1. The clearing (beyng)
Coming from “beings” and the representing comportment toward them, and seemingly analyzing these merely according to already familiar views and interpretations—we say, for instance, re- presentation is the representation of a “thing” (something) “as” something in the “light” of beingness (e.g., object of use—or, “animal,” “living being,” “equipment,” “work”).
This representation of something as something in the light of . . . is already a framework of that which in itself fits together the “of,” the “as,” and the “in the light of” into a unity; it is the “clearing” of what is cleared in which that which represents (i.e., man) stands, namely such that this “standing” in advance already determines in general the essence of man and such that it must guide and support this essential characterization. No longer: man and in addition and next to him this standing, but the latter and the essence of man as a question! Standing in the clearing—man is in the ground of Da-sein.1 But insistence originarily: mood.
This clearing cannot be explained from beings; it is the “between” [Zwischen] and in-between [Inzwischen] (in the time-spatial sense of the originary time-space). The “of,” “as,” the “in the light of” are not beings, they are nothing and yet not null and naught; on the contrary: they are totally “important” [wichtig], of the heaviest weight [Gewicht], the proper heavyweight and the only thing in which everything that is a being (not merely as beingness, objectness, statehood) as a being “is.”
The clearing is the a-byss as ground, the nihilating counterpart to all that is [das Nichtende zu allem Seienden] and thus the heaviest thing. It
1. Cf. Da-sein {see above I, section 2, p.12}.