that comes to presence, upon its ground. Openness is then no longer the basic character of φύσις as taken up in simple acknowledgment, the φύσις which makes it possible for τέχνη to grasp beings as such. Openness is also not only the condition of the possibility of the correctness of an assertion. As such a condition, it appears merely at first and preliminarily in the field of view of the critical return from correctness. After what we have experienced about the necessity of the question of truth, this cannot be the original access to the essence of truth. That access must proceed out of our need, our distress, out of the abandonment of beings by Being, while we take it seriously that Being is withdrawing from beings, whereby beings degenerate into mere objects of human contrivance and lived experience. What if this withdrawal itself belonged to the essence of Being {Seyns}? What if this were the still unrecognized truth, never to be experienced or expressed, of the whole metaphysics of the West: namely, that Being {Seyn} is in its essence self-concealing? What if the openness were first and foremost the clearing in the midst of beings, in which clearing the self-concealment of Being {Seyns} would be manifest? However it may be with the “answer” to this, the question of truth is not one we can decide by ourselves and in relation to ourselves precisely as neutral spectators. It is rather the question that will one day or another betray itself as the question of who we ourselves are.
In our retrospective sketch of the beginning of Western thinking, we said that man will be determined primordially as the custodian of the unconcealedness of beings. In the progression away from the beginning, man became the animal rationale. In the transition out of the first end of Western thinking into its other beginning, there has to be questioned, in a still higher necessity, with the carrying out of the question of truth, the question of who we are. This question will point in the direction of the possibility of whether man is not only the preserver of unconcealed beings but is precisely the custodian of the openness of Being {Seyns}. Only if we know that we do not yet know who we are do we ground the one and only ground which may release the future of a simple, essential existence [Dasein] of historical man from itself.