basic question, a progression that would simply be a new application (to beyng) of the guiding question; instead, there is only a leap, i.e., the necessity of an other beginning. Nevertheless, through the gradual overcoming of the posing of the guiding question with its answers as such, there can and must be created a transition which prepares the other beginning, makes it visible at all, and allows a presentiment of it. Being and Time serves to prepare this transition; i.e., it already does properly stand in the basic question, though it does not bring that question to a pure self-unfolding in an inceptual way.
The answer to the guiding question is the being of beings, the determination of beingness (i.e., the providing of the "categories" for οὐσία). Various realms of beings become important in various ways for later, post-Greek history. The number and the type of the categories as well as their "system" change, but the approach remains essentially the same, whether based immediately in λόγος ["discourse"] as assertion or following determinate transformations in consciousness and in the absolute spirit. From the Greeks to Nietzsche, the guiding question determines the same mode of asking about "being." The clearest and greatest example attesting to this unity of the tradition is Hegel's Logic.
For the basic question, on the contrary, being is not the answer or the realm in which the answer resides, but is what is most question-worthy. To being is destined the unique appreciation which leaps ahead; i.e., being itself is opened up as sovereignty and thus is set out in the open as what cannot be mastered and can never be mastered. Beyng as the ground in which all beings first come to their truth (sheltering, instituting, objectivity); the ground in which beings are submerged (abyss); the ground in which they also claim to be indifferent and self-evident (distorted ground). The fact that beyng does essentially occur in this manner of grounding indicates its uniqueness and sovereignty. And that again is merely an intimation toward the event, wherein we have to seek the essential occurrence of being in its greatest concealment. Beyng, as what is most worthy of question, does not in itself know any question.
The guiding question, unfolded in its structure, always allows the recognition of a basic position toward beings as such, i.e., a position of the questioner (human being) on a ground which cannot be fathomed on the basis of the guiding question and cannot be known at all but which is brought into the open through the basic question.
Although no progression is ever possible from the guiding question to the basic question, yet, conversely, the unfolding of the basic question does at the same time provide the ground for taking back up into a more original possession the entire history of the guiding question rather than simply repudiating it as something past and gone (cf. The interplay, 92. The confrontation between the first and the other beginning).