28 | I. The Incipience of Inception
How should this be taken, how should it even be intimated, when thinking has only arrived at an approximation of its {GA 70: 40} provisional essence? But the ultimate step does come, finally, not at “the end,” though, but at the proper inception of thinking.
And the ultimate step of thinking leads into the knowledge of beyng; and in this knowledge it becomes evident that it cannot be essential that the telling of beyng is made public—precisely because thinking, as eventuated, belongs to the event. The event-character of thinking requires of it an entrance into the stillness of pure incipience.
It looks as if what is eventuated in beings and in their public availability is nothing, nothing more than that which constitutes the process, procedures, and activities of beings.
The ultimate step of thinking is the knowledge of the pure belongingness of this thinking, in its uniqueness, to the singular incipience of beyng.
The ultimate step of thinking is the knowledge that, if it happens in this way, thinking can be the singular acknowledgment of the dignity of inception. Beyng appropriates thinking eventally, rendering it necessary in the most extreme plight of pure, remote acknowledgment. Beyng, in its incipience, has need of thinking, and demands the plight of being-there and, for this plight, has need of a singular humanity. But beyng does not need the recognition and taking cognizance of beings; it does not need beings and their availability and efficacy.
The ultimate step of thinking is a knowledge of the incipience of beyng as of the event; a step in which the knowledge does not move forward toward the recognized or apprehended, diffusing itself as something familiar. This knowledge “remains” unknown. And its “remaining” (bleiben)—beyond the familiar, but yet accessible—is a kind of staying away, an inceptive assigning into the event.
This knowledge knows itself out of itself, but only in the sense that it thinks beyng, that it insists in belonging to beyng and happens from the projecting of beyng. Because of this, the knowing of itself in itself does not make thinking into something of its own over against beyng. This knowing itself in itself has only one essential consequence, which must be held back in reticence: just when and how the inceptiveness of the incipience of inception eventuates.
If this knowledge were ever to become known, it would not be this knowledge, but it might perhaps be a recollecting into inception or perhaps a lost trace of beyng, one that leads beyond beings.