The title designates the attempt at a reflection which persists in questioning. The questions are paths to an answer. If the answer could be given, the answer would consist in a transformation of thinking, not in a propositional statement about a matter at stake.
The following text belongs to a larger context. It is the attempt undertaken again and again ever since 1930 to shape the question of Being and Time in a more primal way. This means: to subject the point of departure of the question in Being and Time to an immanent criticism. Thus it must become dear to what extent the critical question of what the matter of thinking is, necessarily and continually belongs to thinking. Accordingly, the name of the task of Being and Time will change.
We are asking:
1. What does it mean that philosophy in the present age has entered its final stage?
2. What task is reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy?
1. What does it mean that philosophy in the present age has entered its final stage?
Philosophy is metaphysics. Metaphysics thinks being as a whole—