of emerging. However, it is also illuminating to us if we think emerging (in the sense of the self-opening of the clearing) from out of what is properly determined through this emerging: namely, from out of beings themselves, which appear into emerging. Because it appears—that is, because it attains to presence and is precisely thereby that-which-is—emerging ‘dominates.’ Seen from the perspective of beings, it is of course being in whose emerged light alone beings as such can come to presence. With this perspective, the priority of emerging is grounded upon the priority of beings. However, the question stands before us: why are beings decisive and not rather non-beings and, what amounts to the same, the ‘nothing’? Why beings, and not rather nothing? Furthermore, apart from the question regarding the priority between that-which-is and that-which-is-not, could it not be the case that being itself unfolds as the prerequisite of the possibility of making a decision over whether or not there are beings?

[160] However, even this way of thinking—a way of retreat back to the priority of beings—does not allow us to find the grounding for the priority of being, and thereby the priority of emerging. Given this, we see that this justification on other grounds is not possible, since it already assumes the way of thinking characteristic of metaphysics, which questions being exclusively from the perspective of beings. By means of the metaphysical interpretation just executed above, we have already again taken being/emerging/ φύσις for itself and have forgotten that according to the inceptual two-foldness, φύσις names at the same time the relation of φύσις to κρύπτεσθαι, and thus names φιλεῖν, the favor of the bestowal of essence in which the two join themselves together into their essence.

120    The Inception of Occidental Thinking