POSTSCRIPT TO "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"

for the preservation of the dignity of being. Such a stance is the equanimity that allows nothing to assail its concealed readiness for the essential departure that belongs to every sacrifice. Sacrifice is at home in the essence of the event [Ereignis] whereby being lays claim upon the human being for the truth of being. For this reason, sacrifice tolerates no calculation, which can only ever miscalculate it in terms of utility or uselessness, whether the ends are placed low or set high. Such miscalculation distorts the essence of sacrifice. The obsession with ends confuses the clarity of the awe, ready for anxiety, that belongs to the courage of sacrifice which has taken upon itself the neighborhood of the indestructible.

The thinking of being seeks no hold in beings. Essential thinking heeds the measured signs of the incalculable and recognizes in the latter the unforeseeable arrival of the unavoidable. Such thinking is attentive to the truth of being and thus helps the being of truth to find its site within historical humankind. This help does not effect any results, because it has no need of effect. Essential thinking helps in its simple stance within Dasein insofar as such a stance, without being able to dispose over or even know of this, kindles its own kind.

Thinking, obedient to the voice of being, seeks from being the word through which the truth of being comes to language. Only when the language of historical human beings springs from the word [107] does it ring true. Yet if it does ring true, then it is beckoned by the testimony granted it from the silent voice of hidden sources. The thinking of being protects the word, and in such protectiveness fulfills its vocation. It is a care for our use of language. The saying of the thinker comes from a long-protected speechlessness and from the careful clarifying of the realm thus cleared. Of like provenance is the naming of the poet. Yet because that which is like is so only as difference allows, and because poetizing and thinking are most purely alike in their care of the word, they are at the same time farthest separated in their essence. The thinker says being. The poet names the holy. And yet the manner in which - thought from out of the essence of being - poetizing, thanking, and thinking are directed toward one another and are at the same time different, must be left open here. Presumably thanking and poetizing each in their own way spring from originary thinking, which they need, yet without themselves being able to be a thinking.

We may know much about the relation between philosophy and poetry. Yet we know nothing of the dialogue between poets and thinkers, who "dwell near one another on mountains most separate."

^a Fifth edition, 1949: Appropriates in its event [er-eignetJ, needs and uses.

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