it recalls in what way and from what source Being itself receives its appropriate determination, from the "there is, It gives Being." The giving showed itself as sending.

But how is the "It" which gives Being to be thought? The opening remark about the combination of "Time and Being" pointed out that Being as presence, as the present in a still undetermined sense, is characterized by a time-character and thus by time. This gives rise to the supposition that the It which gives Being, which determines Being as presencing and allowing-to-presence, might be found in what is called "time" in the title Time and Being.

We shall pursue this supposition and think about time. "Time" is familiar to us by way of current representations in the same way as "Being." But it is also unknown in the same way once we propose to explain what is peculiar to time. While we were just now thinking about Being, we found: what is peculiar to Being, that to which Being belongs and in which it remains retained, shows itself in the It gives and its giving as sending. What is peculiar to Being is not anything having the character of Being. When we explicitly think about Being, the matter itself leads us in a certain sense away from Being, and we think the destiny that gives Being as a gift. By noting this fact we are prepared to find that what is peculiar to time also can no longer be determined with the aid of the current characteristics of time as commonly represented. But the combination of time and Being contains the directive to explain time in its peculiarity in the light of what was said of Being. Being means: presencing, letting-bepresent: presence. Thus we might read somewhere the notice: "The celebration took place in the presence of many guests." The sentence could be formulated just as well: "with many guests being present."

The present—as soon as we have named it by itself, we are already thinking of the past and the future, the earlier and the later as distinct from the now. But the present understood in terms of the now is not at all identical with the present in the sense in which the guests are present. We never say and we cannot say: "The celebration took place in the now of many guests."