also said to be the inceptive sense of speech. "Originarily and inceptively speech 'gathers.'" Then, still plainly stated, Heidegger seems to explain why the linguistic meaning of legein has nevertheless prevailed over its broader meaning since a very ancient age—possibly Homer's . What constitutes the prepotency of 'saying'? Precisely its relation to being. Poets and thinkers give utterance to being and have done so since the beginning—probably of Greece. Hence, the second apparent slippage: poetry and thinking are said to be the same in their origination as in their beginning. It is not easy to untangle these relationships between beginning, inception, and origin in Heidegger. And yet, the task is crucial if acting—life—is to be disengaged from teleocratic as well as principial frameworks; if deconstruction is to set free from beneath archē and principium an origin less compromised by command and domination; and if in the final analysis the question of acting comes down to complying with that more elusive origin. It is as elusive as anything best designated by verbs: beginnen, anfangen, springen. The principles, on the other hand, bear names since, as we have seen, during the metaphysical age "being receives its essential stamping each time from one measure-giving entity."2 First the three terms derived from those verbs have to be clarified. I shall translate Beginn as 'beginning', Anfang as 'inception', anfänglich as 'inceptive', 'initial' or 'incipient', Ursprung as 'origination' and ursprünglich as 'originary'. Then I shall try to show why and how presencing is inseverable from the reversals or breaks in history-how, in other words, the 'thinking of being' cannot dispense with deconstruction. In all this my ultimate purpose is to understand what acting would be like when freed from epochal principles.
1. The semantic extension of the three terms in the epigraph is not clear-cut. Would origination be identical with the beginning (of Western civilization or at least philosophy)? And would the latter not then be reckoned in centuries elapsed (approximately twenty-five)? Or conversely, would origination fall under the law of temporal distance? Is the originary contemporaneous with us, in us or around us, or is it contemporaneous with the poets and thinkers of 'the dawn'? And what of inception? Is this a historical notion, or perhaps an existential one? Or is it ontological?
Of these three words the easiest to clarify is Beginn, beginning. In Heidegger it usually designates the birth of metaphysics in Plato and Aristotle.3 However, Heidegger also speaks of the "unique and incomparable beginning of Western thinking, " and here he means "pre-metaphysical thinking."4 Obviously, the guiding idea is that of a moment when a new age arises, an auroral , inchoate moment. Our own era also constitutes a beginning. With the turning, being "has begun (begonnen) to come back to its truth. Being turns silently . . . in order to give humans the beginning (beginnlich) of their unique dignity."5 Recognizable here are the three great inaugural moments in the history of presence, according to Heidegger
2. N II 421/EPh 20 (emphasis added).
3. E.g., GA 55 78. In the remarks about Beginn, Anfang, and Ursprung in this section, I follow especially Heidegger's 1943 course, "The Incipience of Western Thinking," whose subject is to a large extent the clarification of those terms. "Instead of the deliberately formulated title of this course, 'The Incipience of Western Thinking' ('Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens'); Heidegger says in the introduction, "one could also say 'The Beginning (der Beginn)--or the Origin (der Ursprung)--of Philosophy in the West'. The reason we are retaining the other title will become clear as the course proceeds" (GA 55 3 f.).
4. GA 55 332.
5. GA 55 387. Thanks to the turning, "what the beginning of thinking has once (formerly) begun will once (at a time to come) come back toward man" (GA 55 288). On the insurpassable lead that the beginning in pre-classical Greece maintains over all Western history, see GA 55 383.