The questioning of being is at first merely the question of the being of beings, and is so throughout the long history from Anaximander to Nietzsche. This question is directed at beings as that which is asked about, and the question asks for what they are. What is asked for is determined as that which is common to all beings. Being has the character of beingness. Within the questioning that proceeds from beings and asks back into them, beingness proves to be something supplementary to beings. Within the asked-about and the asked-for, however, beingness as most constantly present in all beings is that which is most eminently and therefore that which is in each case earlier in relation to every determinate individual being. As soon as beingness is conceived as an object of representation, and representation is conceived as representation to oneself, i.e., conceived with respect to the subjectum, to be earlier is then assigned to a different order and becomes the apriori in the order of representing. Because this representing, too, concerns the presentifying of the objectively present as such, even here to be earlier refers not to a priority in the order of common "time," but to a temporal priority with respect to presencing. Yet it is not the case that this apriori is for the Greeks "still" something "objective" and since Descartes something "subjective." It is neither the one nor the other. Instead, the πρότερον τῇ φύσει, precisely in the sense of φύσις, i.e., in the sense of being (as e-mergence [an-wesend] into presence), "is" itself, just as beingness remains what is most eminently.
Ever since Descartes, however, the apriori is not "subjective" but precisely "objective," and it bears the objectivity of the object, the standing over and against of what so stands in the representing and for the one who does the representing. Only if the subjectum is misinterpreted as an individual present-at-hand I-thing, and representation, instead of remaining the essence of this I-thing, is degraded to an extant property, only then can the "apriori" (beingness in the sense of objectivity) be misunderstood subjectively as what is "merely" subjective. As great as Kant's advance might have been, as immense as might be the difference between the absolute idealism of post-Kantian philosophy and Kant himself, and as confusedly as everything then sinks down into the mediocrity and groundlessness of the "logical" and "biological" interpretation of the apriori and in this form reappears in Nietzsche, yet all these differences cannot hide the simple unity of the entire history of this questioning of being (a questioning of beingness in the form of the question, what are beings?). The history of this question of being is the history of metaphysics, i.e., of the thinking that thinks being as the being of beings, departing from beings and returning back to them. The fact that