5
The Saga

4. The Question of Being
(The First and the Other Inception)

The question of being is recognized in its ambiguity by distinguishing the question concerning the being of beings (or concerning beingness) from the question concerning the truth of being.

Even if this other form of questioning is admitted, it still appears as nothing more than a reflected supplement to the determination of the being of beings; a supplement which only asks how “we” are capable of understanding (of projecting) being? Thus all that remains is nothing more than some arbitrary form of the conditional or unconditional transcendental question.

What is the decisive twist here?

In the essence of truth and of the mode of relation to it: not νοεῖν and re-presentation of that which appears, rather Da-sein in the clearing; but Da-sein at the same time as the essential prevailing of beyng and being human is otherwise, due to thrownness into Da-sein.

None of this can be achieved through “views” and “doctrines,” for it can only be experienced as the history of being and in the first place in the plight of the abandonment of beings by beings.

But whether this plight compels?

Yet to what extent is the attempt to dispel the ambiguity through phrases such as “Being and Thinking” and “Being and Time” already misleading? For it insinuates that “being” is ultimately being thought in the same way here, albeit simply from a different perspective of projection. But in “Being and Thinking,” being is the beingness of beings, and is experienced from out of beings; in “Being and Time,” in contrast, being takes its definitive force from the truth of beyng.

“

Time
” is not only, as it initially seems, the prior condition of projection for thinking as the re-presentation and making present of that which is present as such; that is only the metaphysical-historical impetus for the transition into beyng-historical thinking, but not the essential apprehension of beyng itself.

The characterization of the distinctiveness of the question of being in terms of the differentiation between the guiding question and the fundamental question (1935ff.)2 always has a merely propaedeutic character, and in truth it drags beyng-historical thinking back into metaphysics. But this danger looms over all transitional thinking.


2 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 21.


On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art (GA 74) by Martin Heidegger