to the title of a "discipline" of scholastic philosophy, and even its later and only partially artificial development is disregarded. The name is supposed to say that the thinking of being takes beings, in the sense of the objectively present, as the point of departure and the goal for a passing over to being which becomes at the same time an immediate passing back again into beings.
Meta-physics is the justification of the "physics" of beings through a constant flight from beyng. "Metaphysics" is the unacknowledged perplexity over beyng and is the ground of the conclusive abandonment of beings by being. The difference between beings and being is shunted into the harmlessness of a merely represented ("logical") distinction, provided metaphysics comes to know at all of this distinction itself as such, which, strictly speaking, metaphysics does not and cannot do. For metaphysical thinking indeed abides only in this distinction but such that in a certain sense being itself is understood as a kind of being. Only the transition to the other beginning, the first overcoming of metaphysics (under the transitional necessity of retaining its name), raises this distinction to the level of knowledge and thereby places it into question for the first time-not casually, but as what is most question- worthy. No matter how extrinsically this distinction is first introduced as the "ontological difference," even if entirely in the sense of representational thinking, still it is necessary to start to meditate on the distinction. For this apparently trifling and harmless "ontological" difference (i.e., the one on which ontology rests) must make visible the original riches, as well as the danger of all dangers, of human being, namely, the danger of the grounding and destroying of the essence of human being. This difference is the most prominent guise of the space of the highest venture assigned to human thinking.
This difference gathers up the essence of metaphysics into the occurrence that is decisive in metaphysics but is never decided by it and cannot be decided through it. The difference carries the concealed history of metaphysics (not the historiology of metaphysical doctrines) over to the history of beyng and moves this latter history into the effective space of the first beginning of the Western thinking of being, a thinking which bears the name "philosophy." Yet the concept of philosophy changes according to the mode of questioning being.
259. Philosophy
Philosophy is the questioning of being. This characterization can be interpreted in two ways, which in their unity contain the essence of previous and of future philosophy and thus include a reference to the transition from the one to the other.