3. The Remoteness of Inception | 7
We can say that heavenly bodies follow their courses and “are,” even if no one anywhere, or in any way, represents them. We say this. But if we say this, then we must also concede that when there is no representing, “then” there is also no “then” and no “when.”
And so, everything is set up by the human and unfolds at its behest.
This could be swiftly foreclosed on, were this ever a domain of “conclusions” and “deductions.”
A being is not without being.
Being does not essence without the appropriative event of being-there.
Being-there is not without the steadfastness of the human.
But how, then, should beyng remain independent of the human? Just because the human belongs to the grounding of the truth of beyng, this does not mean that beyng depends on the human in such a way that beyng would be established by the human.
So how does the human belong to beyng?
As steadfastness in the clearing, which intercepts the happen-stance of beyng in its truth and safeguards the possibility that a world be configured.
In the whole domain of this preceding question, being is immediately understood as what is constant. Being itself is not being thought in its inceptuality. Thus, one places “value” on the inner certainty of beings in their constancy, as if it was through constant duration that they were most in being [am seiendsten].
What is forgotten, though, is to ask with what right this claim about beings might be made, and on what grounds being might be equated with constancy.
What remains entirely beyond reach is the admittedly disconcerting possibility that being, and not just beings, sometimes is not; and that, if decided in this way, the essence of this not-being is such that it even refuses the essential unfolding of the nothing. Thus, being must indeed be entirely remote [abgeschieden] in its essence: there can be no destruction or elimination of being, since it is neither produced nor made.
But is remoteness not also, then, still a mode in which beyng is? Certainly. But this remoteness is always egress into the uniqueness of the abyss. Uniqueness knows no continuity. It is in each case inceptive and is every time its own, singular fissuring. The “remaining” that pertains to inception is not a continuing but is rather remoteness as the receding into concealment. Therefore inception, from out of remoteness, is always an abyss of donation, because it guarantees the essence of a giving that, without the nothing, could never be given over.