This openness was presented as what is most questionable, as the place where the question of the essence of truth has to begin, on condition that the question of truth bears within itself a necessity proper to it, one which unfolds itself as soon as the question is raised. At the same time, it turned out that the Greeks experienced originally the essence of truth as ἀλήθεια, as the unconcealedness of beings. Openness as we intend it and unconcealedness as spoken of by the Greeks are, at least apparently, the same. There is, however, an essential distinction: for the Greeks, unconcealedness remained unquestioned; for us it is what is most worthy of questioning. Why did the Greeks not inquire into ἀλήθεια itself? Their lack of inquiry could leave us indifferent; indeed, many might rejoice that in this way some questions are still left to us. But the lack of inquiry on the part of the Greeks is not something indifferent. For we must bear in mind that to the Greeks ἀλήθεια was a—indeed the—determination of beings themselves and that the question of beings themselves—what they are—became the philosophical question of the Greeks. Thus the question of the unconcealedness of beings, and hence the question of unconcealedness itself, rested directly in the path of the most properly Greek philosophical inquiry into beings! Nevertheless, they did not raise that question. If they omitted it, not out of negligence or some other incapacity, but out of a necessity included in their very task, then we must reflect on what kind of task this was, in order to understand their lack of inquiry and thus come to know how our own questioning is related to that task.
The task of the Greeks was nothing less than the establishment of the beginning of philosophy. To understand this beginning is for us perhaps most difficult, for we are standing within the orbit of the end of that beginning.
2) Nietzsche and Hdlderlin as end and as transition, each in his own way.
We understand end here in a double sense. The end, insofar as it gathers into itself all essential possibilities of the history of a beginning, is not the cessation of something over and done, but, quite to the contrary, it is an affirmation of the beginning by way