of being does not know anything of itself; it supposes itself to be in touch with "beings," with the "actual," to be close to "life," and to be certain of "lived experience," since the forgottenness of being knows only beings. Yet in this way, in such presencing of beings, they are abandoned by being. The abandonment by being is the ground of the forgottenness of being. The abandonment of beings by being gives them the appearance that they themselves, without needing anything else, are now there to be grasped and used. But the abandonment by beyng excludes and precludes the event.
The resonating must sound out of this abandonment and must start with the unfolding of the forgottenness of beyng, in which the other beginning resounds and so does beyng.
Abandonment by being
What Nietzsche for the first time recognizes as nihilism, in fact in the guise of Platonism, is in truth, seen in terms of the basic question that remains foreign to him, merely the surface of the much deeper occurrence of the forgottenness of being. This forgottenness becomes more and more prominent precisely in the pursuit of an answer to the guiding question. Yet even the forgottenness of being (in each case according to how it is determined) is not the most original destiny of the first beginning; rather, that is the abandonment by being, which perhaps was most veiled and denied by Christianity and its secularized successors.
That beings can still appear as such, though the truth of beyng has abandoned them—cf. the disempowerment of φύσις and ὄν as ἰδέα.
To what extent are beings used up when, thus abandoned by being, they appear as objects and as the "in itself"? Note the obviousness, flattening, and downright unrecognizability of beyng in the prevalent understanding of being.
Abandonment by being
What is abandoned by what? Beings by the beyng which belongs to them and to them alone. Beings then appear in that way, namely as objects and as things objectively present, as if beyng were not occurring essentially. Beings are the nondescript and the striking at the same time, in the same undecidedness and arbitrariness.
The abandonment by beyng is basically an essential decay [Verwesung] of beyng. Its essence is distorted and only in that way does it bring itself into truth, namely, as the correctness of representation—νοεῖν ["thinking"]—διανοεῖν ["thinking through"]—ἰδέα. Beings remain what is present, and what most properly is is what is constantly