Is this Why, too, just asking about {GA 40: 6} the ground as a foreground, so that it is still always a being that is sought as what does the grounding? Is this “first” question not the first in rank after all, as measured by the intrinsic rank of the question of Being and its transformations?

To be sure—whether the question “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” is posed or not makes no difference whatsoever to beings themselves. The planets move in their orbits without this question. The vigor of life flows through plant and animal without this question.

But if this question is posed, and provided that it is actually carried out, then this questioning necessarily recoils back from what is asked and what is interrogated, back upon itself. Therefore this questioning in itself is not some arbitrary process, but rather a distinctive occurrence that we call a happening.

This question and all the questions immediately rooted in it, in which this one question unfolds—this why-question cannot be compared to any other. It runs up against the search for its own Why. The question, “Why the Why?” looks externally and at first like a frivolous repetition of the same interrogative that could go on endlessly; it looks like an eccentric and empty rumination about insubstantial meanings of words. Certainly, that is how it looks. The only question is whether we are willing to fall victim to this cheap look of things and thus take the whole matter as settled, or whether we are capable of experiencing a provocative happening in this recoil of the why-question back upon itself.

But if we do not let ourselves be deceived by the look of things, it will become clear that this why-question, as a question about beings as such and as a whole, immediately leads us away from mere toying with words, provided that we still possess enough force of spirit to make the question truly recoil into its own Why; for the recoil does not, after all, produce itself on its own.