POSTSCRIPT TO "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"
denies the high-spirited composure of courage. A "philosophy of anxiety" paralyzes the will to act.
(3) The lecture decides against "logic." Yet since the intellect contains the criteria for all calculation and classification, such thinking leaves any judgment concerning truth to our arbitrary moods. A "philosophy of mere feelings" endangers "exact" thinking and security of action.
The correct response to these propositions will emerge from a renewed attempt to think through the lecture. Such an attempt may query whether the nothing, which attunes anxiety in its essence, exhausts itself in an empty negation of all beings, or whether that which is never and nowhere a being unveils itself as that which distinguishes itself from all beings, as that which we call being. No matter where or to what extent all research investigates beings, it nowhere finds being. It only ever encounters beings, because from the outset it remains intent on explaining beings. Being, however, is not an existing quality found in beings. Unlike beings, being cannot. be represented or brought forth in the manner of an object. As that which is altogether othera than all beings, being is that which is not:. But this nothingb essentially prevails [102] as being. We too quickly abdicate thinking when, in a facile explanation, we pass off tile nothing as a mere nullity and equate it with the unreal. Instead of giving way to the haste of such empty acumen and relinquishing the enigmatic ambiguities of the nothing, we must prepare ourselves solely in readiness to experience in the nothing the pervasive expanse of that which gives every being the warrantc to be. That is being itself. Without being, whose abyssal but yet to be unfolded essence dispenses the nothing to us in essential anxiety, all beings would remain in an absence of being. Yet such absence too, as being's abandonment, is again not a null nothing if indeed the truth of being entails that beingd never4 prevails in its essencee without beings, that a being never5 is without being.
An experience of being as that which is other than all beings is bestowed in anxiety, provided that, out of "anxiety" in the face of anxiety, i.e., in the mere anxiousness that pertains to fear, we do not evade the silentf voice that attunes us toward horror of the abyss. Certainly if, with this hint
a Fourth edition, 1943: This too still said metaphysically, starting from beings.
b Fourth edition, 1943: Of beings.
c Fifth edition, 1949: That which grants.
d Fourth edition, 1943: In the sense of beyng.
e Fifth edition, 1949: Essential prevailing of being: beyng, difference; "essential prevailing" ["Wesen"] of being ambiguous: (1) Event [Ereignis], not effected by beings, event - the granting; (2) Beingness - whatness: enduring, duration, ἀεί.
f Fifth edition, 1949: "Being" (carrying out [Austrag]) as the silent voice, the voice of stillness.
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