"It gives time," we are speaking sentences. Grammatically, a sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. The subject of a sentence is not necessarily a subject in the sense of an ego or a person. Grammar and logic, accordingly, construe it-sentences as impersonal, subject-less sentences. In other Indo-Germanic languages, in Greek and Latin, the It is lacking, at least as a separate word and phonetic form; but that does not mean that what is meant by the It is not also in their thought: in Latin, pluit, it is raining; in Greek, chre, it is needful.
But what does this "It" mean? Philologists and philosophers of language have given the matter much thought without arriving at any valid clarification. The area of meaning meant by the It extends from the irrelevant to the demonic. The "It" of which we speak when we say "It gives Being," "It gives time," presumably indicates something distinctive which we shall not discuss here. We shall be content, therefore, with a fundamental consideration.
Interpreted by the rules of grammar and logic, that about which a statement is made appears as the subject: ὑποκείμενον—that which already lies before us, which is present in some way. What is then predicated of the subject appears as what is already present along with the present subject, the symbebekos, accidens: "The auditorium is illuminated." In the "It" of "It gives" speaks a presence of something that is present, that is, there speaks, in a way, a Being. If we substitute Being for It in our sentence "It gives Being," it says as much as "Being gives Being." And here we are back in the same difficulty that we mentioned at the beginning of the lecture: Being is. But Being "is" just as little as time "is." We shall therefore now abandon the attempt to determine "It" by itself, in isolation, so to speak. But this we must keep in mind: The It, at least in the interpretation available to us for the moment, names a presence of absence. {GA 14: 24}
When we say "It gives Being," "It gives time," we are not making statements about beings. However, the syntax of sentences as we have it from the Greek and Roman grammarians has such statements exclusively in view. In view of this fact we must also consider the possibility that, contrary to all appearances, in saying "It gives Being,"