Of these three words the easiest to clarify is Beginn, beginning. In Heidegger it usually designates the birth of metaphysics in Plato and Aristotle. However, Heidegger also speaks of the “unique and incomparable beginning of Western thinking,” and here he means “pre-metaphysical thinking.” Obviously, the guiding idea is that of a moment when a new age arises, an auroral, inchoate moment. Our own era also constitutes a beginning. With the turning, being “has begun (begonnen) to come back to its truth. Being turns silently … in order to give humans the beginning (beginnlich) of their unique dignity.” Recognizable here are the three great inaugural moments in the history of presence, according to Heidegger: the pre-metaphysical dawn, the classical reversal that founds metaphysics, and the transition, which has become possible today, toward a post-metaphysical age.
However, by ‘beginning’ Heidegger understands yet something else. He says: “Whoever has thought only begins to think and only then thinks.” There is still something of an inchoate movement implied, namely, the first steps (which one perhaps never relegates behind oneself) in thinking. But the historical-epochal sense of ‘beginning’ seems to become entirely untenable when one reads, for example: “Man begins and conceals his essence with being, he waits and beckons with it, keeps silent and speaks with it.” These lines are not as enigmatic as they appear. They deal with the historical modalities of presence. They state that in his way of being, man always follows these modalities, that historical truth appropriates him, makes him its own. The event of appropriation is described here as something that begins. Are we then to think of it as a perpetual birth, as something ever new? If that is the case, even this last sense of Beginn cannot be separated completely from the historical-epochal one. Are we to presume that the ‘beginning which is the event can be grasped only through the ‘beginnings’ which are the epochs? (SCHÜRMANN, HBAPA, p. 121-122)