in the sense that it leaps ahead, so to speak, into a particular realm of being, discloses it for the first time in its constitutive being, and makes the acquired structures available to the positive sciences as lucid directives for inquiry. Thus, for example, what is philosophically primary is not a theory of concept-formation in historiology, nor the theory of historical knowledge, nor even the theory of history as the object of historiology; what is primary is rather the interpretation of genuinely historical beings with regard to their historicality. Similarly, the positive result of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason consists in its approach to [11] working out what belongs to any nature whatsoever, and not in a "theory" of knowledge. His transcendental logic is an a priori logic of the realm of being called nature.
But such inquiry—ontology taken in its broadest sense without reference to specific ontological directions and tendencies—itself still needs a guideline. It is true that ontological inquiry is more original than the antic inquiry of the positive sciences. But it remains naive and opaque if its investigations into the being of beings leave the meaning of being in general undiscussed. And precisely the ontological task of a genealogy of the different possible ways of being (a genealogy which is not to be construed deductively) requires a preliminary understanding of "what we really mean by this expression 'being' ['Sein']."
The question of being thus aims not only at an a priori condition of the possibility of the sciences, which investigate beings as this or that kind of being and which thus always already move within an understanding of being, but also at the condition of the possibility of the ontologies which precede the antic sciences and found them. All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified the meaning of being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task.
Ontological research itself, correctly understood, gives the question of being its ontological priority over and above merely resuming an honored tradition and ma.king progress on a problem until now opaque. But this scholarly, scientific priority is not the only one.
§ 4. The Ontic Priority of the Question of Being
Science in general can be defined as the totality of fundamentally coherent true propositions. This definition is not complete, nor does it get at the meaning of science. As ways in which human beings behave, sciences have this being's (the human being's) kind of being. We define this being terminologically as Dasein. Scientific research is neither the sole nor the most immediate kind of being of this being that is possible. Moreover, Dasein itself is distinctly different from other beings. [12] We must make this distinct difference visible in a preliminary way. Here