184. The event
The vocabulary of its essence


The following delimitation is to make less ambiguous the otherwise still-fluctuating lexicon which must constantly maintain a transitional breadth.

The event expresses the explicitly self-clearing inceptuality of the beginning. The inaugural truth of beyng preserves in itself, as inceptual unification, the inaugural unity of the appropriating and the appropriated. The word “inceptual” always means: appropriated out of the beginning and consigned to the inceptuality. But it does not mean incipient in the sense of mere starting. Being does not start and stop, nor does it exist “perpetually” in the duration of beings. Being begins and does so essentially: it is the appropriating beginning. The event lights up the clearing of the beginning in such a way that the beginning does not merely emerge and bring to appearance along with it something inceptual, as in the first beginning, but, instead, such that the beginning, qua the beginning, is consigned to the truth of its inceptuality, a truth which is therefore illuminated.
The appropriation
(the appropriating eventuation)
is intrinsically counter-turning out of the inceptual emergence, and the latter is at the same time a downgoing into the abyss. In emerging, the emergence differentiates itself from the things that come to appearance in its openness, without this difference as such already co-appearing in its essential belongingness to the beginning. The event is of the difference, but it keeps the difference and its essence concealed. The inceptual

Martin Heidegger (GA 71) The Event