essence as thing.2 Positionality’s essence does not guard the thing as thing. Positionality essences in that it leaves the thing unguarded. But because positionality reigns from long ago, though concealed, and through its requisitioning ever more decisively wrests away all that presences into standing reserve, under this essential domination of positionality the thing as thing has long become ever more unguarded. In the plundering of its drive, which everywhere secures solely the orderable standing reserve, positionality reaps the thing, inceptually unguarded in its essence, away into greater and greater neglect.
In the essence of positionality, the unguarding of the thing as thing takes place.
The word “unguarding” [Verwahrlosung] is here taken literally and this means: it is spoken from out of a previously thought issue; for what is genuinely thought is rightly said and the genuinely said is rightly thought. Unguarding here does not mean a slipping into neglect, does not signify a decay into disorder. The word “unguarding” as now used is no term of derision; it entails no value judgment at all. The unguarding of the thing names what proceeds from the essence of positionality, signaling to us the essence of technology.
What takes place in the unguarding of the thing? What has already occurred if the thing is not yet able to thing as a thing?
In thinging, the thing brings the world near and lets the world abide. If the thing, unguarded as it is, does not thing, then the world as world remains denied. In the unguarding of the thing there takes place the refusal of world.
But world is the still-concealed mirror-play of the fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities.
The world worlds. But the worlding of world is not only not properly experienced and correspondingly thought, but even more we are still entirely inept at both thinking the worlding of the world purely on its own terms and at corresponding to this.3 Thus we require assistance. Admittedly, instead of thinking the worlding of world on its own terms in a corresponding way of thinking, this assistance compels us to conceive that worlding
2. only this! does not the exclusion of the essence of truth take place in the dispensation?
3. The event of appropriation