It should be quite apparent how the historical notion of inception is linked to the experimental one: in both cases it is a matter of responding to the claim that aletheia addresses to us, that is, of entering into history as the conversation aletheia holds with itsel£ The Greek inception as well as the turning toward "the other inception" opens a historical destiny only insofar as we know how to experience the aletheiological mutations and give ourselves over to them.
Here, then, is how the experimental-destinal topos shifts toward the topos of event. If another Anfang is about to take shape around us in our contemporary world, its primary locus is not thinking, nor is "to initiate' equatable with 'to think'. It is rather "phusis that has its constant inception in such a way that, prior to anything else that may appear, that is, prior to any entity that may be present for a while, emergence [as such] has already appeared."22 In other words, if thinking is essentially a response, an echo, a reverberation of appearing as such, then it can hardly be initiating, taking initiatives . What, then, is it that catches hold first and thereby precedes any entity? The text says: phusis, "emergence," and that is to say being qua being. "That free inchoation is the inception itself: the inception 'of' being qua being."23 In this way, Anfang comes to be situated in the ontological difference. Being precedes all and any entities. It ceaselessly "initiates" their unfolding. The diff erence between being and entities is "the initial diff erence itself."24
One may of course wish to add that, in this new focus, man is not at all marginalized since the difference 'initiates' appearances for him. And indeed, Heidegger writes that pure appearing, phusis, is "seen initially," prior even to the phenomena that appear.25 But in what way is coming-to-presence for man? "The essence of inception" declares itself in the ambiguity of phusis, i.e. , its locus is the conflict between hiding and showing;26 or it declares itself in the ambiguity of aletheia, i.e., its locus is the conflict between veiling and unveiling.27 Inception makes 'use' of men by situating them in a constellation of presence and absence . What road, then, is to be followed if we wish to understand the Anfang fully? None other than the road of deconstructing the sequence of these constellations, of "meditating on our position, the position of the West in relation to its historical inception,"28 so as to wrest from this sequence 'emergence as such'. Our position within history is our good luck and our distress. It is our good luck, for "that mittence (Geschick) of being into its truth is being itself as initiating."29 But our position is also "'the unfolding of an initial distress," of the obfuscation that marks our entire course since the Greeks.30 As with Beginn, access to the origin as inception is provided by the phenomenology of the reversals in history; access to the ontological difference as initiating ages is gained by the deconstruction of initial historical moments. But the difference as initiating is the 'event of appropriation', Ereignis. Access to the event is thus through history. "What is initial happens properly [ereignet]
22. GA 55 139.
23. GA 55 131. Concerning the experience of thinking, it may do to construe an equivalence between anfangen and "being-in-the-world," as C. F. Gethmann does in Verstehen und Auslegung (Bonn, 1974), p. 268. But that is insufficient for "the incipience "of being," i.e., the incipience which is being itself.
24. GA 55 150. "That which holds sway initially pertains to relatedness, it is neither a thing nor a state" (GA 55 133).
25. GA 55 143. This text, with its undeniable transcendental overtones, seems to make pure appearing a universal and necessary condition for all knowledge of what appears. The impression of transcendentalism is confirmed by the curious parallel that Heidegger establishes here with time and space: like them, phusis is always seen first, gesichtet, but also like them, it is never thematized, erblickt.
26. GA 55 159.
27. So understood, "truth is the initial essence of being, it is inception itself" (GA 55 175) .
28. GA 55 128.
29. GA 55 345 (emphasis added).
30. GA 55 123.