To this end, let us stick at first to the abbreviated, apparently simpler, and supposedly more rigorous question: “Why are there beings at all?” If we ask in this way, we start out from beings. They are. They are given to us, they are in front of us and can thus be found before us at any time, and are also known to us within certain domains. Now, the beings given to us in this way are immediately interrogated as to their ground. The questioning advances directly toward a ground. Such a method just broadens and enlarges, as it were, a procedure that is practiced every day. Somewhere in the vineyard, for example, an infestation turns up, something indisputably present at hand. One asks: where does this come from, where and what is its ground? Similarly, as a whole, beings are present at hand. One asks: where and what is the ground? This kind of questioning is represented in the simple formula: Why are there beings? Where and what is their ground? Tacitly one is asking after another, higher being. But here the question does not pertain at all to beings as a whole and as such.

But now if we ask the question in the form of our initial interrogative sentence—“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”—then the addition prevents us, in our questioning, from beginning directly with beings as unquestionably given, and having hardly begun, already moving on to the ground we are seeking, which is also in being. Instead, these beings are held out in a questioning manner into the possibility of not-Being. In this way, the Why gains a completely different power and urgency of questioning. Why are beings torn from the possibility of not-Being? Why do they not fall back into it constantly with be present at hand; they begin to waver, regardless of whether we know beings with all certainty, regardless of whether we grasp [22|31] them in their full scope or not.