for all Greek (and especially incipient) thinking. Beings are—thought in Greek—what presences. What emerges and evades emerges into presence {Anwesenheit} and goes away out of presence.
(We know in the meantime that we constantly name beings and in many ways, but when we are asked conversely what the “being” of beings is supposed to mean, we are without a clue. Or people bring forward the most manifold “explanations,” which only attest once again to how completely being and its essence flits away from us into the essenceless. Will fact-crazed modernity ever properly grasp or want to grasp the fact that being flits away? Indeed, can it want to grasp it at all? The Greeks, at the inception, think differently because they think more simply and decisively.)
The Greek word for beings is used in the plural where something double is named: beings as a whole and the single being that in each case belongs to this whole. But nothing is said about beings except that “emergence” is peculiar to them and that elusion emerges from them. Thus we are talking about what is peculiar to beings, and that is the being of beings.
However, emergence and evasion are names for alternation and change, therefore for “becoming.” Are the Greeks supposed to have grasped “being” as “becoming”? One finds in this thought a wealth of profundity. But perhaps it is only the thoughtlessness to which one flees in order to think neither about “being” nor about “becoming.” And above all, the Greeks were far removed from this supposed profundity, despite Nietzsche, who, with the help of this empty opposition of being and becoming, has himself made grasping Greek thought impossible. Nevertheless, these concepts of being and becoming have a well delineated and essential meaning in Nietzsche’s metaphysics. But neither Nietzsche’s concepts of “becoming” and “being” nor Hegel’s concepts of “becoming” and “being” may be thrown together with γένεσις incipiently thought.
Γένεσις is spoken of, in that it is peculiar to what respectively presences. But this is only said in addition, not, however, with its own emphasis. For the fragment begins with ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσις ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι, “whence emergence is for what respectively presences as a whole.”