This Summer Semester 1935 lecture course is a more radical development of the question of being than Heidegger has worked out in Being and Time. The course consists of four parts.
In the first part, Heidegger interprets the fundamental question, “why is there something rather than nothing?,” as the greatest, deepest, and most original question. It asks about entities as such and in the whole, or as it was called in Greek philosophy, “φύσις.” Heidegger wants to introduce his students to this fundamental question. For logical and scientific thinking, the nothing of the second part of the question is strange and alienating. The first part of the question, “why is there something?,” questions the everyday fact that entities are, and thus opens up the domain of being. The fundamental question of metaphysics concerning entities and the nothing thus leads to the more basic question, “How does it stand with being?” The question of being determines the historical fate of the occident and is concerned with historical events like the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, and the standardization of human beings.
In the second part, Heidegger discusses the grammar and etymology of the word being. The infinitive mode refers to an abstraction of its meaning from all particular relations. Being is an empty word that has many senses or meanings. Heidegger emphasizes the importance to retrieving the verbal form “to be” over the nominative form, whose prevalence in metaphysics gives priority to entities over being itself.
In the third part, Heidegger addresses the question of the understanding of being. Does the emptiness of the word “being” not hide the possibility of a multiplicity of meanings?
The fourth part is a discussion of the basic metaphysical opposition or polarities: Being and Becoming, Being and Appearance, Being and Thinking, Being and the Ought. In harmony with Greek philosophy and poetry, he tries to make a fundamental experience of being possible. The question about the meaning of being is, at the same time, the question about the meaning of being-there, because through its temporality being-there is the site for the disclosure of being. Because being-there is temporal in its depths, time was the perspective governing the disclosure of being in the beginning of Western philosophy. This perspective, as such, has remained hidden. Being and Time was the first attempt to make this perspective explicit, and points in a different direction than metaphysics.