and to measure up to it by keeping the site of appearing closed to its almighty sway.

But for Dasein, withholding such openness toward Being means nothing other than giving up its own essence. This demands that it either step out of Being or else never step into Dasein. This is expressed once again in Sophocles, in a choral ode of the tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, lines 1224–25: μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νι/κᾷ λόγον: “never to have stepped into Dasein triumphs over the gatheredness of beings as a whole.”⁸⁴

Never to have taken over Being-here, μὴ φῦναι, is said of the human as the one who is essentially gathered together with φύσις as its gatherer. Here φύσις, φῦναι, is used to refer to human Being, but λόγος is used in Heraclitus’s sense as the fittingness that holds sway over beings as a whole. This word of the poet expresses the most intimate connection of Dasein to Being and its opening up, for the poet’s word names what is farthest from Being: not-Being-here. Here, the uncanniest possibility of Dasein shows itself: to break the excessive violence of Being through Dasein’s ultimate act of violence against itself. Dasein does not have this possibility as an empty way out, but it is this possibility insofar as it is; for as Dasein, it must indeed shatter against Being in every act of violence.

This looks like pessimism. But it would be preposterous to label Greek Dasein with this term—not because the Greeks were somehow optimists at bottom after all, but because these assessments miss Greek Dasein altogether. The Greeks were, to be sure, more pessimistic than a pessimist can ever be. They were also more optimistic than any optimist.

84. Conventional translation: “not to be born surpasses all speech” (in other words, it is best never to be born). Φῦναι, “be born,” is a form of φύειν, the verb that corresponds to the noun φύσις.