In an effort to clarify the meaning of time and space, let me now return to the passage I began by quoting. When understood not just on the basis of world and nature, but on the basis of the full operation of truth as involving a twofold movement of clearing and concealing, time and space emerge as the 'where' and 'when', the 'site' and 'moment' of beyng in its historical unfolding. Needless to say, then time-space is not something of which we can say what it is independently of the way in which it is, and this means of its specific historical configuration. There is simply no 'essence' or 'identity' of time-space outside its concrete spatial-temporal inscription. Time-space, as an event, always refers to a site--the site of a specific and concrete strife (Streif) between world and earth and en-counter (Entgegnung) between men and gods, the site of a singular historical configuration. These are the limits within which history unfolds. Time-space is as it were framed, its field of action delineated by this fourfold horizon, in the unfolding of which comes to be decided what is possible and what is not, what is valued and what is not, what is necessary and what is superficial, etc.

At this point, leaving aside the question of the god, I simply wish to note the fact that 'the human' is mentioned alongside world, earth and gods as one pole or strip (Bahn) constituting the fourfold historical configuration of truth, which Heidegger will later designate as the 'fourfold' (Geviert). This raises the question of the meaning of such a gesture, and of the placed attributed to the human in this reconfiguring of truth. For if, as was already the case in Heidegger's early work, truth is indeed no longer either objective or subjective, or indeed a combination of both subject (mens) and object (res), it is also no longer simply equated with the disclosedness (Erchlossenheit) of finite existence, as in Being and Time. We recall how, in section 44 in particular, Heidegger derived the concept of truth from the existing--and this meant, ultimately, from the temporalizing--of existence, essentially envisaged as the most originary mode of aletheuein. Yet the human is not simply absent from the operation of truth as reformulated in the 1930s, even if truth is now of being. Truth is no longer of the human, or even of Dasein, yet the human remains implicated in the operation of truth. In fact, he is the only being (Seiende) implicated in this operation (for neither earth nor world nor even gods are actual beings). Thus, in a way, the human continues to be privileged in the assembling of truth, in the very moment in which truth moves away from the human, and in the direction of the pre-individual and the pre-human. For truth, as the truth of beyng, is essentially for the human. Such is the reason why, doubling the fourfold articulation of truth as it were, the very movement of Ereignis, as the turning or the oscillation born of the strifely essence of truth, is envisaged as the reciprocal appropriation and the co-respondence of beyng and the human. In its turning, Ereignis turns itself towards the human, in such a way that such a turning cannot take place without the human. The human and being 'need' one another, and call for one another. The human is called forth by being, and being is gathered, grounded, and sheltered in the human's actions, in art and thought especially. The human is by virtue of its exposedness to the clearing of being; being unfolds truly and genuinely to the extent that it is sheltered and preserved in the human. Ereignis designates this co-belonging of the human and being.

P. 83-84

¶ 6:44 PM