that the nominal and verbal meanings can be thought in their own determined relatedness.
With Plato and Aristotle, the guiding question for all thinkers was brought onto a pathway on which, even if one allows for all of the differences in the basic positions of later thinkers, it still remains today [77]. The questions is: “What is the being?” This question unfolds itself more clearly into the question: What is the being of the being? Here the question is directed from out of the being toward being, and from being back toward the being, all with the sole purpose of thereby determining the being itself specifically in its ‘being.’ Because the being is here thought with regard to being, the only proper naming of what the thinkers think remains, in truth, the participle τὸ ὄν, which expresses both the nominal and the verbal.
The nominal sense of τὸ ὄν, according to which the being—and, indeed, beings as a whole—is meant, can be transcribed more clearly through the plural τὰ ὄντα, and the verbal meaning can be more clearly transcribed as τὸ εἶναι. After being thus amplified, the guiding question τί τὸ ὄν means: τί τὸ εἶναι τῶν ὄντων;
Thus, strictly speaking, it is only conditionally true when we say that the participle ὄν, thought in the manner of the thinkers, must always be understood verbally. Philosophy—or, as we could now also say, metaphysics—does indeed constantly think being, but it exclusively thinks the being of the being: that is, it in fact thinks the being, and indeed with regard to being. The casual manner of speaking that often sneaks its way into the thinkers’ speech speaks at one time of ‘the being,’ when the being of the being is meant, but at another time of being, when the being is presented with regard to being. One speaks even more casually and more vaguely of the ‘question of being,’ saying that this is the question concerning being, when in fact, already after a short reflection, it becomes clear that one is actually asking about the being, about what the being is. In the oft - mentioned ‘question of being,’ one asks so blindly and implicitly about the being that one cannot hear a different sort of question that suddenly, and for a change, asks about being and its truth. One hears only what one wants to hear.
[78] Aristotle, in fact, gives us an elucidation of how the participle ὄν is to be understood and how the guiding question of the thinker reads—τί τὸ ὄν;—but it nevertheless remains doubtful whether we can directly interpret the doctrines of Aristotle back into the thinking of the inceptual thinkers, even though he, like them, is Greek through and through. To be sure, such retroactive interpreting happens constantly. Indeed, Aristotle himself is in fact the originator of the attempt to locate the metaphysical manner of thinking that begins with him and Plato already in the thinking of the ‘pre-Platonic’ thinkers. Aristotle habitually begins each of his treatises with a critical review of the prior doctrines of earlier thinkers that he then contrasts with his own doctrine, but only after having already translated their doctrines in such a way that they are on the level of his own manner of questioning. The manner in which Aristotle, and also already Plato,