e) The essential occurrence of truth as a sheltering

243. Sheltering

is not a subsequent berthing in beings of a truth already objectively present in itself, not to mention the fact that truth is never something objectively present.

Sheltering belongs to the essential occurrence of truth. This is not an essential occurrence if it never occurs in a sheltering.

If, therefore, the "essence" of truth is indicationally called the clearing for self-concealing, then that is done only in order to unfold the essential occurrence of truth. The clearing must ground itself in its open realm and has need of what maintains it in openness, and that is in each case and in different ways a being (thing-tool-work). But this sheltering of what is open must also and in advance be such that the openness comes to be in a way which allows self-concealing, and thereby beyng, to occur essentially in it.

Accordingly, it must be possible—although with a corresponding leap ahead into beyng—to find a way from "beings" to the essential occurrence of truth and to make visible, on this way, sheltering as something that belongs to truth. But where is this way supposed to start? In order to find it, must we not first grasp our current relations to beings, such as we stand therein, and thus bring before our eyes something most ordinary? But to do so is precisely what is most difficult, because it can never be accomplished without a tremor, which means: without a dislodging of the basic relation to beyng itself and to truth (cf. Prospect, 5. For the few—For the rare, p. 13f., on philosophical knowledge).

It must be shown in which truth beings stand and how they stand in it in each case. It must become clear how world and earth are here in