positionality. But positionality constitutes the essence of the modern technological world. Positionality everywhere immediately approaches us. Positionality is, if we now be so permitted to speak, more extant than all atomic energy and all mechanical engineering, more extant than every form of organization, information, and automation. In positionality we catch sight of a belonging together of the human and being wherein the letting-belong first determines the type of togetherness and its unity. Positionality challenges the human to the calculation of being, itself arrogated into calculability. Positionality poises both the human and being to challenge each other into the requisitioning of beings as orderable standing reserve.
We were brought to the question of a belonging-together where the belonging takes precedence over the togetherness by the statement of Parmenides: “The same, namely, is thinking as well as also being.” The question concerning the sense of this same, i.e., concerning the sameness of what is different, is the question concerning the essence of identity. According to the doctrine of metaphysics, identity holds as a basic characteristic of the being of beings. (The principle of identity says this as well, if we hear its formula A is A in its genuine intonation. Concerning the essence of identity, the principle of identity provides no information.) Contrary to this, the statement of Parmenides wherein identity itself speaks through the τὸ αὐτό, contains a hint. Yet the word τὸ αὐτό, the same, remains a riddle and remains so as long as thinking is not successful in thinking ahead to that region where belonging-together addresses us as belonging-together. In that region, one would experience the essential provenance of identity. Might we not search for the place of provenance of identity in what our thinking would like to come nearer to under the name “event of appropriation”?
The essence of identity is the propriety of the appropriative event [Eigentum des Er-eignisses]. We can only sensibly speak of authenticity when we think it in terms of the event of appropriation. If there could be something tenable in the attempt to point our thinking into the place of the essential provenance of identity, then what would become of the title of this lecture? The sense of the title “The Principle of Identity” would have changed.