indeed believes he is familiar with everything. For him everything earlier is something past, by means of which he can illuminate what comes later and what pertains to him according to his needs. Here the earlier has no power of decision because it is no longer experienced as the incipient in history. The inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. This inception is not the past, but rather, because it has decided in advance everything to come, it is constantly of the future. We must think about the inception this way.
By inception we understand the originary decisions that sustain in advance what is essential in Western history. To the essential first belongs the determination of the essence of truth, in whose light Western man seeks, finds, secures, and transforms what is true.
The inception as the inception of history is only where there is freedom, that means where a humanity decisively comports itself toward beings and their truth. Nations and races can perhaps live without history if it is a matter of mere “life.” The mere passage of "life’” is not yet history, not even when much “happens,” i.e., transpires, in it.
The inception of our history is the Greeks. We see here something essential that harbors still uncompleted decisions within itself. For us this inception is not “antiquity,” and reflection upon it is not an activity aimed merely at salvaging a handed-down cultural treasure. The thinker of history Jakob Burckhardt (who, happily, was never a “historian”) said decades ago: Occupation with antiquity “‘is treated here and there like a poor old relative, who, for decency’s sake, one may not allow to go under.”1
The equipment needed for reflection upon the inception is, for the purpose of this lecture, directly necessary only for the person who is attempting to provide an opportunity for reflection for the first time here. Where it is necessary for us to hear the Greek word of ancient sayings, translation can be sufficient—to be sure, under the condition that the elucidation of what the word says to us is not lacking, that it is thought
1. J. Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Ges. Ausg. vol. VII: Historische Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, ed. A. Oeri and E. Durr (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929), p. 229.