PATHMARKS
that does not have the character of a proposition, but rather belongs to the occurrence of transcendence as such (temporality).
The latter appeals to the unquestionable character of the beings that are opened up and interprets all thoughtful questioning as an attack on, an unfortunate irritation of, sound common sense.
Thus the principle of reason too lets its non-essence interfere with the essence of ground, and in the sanctioned form of a grounding principle suppresses a problematic that would first open up this very principle. Yet this "non-essence" cannot simply be attributed to the supposed "superficiality" of individual philosophers, and nor can it therefore be overcome by supposedly more radical "progress." Ground has its non-essence because it springs from finite freedom. This freedom is itself unable to withdraw from whatever springs forth from it in this way. The ground that springs forth in transcending folds back upon freedom itself, and freedom as origin itself becomes "ground." Freedom is the ground of ground. Yet not simply in the sense of a formal, endless "iteration." Freedom's being a ground does not — as we are always tempted to think — have the character of one of the ways of grounding, but determines itself as the grounding unity of the transcendental strewal of grounding. As this ground, however, freedom is the abyss of ground [Ab-grund] in Dasein. Not that our individual, [70 {GA 9 174}] free comportment is groundless; rather, in its essence as transcendence, freedom places Dasein, as potentiality for being, in possibilities that gape open before its finite choice, i.e., within its destiny.a
Yet in its world-projective surpassing of beings, Dasein must surpass itself so as to be able to first of all understand itself as an abyss of ground from out of this elevation. And the character of this abyssal ground of Dasein is in tum nothing that lends itself to a dialectic, or to psychological dissection. The irruption of this abyssal ground in transcendence as grounding is rather the primordial movement that freedom accomplishes with us ourselves and thereby "gives us to understand," i.e., proffers as the originary content of world, that this content, the more originarily it is grounded, concerns all the more directly the heart of Dasein, its selfhood in action. Accordingly, the non-essence of ground is "overcome" only in factical existing, but never eliminated.
If, however, transcendence in the sense of freedom for ground is understood in the first and last instance as an abyss of ground, then the essence of what was called Dasein's absorption in and by beings also thereby becomes sharper. Dasein — although finding itself in the midst of beings and pervasively attuned by them — is, as free potentiality for being, thrown among beings. The fact that it has the possibility of being a self, and has this
a First edition, 1929: Still the futile attempt to think Da-sein while shielding the truth of beyng in its turning.
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