OFF THE BEATEN TRACK

Insofar as things which stay awhile are not entirely abandoned to the boundless fixation on aggrandizing themselves into sheerly persisting continuants - a craving which leads them to seek to expel one another from what is presently present - they let order belong, διδόναι δίκην.

Insofar as things which stay awhile give order they thereby allow, in their relationship to each other, reck to belong, in every case, each allowing it to belong to the other, διδόναι . . . καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις. Only when we have thought τὰ ἐόντα as what presences, and this as the totality of what presences awhile, does ἀλλήλοις receive the significance it has in the saying: within the open region of unconcealment each tarrying thing becomes present to all the others. As long as we fail to think the τὰ ἐόντα, ἀλλήλοις remains the name of some indeterminate reciprocity within a blurred multiplicity. The more strictly we think, in ἀλλήλοις, the multiplicity of that which stays awhile, the clearer becomes the necessary relationship of ἀλλήλοις to τίσιν. The more unambiguously this relation emerges, the more clearly we recognize that the διδόναι . . . τίσιν ἀλλήλοις, each giving reck to the other, is the manner in which things which stay awhile in presence occupy the while; that is to say, διδόναι δίκην, giving order. The καὶ between δίκην and τίσιν is not the vacuous conjunction "and." It signifies, rather, the essential consequence. When the things that presence give order they do it by, as things that stay awhile, according each other reck. The surmounting of disorder properly occurs through the letting-belong of reck. This means that in the ἀδικία, as the essential consequence of dis-order, lies the non-reck [Un-Ruch], the reckless:

διδόναι . . . αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας

- they let order belong and thereby also reck, one for another (in surmounting) the dis-order.

Letting-belong, as the καὶ says, is something twofold. For the essence of the ἐόντα is doubly determined. The things which stay awhile come to presence from out of the jointure between approach and withdrawal. They presence in the "between" of a twofold absence. They presence in each time of their while. They presence as the presently present. With a view to their while they grant reck, and even a while, to the others. But to whom do the things that presence allow the order of the jointure to belong?

The now-explicated second clause of the saying does not answer this question. But it gives us a hint. For there remains a word we have overlooked:

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