Richard Polt
Heidegger Circle, May 2025
My first—dare I say “inceptive”—talk at the Heidegger Circle, at Villanova in 1998, was titled “What is Inceptive Thinking?” I was tempted to just repeat it today—who would notice?—and to think of it as my “other inception.”
But instead, I’ve written a new talk on this old topic. What I want to reconsider is reconsideration, reappropriation, retrieval. What does it mean to go back to the origin and take it up again? What is Heidegger up to when he rereads early Greek thinking in the name of a “second inception” or “the other inception”? How does he find the other inception in the first?
The word Anfang gives us a first clue. Heidegger repeatedly distinguishes an Anfang from a Beginn, an inception from a beginning. In 1934, as he opens his first lecture course on Hölderlin, he says:
The beginning is immediately left behind; it vanishes as the happening proceeds. The inception—the origin—by contrast, first appears and comes to the fore in the course of the happening and is fully there only at its end. One who begins many things often never reaches the inception. Of course, we human beings can never initiate the inception—only a god can do that. Rather, we must begin—that is, set out from something that first leads into or points to the origin.1
So a Beginn is the first visible stage of a development whose conclusion may leave that stage far behind, while an Anfang becomes evident only in the development. This thought sounds almost Hegelian, and perhaps in order to distance himself from that mode of thinking, in later texts Heidegger drops the notion that an Anfang can ever be “fully there.” It retains its mystery; it holds back, and in this way it is never bygone but remains futural. The Anfang is an inexhaustible origin that generates explicit applications and interpretations; everything that follows an Anfang is indebted to it, narrower than it, and inferior to it. An Anfang keeps its power of possibility: as he puts it, it is not “what has passed, but always what is to come, because it has decided all that is coming in advance” (GA 51: 15). It is “the origin that has not yet been misused and managed, which by always withdrawing reaches out the farthest” (GA 65: 57).
There are several options for translating these words into English, but I like “beginning” for Beginn, for obvious reasons, and “inception” for Anfang, for the less obvious reason that the etymology of both words involves seizing: Latin capere, German fangen. In the opening of Über den Anfang (GA 70, 1941), Heidegger describes the Anfang as “the taking-to-itself and taking up of what is appropriated in the reaching out that takes to itself”; “The initiating is the self-seizing and taking-itself-up in the Ereignis itself” (GA 70: 10). (Unfortunately, there’s no English verb that corresponds to “inception,” so I’ve used “initiate.”)
We initiate an act by seizing an opportunity, by catching hold of something. But in an inception in Heidegger’s sense, we are not the original catchers. What he calls Seyn or Ereignis is seizing the clearing, making the “there” its own—which is why one can speak of an event of appropriation. But we are challenged and needed to reappropriate this event. Heidegger writes in the Introduction to Metaphysics:
The inception, as incipient, must, in a certain way, leave itself behind. … The inception can never preserve its initiating as directly as it initiates; it can never preserve it in the only way that it can be preserved, namely, by re-trieving it more originally in its originality. (GA 40: 199-200/213)
We are the preservers of the inception, the ones who we must retrieve it. But what does that mean? Elsewhere in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger says:
To ask: how does it stand with Being?—this means nothing less than to repeat and retrieve [wieder-holen] the inception of our historical-spiritual Dasein, in order to transform it into the other inception. … But an inception is not repeated [wiederholt] when one shrinks back to it as something that once was, something that by now is familiar and is simply to be imitated, but rather when the inception is initiated again [wiederangefangen] more originally, and with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that a genuine inception brings with it. (GA 40: 42/43tm)
One might translate wiederholen as “haul back,” and to haul back is to call back (or at least, the words haul and call share the same Indo-European root).2 The first inception cries out for us; our callback responds by calling forth the inception’s possibilities, not by reproducing it—as a superficial classicism might have it.
So when he speaks of retrieving the first inception of philosophy, Heidegger cannot simply mean that we have to clear away millennia of traditional interpretations and encounter the early Greek thinkers in their purity, understanding them as they understood themselves. Of course, the dismantling of the tradition is crucial to his way of reading; the tradition subjects the sources to concepts that have become seemingly obvious, while forgetting that these concepts are themselves indebted to the very sources we are trying to interpret. (For example, Heidegger comments that the very idea of classicism borrows from Platonic metaphysics: Plato is “the classic of classicism,” GA 40: 194.) But once we have deconstructed the tradition, the sources do not simply hand us an uncontaminated meaning; we have to bring other knowledge to bear on them, including linguistic research, other ancient texts, and our own thought and experience. This leaves all interpretations open to further discussion. And more fundamentally, even if we could establish the pristine significance of the sources beyond all doubt, what Heidegger wants is not factual clarity but, as he said, “the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that a genuine inception brings with it.” We ourselves have to engage in inception. And that means taking a chance.
This relation between the other inception and the first is historical—and historicity is essential to the new understanding that the other inception discloses. So it should help us here to reflect on Heidegger’s concept of historicity—what it means and what it does not mean.
First, whenever Heidegger asserts that Dasein is profoundly historical, his point is not that we are in a process of change or becoming. Of course we are—the human condition isn’t static—but simply to watch the process of becoming is to remain naively within the purview of presence. The dynamic upsurge, lingering, and decline of things, the process of φύσις, is not history as Heidegger understands it. I’ll return to this point.
Secondly, he is not a historicist who means to limit the truth or meaning of thoughts to the cultural context from which they come. When he reads the Greeks, for instance, he is not just taking their texts as symptoms or expressions of their moment in the past. Heidegger’s comments on historicism are consistently negative. For instance: in “a superficial ‘historicism’ one opines that truth is not eternally valid, but only ‘for a time.’ But this opinion is just a ‘quantitative’ restriction of general validity and [presupposes] that truth is correctness and validity” (GA 65: 343). Historicism is an offshoot of historiography (Historie), which, Heidegger writes, “is the constant destruction of the future and of the historical relation to the arrival of destiny” (GA 5: 326).
Destiny is a key concept here. Heideggerian truth is not a set of facts that are correct either forever or for some period, but a disclosure that takes place when destiny arrives—that is, when our future takes up who we have been and thereby opens a present world.
Instead of making Heidegger a historicist, his concept of “historicity” has some affinities to Nietzsche’s concept of the “monumental” attitude to the past: we draw on what has been as a source of inspiring possibilities for ourselves today. As Nietzsche puts it, from this conception we learn “that the greatness that once existed was … once possible and may thus be possible again.”3
Of course, Nietzsche does not naively embrace monumental history; he shows that it does violence to truth, and may also do violence to life. In his seminar on Nietzsche’s text, Heidegger emphasizes the distortions and risks of monumentalism. It assumes “something already past, that is, belonging to the past and standing in it like a statue, lifted out of ‘becoming’” (GA 46: 71-72/57). Heidegger goes on:
The “monumental” in the sense of the gigantic, the colossal, [is] therefore also “in the present,” and this precisely when the present already wants to secure itself as a future past and calculates accordingly (propaganda for what, one day, will have taken place). Hence one strives for what is the most impressive and overwhelming … that will later allow the past to ground itself as something “great” … while everything else is suppressed and eliminated. (GA 46: 72/57)
These are timely meditations in 1938—and again today.
But to see the resemblance between monumentalism and Heideggerian historicity, consider this line from Nietzsche: “That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millennia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great—that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history.”4 And now compare Heidegger in 1934, imagining “a second inception in a peak proximity [Gipfelnähe] to the first” (GA 94: 209). Or consider how in an undated text from the thirties, he writes of “the correspondence of the inceptions. The belonging together of the peaks. A more intrinsic belonging than that of a seamless tradition of influence [Überlieferung als Nachwirkung]!—where, in the end, everything is reduced to the small and uniform, and everything is equally ‘historical’” (GA 73.1: 509). For Heidegger, only a few moments are deeply historical; only a few become what he calls, with Hölderlin, “the peaks of time” (GA 39: 52, 54, 56, 109).
The other inception would constitute such a peak. It would overlook the flatlands of tradition, gazing at the peak of the first inception, distant yet in “peak proximity”—akin because of its height.
We can also use the language of remembering and forgetting to describe the relation between the other inception and the first—with due caution.
In Plato, the myth of reincarnation and the talk of recollecting prenatal knowledge evokes the experience of turning around to notice our own assumptions and concepts. Platonic “recollection” is not literally a retrieval of a former experience in the past. Instead, it alerts us to the very process of experiencing, and allows us for the first time to investigate and question that process.
Likewise, Heideggerian remembering is not a return to a historical moment “as it was,” but opens new horizons by calling into question our relation to being. Heidegger speaks of “recollection [Erinnerung] as transformation”: “In this transforming, the ‘old’ first becomes ‘newly’ apparent, whereas imitation merely eternalizes the obsolescent” (GA 73.1: 496). The other inception is a “recollection into what is most questionable” (GA 73.1: 500).5 We can think of recollecting as collecting, as a gathering into a problematic nexus.
As for forgetting, it is not the opposite of getting—not failing to hold on to what we once had. Heidegger rejects that analysis in one of his rare looks at the English language, in the unfinished essay “Von der Vergessenheit” from the mid-forties (GA 80.2: 921-45). He argues that the true meaning of forgetting is Verheitern (GA 80.2: 940): the destruction of serenity. Oblivion is gloom.
Now, we may be living in gloom without ever having enjoyed a serene clearing. In that case, we may not realize our condition. We are oblivious to our own oblivion. It is a “signless cloud,” to quote Heidegger quoting Pindar (GA 54: 121/82, 126/85; Olympian Ode 7.45). The first step toward the other inception would be recognizing the gloom as such.
To review: by finding possibilities in the first inception, the new inception would enter a peak moment of history; by gathering us into these possibilities, it would dispel the dull gloom of a tradition that has become obvious and seize the opportunity to step into—not a bright light but a creative darkness, a new venture.
Now, why does Heidegger call this “the other inception”? At first, he called it a “second inception.” For instance, in the Black Notebooks of the mid-thirties he writes that we must “prepare the second inception by taking up the first,” which “had to go astray” because “its character as inception was strangled” (GA 94: 210). An undated note that I would guess dates from the same period reads: “In this second inception, the first and its end are presupposed. But not as something in itself and merely at hand—instead, through the second inception it too is inceptively taken up again. This means that the inception does not posit itself in nothingness and does not presume to pull everything out of itself—instead, it is a retrieval. The question of the inception can be posed for us today only in the sense of a second inception” (GA 73.1: 583).
But the retrieval is not just a rescue operation: “the second inception [must] struggle with the first” by way of an “originary transformation of φύσις” (GA 94: 213). Because the new inception will not just save the first but also challenge it, calling it the “second” inception sounds too much like a demotion; it does not let the new inception into the boxing ring, as it were, with due regard for its strength. Heidegger writes that “the second inception [is called such when it is] merely counted and put into an extrinsic sequence; but this ordinal number [is used] here only as the veiling of the historical relation that must necessarily remain a mystery to us initiators, not as something merely at hand, but as the origin of the act of violence” (GA 94: 209). (Again, this is the mid-thirties, when “violence” attracts Heidegger, in a striking contrast to his search for “serenity” and “releasement” a decade later.)
The first use I have found of the expression “the other inception,” a little later in GA 94, puts it in this polemical context. The “necessity of the other inception is seized and grasped only where the deepest emergency [Not] has been brought to necessitation, and this only where emergency is experienced, and this only where there is the openness of the highest free knowledge and actual struggle.” We must “rise to the great challenge” (GA 94: 246).
So the otherness of the other inception is not just difference, but bold opposition. The first inception will release possibilities for us only if we fight them loose.
But in order to reach that boxing ring, we have to push our way through the throng of spectators, so to speak—that is, the endless epigones who presume to speak for the inception. So one venture we have to undertake in order to engage in inception is to loosen the grip of the metaphysical tradition.
What is metaphysics? Heidegger thinks of it in various ways, sometimes in a positive sense, but by the late thirties he settles on a negative characterization. Metaphysics is a form of thought that, like Aristotle in his “first philosophy,” focuses on both beings as beings and the supreme being. It looks for a general sense of “beingness” and it thinks about God, or some other entity that is the ultimate exemplar of beingness. Metaphysics is “ontotheology.” Ontotheology organizes the understanding of what is and orders it hierarchically under what most is.
What is wrong with ontotheology? In brief, it pays insufficient attention to the question of how being has any meaning for us at all, which Heidegger sometimes calls the question of “being itself” or “being as such.” I will return to this point.
In any case, we stand within a metaphysical tradition—perhaps at its end, perhaps glimpsing some possibility beyond it. That tradition evolved from early Greek thinking. Could that thinking have gone in a different direction? Can we find the hint of such a direction in early philosophical texts, if we manage to dismantle the metaphysical tradition enough that we get a chance to wrestle genuinely with those texts?
In order to catch such a hint, we must read these pre-metaphysical thinkers as if they were post-metaphysical. Heidegger explains this point in a little-known, but very helpful letter to Dieter Sinn from 1964. (This portion of the letter appeared briefly on a website for the auction house that was selling the document. It was spotted and kindly preserved by Daniel Fidel Ferrer in his 2022 book Martin Heidegger as Interrogator.)
The “ambivalence” in the thinking of the pre-Socratics is to be understood as meaning that they did not yet properly think being in the ontological difference. This “not yet” creates the impression that they were already thinking beyond metaphysics, as it were—[thinking] being as such. This “not yet” suggests the possibility of elucidating the question of being as such through the thinking of the pre-Socratics, in conversation with them, that is, to attribute something that is no longer Greek to them in one’s interpretation. Gadamer has aptly treated the “prehistory of metaphysics” in his contribution to the Festschrift Anteile. The “not yet” as prehistory is something other than the “no longer” after the “overcoming of metaphysics.”6
Heidegger’s first line here says that the early Greek thinkers do not clearly distinguish between what is and to be, or beings and beingness. Later thinkers do, and in this way they practice metaphysics. Heidegger himself wants to step in a different direction, to think about what he vaguely calls “being as such”—which, again, I take to mean the problem of how the “to be” is significant for us in the first place. This problem is “no longer Greek” at all, but it can be elicited through creative—not to say violent—readings of the pre-Socratics.
Heidegger apparently alludes to this line by Gadamer, published in 1950 in the Festschrift for Heidegger’s sixtieth birthday: “The prehistory of Greek metaphysics no longer signifies the first and thus archaic and undefined steps along the single path to truth … instead, it harbors a historical decision that took place in the original closeness to other, unthought possibilities of truth, and can remind us of something that is yet to be thought.”7 The notion of a reminder of the future is a pleasing paradox.
But—more than one intelligent reader has insisted—isn’t Heidegger reminding us not of some future possibility, but of the original Greek experience of φύσις? Isn’t he rediscovering the phenomenon of emergence into unconcealment, ἀλήθεια, and calling on us to allow that process to happen instead of trying to freeze it into an eternal “now”? Isn’t his target a metaphysics of enduring underlying substances or static presence-at-hand, while he is more sympathetic to a metaphysics of process or becoming? In this case, Heidegger is returning to early Greek thought, not using it as a springboard to leap into the unthought—and my emphasis on strangeness, struggle, and transformation has been misleading.
This issue has everything to do with the problem of presence. Physis is “growth” in the sense of developing and arising. It is, as Heidegger puts it, “coming forth and coming up, self-opening” (GA 4: 56). It is “the emerging and abiding sway [Walten]” (GA 40: 16). And this is precisely “presencing [Anwesung] in the sense of coming forth into the unconcealed, placing itself into the open” (GA 9: 272). For the Greeks, beings “appear and they presence, they decay and disappear” (GA 55: 205). This experience of coming to presence hardened into a metaphysics of constant presence.
So the question of how to find the other inception in the first cannot be solved until we look closely at Heidegger’s concept of presence—and in fact, he has more than one such concept, as I said at our meeting last year. Since then, I’ve developed my talk into a short book in the Cambridge Elements series titled Heidegger on Presence. Let me sum up my findings.
In quite a few passages, Heidegger does take permanent presence as the target of his critique, and he certainly is interested in rediscovering “presencing” as an experience that underlies narrower, atemporal notions such as the eternal presence of Plato’s forms or the pure actuality of Aristotle’s god. Here we can learn from his patient, sympathetic interpretations of φύσις in texts such as Introduction to Metaphysics or the Heraclitus lectures.
However, even “presencing” in the broad sense—which includes phenomena such as potential, change, distance, absence, and readiness-to-hand—is given within the horizon of the temporal present, a horizon that is taken for granted while the deeper reach of time falls into oblivion. Time here has to be understood not merely in terms of change, but in terms of destiny and history. Of course, this critique takes different forms at different stages in Heidegger’s thought, but I conclude that he never simply accepts presence, not even rich “presencing,” as the answer to his “question of being.”
Here are a few passages, from a wide range of years, that support my interpretation.
In 1936 he writes that he is seeking “the disclosure of the essence of beyng, as opposed to ‘physics’ up to now” (GA 82: 102). This project is “meta physical” only in the sense that “it no longer has φύσις and ἀλήθεια as its ground and determination” (GA 82: 135).
Elsewhere he writes that “‘Physics’ determines the essence and history of metaphysics from the start,” because metaphysics descends from the original experience of being as φύσις; “but the question of being as such has another essence and another provenance” (GA 40: 20/20). Φύσις is, “due to the predominance of presencing, the disguising of the abyssal ground of beyng” (GA 66: 95-96).
As for Ereignis, the keyword in Heidegger’s “other inception,” he writes that “Ap-propriating … is not presencing into the unconcealed (φύσις)” (GA 74, 1942?: 21). “Beyng is not just emergent presencing, but a-byssal appropriating” (GA 74: 30). “With Ereignis, one is no longer thinking in a Greek way at all” (GA 15, 1969: 366). So what he wants is “not flight into the Greek world, but the clear pain of the tearing of the departure …. We will never again, and in no form, become ‘more Greek from day to day,’ as Nietzsche thinks” (GA 82, 1943: 366). “Only in a thinking that is marked [bestimmt] in a Greek way, but is not Greek anymore, does the inceptive saying of being become retrievable for us again” (GA 91: 718).
One more indication that Heidegger is not pre-Socratic or neo-Hellenic: in a text from 1950, published only in 2020, he reflects on “the thing”—his notion of a rich, relational experience of beings—and makes the striking claim that “things” have not been “thinging” since the very inception of Western thought in presence. “The unprotectedness of the thing [or its loss of truth: Verwahrlosung] is as old as the inceptive clearing of being, in accordance with which being takes place as the presence of the present. … the unprotectedness of the thing secretly holds sway in the beginning of the clearing of being” (GA 80.2: 971). (Here he uses Beginn in the sense of Anfang. The word Beginn gets rehabilitated in some texts.)
I hope I’ve convinced you by now that the other inception is not simply a return to the first, but inaugurates different, non-Greek possibilities. Of course, this is not a mere negation of Greek thought; doing battle can be a way of honoring. In this sense, writes Heidegger, “The other inception [is possible] only from the great Yes to the first!” (GA 73.1: 500).
But what are these non-Greek possibilities, and how would the other inception come to pass? How can we find it in the first?
We can never find it unless we ask the right question. The tradition asks: What is present? What is most present? It may even ask: What is presence itself? But according to Heidegger, it does not ask how presence as a meaning of being is given. With this question, as he puts it in the Contributions, we shift from the “guiding question” of the tradition—What is that which is, as such?—to the “grounding question”: “How does beyng essentially happen?” (Wie west das Seyn?) (GA 65: 6-7). Or, as he puts it with simple clarity in his late texts, we inquire into das Anwesenlassen: letting presence (e.g. GA 14: 9). Apart from using and investigating whatever may be present—or what is in any form at all—we now ask: What gives? What gives us the ability to encounter anything as present, or indeed as being at all?
In a way, and probably more than he would like to admit, Heidegger’s question is a classic philosophical move: there is a moment when many thinkers turn their inquiries back on themselves, looking for what makes it possible for them to inquire. (This is one function of Platonic recollection.) I am not suggesting that Heidegger is focused on his own mind in a subjectivistic sense, but that, as he puts it, “every metaphysical question can [properly] be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such … is placed in question.”8
Again, instead of simply trying to establish what there is, and how it is, he asks: How is any sense of being given to us in the first place? Why is there any meaning of being for anyone?
Starting in the mid-1930s, Heidegger is at pains to claim that this line of thinking is not transcendental (e.g. GA 65: 142, 239, 305, 312, 447-48). And it’s true that it’s not a “hard” transcendental project, as it were: he does not identify structures of subjectivity that inevitably condition the objective content of experience, à la Kant or Husserl. But Heidegger does want to ask a “soft” transcendental question: he investigates the origination of the clearing that enables all encounters with beings.
So: What gives?
Heidegger’s answer is concentrated in the word Ereignis—which, we already saw him claim, is not a Greek concept. It is this answer, more than his soft transcendental question, that sets him apart from the tradition.
A passage from the Black Notebooks of the postwar years (GA 97: 175-76) offers an important explanation of Ereignis. (This English version is based on Adam Knowles’ fine forthcoming translation, Remarks I-V, which I recently had the opportunity to read.) I’ve boldfaced the key concepts I want to trace in this dense text.
The name Da-sein names neither the human “subject,” nor the human as “subjectivity,” nor does it at all name the human as an ontically separate entity. The name thinks the essential occurrence [das Wesende] in which the human is based [i.e.] the essential occurrence of being as such …. This essential occurrence, Da-sein, does not “make” and does not “posit” being “subjectively,” and hence not “objectively” either—rather, it projects, i.e. it clears and withstands the clearing of being, which it, Da-sein, is capable of only insofar as it essences as the clearing (“the there”) of being and thus it “is” “the there” …. Da-sein does not make itself, nor is it made by some other making [Mache]; rather, how Dasein belongs to being must be thought from the essence of being itself. Being and Time names this, namely thrownness. Da-sein essences in the throw of a thrower, i.e. something that releases and frees through the throw, and yet still contains within the arc of the throw. And precisely this throwing essence is the truth of being. … Da-sein as such belongs in the essence of being as that which throws. Its throw thus casts and illuminates the arc of the clearing (the unconcealment of being, to which Da sein is resolutely open [ent-schlossen], i.e. authentically cleared and is thus authentic). Authenticity must therefore “hang together” with the relation of thrownness to the thrower. The thrower thus essences in some manner in that which concerns the authentic [das Eigentliche], the ownlike [Eigen-hafte], but also unfolds [zeitigt] as the truth of being, i.e. as “time.”
This throwing-unfolding essence of being itself, within which every form of the ownlike rests, is called Ereignis.
Although Heidegger often indicates a connection between eigen (own) and Ereignis, he is rarely as clear as he is here about the meaning of that word and how it ties into Being and Time. Das Ereignis is the thrower that throws us open, granting a clearing along with a domain for the own, for the authentic, for belonging. Thanks to Ereignis, we have a home—a place where we belong and where other beings belong, where they can make sense to us as part of a meaningful world.
Obviously, we could do a lot more work here. We’d have to clarify that Ereignis is not some ontic agent or cause that brings about the clearing as an effect; we’d have to unfold the meaning of the words “throw” and “own”; we’d have to investigate the intimate relation between belonging and not belonging; we’d have to address some delicate questions about ownness, rootedness, and politics. But the key thought has emerged: we receive a place of our own.
This thought is not developed by Greek philosophers, early or late. Instead, they take for granted who they are and the broader historical clearing in which they dwell. They pay attention to the beings that rise up as present within that clearing; they inquire to some extent into presence itself; but they do not dwell on the ownness or owning that makes presence available to them. As Heidegger puts it in a 1944 seminar on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, “If we understand ousia as presencing … for whom and where does this presence presence? That is, in what timespace in the broadest sense? It is strange and highly significant that this question, as a question, does not arise among the Greeks” (GA 83: 459).
So when Heidegger reads early Greek thinkers, he finds something un-Greek in them. As he said in his letter to Dieter Sinn, he wants to “attribute something that is no longer Greek to them in [his] interpretation.” He misinterprets them, then. Or to be more charitable, we can say that he overinterprets, as he himself writes around 1940: “My ‘interpretations’ can easily be shown to be ‘historiographically’ false; all of them … are carried out in the intention of saying the unsaid, which looks as if I meant to attribute my interpretation to thinkers as their opinion. Every time, the interpretation is an overinterpretation [Jedesmal ist die Auslegung eine Überdeutung], for it oversteps the limits of what ‘stands there’” (GA 96: 211).
Overinterpretation is not simply an error. It is a leap into another way of thinking and questioning. Heidegger does not claim that the pre-Socratics would endorse his readings of their texts; but what they mean is not exhausted by plausible reconstructions of how their words may have been used and received in the ancient world. Meaning also consists in the possibilities that these words can release for us today.
Those possibilities are not arbitrary: Heidegger discovers them through painstaking meditations on the history and the potential of every word in the fragments that he interprets. The intensity of labor and attention in his overinterpretations of Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus—which often take bold flights, but always return to the Greek words—has rarely been matched by more conventional, philological readings.
I’ll remind you briefly of some possibilities that Heidegger discovers in early Greek philosophical texts.
His reading of Anaximander is a tour de force of overinterpretation, given how few words of this thinker survive. For Heidegger’s Anaximander, humans are addressed by the presencing of what presences, solicited by it, destined to be present with it in the shining present.
“Being-there” means presencing in a cleared way to all that is presencing. But this presence that is marked out by the destiny of being does not essence unless the one who is charged by destiny sends himself—that is, unless he himself takes over the task of taking up such presence as his own affair, which is, however, the affair of being itself. (GA 78: 92)
Here Heidegger reaches the theme of Ereignis, the theme of being thrown into one’s own.
Anaximander’s τὸ χρεών is usually translated with the bland “necessity.” Heidegger calls it der Brauch (GA 78: 135), and elucidates it at length. In brief, it is the destiny and demand that governs the relationship between humans and being. The word Brauch becomes frequent in his late texts. So far there is no consensus on how to translate it, but I like “requirement.” Being requires us, both in the sense that it needs us to receive and develop it—it has no meaning without us—and in the sense that it uses us, it summons us to do this work. Requirement is the reciprocal relation between being and Dasein.
Heidegger also finds that relation in Parmenides’ saying that thinking and being are “the same,” τὸ αὐτό. He interprets, or overinterprets, τὸ αὐτό not as identity but as belonging together. Among his many comments on this theme, I’ll quote a marginal remark to What is Called Thinking?:
That beings are (that being holds sway) gives thinking its destiny [Bestimmung], disposes [verfügt] thinking into the relation “to itself,” i.e. to the sway of disposing being. If we think this (being) as presence, or more precisely as letting what is present be present, then this letting-presence demands that one think of how λέγειν and νοεῖν belong together. Greek thinking did not get any farther than this announcement of the relation between ἐὸν ἔμμεναι [being] and λέγειν—νοεῖν [saying, thinking]. Subsequently the subject-object relationship inserted itself here, without posing the question of the command for thinking. Behind the domain of questions I have unfolded [in these lectures] stands “Ereignis” …. (GA 8: 233) beyng.com: the above is from a footnote on GA 8: 234.
Again, Heidegger overinterprets the early Greek words in the direction of the event of ownness that throws us into the domain where we belong.
His very rich reading of λόγος in Heraclitus goes in the same direction. Λόγος, as all interpreters of Heraclitus recognize, is not only human reason, but something like the order that governs the cosmos. In Heidegger’s reading, λόγος is a “gathering gatheredness” that has us, rather than being our possession. Drawing this reading together with other readings of Greek philosophy and tragedy, he says: “in the inception, this is what happens: λόγος as the revealing gathering … becomes the necessity of the essence of historical humanity. … Being-human, according to its historical, history-opening essence, is λόγος, the gathering and apprehending of the being of beings” (GA 40: 179-80/190 tm).
Heidegger’s repeated references to “history” here should confirm that this is no reading of the Greeks as they understood themselves, since he claims that they had no explicit awareness of their own historicity. This is a “struggle with the first inception” (GA 94: 213) in order to liberate possibilities for the other.
I’ve described the relation between the first and other inception, the question that Heidegger asks in the other inception, and his answer to that question: Ereignis. What else is there to ask?
Only this: What moves us to ask in the first place? Remember that he claims we do not spontaneously originate our thinking of being. We are thrown, driven, summoned by an event that requires us. So his inquiry must itself be an instance of what he is inquiring into: a case of requirement.
Here, I think it’s helpful to consider the more “personal” passages in Heidegger, the ones where he tells us most clearly what delights or (more frequently) apalls him. These are not just anecdotal supplements to his philosophy, or material for a psychobiography. They are attempts to express an experience of requirement. We may, of course, find that his experience resonates or does not resonate with our own.
Every experienced reader of Heidegger can think of many such passages. For instance, there is this one in Introduction to Metaphysics:
Dasein began to slide into a world that lacked that depth from which the essential always comes and returns to human beings, thereby forcing them to superiority and allowing them to act on the basis of rank. All things sank to the same level, to a surface resembling a blind mirror that no longer mirrors, that casts nothing back. The prevailing dimension became that of extension and number. … In America and Russia, then, this all intensified until it turned into the measureless so-on-and-so-forth of the ever-identical and the indifferent, until finally this quantitative temper became a quality of its own. By now in those countries the predominance of a cross-section of the indifferent is no longer something inconsequential and merely barren, but is the onslaught of that which aggressively destroys all rank and all that is world-spiritual, and portrays these as a lie. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic. (GA 40: 49-50/35-36)
This is obviously a right-wing complaint about egalitarianism, in the name of hierarchy and order. But it is more than political: Heidegger sees a metaphysical flattening, not just in theory but in practice. After the war, this vision becomes his account of the technological age as a reduction of the earth to “a gigantic gasoline station,”9 a stock of natural resources ready to be exploited.
But on its own, this vision of the world is not enough to motivate the other inception. In order to experience reduction as an emergency, we must have another experience: a glimmer, at least, of a world of depth, ownness, and engagement. This promise of belonging, this taste of Ereignis, generates the dissatisfaction that drives Heidegger to fight the first inception and seek the other inception. “Only the already achieved sojourn in Ereignis grants the ability to elucidate letting-presence … as sending, appropriating. In this elucidation, what is present will transform into what is proper [das Ge-eignete]” (GA 73.2: 1295). That would be the other inception—and it would not just be an acknowledgment of some already operative Ereignis, but the proper arrival of Ereignis itself. “What is the inception?” asks Heidegger in the Contributions. “It is the essential happening of being itself. … The inception is beyng itself as appropriation” (GA 65: 58).
How, then, do we find the other inception in the first? In the light of a glimmer of belonging, we experience our age as one of nonbelonging. We are moved to leap back into the remote origin of our age, the peak of early Greek thinking. On that peak we struggle with the Greeks until, in the heat of battle, their own words finally release a new possibility: that we may be required, singled out, charged with founding and dwelling in a place where things have resonance and depth.
I’ll end with one more question. Until around 1930, Heidegger believed that we all already dwelled in such a place. We needed only to pay attention to the human condition as we experience it before and despite our theoretical constructs. We inhabit a “world,” a network of meaningful and purposive belonging. When he becomes politically and philosophically radicalized, Heidegger comes to fear that the world is no longer worlding, or even that it has never yet worlded—that belonging is reserved for the future, for another inception. Is that true? Or does the truth lie in recognizing that being, including our own being, is always already more than mere presence?
1 GA 39: 3-4/3 tm. Other passages that make the distinction include GA 69: 156; GA 70: 9-10; GA 51: 108; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, 48-49.
2 The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html , s.v. kelə-2.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 72.
4 Ibid., 68.
5 These passages are found in a collection of notes titled “Advancing in the Other Inception [Vorgehen im anderen Anfang]” (GA 73.1: 493-529), which is undated but reads as if it overlaps with the Contributions to Philosophy.
6 “Die ‘Ambivalenz’ im Denken der Vorsokratiker ist dahin zu verstehen, daß sie noch nicht eigens in der ontologischen Differenz das Sein dachten. Dieses ‘noch nicht’ erweckt den Aschein [sic], als dächten sie schon gleichsam über die Metaphysik hinweg—das Sein als solches. Dieses ‘noch nicht’ legt es nahe, im Gespräch mit den Vorsokratikern durch ihr Denken die Frage nach dem Sein als solchen zu erläutern, d. h. im Auslegen ihnen Nicht-mehr- Griechisches unterzulegen. Gadamer hat in seinem Beitrag zur Festschrift ‘Anteile’ (1950) treffend von der ‘Vorgeschichte der Metaphysik’ gehandelt. Das ‘noch nicht’ als Vorgeschichte ist etwas anderes als das ‘nicht mehr’ nach der ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik’”: letter to Dieter Sinn, 1964, reproduced by Kotte Autographs, quoted in Daniel Fidel Ferrer, Martin Heidegger as Interrogator: The Final Paradigm (published by the author, 2022), 217.
7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Metaphysik,” in Anteile: Martin Heidegger zum 60. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), 53.
8 “What is Metaphysics?” trans. D. F. Krell, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82.
9 “Memorial Address,” trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, in Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 50.