This distress explodes beings, still veiled as such, in order to make the space of the “in the midst” of beings able to be occupied and founded as a possible standpoint of man. This distress—here barely intimated by speaking of it as a not knowing the way out or the way in—is the casting asunder of what will be determined forthwith as beings in their beingness over and against non-beings, assuming that the distress makes needful in man a necessity corresponding to it.

The distress we are speaking of is therefore by no means indeterminate but is very determined in its needfulness, in that it provides to thinking its essential space, and indeed does nothing else than that. For thinking means here to let beings emerge in the decisiveness of their Being and to let them stand out before oneself, to perceive them as such and thereby to name them in their beingness for the first time.

This distress—the not knowing the way out of or the way into the "in the midst," itself ungrounded, of still undifferentiated beings and non-beings—is not a lack and not a deprivation but is the surplus of a gift which, however, is more difficult to bear than any loss. This distress—we are saying—is a character of Being and not of man, as if this distress could arise “psychically” in man as a “lived experience” and have its proper place in him. On the contrary, man himself first arises out of this distress, which is more essential than he himself, for he is first determined by it.

This distress pertains to the truth of Being itself. It possesses its highest gift in being the ground of the necessity toward the highest possibilities, on the path of which man in his creations surpasses himself and returns through beings to the truth of Being.

Pp. 132-3

¶ 9:08 AM