The Primacy of the Past as Gewesen
True history is not the ephemeral, the anecdotal, the perishable, the finished, but what has-been, lasting till the present and harboring the future. "What is historical (historisches)—which means, the past as such (Vergangenes als solches)—is no more, it is dead. ... In the History (Geschichte) of thought, what is at issue is thought itself. . . . Everything is preserved. The History (Geschichte) of philosophy busies itself with the past, but equally with the present."7 For Hegel, this past which is preserved is the eternity of the shapes of Spirit. History, in a decidedly Platonic manner, is nothing but the presentation in time of the shapes of Spirit such as they exist in themselves. The Platonism of such an opposition between the immutable and the changing is dialectically overcome, which means preserved — notably in the form of the difference between the Idea in itself — the Logic — and its manifestation in time — the Phenomenology. History possesses at one and the same time a preeminent value in that it is the absolute itself, and a subordinate value in that it is only the instrument of the manifestation of the eternal Spirit, which has always existed in itself. "History," Hegel writes, "is the representation [Vorstellung] of Spirit as it comes into its own"8 (emphasis added). Inasmuch as for Heidegger truth or being does not preexist its appearance (for being is not something in itself), what sort of nature does this essential past have such that it produces History as "that which abides"? It goes without saying that if it is opposed to a past that simply slips away and disappears (Vergangenes), it is above all because it is capable of a future: "the essential having-been (Gewesendes) abides in coming."9 Having-been as such transcends the dimension of the pure past: it is neither the past that has disappeared, slipped away (as the root Gang in Vergangenheit indicates), nor the isolated present by itself, nor of course is it only the future. Having shown at the end of his essay on Rilke in Holzwege that the spurious eternity is Vergänglichkeit raised to a nunc stans, "to the emptiness of a moment without duration," Heidegger suggests that the true eternity is das Gewesenes: that which, having been, has not ceased to be.10 Indeed, contrary to Hegel, das Gewesenes is not the product or result of history but an absolutely inaugural anteriority. What controls all History, as Heidegger emphasizes in a number of texts — particularly in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung—what summons the future is the exigency of the inaugural, the Anfang: the first Gewesenes, the first essential having-been, the first grasp of being, exerts a destiny-like influence over the whole tradition — such is the force of the Greek aletheia. "The inaugural never passes away, it is never something past."11 Genuine History is the future of an essential and inaugural past. Inaugural Gewesenes is interpreted as the source of History.
The definition of History as Geschick, destiny in the sense of Schickung, destination, the sending of being, is simply the recognition of the omnipotence