is not different from ex-sistence but is the reason why ex-sistence ex-sists at all. It is the existential essence of existentiel man. There are not two separate things, ex-sistence over here, the clearing over there, with “needing” and “belonging” as the glue that binds them together. The “two” are actually the same phenomenon considered from distinct viewpoints: either ex-sistence as the clearing or that same clearing as what makes possible all meaningfulness. As thrown-open, ex-sistence always already is the existential space in which the existentiel understanding of things-in-their-being takes place. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is incorrect to speak of ex-sistence as “open to” the clearing, as if the clearing were a space that ex-sistence could possibly enter, the way someone might, or might not, walk into a room.51 This oscillating sameness was first designated as In-der-Welt-sein: the being of ex-sistence is to-sustain-and-be-the-world; and the ever-open world is the very being of ex-sistence.52 Heidegger never loses sight of this structural sameness as a “unitary phenomenon [which] must be seen as a whole.”53 Meaningful presence is possible only because of this oscillating sameness (reci-proci-tas, Gegen-schwung) of “being-in” and “the world of meaning.”54
Once the Kehre is understood in its primary and proper sense as the oscillation of ex-sistence/clearing, we readily see that Ereignis and the Kehre both name “the thing itself”: the appropriation of human being to its dynamic thrown-openness. Without it, nothing human happens; and yet in itself it is not a happening but the presupposition of all happenings. Moreover, this oscillating reci-proci-ty is finite insofar as it is necessarily bound up with ex-sistence as possibility, the privation of full self-presence. If ex-sistence as privative self-absence (= possibility) were converted into full self-coincidence and actuality, we would not be able to (and we would not need to) make discursive sense of anything. Making sense of things requires the imperfection and incompleteness of possibility, along with the resultant space for mediation. Heidegger sets this particular notion of the human finitude over against the traditional one, which measures finitude against the infinity of the divine.
51. Nonetheless Heidegger himself abets the wrong impression when, for example, he speaks of “Geworfenheit in die Lichtung”: GA 69: 21.16, et passim.
52. GA 9: 154.18–19 = 120.24–25: “Welt ist . . . die Bezeichnung für das menschliche Dasein im Kern seines Wesens.” Also SZ 64.19–20 = 92.32; 365.38 = 417.11; 380.28–30 = 432.17–18. Also GA 24: 237.8–10 = 166.33–35. On world and clearing: GA 9: 326.15–16 = 248.36–37: “Die Lichtung des Seins, und nur sie, ist Welt.”
53. SZ 53.12–13 = 78.22–23: “ein einheitliches Phänomen. . . . Dieser primäre Befund muß im Ganzen gesehen werden.”
54. In a somewhat hypostasizing formulation: GA 78: 335.10–12: “Geworfen—nicht aus sich. / Woher anders denn aus Seyn selber? / Ereignis.” Roughly: Ex-sistence is thrown-open, but not of its own accord. / What else explains this thrown-openness if not the appropriated clearing? / that is, appropriation.