into the limits of the contour. Set out in its contours, standing out in them, the being “is,” i.e., comes into the light of day. Contour—not an indifferent framework, but the integrating-gathering power and inner substantiality of things. Thus through the clarification of an appearing thing in its appearing a new essential character of the Being of beings has obtruded. More precisely, appearance as emergence has been better determined as an entering into contours. Appearing—emergent entrance into contours. The experience of beings as what appears in possessing such Being—that is the primal experience of the Greeks.
Yet what is this to us, this sharper and fuller formulation of the essence of appearance? It should bring us closer to an understanding of the Being of beings. But that in turn is for the sake of under standing, on the basis of such a grasp of Being, how Being persists in the noncompliance which constitutes the noncompliance of beings. If the noncompliance is not something tacked on to beings, in the guise of a defective property or a belated epiphenomenon, but if it belongs, as Anaximander basically says, to the essence of beings as beings, then a sufficiently broad and penetrating elucidation of the essence of Being must | clarify how the noncompliance predominates here in beings as such.
That which appears, that which stands in apparentness, is as such noncompliant, out of order. What can this now mean, in terms of the expanded clarification of appearance? We will try to clarify it in the context of the pronouncement, by way of a free construction, so to speak.
Appearance means emerging entrance into contours; this entrance-into is supposed to be out of order. Whence steps that which enters into contours? Out of a lack of contours. What holds itself in apparentness persists in contours over and against contourlessness. The noncompliance would then consist in the possession of contours.
Seen this way, what then is disappearance? Let us remain within the basic experience of the Greeks! When day gives way to night and darkness falls over things, then contours and delineated colors disappear, the limits of things become indistinct and fade away, things lose their substantiality and individuality—everything is concealed in the gaping void (χάος) of darkness. Disappearance is accordingly a stepping-back out of the possession of contours into contourlessness. Returning to appearance is then a giving-way to a persistence in contours. In giving way to it, the appearance takes into consideration the noncompliance occurring through an abandonment of contourlessness.1
The receding acquiesces to the contourlessness and in this acquiescence testifies to it (discerns the compliance). Thus the noncompliance
1. [Reading Umrißlosigkeit for Umrissenheit, “possession of contours.”—Trans.]