153. The History of Being | 145
Only in the history of being does being safeguard the site of steadfastness, for which inception clears itself.
How, though, should the history of being be experienced? Does this experience not involve the snares of all historiographical reckoning, inasmuch as knowledge is indeed necessary? Or can being itself still be productively thought without all the historiographical padding? Must this not be accomplished when being has a different essential relation to historical humanity? (cf. Summer Semester 1941;2 The Guide-Words {GA 70: 173} of Beyng). Then, historiography can be thrown out by recollecting the holding-sway of being as beingness. In any case all the “thought”-habits of historiography must be given up. The recollective-fore-thinking knowledge of beyng is already the turn into being-there, without this being named as essential.
The history of being (unconcealment, concealment*, the releasing into “appearance” and into non-essence) cannot be brought under a rule. There is no progression here (like some rule, for instance, of three-step “dialectic”). Even if we look over centuries historiographically, we can intimate but little of the historical, because this latter does not consist in a lapse of time but rather holds to its essential site in the event, and that means in the incipience of inception. Incipience itself is the “remaining,” in the sense of the ever more inceptive abyssal grounding.
Unconcealment and concealment are not directed from a subject toward a grasping, but rather away from it, and away from the human as animal rationale and unfold as incipience; the same goes for “appearance.” The holding-sway of the essence, truth.
The event is also no “myth,” no “mystery,” and no fate, if this is meant historiographically as the original cause of beings, though with the counter-imprint of the in-calculable.
The appropriative eventuation of being-there, and the claiming, still more concealed within it, of the human being into safeguarding the truth of being, is long prepared in stillness. But it also demands from the prepared the great courage of never ever retreating back into beings.
* Unconcealment, concealment can be easily mistaken by metaphysics as “appearing” and “veiling” in the sense of Hegel’s phenomenology, which conceives everything as the objectivity of the object for a representing by the subject.
2. Grundbegriffe (GA 51).