our being stretched between the actual thing and its possible meanings follows from our kinetic bivalence, the fact that we have our actuality as our stretched-ahead-ness as possibility.
But how exactly do we sustain the openedness of the clearing that we ourselves are? The movedness of human life is analogous to the bivalent movedness of any living thing: a matter of being relatively self-absent—stretched beyond itself (Weg-von-sich)—while remaining relatively self-present (bei-sich-selbst einbehalten).165 In the case of man, Heidegger calls this movedness a fortnehmende Zukehr, a being carried away into possibilities (fortnehmende) that is always “returning to” itself (Zukehr), in the sense of always remaining with itself.166
This being-ahead-of-oneself as a returning [Sich-vorweg-sein als Zurückkommen] is, if I may put it this way, a peculiar kind of movement that ex-sistence qua “temporal” constantly makes.167
Being carried away into possibility and returning to oneself as actuality opens the discursive space that Heidegger calls the world, the clearing, or the open. “To ex-sist.” Heidegger says, “might be more adequately translated as ‘sustaining a realm of openness.’”168 Within that existential space we carry out our existentiel mediations. The “re-turn” or turning back to our here-and-now selves from out of the possibility that we are is also a “re-turn” to the things we currently encounter as we render them meaningfully present in terms of this or that specific possibility. This dynamic structure of ahead-and-return is what Heidegger is getting at with his notion of “temporality” as thrown-openness. We are an ec-centric self, an incompletely self-present aheadness-in-possibility that “returns” to make sense of ourselves and of things.
In 1930 Heidegger interpreted that structural movement of thrown-ahead-and-returning in terms of existential thrown-openness (“thrown projectedness”: geworfener Entwurf) that makes possible the existentiel synthesizing of things with possible meanings. First, the existential structure:
165. GA 29/30: respectively 343.4 = 235.24–25 and 342.19 = 235.9. See chapter 5.
166. GA 29/30: 527.35 = 363.15–16. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, 14, 2 ad 1: “Redire ad essentiam suam nihil aliud est quam rem subsistere in se ipsum.” Aquinas here draws on Proclus, The Elements of Theology, proposition 82 (p. 76.29–30): Πᾶν τὸ ἑαυτοῦ γνωστικὸν πρὸς ἑαυτὸ παντῃ ἐπιστρεπτικόν ἐστιν. “All that is capable of self-knowledge is capable of completely returning to itself.”
167. GA 21: 147.23–26 = 124.19–20. I here correct my earlier reading (ibid.) of “Zeit” in place of “Dasein.”
168. Zollikoner Seminare, 274.1 = 218.15: “aus-stehen eines Offenheitsbereich.” See the translators’ note on the English page. GA 45: 169.24 = 146.28. GA 49: 41.25–28: “Ent-wurf besagt: “Er-öffnung und Offenhalten des Offenen, Lichten der Lichtung, in der das, was wir Sein (nicht das Seiende) nennen und somit unter diesem Namen auch kennen, eben als Sein offenkundig ist.”