4. “Inception” and “Event” | 9
When beyng is “inception” and “event,” and if this saying must likewise let what is said here—its “is”—be determined from inception and event, then this saying immediately issues in a great difficulty.
“Inception,” “event” are names of movement and of “becoming.” One could try to bring all saying about beyng back around to “that which was uttered long-ago,” according at any rate to the view articulated by the historians {GA 70: 17} of the proposition: “being is becoming.” This misunderstanding of onto-historical thinking must now be put to rest. Even were it to be in the right (and precisely then), there would arise the difficulty that it now becomes necessary to think through. Beyng is determined here, entirely, only as “formal” and “empty,” which means it is not determined at all. Because everywhere the question comes up: “what” is it that begins here? “What” is eventuated?
Is there, then, an “inception” and an event that begins “nothing” and eventuates nothing?
This apparently justified question slips back unawares into metaphysics; or better said: it still comes from there. It initially “thinks” a being and demands of being that it be the beingness of this being, and hence something initiated by an inception or eventuated by an event. Once again, “thinking” sees itself placed before beings as an obstacle and expected to abstract from the beingness of these beings.
But in truth, event is not the empty form of the universal for the sundry eventuations that beings are to be. Event is not an “occurrence” that instantly perishes in its occurring, surfacing and vanishing like a phase in a process, in which case it is the process that would be primary.
The event is in itself its own essential plenitude. It eventuates appropriatively, bringing the clearing of the in-between (amid and in the meantime), that is, of time-space, into the proper domain of inception. The there eventuates the event appropriatively. The eventuated “there” happens as event, that is, belongs to the event and is, therefore, being-there. “Being” “is.”
But the appropriative event, in which the proper domain is eventuated—and with it the whole abundance of beyng—is essentially more abundant than any conceivable plenitude of incidents. The question of what, here, might “be eventuated” in the event, already falls short of its essence, in as much as a particular this or that, or any being at all, be it finite or infinite, is what is asked about; all of this remains infinitely different from the appropriative event itself in {GA 70: 18} which, alone, any being can first arise out of itself toward its being.