is worked out with very little clarity and explicitness. Being is understood as the generalization of beings, just as graspable in representation as are beings, only more "abstractly." Being is still a being, though in rarefaction, so to speak, and yet is not a being, since actuality is reserved for beings alone. On the other hand, due to the predominance of thinking (the representing of something as the κοινόν and the καθόλου), being qua beingness nevertheless has assumed a priority, one which then appears in the corresponding determination of the relation between being and beings.
Being is the condition for beings, which are thereby already established in advance as things [Dinge] (the objectively present at hand). Being conditions [be-dingt] beings either as their cause (summum ensorn—δεμιουργός ["craftsman"]) or as the ground of the objectivity of the thing in representation (condition of the possibility of experience or in some way as the "earlier," which it is in virtue of its higher constancy and presence, as accords with its generality). Here, thought in Platonic-Aristotelian terms, conditioning as a character of being still corresponds most nearly to the essence of being (presence and constancy) in the first beginning but also cannot be explained further. Thus it is always off the mark, and destructive of the originality and caution of Greek thought, to read this conditioning, whether in a causal or even "transcendental" sense, back into the relation between being and beings as understood by the Greeks. Admittedly, however, even the later modes of the conditioning of beings into beings through being are predelineated and called for by the Greek interpretation, inasmuch as beingness (ἰδέα) is the properly produced (ποιούμενον) and therefore is what makes up beings and makes beings and also inasmuch as, on the other hand and at the same time, the ἰδέα is the νοούμενον ["thing thought of"], the represented as such, that which is seen in advance in all representation. Metaphysics never transcends these ways of differentiating being and beings and of grasping their relation. Indeed, it is of the essence of metaphysics to create expedients for itself by mixing up these modes of thought and to vacillate between extreme positions, that of the unconditionality of beingness and that of the unconditionality of beings as such. On this basis, the ambiguous labels "idealism" and "realism" receive unambiguous metaphysical significance. A consequence of this metaphysical conception of being and beings is the distribution of both into domains (regions) and levels; this at the same time contains the presupposition for the development of the notion of system in metaphysics.
What remains incomparable, and can never be grasped in metaphysical concepts and modes of thought, is the projection of beyng as appropriation, a projection that experiences itself as thrown and that