PATHMARKS
more we turn toward beings in our preoccupations the less we let beings as a whole slip away as such and the more we turn away from the nothing. Just as surely do we hasten into the public superficies of our existence.
And yet this constant if ambiguous turning away from the nothing accords, within certain limits, with the most proper significance of the nothing. In its nihilation the nothing directs us precisely toward beings.a The nothing nihilates incessantly without our properly knowing of this occurrence in the manner of our everyday knowledge.
What testifies to the constant and widespread though distorted manifestness of the nothing in our existence more compellingly than negation? But negation does not conjure the "not" out of itself as a means for making distinctions and oppositions in whatever is given, inserting itself, as it were, in between what is given. How could negation produce the "not" from itself when it can negate only if something negatable is already granted to it? But how could the negatable and what is to be negated be viewed as something susceptible to the "not" unless all thinking as such has already caught sight of the "not"? But the "not" can become manifest only when its origin, the nihilation of the nothing in general, and therewith the nothing itself, is disengaged from concealment. The "not" does not originate through negation; rather, negation is grounded in the "not"b that springs from the nihilation of the nothing. But negation is also only one way of nihilating, that is, only one sort of comportment that has been grounded beforehand in the nihilation of the nothing.
[14] In this way the above thesis in its main features has been proven: the nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa. If the power of the intellect in the field of inquiry into the nothing and into being is thus shattered, then the destiny of the reign of "logic"c in philosophy is thereby decided. The idea of "logic" itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more originary questioning.
No matter how much or in how many ways negation, expressed or implied, permeates all thought, it is by no means the sole authoritative witness of the manifestness of the nothing belonging essentially to Dasein. For negation cannot claim to be either the sole or the leading kind of nihilative comportment in which Dasein remains shaken by the nihilation of the nothing. Unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke have a more abysmal source than the measured negation of thought. Galling failure and
a Fifth edition, 1949: Because into the being of beings.
b First edition, 1919: And yet here - as elsewhere in the case of assertion - negation is conceived in too retrospective and extrinsic a manner.
c First edition, 1919: "Logic," i.e., the traditional interpretation of thinking.
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