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Metaphysics as History of Being


Whatness and Thatness in the Essential Beginning of Metaphysics: idea and energeia


One could take the following as a historical report about the history of the concept of Being.

Then what is essential would be missed.

But perhaps what is essential can at times hardly be said any other way.


"Being" means that beings are, and are not nonexistent. "Being" names this "That" as the decisiveness of the insurrection against nothingness. Such decisiveness emanating from Being at first arrives in beings, and here adequately, too. In these beings Being appears. So decisively has Being allotted beings to itself (in Being) that this does not need to be thought expressly. Beings give adequate information about Being.

"Beings" are considered what is actual. "Beings are actual." This sentence means two things. Firstly: The Being of beings lies in actuality. Then: As what is actual, Beings are "actual," that is, truly what-is. The actual is the completed act or product of an activity. This product is itself in turn active and capable of activity. The activity of what is actual can be limited to the capacity of producing a resistance which it can oppose to another actual thing in different ways. To the extent that beings act as what is actual,


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Martin Heidegger (GA 6-2) Metaphysics as History of Being - The End of Philosophy