If we now begin again with these facts of linguistic history and ask why they are as they are, then perhaps what we can still offer as an explanation becomes not clearer but only more obscure. The fact that matters stand as they do with the word “Being” really hardens now in its indisputable factuality. But we reached this state of affairs long ago. After all, this is what the usual procedure in philosophy appeals to, when it explains in advance that the word “Being” has the emptiest and thus all-embracing meaning. What is thought with this word, the concept, is thus the highest generic concept, the genus. It is true that one can still point to the ens in genere <the being as genus>, as the old ontology says, but it is just as certain that there is nothing further to be sought there. To want to go so far as to attach the decisive question of metaphysics to this empty word “Being” means to bring everything into confusion. There is only one possibility [58|81] left here: to acknowledge the aforementioned fact of the emptiness of the word and to leave this fact in peace. It appears that we may do so with a clear conscience, all the more so now that the fact has been explained historically by the history of language.

So: away from the empty schema of this word “Being”! But where to? The answer cannot be difficult. At most we can wonder why we have persisted in such a long and minute examination of the word “Being.” Away from the empty, universal word “Being,” toward the special characteristics of the particular domains of beings themselves! For this project, we have all sorts of things immediately at our disposal: the things that we can grasp with our hands right away, all the equipment that is at hand for us all the time—tools, vehicles, etc. If these particular beings strike us as too ordinary, not refined and soulful enough for “metaphysics,” then we can stick to the nature that surrounds us—land, sea, mountains, rivers, forests, and the individual things in them: