We saw that the three key terms—Beginn, Anfang, Ursprung—all share a historical, meaning. Certain features of Greek culture were called "the beginning, "the inception," and even "the origination" of Western civilization. But all three terms also share an ahistorical meaning. In one way or another, they all imply the event of appropriation. To articulate this ambiguity in the origin as both an empirical (Geschehen) and a transcendental (Ereignis) happening, a slightly different convention in vocabulary is required. I will call the phenomenon of historical beginning/inception/origination the 'original' and the phenomenon of ahistorical beginning/inception/ origination the 'originary'. This distinction emphasizes most sharply Heidegger's method in trying to understand being qua being, the method of reaching the (originary) event of presencing through the deconstruction of (original) epochs.
We also saw that the metaphysical concept of ontological difference rests on the mutual exclusion of antic representations and their common fact of being. Understood phenomenologically, that difference sets apart the epochally determined fact of being (die Seiendheit) and the to-be (das Sein) : from the viewpoint of the phenomenological difference, the 'original' and the 'originary' are the mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive notions of the origin. One could continue speaking instead of 'history' and 'being', but then their kinship as the two types of oriri—of phenomenal showing-forth—would get lost.
These two notions of 'original' and 'originary' {to which the following sections are devoted) may be viewed as the result of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics: he criticizes the archē in order to recover its pre-philosophical sense of pure 'commencing', archein; and he criticizes the principium in order to recover its sense of pure 'showing forth', phuein. This double repetition restores historicality to the original and temporality to the originary. The outset of an era is the 'decisive' instant in which a new way of being-in-the-world substitutes itself for a previous one; the showing-forth or rise66 is the now-'event' in which presencing appropriates absencing.67 This appropriation will turn out to be the temporality of being, which had remained the sole issue for Heidegger since Being and Time.
The distinction between 'original' and 'originary' helps to spell out Heidegger's answer to the old question of the many and the one. There are many cases of new beginnings (although the leading instance of 'commencing' is undoubtedly borrowed by Heidegger from the German Romantics: what is original par excellence is ancient Greece), our history is made of many ruptures in which a new arrangement breaks through. Each of these breakthroughs has a date . But there is only one event of 'showing forth', one essence of manifestation, one originary origin. This is the conjunction, the coming together, of phenomena into such an arrangement—their mutual presencing. To understand the 'originary'—Heidegger's "being"—we first have to grasp the 'original'.
66. The exemplary sense of φύειν, oriri, Aufgehen is the rising of the sun (EiM u/IM 14). On the double repetition see VA 267-276/EGT 111-118.
67. After Greek (archein) and Latin (principium), German, the third philosophical tongue ("Sprache des Denkens") according to Heidegger, seems more suitable for preventing and combatting the reduction of speech to conceptual language (Begriffsprache) because it is a more primary tongue than any other modern language. According to E. Schöfer, Die Sprache Heideggers (Pfullingen, 1962), the word Ursprung, along with its derivatives, is an exemplary case of "the vocabulary of German inwardness . . . This vocabulary belongs to what is most German—sit venta verbo—in the German linguistic treasury and has always been keenly felt as the most genuine expression of the German soul" (p. 243; cf. the entire section entitled "Das Vokabular der 'deutschen Innerlichkeit'," pp. 243-247). Because it is less fixed, the German language would be particularly fit for "winning back the originary experiences of being in metaphysics through the deconstruction of representations that have become current and empty" (Wm 245/QB 93). Toward the end of the Latin age, Meister Eckhart was the first to designate the origin no longer by the noun principium but by the verb urspringen. This is not to say, however, as Schafer does, that "since the German mystics the words of this derivation no longer appear in the philosophical texts" (p. 243). To mention only Kant, H. Ratke, Systematisches Handlexikon zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg, 1929), pp. 267 f., indicates eight different meanings of the word Ursprung in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is undeniable, in any case, that in Heidegger's view the German language, by its malleability, allows for a certain recovery of the initial experience of pre-metaphysical Greek thought: "I am thinking of the special inner kinship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. The French keep confirming this to me again and again. When they begin to think, they speak German" (Sp 217/ISp 24). In a letter to Jean Beaufret, Heidegger underscores Beaufret's remark, "the German language has resources, but the French has limits." Heidegger adds : "Here lies hidden an essential indication of the possibility of learning from each other," M. Heidegger, Questions III, ed A. Préau, R. Munier, and J. Hervier (Paris, 1966) , pp. 156 f.