Coming from “beings” and the representing comportment toward them, and seemingly analyzing these merely according to already familiar views and interpretations—we say, for instance, re-presentation is the representation of a “thing” (something) “as” something in the “light” of beingness (e.g., object of use—or, “animal,” “living being,” “equipment,” “work”).
This representation of something as something in the light of . . . is already a framework of that which in itself fits together the “of,” the “as,” and the “in the light of” into a unity; it is the “clearing” of what is cleared in which that which represents (i.e., man) stands, namely such that this “standing” in advance already determines in general the essence of man and such that it must guide and support this essential characterization. No longer: man and in addition and next to him this standing, but the latter and the essence of man as a question! Standing in the clearing—man is in the ground of Da-sein.1 But insistence originarily: mood.
This clearing cannot be explained from beings; it is the “between” [Zwischen] and in-between [Inzwischen] (in the time-spatial sense of the originary time-space). The “of,” “as,” the “in the light of” are not beings, they are nothing and yet not null and naught; on the contrary: they are totally “important” [wichtig], of the heaviest weight [Gewicht], the proper heavyweight and the only thing in which everything that is a being (not merely as beingness, objectness, statehood) as a being “is.”
The clearing is the a-byss as ground, the nihilating counterpart to all that is [das Nichtende zu allem Seienden] and thus the heaviest thing. It is thus the “ground” that is never “present-at-hand” and that is never found, the “ground” that refuses itself in the nihilation as clearing—the supporting-founding one that decides, the one that e-vents—the e-vent.
The nihilation: making room for the purity of the need for grounding (refusal [Ver-sagung] of the ground).
The clearing: the a-byss (open to all directions) 1. of /“to”/ beings, also /to/ ourselves and those like us, 2. of the “as” that everything ultimately is, and that here before all is the as of beyng.
The a-byss: the nothing, what is most a-byssal—beyng itself; not because the latter is what is most empty and general, and what fades the most, the last fumes—but the richest, the singular, the middle that does not mediate and thus can never be taken back.
It can “already” be seen with the brightest view in the experience of man from his allotment to “being.”
This still as the beingness of beings, for instance in the sense of the transcendental a priori, and all this within the comportment of “cognition,” of the “mere” representation of something as something from the view toward . . . being.
Here man (?) stands in the open toward something, and the latter in the free domain of the “as”; and the whole [stands] in the opening of beyng, which itself is not “object,” but which “is” precisely already all this, namely this which is open, a-byssal and yet grounding. The ground—as a-byss (and at the same time refusal! [Ver-weigerung]). Joined together as the there and thereness in the insistence of man, an insistence that is not a property “of” man but that is the essential ground for him (genitivus essentialis).
Hegel’s negativity is not a negativity because it never takes seriously the not and the nihilating,—it has already sublated the not into the “yes.”
The objective—states in the beingness of unconditioned thinking.
The nihilating: refusal [Ver-sagen] of the “ground,” a-byss.
Beyng “is” the “nothing,”—not because each is equally as undetermined and unmediated as the other, but because they are one and yet “fundamentally” different! They are that which first opens up a “decision.”
The “finitude” of being—an expression that is very misinterpretable and that at first is only a contrasting [ab-setzender] expression (neither “finite” nor infinite). What is meant is the essential connection of being and “nihilation.”
The a-byss is the ground of the need for the nothing and of the necessity of the nihilation, and this makes possible (admittedly in the long run) the differentiation.
The nothing the a-byss: refusal of the ground, of every support, and of every shelter in beings; but this refusal is the highest granting of the need for decision and differentiation.
The nothing is never what is “null and naught” in the sense of what is merely not present-at-hand, not effective, not valuable, non-being [Un-seienden], but the essential occurrence of beyng itself as that which nihilates a-byssally-abyssfully.
The a-byss, however, essentially as the in-between of the need for decision for the divine and for mankind—and thus for Da-sein, being-in-the-world, world and earth, strife.
Da-sein as the “yes” (not agreement and consent to beings) to the truth of beyng, the yes to the nihilation and to the necessity of the “no.”
The “no” is the yes to nihilation. The yes to nihilation as the yes to the a-byss is the inquiry into what is most question-worthy. The guardianship of the truth of beyng is the inquirership as the acknowledgment [Er-würdigung] of what is most question-worthy.
But what is the distinction between being and beings? Is this characterization still defensible and possible as a directive for the inquiry?
Whence the “not” and the not-like in all its shapes and sites? But how do we understand the “whence”? The why—as for what reason and in which manner! We mean the “ground”!
However—how do we inquire when we inquire into the ground? Is it superior to that into whose ground we are inquiring, to the “not”? Or? Do both belong together, and how?
The a-byss: beyng. Beyng as a-byss—both the nothing and the ground. The nothing is what is a-byssally distinct from beyng as nihilation and therefore?—of the same essence. The a-byss is not-like ground, not a supporting-sheltering being, and therefore of the essence of beyng.
Beyng as the abyss is the nothing. The nothing is the extreme opposite of all that is null and naught. The nothing nihilates and makes possible the projection of the not;—the latter can be grasped as negatedness, and this, in turn, what is representable of the negation. And negation?
What is man now?—Da-sein.
What was just said is no inversion of what was said earlier, because being essentially something else, no longer inquired into as beingness of beings.
In all metaphysics, for which being as the beingness [is] already a supplement to beings, the nothing is only a supplement to being. That is to say: How the nothing is determined depends in each case on how beingness is conceived. (Cf. the table of the nothing in Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A290ff., B346ff. [382ff.].)
1. Cf. Da-sein {see above I, section 2, p.12}.