arbitrarily posit an indeterminate power which is supposed to bring about all giving of Being and of time. However, we shall escape indeterminancy and avoid arbitrariness as long as we hold fast to the determinations of giving which we attempted to show, if only we look ahead toward Being as presence {Anwesenheit} and toward time as the realm where, by virtue of offering, a manifold presencing takes place and opens up. The giving in "It gives Being" proved to be a sending and a destiny of presence {Anwesenheit} in its epochal transmutations.
The giving in "It gives time" proved to be an extending, opening up the four-dimensional realm.
"Insofar as there is manifest in Being as presence {Anwesenheit} such a thing as time, the supposition mentioned earlier grows stronger that true time, the fourfold extending of the open, could be discovered as the "It" that gives Being, i.e., gives presence. The supposition appears to be fully confirmed when we note that absence, too, manifests itself as a mode of presence. What has-been which, by refusing the present, lets that become present which is no longer present; and the coming toward us of what is to come which, by withholding the present, lets that be present which is not yet present-both made manifest the manner of an extending opening up which gives all presencing into the open.
Thus true time appears as the "It" of which we speak when we say: It gives Being. The destiny in which It gives Being lies in the extending of time. Does this reference show time to be the "It" that gives Being? By no means. For time itself remains the gift of an "It gives" whose giving preserves the realm in which presence {Anwesenheit} is extended. Thus the "It" continues to be undetermined, and we ourselves continue to be puzzled. In such cases it is advisable to determine the It which gives in terms of the giving that we have already described. This giving proved to be the sending of Being, as time in the sense of an opening up which extends.
{GA 14: 23} (Or are we puzzled now only because we have allowed ourselves to be led astray by language or, more precisely, by the grammatical interpretation of language; staring at an It that is supposed to give, but that itself is precisely not there. When we say "It gives Being,"