metaphysics of unconditional intellectual presumptuousness, it is necessary first to take the word spoken by Heraclitus seriously. It says:
φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.
Emerging to self-concealing gives favor.
The favor of emerging belongs to self-concealing. κρύπτεσθαι—to conceal itself—is, in relation to emerging, the self-occluding. In this sense, we seek to think κρύπτεσθαι first, though not in a complete way. Emerging grants to self-occluding that it be, because self-concealing itself, from out of its ‘essence,’ allots to emerging what it is.
(One grants itself to the other and thus allots to the other the freedom of its own essence, which rests in nothing other than this granting that thoroughly prevails in concealing and revealing in which the essence and prevailing of unconcealment freely commences. This free commencement is the inception itself: the inception ‘of’ beyng as beyng.
[132] And yet, with these last sentences too much has already, but unavoidably, been said: ‘too much’ in the sense that the simpler the to-be-said is, the more the proper elucidation of it lags behind the to-be-thought. The above sentences had to anticipate what we could perhaps one day experience in our understanding of the saying of φύσις, so that we may, given such experience, direct our thinking toward the unforgettable.
Before this, however, we must first attempt to gain insight into the reciprocal essential relation that is here called by the name φιλία/φιλεῖν—favor. Emerging grants to self-concealing that the latter might unfold in the proper essence of emerging; self-concealing unfolds, however, by allotting to emerging that emerging may ‘be’ emerging. In φύσις, favor prevails: not any old favor and privileging, but rather favor in the sense of the granting that grants nothing other than the allotting, the bestowing, and keeping safe of that which unfolds as emerging.
If for the modern human, who is just barely three hundred years old, everything was not already bent toward the subjective and experiential and was not made conscious through the calculating consciousness (and at the same time shuffled off into the fatal region of the so-called ‘unconscious’), then we could now, without the
100 The Inception of Occidental Thinking