c) Primordial Movedness of Fundamental Attunement. Having-Been and Past
Already the fact that we cannot and may not directly name the fundamental attunement with a single word points to the fact that the attunement in itself—as both attuning and attuned—is reciprocal and thus a properly primordial movedness. This movedness we wish now to clarify in concluding our interpretation of lines 1 to 38.
The gods of old, as those that have fled, are precisely there in no longer being permitted to call upon them; they are there not as present, but rather, in the renunciative Dasein, they are there as having been, i.e., as still being. In being absent, they come to presence precisely in the absence of that which has been. That which has been, and its having-been, is something fundamentally different in principle from that which is past and its being past. It is true that we do not name either one unequivocally in our language, in part because in our customary referring to time and temporal moments we indeed fail to experience any distinctions. That which has been is for us the past, and vice-versa. However essential language can be in its telling, our immediate word usage is just as often contingent and arbitrary. That is, the use of language is not a matter of official or pedantic ‘terminology,’ and it would run counter to the meaning of language to try to regulate all word usage in a terminological way. If, however, we decide to go with a particular designation in order to name the difference in meaning between having-been and past, we do so out of the necessity of establishing an essential difference within the essence of time. Whether one is named having-been and the other past, or vice-versa, is arbitrary within certain limits and a matter of one’s feel for language. What we want to name that which ‘has been,’ the poet indeed names that which is ‘past’ (lines 12f.):
Und rükwärts soll die Seele mir nicht fliehn
Zu euch, Vergangene!
And backwards shall my soul not flee
To you, past ones!
Yet he understands passing here in a specific sense, as we shall document (p. 110f.).
What is past is unalterably closed off, unable to be brought back; it lies firmly in the past, which, as our language fittingly says, is a space of time—a storeroom, as it were—in which everything that has expired or passed away collects. Even if it were possible for something