bringing before oneself that brings nothing forward, an exorbitant representation possible at any time, everywhere, on any occasion, and over and against every being, and so in relation to beings is simply that which is most common to everything that can be considered a being. Thus it is a "nullity." In the end, being counts only as a name, one which no longer names anything and yet is still used as a sign for the most negligible of all beings.
This view [Meinung] of beyng does not need to provide extensive proofs of its correctness. It finds its best confirmation in those attempts which (perhaps indeed standing in opposition to this view, though still entirely shackled to its perspective) would like to provide this empty name with the littlest bit of fullness. Beings, in the sense of the objectively present at hand, are taken to be unassailable and unquestionable, and the most appropriate way of relating to them occurs when the present at hand becomes entirely and utterly ready to hand and the latter is established in a completely technical sense.
Beings are taken in this way, and being is conceded only as something that can merely be intended [meinbar] in "thought." Being then shows itself precisely as this that is most general.
Why do we not make a concerted effort for once to unsettle these admittedly most common "presuppositions," ones "pre"-posited furthest in advance (namely, that beings are what is objective and that the grasping of beyng is an empty intending of what is most general and of its categories)? It is because we recognize only with the greatest difficulty what that requires. It requires the unsettling of this "we," i.e., the unsettling of the human being of the modern era, who, as subjectum, has become the stronghold of those presuppositions, indeed in such a way that the very character of the human being as subject has its origin and the support of its unbroken power in the conceded predominance of those presuppositions (ones that concern the understanding of being [Sein] entrenched in the modern West). How is there supposed to occur such an unsettling, which would have to be essentially more than a mere change of view with regard to the concept of beyng within a "subject" whose further action is otherwise undisturbed? An examination of those "presuppositions" shows clearly that not to bother about beyng is justified at all times and especially when it magnanimously relegates the concern with being to the conceptual quibbling of the "ontology" again carried out in the schools, or, equivalently, when it agrees with the view that declares impossible every "ontology" as a "rationalization" of being. For, with this either—or, to decide about being and about the view of being, in each case on the basis of ontology, is self-evidently to decide in such a way that "particular" necessities for deciding can scarcely (and indeed for good reason) still be found and conceded here.