beings whose beingness it constitutes. This circulation is generated, on the one side, by the requirement that the ἰδέα be sighted in advance of beings and, on the other side, by the capacity of beings to present their ἰδέα. This is the circulation that is itself presented in the Platonic images of line and cave. It is the circulation that Heidegger finds meant in the very name metaphysics: “The name is meant to say that thinking of being takes beings in the sense of what is present and extant as its starting point and goal for ascending to being, an ascending which immediately and at once turns again into a descending into beings” (GA 65/CP, §258). Thus metaphysics circles; thus it circles through all possible configurations of its circle until, with Nietzsche, it comes to its end. To the extent that ground and grounding are determined purely in reference to the circling between beings and beingness—as indeed they have been heretofore—the end of metaphysics is also the exhaustion of ground and grounding. The slightest move beyond, the merest gesture toward twisting free of the final—and thus of every—possibility of socalled Platonism, cannot but expose one to an abyss.
Crossing to another beginning would bring, then, an overcoming of metaphysics, a leap beyond the first beginning and everything possible within its orbit. And yet, it is only in the crossing to another beginning that an originary appropriation of metaphysics and of its history becomes possible; that is, it is precisely at the point of its overcoming that metaphysics “first becomes recognizable in its essence” (GA 65/CP, §85).10 Recognizing it in its essence means, in a provisional formulation: 11 thinking and saying that which, in play in the first beginning as the very condition of its possibility, nonetheless went unthought and unsaid both in the first beginning and also, consequently, in the history of metaphysics. The unthought of the first beginning could, then, be said—provisionally—in a discourse on that by which the opening and sustaining of the difference between beings and their beingness becomes possible. In the same mode, one could say of this unthought that it is the condition that makes possible the circulation between beings and beingness, that enables the circling played out in the history of metaphysics. In the first beginning, philosophy would have passed over this condition—that is, the condition would have remained concealed precisely as it, at once, made possible everything that philosophy ventured in the first beginning. It is this unthought, unsaid condition, this “domain . . . completely hidden up to now” (GA 65/CP, unnumbered opening section) that would be thought and said in the crossing to another beginning ventured in Contributions.
One of the names for this unthought of the first beginning—provisionally characterized as condition of possibility—is beyng, the archaic spelling of which serves not only to distinguish it from being as beingness but also to suggest a certain anteriority with respect to the metaphysical