beyng and are vibrant therein. Indeed with this “question,” which harbors the necessity of the sheltering of truth in beings, the space of the first decision is already again abandoned. The “between” for beyng and beings—; yet this “between” is not a third added on to the two distincta. Instead, because what is at issue here cannot be a mere differentiation and because beyng remains completely other than all beings, though at the same time their abyss, beyng itself is that “between.” This is so true that it can still be grasped—perhaps first of all—in a remote consequence: only where beyng holds sway, is there “space” and “time,” and a fortiori | only where beyng holds sway, is there that originary space-time, namely, the “between” which has chosen itself as beyng itself for truth (clearing of its own hiddenness). Through this first—and longest—decision, beyng itself is brought onto the “catastrophic” course of its history and becomes manifest in that history through this course; and “metaphysics” proves to be the opening move of the course of beyng.
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Inasmuch as the essential happens in fundamentally different domains, historical knowledge in itself needs to be transformed. Therefore, historical meditation must preserve an inner freedom for the respective unique necessities. To a historiologist, everything proceeds on a few, ever interconnected levels. The historiologist counts on the explanatory context; the historical thinker seeks in each case—almost in a desultory way—the origins of what is necessary—he thinks in an apparently contextless way.
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Hard by the edge of nihilation runs the way indicated by beyng for thinking. And if thinking is first assigned to the decision about beyng, and is so from afar by | beyng itself, then the moment must come in which truth itself demands the grounding of its essence. Here every support and protection will be denied—every foothold in beings disrupted, because a foothold is contrary to truth, which bursts open to the clearing in whose open realm, as in a still gaze, everything finds the preservation of its essence—becomes a being. But how long must the aloof genus of thinkers still search, in order to touch upon portions of this way?
Or is the history of thinking rather an eager and merry flight from this way and from the point of decision to which the way presses on?