having an effect, being proper consists, in whose truth our being-with all beings resides, and from which it arises.
In the first commencement of Western thinking, still prior to metaphysics, which first begins with Plato, thinkers recognized something essential. It became clear to them that pure appearing and emergence is the true; and something still further, that even not emerging forth into appearance is capable of something higher within being than immediate appearing. Heraclitus, in a saying that is numbered 54 among his fragments, says the following:
ἁρμονίη ἀφανής φανερῆς κρείσσων.
The fitting of accord that does not release itself into appearing is capable of something higher than the fitting that appears.
We are thus led to take seriously the thought that self-withdrawal and concealing themselves let beings be more in being than does the activity of any causal effecting. In the letting be that goes away, the true becomes manifest. In the first version of his poetic work The Death of Empedocles, Hölderlin expressed this for the particular realm of being human. Hölderlin has Empedocles say this word (III, 149):
Am Scheidetage weissagt unser Geist
Und wahres reden, die nicht wiederkehren.
Prophetic is our spirit on the day of departure
And the true is said by those who do not return.
Within the sphere of the two-thousand-year dominance of metaphysics that has yet to be broken anywhere it must seem fantastical to think being otherwise than in terms of the guiding thread of cause and effect. We must attempt it, nevertheless, if we want to think ahead in the wake of what Hölderlin intimates under the names fate and sending.
3. Fitting as releasing into the search for essence and the loss of essence. Errancy and evil
Fitting is not causal intervention; it is not setting about the effective altering of what is actual. Fitting is rather the self-withdrawal and self-concealing that as such first lets beings be yet thereby also releases them into the discord of finding their essence and of losing their essence. Often human beings, while appearing to will themselves, roam around amid the loss of
GA 52: 101-102