and the human being a place for the possibility of their essential occurrence. This "between" overflows its own banks and from this overflowing first allows the banks to rise up as banks, ones that always belong to the stream of the appropriating event, ones whose rich possibilities are always concealed, ones that constitute the hither and thither of the inexhaustible relations in whose clearing worlds conjoin themselves and sink away and earths disclose themselves and suffer destruction.
Yet even in such a way, and above all in such a way, being must remain inexplicable, the venture against nothingness which first owes its origin to beyng.
The greatest danger to beyng, greatest because it constantly arises out of beyng itself, a danger that belongs to beyng as its time-space, is for beyng to make itself "a being" and to tolerate confirmation on the basis of beings. The history of metaphysics and metaphysics itself, in the sense of the priority of beings over being, testify to this danger and to the difficulty of bearing up against it. The ambiguity in the differentiation between beings and being attributes being to beings and yet dissimulates a separation that is not grounded in beyng itself.
Metaphysics, however, makes being something extant, i.e., makes being a being, because it posits being, qua "Idea," as the goal of beings and then, so to speak, appends "culture" onto this goal-positing.
But beyng is the refusal of all "goals" and the denial of every possibility of explanation.
268. Beyng
(The differentiation)
Beyng essentially occurs as the appropriation of the gods and humans to their en-counter. In the clearing of the concealment of the "between," a "between" which arises out of, and with, the en-countering appropriation, there arises the strife of world and earth. It is only within the temporal-spatial playing field of this strife that the appropriation comes to be preserved and lost and that so-called beings step into the open realm of this clearing.
There is no immediate difference between beyng and beings, because there is altogether no immediate relation between them. Even though beings as such oscillate only in the appropriation, beyng remains abyssally far from all beings. The attempts to represent both together, already in the very manner of naming them, stem from metaphysics. Indeed, what is precisely characteristic of metaphysics is that it takes this differentiation as an immediate one, even when it