The Anaximander Fragment

Greeks experience beings as being present, whether at the present time or not, presencing in unconcealment. The word by which we translate ὄν, "being," is now no longer obtuse; no longer are "to be," as the translation of εἶναι, and the Greek word itself hastily employed ciphers for arbitrary and vague notions about some indeterminate universal.

At the same time it becomes manifest that Being, as the presencing of what is present, is already in itself truth, provided we think the essence of truth as the gathering that clears and shelters; provided we dissociate ourselves from the modern prejudice of metaphysics—today accepted as something obvious—that truth is a property of beings or of Being. Being, saying the word thoughtfully now, is εἶναι as presencing. In a hidden way it is a property of truth, but clearly not of truth considered as a characteristic of human or divine cognition, and not as a property in the sense of a quality. Furthermore, it has become clear that τὰ ἐόντα ambiguously names what is presently present and also what is not presently present; the latter, understood with regard to the former, means what is absent. But what is at the present time present is not a slice of something sandwiched between two absences. If what is present stands in the forefront of vision, everything presences together: one brings the other with it, one lets the other go. What is presently present in unconcealment lingers in unconcealment as in an open expanse. Whatever lingers (or whiles) in the expanse proceeds to it from concealment and arrives in unconcealment. But what is present is arriving or lingering insofar as it is also already departing from unconcealment toward concealment. What is presently present lingers awhile. It endures in approach and withdrawal. Lingering is the transition from coming to going: what is present is what in each case lingers. Lingering in transition, it lingers still in approach and lingers already in departure. What is for the time being present, what presently is, comes to presence out of absence. This must be said precisely of whatever is truly present, although our usual way of representing things would like to exclude from what is present all absence.

Τὰ ἐόντα names the uniform manifold of whatever lingers awhile. Everything present in unconcealment in this way presents itself to all others, each after its own fashion.

Finally, we gather something else from the passage in Homer: τὰ

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