of objects and objectively present things and nothingness signifies the utter negation of beings understood in that sense. Thereby negation itself has the character of an objective assertion.
This "negative" determination of "nothingness," in relation to the most general and emptiest objective concept of "being," is indeed the "most negative," and everyone immediately and readily feels antipathetic to it. If our inquiry concerned only this acknowledged (though not yet conceptualized) nullity, then such an inquiry could not claim to place metaphysics in question and to determine the belonging together of beyng and nothingness more originarily.
But what if beyng itself were the self-withdrawing and essentially occurred as refusal? Is the latter a nullity or, rather, the highest gift? Indeed, is it not primarily on account of this negativity of beyng itself that "nothingness" is full of that assigning "power" the enduring of which is the origin of all "creating" (beings coming to be more fully)?
If now the abandonment by being pertains to the "beings" of machination and lived experience, can it be surprising that "nothingness" is misinterpreted as sheer nullity?
If the "yes" of "making" and "lived experience" determines the actuality of the actual so exclusively, then how reprehensible must every "no" and "not" appear! For the decision regarding these always depends on the immediate and unreflected way the customary "yes" is raised to that pure and simple "yes" which lends measure to every "no."
Yet the essential, "creative" "yes" is more difficult and rarer than would be admitted by the usual affirmation of what is current, graspable, and satisfying. Therefore those who dread and those who are contemptuous of the "no" must always be interrogated first concerning their "yes." And then it is often shown that they themselves are not at all certain of their "yes." Could this be the reason they become the allegedly valiant adversaries of "nothingness"?
Finally, what is the origin of the "yes" and the "no" and also of the distinction and opposition between them? To put it in a different way: who founded the distinction between the possibility of affirmation and negation, the "and" of the affirmable and the negatable? Here all "logic" fails, and metaphysics does so afortiori, since these indeed grasp beingness only on the basis of thought.
The counter-turning must lie in the essential occurrence of beyng itself, and the ground is ap-propriation as the refusal which is an assigning. Then the "no" and the "not" would precisely be what is more originary in beyng.