This essay ideally follows and complements a study of mine on Heidegger's Beitrdge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), focusing in particular on the relation to ancient Greek thought in the movement from the first to the other beginning.1 Here, I return to an earlier discussion by Heidegger, analogously tense and contrasted in its approach to the Greek beginning.2 I will attempt to trace Heidegger's approach to Aristotle in its luminosity and disclosive character, but also point to its fragility and instability. At stake in this operation will have been some contribution to a re-occurrence of the past-to an encounter with the past allowing it to take place in its disruptiveness and unfore seen character. At the same time, this contribution will have had to do with us-with us who are interrogating ourselves about our own possibility and belong in that which is irreducible to us. The eventuating of mindfulness, or eventuating as mindfulness (Besinnung), comes to pass as self-mindfulness (Selbstbesinnung) (Beitrage §19). In the 1924-25 lecture course on Plato's Sophist, which is conspicuously devoted as well to a reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Heidegger already introduces an understanding of history, of historical inquiry, as a reformulation of the question concerning us: This past, to which our lectures are seeking access, is nothing detached from us, lying far away. On the contrary, we are this past itself. And we are it not insofar as we explicitly cultivate the tradition and become friends of classical antiquity, but, instead, our philosophy and science live on these foundations, i.e., those of Greek philosophy, and do so to such an extent that we are no longer conscious of it: the foundations have become obvious. (7; emphases added) Accessing "this past" indicates, thus, accessing ourselves. It concerns us in our being, how we understand ourselves and, more broadly, how we are, that is, how we live. What is brought to the fore is the proximity, even the immediacy, of the past with respect to us-of the past in and as us. Yet, realizing this co-incidence in no way means experiencing the past in terms of familiarity or obviousness. On the contrary, it is precisely in regarding ourselves as well as our provenance as obvious that we miss the mysterious profundity of this question and fail to experience the anguish (Not) of becoming obscure to ourselves. Realizing this coincidence, experiencing the immediacy of the past in and as us, far from allowing us to bring the past to presence in the mode of naive historicism and rest secure on that ground, casts a shadow across us, opens us up to that which we cannot appropriate. We are revealed to ourselves as dispersed, stretched out, traversed, constituted in such openness. Here lies the possibility of reawakening to our uncanny circumstance and becoming aware of the covering over of its strangeness, incipiently recapturing the primordial insight of the remembrance of forgetfulness. Experiencing mystery bespeaks becoming aware of oblivion as such. Distress follows upon this awareness that stares into the opacity of the withdrawing. Again, Heidegger remarks: To understand history cannot mean anything else than to understand ourselves-not in the sense that we might establish various things about ourselves, but that we experience what we ought to be.... The authentic possibility to be history itself resides in this, that philosophy discover it is guilty of an omission, a neglect, if it believes it can begin anew, make things easy for itself. (7) What is noteworthy here is the deontological demand emphatically inscribed in accessing ourselves. The work of intimacy with the open that we are results in an ethical directive-in an insight orienting becoming. Later in the lecture course, and certainly in his later work, Heidegger will be quite impervious to this kind of language. For instance, even in the middle of his analysis of Aristotle's ethical discourse he avoids discussing the question of eudaimonialagathon in terms of that which orients becoming, as that which moves life. …