OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
And yet: beyond beings - though before rather than apart from them - there is still something other that happens.a In the midst of beings as a whole an open place comes to presence. There is a clearing. Thought from out of beings, it is more in being than is the being. This open center is, therefore, not surrounded by beings. Rather, this illuminating center itself encircles all beings — like the nothing that we scarcely know.
The being can only be, as a being, if it stands within, and stands out within, what is illuminated in this clearing. Only this clearing grants us human beings access to those beings that we ourselves are not and admittance to the being that we ourselves are. Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain and changing degrees. But even to be concealed is something the being can only do within the scope of the illuminated. Each being which we encounter and which encounters us maintains this strange opposition of presence in that at the same time it always holds itself back in a concealment. Concealment, however, reigns in the midst of beings, in a twofold manner.
Beings refuse themselves to us down to that one and seemingly most trivial feature which we meet most immediately when all we can say of a being is that it is. Concealment as refusal is not primarily or only the limit of knowledge in each particular case; it is, rather, the beginning of the clearing of what is illuminated. But concealment, though of course of another sort, also occurs within the illuminated. Beings push themselves in front of others, the one hides the other, this casts that into shadow, a few obstruct many, on occasion one denies all. Concealment, here, is not simple refusal. Rather, a being indeed appears but presents itself as other than it is.
This concealment is an obstructing [Verstellen]. If beings did not obstruct one another we could not err in seeing and doing, we could not go astray and transgress, and, in particular, could not overreach ourselves. That, as appearance, the being can deceive us is the condition of the possibility of our deceiving ourselves rather than the other way round.
Concealment can be either a refusal or merely an obstructing. We are never really certain whether it is the one or the other. Concealment conceals and obstructs itself. This means: the open place in the midst of beings, the clearing, is never a fixed stage with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings enacts itself. Rather, the clearing happens only as this twofold concealment. The unconcealment of beings - this is never a state
a Third edition, 1957· The Event.
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