within it; however, it cannot and may not be seen explicitly. The field of view, ἀλήθεια, must in a certain sense be overlooked.
The first task was then to apprehend beings as beings, to install the pure recognition of beings as such, and nothing more. This was quite enough if we consider what was simultaneously grounded with it: the primordial determination of man as that being which, in the midst of beings as a whole, lets beings hold sway in their unconcealedness. This letting hold sway is accomplished by exhibiting beings in their forms and modes of presence and by preserving beings therein—occurrences in which poetry as well as painting and sculpture, the act that founds a state, and the worshipping of the gods first obtain their essence, bringing these essences into being historically and as history by their words and works, actions and raptures, assaults and downfalls.
3) The origin of the apprehension of man as the rational animal out of an inability to sustain the first beginning.
The beginning of the determination of man on the basis of his relation to beings as such was only a first inception and did not remain the beginning. What followed was incapable of adhering to this grounding of the essence of man in its primordiality, i.e., to create it ever more originally. Therefore it had to be pointed out briefly how the subsequent and now ordinary apprehension of man as rational animal originated from an inability to sustain that great beginning in which man had to bring himself before beings as such and had to be a being in the midst of beings.
We have exposed the most extreme and for us today the most visible developments of this history of the determination of the essence of man not in order to begin a sterile “critique of culture” or the like, nor even just to portray the “contemporary situation” of man. On the contrary, it is entirely and solely as connected to the question of truth and the history of its essence that we have referred to the distance between today’s universally common conception of man and its beginning. For if now on the basis of a preparation which has lasted centuries, and was especially accomplished in the modern period, beings have become a