And they find what endures permanently in what persists throughout all that happens, in what remains. That which remains they discover, in turn, in the aspect (εἶδος , ἰδέα), for example, the Idea "house."

The Idea "house" displays what anything is that is fashioned as a house. Particular, real, and possible houses, in contrast, are changing and transitory derivatives of the Idea and thus belong to what does not endure.

But it can never in any way be established that enduring is based solely on what Plato thinks as ἰδέα and Aristotle thinks as το τί ην εΐνοα (that which any particular thing has always been), or what metaphysics in its most varied interpretations thinks as essentia.

All unfolding endures. But is enduring only permanent enduring? Does the essence of technology endure in the sense of the permanent enduring of an Idea that hovers over everything technological, thus making it seem that by technology we mean some mythological abstraction? The way in which technology unfolds lets itself be seen only on the basis of that permanent enduring in which enframing propriates as a destining of revealing. Goethe once uses the mysterious word fortgewähren [to grant continuously] in place of fortwähren [to endure continuously].⁴ He hears währen [to endure] and gewähren [to grant] here in one unarticulated accord. And if we now ponder more carefully than we did before what it is that properly endures and perhaps alone endures, we may venture to say: Only what is granted endures. What endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.

As the essencing of technology, enframing is what endures. Does enframing hold sway at all in the sense of granting? No doubt the question seems a horrendous blunder. For according to everything that has been said, enframing is rather a destining that gathers together into the revealing that challenges forth. Challenging is anything but a granting.

4. "Die Wahlverwandtschaften," pt. 2, chap. 10, in the novel Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder.