Nothing can be twisted out from some clutched-at definition. And even if this were possible, that “word” would still not be that which should here say the essential. Here, the word is the telling of the truth of beyng. And so, it is the thinking of beyng that must say and must justify, that must even demand the word, in as much as it is beyng itself that beckons back toward this “essence” that is to be called inception, whose essential unfolding and essentiality is determined in that essence.
The thinking of beyng as inception thinks toward the essence of beyng as event. Both essential occurrences [Wesungen]—appropriative event and inception— belong together. Through this thinking, “beyng” as essential word is not erased; it does, though, lose that exclusive primacy that, especially in the form of the essential imprint of metaphysics (“beingness”), denied every essential questioning of beyng itself, by making it seem as if every determining of being might be contained within the form of a question about the beingness of being (the question within which all “ontology” plays out).
If it is “inception” that says the truth of beyng, then how is it that we know of being? In the first place, through recollecting that we know and understand being, though without, to be sure, taking any special “notice” of this understanding. The understanding of “being” is essentially far removed from a knowing of beyng. That understanding always tends to explain being from out of beings, whereas the knowing of beyng can only be prepared for in a leap beyond the understanding of being and, even then, is not arrived at directly. The creative thinking of beyng in its essence remains what is most difficult for the human being and for the very reasons that suggest that the opposite is the case. It is only from the far distance that thinking enters into this singular essential realm of the most singular: the truth of beyng as event and inception. This is because the essence of the human—still all too concealed—is suspended in and vibrates in the relation of beyng to the human.
The word inception means first of all something like “start”: {GA 70: 10} a special position and phase in the sequence of a progression.
But if the word “inception” is, here, to name the essence of beyng and the essentiality of the essence; if, at the same time, beyng cannot be derived from beings; and if beyng is nevertheless not the absolute and unconditioned (something that can be claimed only of beings), then “inception” must name that which unfolds in itself and which, out of that very same essential unfolding, refuses to consider what unfolds as an unconditioned thing-in-itself. Beyng, and its essence