The ἀρχή, the enjoinment,is itself distinguished by the α when it is the ἄ-πειρον. Enjoinment can obviously not, indeed can least of all, be something deficient. This, which is “without,” the α, may be apprehended grammatically as the expression of “privation,” but in substance and in essence it serves to properly determine, each time, the mode and means and possibility of the “away” and the “not.” It could be that this “not” has in no way the character of something “negative.” It could be that we—for a long time now—have understood the negative too negatively. How decisive the carefulness of thinking must be here may be confirmed even more by noting that in the inception of Western thought, not only the first word for being but also the determining word for truth has just this “privative” character. Truth is called ἀ-λήθεια, which, helplessly enough, we translate (without having provided the slightest clue) as “unconcealment,” in whose essential realm we must now think the thus-named “truth.”
And when we think more inceptively into the inception, the question arises: Is there not an even more incipient relationship between the privative essence of being as ἄ-πειρον and the privative essence of truth as ἀ-λήθεια? Does not an essential unity of being and truth, still uninvestigated, announce itself here?
The α in ἄπειρον has the character of ἀρχή, and that means the character of enjoinment in respect to being and only in respect to being, to presencing. The α pertains to limits, limitation, and the removal of limits. But what does presencing have to do with limits? To what extent does an innerrelationship to limit and limitation lie within presencing?
In presencing what presences determines itself as such. What presences comes into continuance through presence {Anwesenheit} and is thus something that endures. The presencing of what endures has in itself a connection with and an inclination toward duration. And seen thus, duration obviously first attains its essence in steadfastness, in the persistence of a permanence made fast within itself. This lasting permanence would then first be what delimited the essence of presencing, and indeed such that this making fast in permanence would be the limitation that belongs to presencing. In essence, presencing would first be final through the finality of permanence.