198
IV. The Leap [251-252]


133. The essence of beyng4


Beyng needs humans in order to occur essentially, and humans belong to beyng so that they might fulfill their ultimate destiny as Da-sein.

Does beyng not become dependent on an other, if this needing constitutes its very essence and is not a mere concomitant of that essence?

Yet how can we speak of de-pendency [Ab-hangigkeit] here, in view of the fact that this needing radically recreates what is needed and forces it to its self?

Conversely, how can human beings bring beyng under their domination if they must precisely give up their lostness in beings so as to become ap-propriated to beyng, belonging to beyng?

This oscillation of needing and belonging constitutes beyng as event, and our thinking is in the first place obliged to raise the movement of this oscillation into the simplicity of knowledge and to ground it in its truth.

Thereby, however, we must renounce the habit of striving to assure that this essential occurrence of beyng is representable at will for everyone at any time.

Instead, we reach the uniqueness of the oscillation in its pure self-concealment in each case only through the leap. Thereby we know that what we come by here is not the "ultimate"; it is rather the essential occurrence of stillness, that which is the most finite and most unique as the site of the moment of the great decision regarding the remaining absent and the advent of the gods. Only therein do we attain the stillness of the watch for the passing by of the last god.

The uniqueness of beyng (as event), its unrepresentability (not an object), its highest strangeness, and its essential self-concealment—these are indications we must follow up in order at first to prepare ourselves to surmise that which, versus the obviousness of beyng, is the most rare and in whose openness we stand, even if our humanity does for the most part pursue being-away.

These indications address us only if we at once withstand the plight of the abandonment by being and confront the decision regarding the remaining absent and the advent of the gods.

To what extent these indications bring about the basic disposition of restraint, and to what extent restraint disposes us toward compliance with them.


4. Cf. The leap, 166. Essential occurrence and essence.


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger