Solely what occurs only once stands in the possibility of re-petition. It alone has in itself the ground of the necessity of a reversion to it and a resumption of its incipience. Here re-petition does not mean the stupid superficiality and impossibility of the mere occurrence of the same for a second and third time. Indeed the beginning can never be apprehended as the same, since it reaches ahead and thus encroaches differently each time on that which it itself initiates. Accordingly, it determines its own re-petition.
What is inceptual is never the new, because the new is merely what is already fast becoming passe. Nor is the beginning ever the "eternal," because the beginning is precisely not taken out of, and away from, history.
Yet what is the beginning of thinking, if thinking signifies meditation on beings as such and on the truth of beyng?
22. Inceptual thinking
(Projection)
The inventive thinking of the truth of beyng is essentially pro-jection. By its very essence, such a projection, in being carried out and unfolded, must place itself back into that which it opens. This might make it seem that where the projection reigns, there is arbitrariness and a wandering about in what is ungrounded. Yet the projection places itself precisely on the ground and in that way first transforms itself into the necessity to which it is related from the ground up, although in a still hidden way prior to its enactment.
The projection of the essence of beyng is merely an answer to the ('all. If unfolded, the projection loses every semblance of self-aggrandizement and yet never becomes self-loss and surrender. What is opened by it has persistence only in the grounding that shapes history. What is projected in the projection overpowers the projection Itself and justifies it.
The projection unfolds the projector and at the same time captures the projector in that which is opened up. This capture that pertains to the essential projection is the beginning of the grounding of the truth attained in the projection.
What and who "is" the projector-that becomes graspable only out of the truth of the projection, yet it also becomes concealed at the same lime. For this is what is most essential, namely, that the opening qua clearing brings into play the self-concealing, whereby the sheltering of
12. Cf. The grounding.