being.15 The essence of errancy rests in the essence of beyng as the danger.
In this regard, what is most dangerous in the danger consists in the danger concealing itself as the danger that it is. Pursuing the essence of beyng, positionality dissembles its essential danger. Thus it comes to pass that, initially and long thereafter, we largely take no notice of this essence of beyng, essencing in itself as the danger of the truth of its essence, and if we ever do then only with difficulty.
We experience the danger not yet as the danger. We do not experience positionality as the self-pursuing and thus self- dissembling essence of being. Within the predominant relationship to being, we experience in being itself nothing of its essential danger, even though beings are everywhere permeated with dangers and distresses. Instead of referring us to the danger in the essence of being, the perils and plights precisely blind us to the danger. What is most dangerous in all this lies in the fact that the danger does not show itself as danger. It appears as though being itself would be innocuous and in itself dangerless since, on the one hand, being is ever still and only the most universal and emptiest of concepts, and what is more harmless than an empty concept? And since, on the other hand, being is the same as that most extant of beings, God.16
The danger, which takes place as the essence of positionality in the dominance of technology, reaches its culmination when in the midst of this singular danger there is everywhere only the innocuous, proliferating in the form of numerous accidental plights.
15. Translator’s Note: See the 1930 lecture, first delivered in Bremen and published in 1943, “On the Essence of Truth,” section 7, “Un-Truth as Errancy,” now in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, 3rd ed., Gesamtausgabe vol. 9, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), 177–202, 196–98. English translation: “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. John Sallis, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. various (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–54, 150–52.
16. Assuming however that God would be, surely not beyng itself, but the most extant being, then who today would dare to claim that, so conceived, God would be the danger for beyng?