Typed letter signed ("M. Heidegger"), in German, to David Rayfield, an American graduate student, discussing the question of being and not-being: "Not-being consequently means: stepping out of that emerged permanence: [gr.] existasthai – 'existence', 'to exist' means just; not-being. The thoughtlessness and arrogance, in which one uses 'existence' and 'existing' as a term for being, again verifies the alienation from the being and from an originally powerful and certain interpretation"; and explaining that a passage in his Introduction to Metaphysics dealing with these concepts in classical Greece was not meant, as Rayfield seems to have thought, as a criticism of Plato's teachings ("...To the contrary – unlike the contemporary concept of existence, it contains an 'originally powerful and certain' experience of being, namely as presence and as resulting 'permanence'. Plato's great discovery is the insight that also the non-being in the sense of [gr.] me on 'is' in its own way – namely in the sense of a variation of presence – i.e. as non-presence, which has the role in all 'becoming' in the way of not-yet-being-present and of the no-more-being-present..."); finally positing an explanation of how this misunderstanding might have come about, and referring him to Nietzsche II, p. 355ff., one page, folds, 4to; plus translation into English, Freiburg, 1 June 1962 (2)