The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.
Has Dasein as itself ever freely decided, and will it ever be able to decide, whether it wants to come into “Dasein” or not?
Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which from Plato’s time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of Being.
The moving force in Showing of Saying is Owning. It is what brings all present and absent beings each into their own, from where they show themselves in what they are, and where they abide according to their kind. This owning which brings them there, and which moves Saying as Showing in its showing we call Appropriation. It yields the opening of the clearing in which present beings can persist and from which absent beings can depart while keeping their persistence in the withdrawal.
To give oneself the law is the highest freedom. The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the German university; for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative. It primarily meant lack of concern, arbitrariness of intentions and inclinations, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone. The concept of the freedom of the German student is now brought back to its truth. Henceforth, the bond and service of German students will unfold from this truth.
Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought... Perhaps what is distinctive about this world-epoch consists in the closure of the dimension of the holy. Perhaps that is the only unholy malignancy.
Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being. But for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of Being. Man is the shepherd of Being.
Nobody will deny that there is an interest in philosophy today. But – is there anything at all left today in which man does not take an interest, in the sense in which he understands “interest”?
For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.
The greatest nearness of the last god eventuates when the event, as the hesitant self-withholding, is elevated into refusal. The latter is essentially other than sheer absence. Refusal, as belonging to the event, can be experienced only on the basis of the more originary essence of beyng as lit up in the thinking.
Our thinking today is charged with the task to think what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner.
But anyone who only expects thinking to give assurances, and awaits the day when we can go beyond it as unnecessary, is demanding that thought annihilate itself.
The truth of beyng is the beyng of truth – said in this way, it sounds like an artificial and forced reversal and, at most, like a seduction to a dialectical game. In fact, this reversal is merely a fleeting and external sign of the turning which essentially occurs in beyng itself and which casts light on what might be meant here by “decision.
What is decision anyway?
Humans act as though we were the creators and masters of language, while in fact language remains the master of us. Perhaps it is, before all else, humankind’s distortion of this relation of dominance that drives our nature into alienation.
Language is neither merely the field of expression, nor merely the means of expression, nor merely the two jointly. Thought and poesy never just use language to express themselves with its help; rather, thought and poesy are in themselves the originary, the essential, and therefore also the final speech that language speaks through the mouth of man.
In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing. Nor can it ever be thought in an essentially correct way in terms of its symbolic character, perhaps not even in terms of the character of signification. Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.
As long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and always will understand itself in terms of possibilities.
Through the old word bauen, we fnd the answer: ich bin really means I dwell. The way in which I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.
Everything has always already been said. And yet this “same” possesses, as its inner truth, the inexhaustable wealth of what is on every day as if that day were its first.
Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.