unifies in advance the ways in which what has-been, what is about to be, and the present reach out toward each other.
Time is not. There is, It gives time. The giving that gives time is determined by denying and withholding nearness. It grants the openness of time-space and preserves what remains denied in what has-been, what is withheld in approach. We call the giving which gives true time an extending which opens and conceals. As extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in true time.
But where is there time and time-space, where are they given? As urgent as this question may be at first sight, we may no longer ask in this manner for a where, for the place for time. For true time itself, the realm of its threefold extending determined by nearing nearness, is the prespatial region which first gives any possible "where."
True, from its beginning, whenever it thought about time, philosophy also asked where time belongs. What philosophy primarily had in view was time calculate.d as a sequence of the succession of consecutive nows. It was explained that there could be no numerically measured time with which we calculate without the ψυχή, without the animus, without the soul, without consciousness, without spirit. There is no time without man. But what does this "not without" mean? Is man the giver or the receiver of time? Is man first of all man, and then after that occasionally—that is, at some time or other—receives time and relates himself to it? True time is the nearness of presencing out of present, past and future—the nearness that unifies time's threefold opening extending. It has already reached man as such so that he can be man only by standing within the threefold extending, perduring the denying, and withholding nearness which determines that extending. Time is not the product of man, man is not the product of time. There is no production here. There is only giving in the sense of extending which opens up time-space.
But granted that the manner of giving in which time is given requires our characterization of time, we are still faced with the enigmatic It which we named in the expression: It gives time; It gives Being. There is a growing danger that when we speak of "It," we