81. In the first beginning
there essentially occurs being as emergence. The saying of being is the “dictum.” Here “dictum” does not simply mean “adage,” nor simply “statement” as individual proposition; it means the gathering and naming of the inceptual, and the inceptual endures and decides in concealment.
It is only of secondary significance that these “dicta” have come down to us as fragments.
“Dictum” does also not mean “maxim” and must not mislead us into searching for rules of life here. Dictum is judgment in the sense of sentencing to thought, to the interrogation of being.
The “dictum” therefore embraces a manifold of propositions. And the mode of saying is hardly made clear.
82. The thinkers of the first beginning
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides cannot be called pre-Socratics or pre-Platonics, because in that way they are precisely not thought of as the ones who carry out the beginning but, instead, are understood in terms of Socrates—Plato.
By the same token, Plato is not simply a fully developed Parmenides, nor Aristotle the completion of Heraclitus. The inceptual thinkers are not the preliminary stages of the supposed pinnacles (highest stage and completion in Plato—Aristotle), nor are the later thinkers merely ones who have forsaken the beginning.
Quite to the contrary, there is advancement here, but Plato indeed stands entirely, as does Heraclitus, within the necessity of the history of being. When inceptual thinking becomes historical by necessity, however, the beginning occurs more essentially than any advancement does. But here exaltation has as little place as disparagement: for never can any one of these thinkers be taken as a model to be emulated or even repeated.
83. The first beginning
It is apparently a sheer accident that the first beginning has been handed down in fragments; in truth, however, it is a necessity, for only in that way does the beginning appear as something to be striven for in its inceptuality and never something to be possessed.