b) Historical reflection on the future, the future as the beginning of all happenings.
But a historiographical consideration does not exhaust the possible relation to history; so far from doing so, it actually impedes such a relation and cuts it off. What we are calling historical reflection is essentially different from a historiographical consideration. If we consciously elaborate the distinction between the historiographical and the historical even linguistically, and adhere to it over and against the ordinary confusion of the two terms, then this precision in the use of words is founded on a basic attitude of thought. The word “historical” [geschichtlich] means “happening” [das Geschehen], history itself as a being. “Historiographical” refers to a kind of cognition. We will not speak of historical “consideration” but “reflection.” For reflection [Be-sinnung] is looking for the meaning [Sinn] of a happening, the meaning of history. “Meaning” refers here to the open region of goals, standards, impulses, decisive possibilities, and powers—all these belong essentially to happening.
Happening as a way to be is proper only to humanity. Man has history because he alone can be historical, i.e., can stand and does stand in that open region of goals, standards, drives, and powers, by withstanding this region and existing in the mode of forming, directing, acting, carrying out, and tolerating. Only man is historical—as that being which, exposed to beings as a whole, and in commerce with these beings, sets himself free in the midst of necessity. All non-human beings are history-less, though, in a derived sense, they can be historical, and are even necessarily so, insofar as they belong within the circuit of the commerce of man with beings. For example, a work of art possesses its history as work. This implies, however, that it does so on the basis of its being created by man, or, more precisely, on the basis of its opening up, as work, and keeping open, the world of man.
It is now clear that happenings and history are not what is bygone and what is considered as such, i.e., the historiographical. But just as little is this happening the present. The happening and the happenings of history are primordially and always the future, that which in a concealed way comes toward us, a revelatory