the pre-metaphysical dawn, the classical reversal that founds metaphysics, and the transition, which has become possible today, toward a post-metaphysical age.
However, by 'beginning' Heidegger understands yet something else. He says: "Whoever has thought only begins to think and only then thinks."6 There is still something of an inchoate movement implied, namely, the first steps (which one perhaps never relegates behind oneself) in thinking. But the historical-epochal sense of 'beginning' seems to become entirely untenable when one reads, for example: "Man begins and conceals his essence with being, he waits and beckons with it, keeps silent and speaks with it."7 These lines are not as enigmatic as they appear. They deal with the historical modalities of presence. They state that in his way of being, man always follows these modalities, that historical truth appropriates him, makes him its own. The event of appropriation is described here as something that begins. Are we then to think of it as a perpetual birth, as something ever new? If that is the case, even this last sense of Beginn cannot be separated completely from the historical-epochal one. Are we to presume that the 'beginning' which is the event can be grasped only through the 'beginnings' which are the epochs?
By Anfang, too, Heidegger designates a certain point of departure. And here again his uses of the word shift from a historical sense to one pertaining to the event.
'Inception' is first of all a matter of experience . The so-called Presocratics are anfängliche Denker because they experienced presence as pure presencing, which is what made them think As they are initially experienced, they initiate philosophy. The historical sense of incipience is thus a result of the sense one might call experimental. Inception is to be distinguished from the "later beginning of metaphysics,8 that is to say, from the forgetting that, with Plato and Aristotle, descends over the initial experience. What is that experience whose loss has gone unnoticed for so long? The words Anfang and inception (just like principium9) mean that which seizes, catches, takes hold first. The pre-Classical Greeks were seized, "that is why they found the inception of authentic thinking."10 Such finding comes from being seized. By what? By something to which one can or must respond and correspond. "This initial corresponding, carried out for its own sake, is thinking."11 The Presocratic experience is initial less by virtue of its antiquity than of its responsorial character. The correspondence that initiates everything obviously cannot consist in the conformity between a judgment and its object. What is initially gripping is so elementary that responding to it amounts to something like perplexity. Anfang strongly resembles θαυμάζειν, the wonder that Plato tells us is the archē of philosophizing.12 Philosophical thinking remains authentic-historically, with the Greeks , and very personally in the Heideggerian 'repetition'-only as long as "the perplexity of not understanding the word 'being'"13 remains alive and incipient.
6. GA 55 211 f. (emphasis added). Elsewhere the Beginn designates the first step in questioning, which is the essence of thinking (GA 55 241).
7. GA 55 377 (emphasis added).
8. GA 55 78-80 (emphasis added).
9. See above, pp. 107.
10. GA 55 15.
11. TK 40/QCT 41. Here is how, in the course of a seminar, Heidegger connected the sense of 'correspondence' to the etymological sense of 'Anfang': by "incipience" one has "to understand quite literally what . . . takes us and ceaselessly retakes us, what, therefore, holds us in a web . . . . This word does not so much mean 'announcing in advance something yet to come', but rather "calling, provoking to respond and to correspond', " quoted in M. Heidegger, Chemins qui ne menent nulle part, trans. W. Brokmeier (Paris, 1962.), p. 60 n.
12. Theaetetus 155 d (quoted WP 24/WPh 79).