being, what makes us free, “sets us free,” in what could be called “the free scope of freedom.” This scope of freedom is what Heidegger indicated when, already in Being and Time, he claimed that Dasein is characterized as “being free [Freisein] for its ownmost potentiality-for-being” or that Dasein’s “being toward a potentiality-for-being is itself determined by freedom” (SZ, 191). The issue is to think freedom as originary to being itself, a freedom that is synonymous, as it were, with eventfulness itself.
As noted, by approaching being in distinction from beings, by distinguishing the present being from its presence, Heidegger allows the seizing of being in its eventfulness, as the event of presence. Now in the tradition being was indeed approached as presence, Anwesenheit, but its proper eventfulness was nonetheless “repressed” in the reference to constant presence (beständige Anwesenheit), substantiality, Heidegger speaking of how in such tradition of substantiality the temporal meaning of Anwesenheit was “repressed” (abgedrängt).23 In fact, the very term Anwesenheit, presence, harbors the motion of an event: the an- in An-wesen or An-wesenheit suggests a movement from concealment to unconcealment, a coming into presence, in a word, an event of presence. To characterize a being as an-wesend “is to implicitly understand presence as an event.”24 Further, the preposition an “indicates a movement of approach that enters in a conflict with a movement of withdrawal,” a play between unconcealment and concealment already captured by the Greeks in the contrast between the prepositions para and apo in parousia and apousia. This implies, in turn, a break with the model of constant presence, that is, with a kind of “stability” that represses the temporal happening in the phenomenon of presence, including the phenomenon of withdrawal that seems to affect, each time, such event of presence. It is a matter of hearing again the temporal meaning of presence and breaking with the notion of a constant presence, that is, with the metaphysics of Vorhandendeit that has governed the philosophical tradition. Instead of supposing a substrate, an underlying permanent substance and foundation, it is a matter of approaching being as a coming into presence.
This approach to being as event of presence (Anwesenheit), or “presencing” (Anwesen), is developed in a remarkable way in the 1962 lecture, “On Time and Being.” It is striking to note that Heidegger begins the lecture by recalling that being is not a being, thereby opening the way for grasping being, no longer as a present entity, but as eventfulness, that is, the event of presence. In fact, the prologue of “On Time and Being” is the place where Heidegger famously claimed that it becomes “necessary” to “think being without beings” (Sein ohne das Seiende zu denken).25 This sentence has often been commented upon and perhaps