Such is the initial experience of thinking-the always inceptive experience that is thinking—as it addresses concrete existence.
It is as an address, then, that inception has the characteristics of speech. For philosophy to remain authentic much more (or much less) is required than confessing perplexity before the many senses of one word, the copula. The starting point of thinking is something simple. A certain sense for word-like claims on man needs to be aroused, a sense for the injunctions that inaugurate every act of thinking. "At the inception of thinking" is an "initiating soundless word."14 It is an exacting word (Wort) to which thinking is the response (Antwort); an in-ceptive word (an-fangen) that listening ac-cepts (ent-fangen).15 The initiating claim laid on man is moreover so encompassing that it addresses itself to sight as well as hearing: thinking "sees being itself, imageless, in its initially simple essence as a constellation."16 To be seized and called upon inceptively is, then, to find oneself inserted into an aletheiological constellation.
That thinking will be anfänglich which echoes such a disposition or such an economic presence-absence. 'Anfang' is a historical notion only because, at the close of over twenty centuries of metaphysical principles, we will never regain the simple starting point of thinking—namely, heeding 'being' as a temporal constellation, without any suprasensible alibi—except by returning to the pre-metaphysical experience in order to take from it the cue for our post-metaphysical potential.
The commemoration-anticipation (Andenken-Vordenken) so described is the very content of the 'turning' . Obviously, under 'Anfang', Heidegger thinks, in part, the same traits as he does under 'Beginn': "If the incipient holds sway beyond all its consequents and prior to them, then it is not something lying behind us, but rather the One and the Same that comes before us, toward us, in a mysterious turning (Kehre)."17 Something is mysterious which manifests itself while hiding (aletheia), or which emerges into presence while remaining absent (phusis). The reason Heidegger takes up the fundamental words of the Presocratics is that they enable us to think what comes toward us, what already grasps (fängt) us and in that sense is anfänglich. Not just any economic disposition that embraces and situates man is inceptive, but one definite historical-destinal disposition: ours, as stamped by global technology. "For us, what is wanted . . . is an inceptive reversal (eines anfänglichen Wandels)."18
What, then, is it that already holds us? Nothing other than the post-principial economy made possible by technology as the completion of metaphysics. What holds us is the possibility of "thinking 'appearance' in the Greek way, i.e., of experiencing it as being."19 Pure appearing is the incipience to which the Greeks knew how to respond and correspond. It remains for us "to listen initially,"20 to "put aside personal opinions and to think what is inceptive about incipient thinking really as if we were 'initiates', and that is to say, with simplicity." Indeed, "there is inception only in initiating, Anfang ist nur im Anfangen."21
14. GA 55 27.
15. US 262/OWL 131.
16. GA 55 146.
17. GA 55 43. Cf. in the same sense: "We will never find the incipience of Western thinking by calculating backward through historical comparisons. We will find the incipience only by thinking forward through historical experience" (GA 55 80). "The transition toward the other incipience . . . [is possible only in] returning to the ground of the first incipience" (N II 29).
18. GA 55 175.
19. GA 55 25.
20. GA 55 125.
21. GA 55 93 In Heidegger, quite as in ordinary German, it is the substantivated verb, das Anfangen (or das Unterfangen, a word I have not found in his works) which designates the action of initiating something. In the narrower sense cf human undertakings one would say adas Beginnen" (cf. GA 55 350)