What happens in the history of beyng? With this question we are already positing a difference between the happening and what it is that happens. And in asking about the “what” of the happening, we hunt for a being of beyng. We are already no longer asking about the history of beyng, which beyng itself is as history.
The happening of this history is the sole thing that happens “in” it; that is, it happens as itself. So “what” happens? Nothing happens. And this is why the history of beyng is always unknown and inaccessible to historiographical endeavor. Nothing happens. But the nothing is beyng. Nothing happens. The event eventuates.
Ownness is. Inception begins and remains in incipience. In-cepting, it takes on the parting and thus delivers the clearing into its simple openness, which has its nonpunctual center in the nothing. Inception eventuates the essence of truth, and thus, looming into and rising out of its own abyss, it is the essential unfolding of beyng itself. Inception is dignity.
What happens in the history of beyng? With this question we are already held up at the difference that differentiates something that has happened from its happening. In asking after what happens, we have in mind a being, even when we name it a “becoming” and attend only to its arising, approaching and decaying. We ask about the beings that pertain to being, and do not ask about the happening in such a way that this alone is itself what happens. If we ask, what happens “in” the history of beyng, then we either do not yet, or no longer, ask about the “history of beyng,” the naming of which always indicates that beyng is in itself history. And if we nevertheless adhere to the question in such a form: What happens? Then we come to the answer: nothing happens. “Nothing”: no incidents, no facts, no “temporal-historical conditions” into which we like to place “history,” {GA 70: 172} deeming it thereby truly grasped in itself. Therefore, the history of beyng is also and remains every time always unknown and inaccessible to historiographical endeavors. Nothing happens in the history of beyng. But the nothing is beyng.
Nothing happens. The event eventuates. The evental appropriation takes on what it at the same time clears as its own: the clearing itself, which is the ownness of beyng. Ownness is as inception. Incepting, it takes on what is most proper to it—the parting—and thus delivers the clearing into its own openness, which has its nonpunctual center in the nothing. Inception eventuates the essence of truth, which, because it attunes toward the ground of the true, cannot itself rest on a ground; and from out of this simple plenitude of its essence it has foregone the ground and is, inceptively, abyssal ground.
Thus, inception is the essential unfolding of beyng itself, looming into and rising out of its own abyss. Inception, though, is dignity. Dignity is the simple