18 | I. The Incipience of Inception
from inception, and its unique intimacy with inception’s rareness. In this way, “the staying” is thought historically, and against every metaphysical habit.
How far Hölderlin intended this onto-historical staying in his foundational word, or to what extent he was still thinking of and looking for a metaphysicallyconceived constancy, can barely be decided.
With the twisting-free of beyng, “staying,” as an essential trait of beyng, becomes less important. But it would be quite wrong to think, from this, that one should take it that now only the inconstant “stays”; because this, too, belongs—as essential opposition—to the staying, and remains outside the inceptive.
But beyond this “staying,” the inceptive essence of staying must still be creatively returned to in thought.
The metaphysical essence of staying is determined out of presencing. This already veils emergence and unconcealment, and thus also the incipience of inception.
The inceptive essence of staying consists in the regress into inception, in the parting. This is the innermost not-advancing-away from the inception, because the parting has let go of every occasion of advancing-away.
Only the steadfastness of being-there corresponds to this inceptive staying.
The inceptive staying is inception itself, as the calling-to-itself of the parting.
Here, every sense of “duration” loses its import.
To acknowledge this means knowing inception and the parting. Incipience is the ground of the poetic-character of beyng.
The parting is the ground for the effective lack of need [Wirkungsunbedürftigkeit] that beyng has in respect of beings.
This inceptive-separative [anfänglich-abschiedliche] essence of beyng, which returns “essence” itself to essentiality as inception and parting, remains inaccessible to all metaphysics. As will to power, beingness, whose essence still lurks hidden in machination, is separated from beyng as by an abyss.
Beyng is never to be intimated from will to power, nor from any determination of being as actuality; much less is it known that beyng enters into the twisting-free in order to find shelter in the intimacy of inception.
The inceptive essence of beyng brings the question of the relation of beyng to humanity and to divinity into an entirely other domain.