OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Because it is such a fetching-forth, all creation is a fetching, as in fetching water from a spring. Modern subjectivism, of course, misinterprets creation as the product of the genius of the self-sovereign subject. The founding of truth is a founding, not merely in the sense of a free bestowal, but in the sense, too, of this ground-laying grounding. The poeticizing projection comes out of nothing in the sense that it never derives its gift from what is familiar and already here. In another sense, however, it does not come out of nothing; for what it projects is but the withheld determination of man's historical existence itself.
Bestowal and grounding have in themselves the abruptness of what we call a beginning. But this suddenness of the beginning, the uniqueness of what is unique to the leapa from out of this suddenness, docs not exclude — rather it includes — the fact that the beginning has inconspicuously prepared itself over the longest time. As a leap, the genuine beginning is always a leaping-ahead, a leaping-ahead in which everything to come is already leapt over, even if as something veiled. Concealed within itself, the beginningb contains already the end. A genuine beginning, of course, is not a beginning in the sense of being primitive. The primitive, because it lacks the bestowing, grounding leap and the leap-ahead, has no future. It cannot release anything more from itself since it contains nothing save that in which it is caught.
A beginning, by contrast, always contains the undisclosed fullness of the extraordinary, and that means the strife with the ordinary. Art as poetry is founding in the third sense of the instigation of the strife of truth; it is founding as beginning. Whenever what is as a whole, as what is, itself demands a grounding in openness, then art, as founding, accedes to its historical essence. In the West, this first happened in Greece. What would, in the future, be called being was set into the work in a standard-setting way. The thus-opened totality of beings was then transformed into beings in the sense of God's creation. This happened in the Middle Ages. This kind of being was again transformed at the beginning, and during the course, of the modem age. Beings became transparent objects capable of being mastered by calculation. Each time, the openness of beings had to be established in beings themselves, through the fixing in place of truth in the figure. Each time, the unconcealment of beings happened. It set itself into the work, a setting which is accomplished by art.
a Reclam edition, 1960. Concerning "the leap" see Identity and Difference, the lecture about identity.
b Reclam edition, 1960. To think the beginning as the beginning in terms of the Event.
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