is the open which surrounds us. What is this open itself, if we disregard that it can also appear as the horizon of our representing?
GUIDE: This open seems to me to be something like a region, by means of whose enchantment everything which belongs to it returns to that in which it rests.
SCHOLAR: I am unsure if I understand anything of what you just said.
GUIDE: I do not understand it either, if by “understanding” you mean the capacity to represent [vorzustellen] what is offered in such a manner that it is, as it were, set down [untergestellt] in what is familiar and thus [113] secured; for I too lack something familiar in which I would be able to accommodate [unterbringen] what I attempted to say about the open as region.
SCIENTIST: That is perhaps impossible here, since presumably what you call “region” is itself what first grants all lodging.
GUIDE: I mean something like this; but not only this.
SCHOLAR: You spoke of “a” region in which everything returns to itself. Strictly speaking, a region for everything is not one region among others, but rather the region of all regions.
GUIDE: You are right; it is a matter of the region.
SCIENTIST: And the enchantment of this region is perhaps the prevailing of its essence, the regioning, if I may call it that.
SCHOLAR: According to the word, the region [Gegend] would be that which comes to encounter [entgegenkommt] us. Indeed we also said of the horizon that, from the outward view which is delimited by it, the outward look of objects comes to encounter us. If we now comprehend the horizon from the region, then we take the region itself to be that which comes to encounter us.
GUIDE: In this manner we would of course be characterizing the region— just as we earlier characterized the horizon—in terms of its relation to us, while what we are in fact seeking is what the open that surrounds us is in itself. If we say this surrounding open is, in itself, the region, then this word must name something other than what comes to encounter us.
SCIENTIST: Moreover, this coming-to-encounter is in no way a—and even less the—basic trait of the region. What then does this word signify? [114]
SCHOLAR: The word gegnet44 means the free expanse. Does this allow anything to be gleaned from it for the essence of what we would like to call the region?
44. The special term Heidegger introduces here, gegnet, is a Middle High German form of Gegend which is still used in some South German dialects. (Note that, after its first mention, Heidegger capitalizes Gegnet, as is done with all nouns in modern German.) Gegnet is derived from a contraction of gegenôte (-ôte is a substantive ending, similar to -heit or -keit). Both Gegend and Gegnet bear the sense not only of a “surrounding region” (Umgegend), but also of the direction toward (gegen) which one is moving, or the direction in which something lies “over against” (gegenüber) one. However, Heidegger takes pains here to distinguish his (re)thinking of Gegend/Gegnet from anthropocentric notions of a horizonal environment that is centered on and oriented toward the human. His retrieval of the unusual word die Gegnet in the present context is intended primarily, it seems, to mark a terminological distinction between this or that limited region on the one hand, and “the region of all regions” on the other. Since Heidegger associates die Gegnet with what “the open” (das Offene) is in itself, and following his explanation of it as “the free [i.e., open] expanse” (die freie Weite) which surrounds the limited or restricted openness of human horizons—both holding them within itself and withholding itself from them (compare der Enthalt, “the with-hold,” in the second conversation [see p. 118], and also “the open and yet veiled expanse” in the third conversation [see p. 132])—I translate die Gegnet as “the open-region.”—Tr.