196

IV. Leap [278-279]

156. Cleavage

In order to know the cleavage in its structural texture. we must experience the abground (cf. truth) as belonging to enowning.

The essential swaying of be-ing will always remain closed off to philosophy as long as it believes that one could know being somehow through puzzling out the various concepts of modality and with these concepts could, as it were, put being together. Aside from the questionable origin of modalities, one thing is decisive here: the leap into be-ing as enowning; and only from this does the cleavage open up. But this very leap needs the most extended preparation, and this includes the complete disengagement from being as beingness and as the "most general" determination.

Whether someday a better equipped thinker ventures the leap? In a creative sense he must have forgotten the way of hitherto inquiring into being, i.e., into beingness. This forgetting is not losing something nevertheless to be possessed but transformation into a more originary stance of questioning.

But here one must be equipped for the inexhaustibility of the simple, so that it no longer withdraw from him because of misconstruing it as something empty. The simple, in which all essential swaying has gathered, must be found again in each being—no, each being must be found in essential swaying. But we attain the simple only by preserving each thing, each being—in the free-play of its mystery and do not believe that we can seize be-ing by analyzing our already firm knowledge of a thing's properties.

This analysis and holding onto an experience as the experience was once necessary, so that Kant could initially point to that which the "transcendental" kind of knowledge was to grasp. And even this directive and its formation as a work in Kant's works needed the services of centuries of preparation.

What should we now expect from our initial groping, when something completely different is at stake, for which Kant can be only a distant prelude—and only if this prelude is already grasped from within the more originary task?

What does it mean that at the end of the analytic of principles the "modalities" are dealt with, thus pre-determining everything that has gone before?

157. Cleavage and "Modalities"

The "modalities" belong to beings (to beingness) and say nothing at all about the cleavage of be-ing itself. This cleavage can become a question only when the truth of be-ing as enowning is lit up, namely as that which god needs, while man belongs to it (cf. The Last God, 256: The Last God). Thus modalities lag behind the cleavage, just as beingness lags