everything present and absent in them have the place that gathers and protects everything.
In the same way as speculative dialectical thinking, originary intuition and its evidence remain dependent upon openness that already holds sway, the clearing. What is evident is what can be immediately intuited. Evidentia is the word that Cicero uses to translate the Greek ἐνάργεια, that is, to transform it into the Roman. Ἐνάργεια, which has the same root as argentum (silver), means that which in itself and of itself radiates and brings itself to light. In the Greek language, one is not speaking about the action of seeing, about videre, but about that which gleams and radiates. But it can radiate only if openness has already been granted. The beam of light does not first create the clearing, openness, it only traverses it. It is only such openness that grants to giving and receiving and to any evidence at all the free space in which they can remain and must move.
All philosophical thinking that explicitly or inexplicitly follows the call "to the matter itself" is in its movement and with its method already admitted to the free space of the clearing. But philosophy knows nothing of the clearing. Philosophy does speak about the light of reason, but does not heed the clearing of Being. The lumen naturale, the light of reason, throws light only on the open. It does concern the clearing, but so little does it form it that it needs it in order to be able to illuminate what is present in the clearing. This is true not only of philosophy's method, but also and primarily of its matter, that is, of the presence {Anwesenheit} of what is present. To what extent the subiectum, the ὑποκείμενον, that which already lies present, thus what is present in its presence {Anwesenheit} is constantly thought also in subjectivity, cannot be shown here in detail. (Refer to Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2 [1961], pages 429ff.)*
We are concerned now with something else. Whether or not what is present is experienced, comprehended, or presented, presence {Anwesenheit} as
*This material appears in English in Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 26ff.—ED.