps stem from being itself. Indeed, without exception the guide words indicate a peculiar ambivalence of being.
If, in the manner just presented, thinking encounters insurmountable difficulties, and sees itself placed into a situation where there is no way out, then it can yet deliver itself from peril in the way previous thinking has done. We have already refrained from the nearest available technique