as a specific mode of the present in unity with an expecting and retaining of something available. Consequently, to missing, as a specific enpresenting, there corresponds not no horizon at all, but a specially modified horizon of the present, of praesens. To the ecstasis of the unenpresenting that makes missing possible there belongs the horizonal schema of absens. This modification of praesens to absens, in which praesens preserves itself as modified, cannot be interpreted more precisely without entering upon a characterization of this modification in general, that is, upon modification of praesens as not, as negative, and clarifying it in its interconnectedness with time. If circumspective letting-function were not from the very outset an expectance, and if this expectance did not temporalize itself, as an ecstasis, in ecstatic unity with an enpresenting, hence if a pertinent horizonal schema were not antecedently unveiled in this ecstatic unity, if the Dasein were not a temporal Dasein in the original sense of time, then the Dasein could never find that something is missing. In other words, there would be lacking the possibility of an essential factor of commerce with and orientation within the intraworldly.
Conversely, the possibility of being surprised by a newly emerging thing which does not appear beforehand in the customary context is grounded in this, that the expectant enpresenting of the handy is unexpectant of something else which stands in a possible functionality connection with what is at first handy. Missing, however, is also not just the uncovering of the nonhandy but an explicit enpresenting of what is precisely already and at least still handy. The absensial modification, precisely, of the praesens belonging to the enpresenting of commerce {with the handy), the praesens being given with the missing, is what makes the handy become conspicuous. With this a fundamental but difficult problem lays claim to our attention. When we formally call the ab-sensial a negation of the praesensial, may it not be, exactly, that a negative moment is constituting itself in the structure of the being of the handy, that is, primarily in handiness? In fundamental terms, to what extent is a negative, a not, involved in Temporality in general and, conjointly, in temporality? We may even inquire to what extent time itself is the condition of possibility of nullity in general. Because the modification of praesens into absens, of presence into absence-a modification belonging to temporality (to the ecstasis of the present as well as to the other ecstases)-has the character of negativity, of the not, of not-presencing, the question arises as to where in general the root of this not lies. Closer consideration shows that the not and also the essential nature of the not, nullity, likewise can be interpreted only by way of the nature of time and that it is only by starting from this that the possibility of modification-for example, the modification of presence into absence-can be explained. In the end, Hegel is on the track of a fundamental truth when he says that