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§242 [380-382]


But how is emptiness to be understood here? Not in the sense that space and time, as forms of ordering and as frameworks for calculable and objectively present things, are simply vacant, i.e., not in the sense of the sheer absence of such things therein, but, rather, in the sense of a temporal-spatial emptiness, an originary yawning open in hesitant self-withholding. Nevertheless, must the latter not strike up against a claim, a search, a will to reach, just in order to be a self-withholding? Certainly, but both essentially occur in each case as event, and the only task now is to determine the essence of the emptiness itself, which means to think the a-byssal character of the abyss, i.e., how the abyssal ground grounds. In the proper sense, that is always and only to be thought out of the primordial ground, the event, and in carrying out the leap into its oscillating turn.

The abyssal ground, as the staying away of the ground, is indeed supposed to be the essential occurrence of truth (i.e., the essential occurrence of the clearing concealment). The staying away of the ground—is that not the absence of truth? Yet the hesitant self-withholding is precisely the clearing for concealment and is thus the presencing of truth. Certainly, "presencing," but not in the way something objectively present has come to presence; instead, the essential occurrence of what first founds the presence and absence of beings and not only this.

The "staying away" as (hesitant) self-withholding of the ground is the essential occurrence of the ground as abyssal ground. The ground needs the abyssal ground. Furthermore, the clearing which occurs in the self-withholding is not a mere gaping hole or chasm (χάος—versus φύσις); it is the attuned disposing of the essential dis-lodgments of precisely this cleared being which allows such self-concealing to stand within it.

That is so because truth as clearing concealment is the truth of beyng as event, i.e., as the appropriation that oscillates back and forth, that grounds itself in the truth (in the essential occurrence of the "there"), and that also attains for itself therein, and only therein, the clearing for its self-concealing.

The event attunes and pervasively disposes the essential occurrence of truth. The openness of the clearing of concealment is therefore originarily not the mere emptiness of vacancy; instead, it is the disposed and disposing emptiness of the abyssal ground which, according to the attuning intimation of the event, is a disposed abyssal ground, i.e., here, a joined one.

Moreover, "emptiness" is not the mere non-satisfaction of an expectation or wish. It is only as Da-sein, i.e., as restraint (cf. Prospect, 13. Restraint), the withholding in the face of the hesitant self-withholding whereby time-space is grounded as the site of the moment for the decision.