Indeed, in these remarks, one thing has come forth on its own: all our considerations take off from a fundamental distinction which can be expressed thusly: being is not a being.
This is the ontological difference.
How is this to be understood? Difference, διαφορά, means to keep separate. The ontological difference holds being and the being together at a distance from one another.
This difference would not be produced by metaphysics; instead it maintains and subtends metaphysics. Spoken in a Kantian manner, the ontological difference is the condition of possibility for ontology.
Why is the ontological difference not able to become a theme for metaphysics? Because if this were the case, the ontological difference would be a being and no longer the difference between being and beings. Hereby it becomes evident that the Diltheyan project of a metaphysics of metaphysics is impossible.
One can say in brief summary: the difference between being and beings reigns through all philosophy, fundamentally concealed and never thematized. But since the thinking of Being and Time sought to achieve the hearing of being as being, since accordingly the ontological difference becomes an explicit theme, is it not necessary to utter the strange statement, “being is not a being,” which means, “being is nothing”?
The statement is estranging in the sense that it says of being that it “is,” while indeed the being alone is. Difference stubbornly resists the attempt to say it as difference; and being likewise resists the attempt to say it as being.
Heidegger indicates that it is better here to give up the “is”—and to simply write:
being : nothing
Will someone not object, however, that these formulations, whose strange character we have just emphasized, in fact already arise in metaphysics? Does not Hegel say, for example at the beginning of the Logic: “Pure being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same"?87 The task here is, first of all, to understand the statement correctly. Even more intently then: what relation could there be between being and nothing for Hegel and this formulation, to which the extra-metaphysical grounding of the ontological difference as concealed source of metaphysics has led? In order to situate this question, the seminar now asks about the place in Hegel’s thinking where the above cited statement is to be found.
It stands at the beginning of the Logic. This title actually reads Science of Logic [Wissenschaft der Logik]. The expression speaks from out of the