SCIENTIST: It conditions or rather, literally, bethings [bedingt]52 the thing into being a thing [zum Ding].
SCHOLAR: And so the relation of open-region to thing is best called conditioning or rather, literally, bethinging [Bedingnis].
SCIENTIST: But bethinging is not a making and effecting; neither is it a making-possible in the sense of the transcendental.
GUIDE: It is rather only a bethinging.
SCIENTIST: So we must first learn to think what bethinging is.
GUIDE: By learning to experience the essence of thinking.
SCHOLAR: And thus to wait upon bethinging and enregioning.
SCIENTIST: Nevertheless, this naming is now of some help in bringing a certain transparency to the manifold of relations introduced. Still, precisely that relation whose characterization is to me the most important remains indeterminate: I mean the relationship of the human to the thing.
SCHOLAR: Why are you so doggedly persistent about this relationship?
SCIENTIST: We started, after all, by illuminating the relation between the ego and the object by way of the factual relationship of the thinking in physics to nature. The relation between ego and object, often called the subject-object-relation, which I took to be the most universal, is evidently only a historical variation of the relationship of the human to the thing, insofar as things can become objects.
GUIDE: And they have even become objects before attaining their thing-essence. [141]
SCHOLAR: The same is true of the corresponding historical transformation of the human-essence to egoity.
GUIDE: Which likewise occurred before the essence of the human could return to itself.
SCIENTIST: If, that is, we do not regard as final the molding of the human-essence as animal rationale.
SCHOLAR: Something which after today’s conversation is hardly possible any more.
SCIENTIST: I hesitate to so rashly make a decision about this. However, something else has indeed become clear to me: that in the relation between ego and object something historical conceals itself, something which belongs to the history of the human essence.
GUIDE: And insofar as the essence of the human does not receive the mold of its character from the human, but rather from what we call the open-region and its enregioning, the history of which you had an inkling occurs as the history of the open-region.
52. The dictionary definitions of bedingen include “to cause” as well as “to condition,” but the word is being redefined here in a quite literal sense.—Tr.