essence of ground, however, was a problem for us, because giving reasons and reasonableness [Begründung und Begründbarkeit] belong to truth. But, properly understood and taken universally. truth is the theme of logic. Clarifying the essence of ground, or the way thereto, should not only provide us with insight into this essence, but should simultaneously bring us to see that logic is nothing other than the metaphysics of truth.
What then is the essence of ground? Just as important, even more decisive than a straight, apparently reassuring and merely learnable answer to this question, is familiarity with the way it is worked out. This is because the answer can only be given in traversing and repeating the pathway of the question. Now, however, an answer should be attempted to the question about the essence of ground, with all the reservations that any such answer contains when taken as, so to speak, a definition and isolated claim.
When we inquire into the essence of ground, we are not seeking particular grounds for something, but we are rather looking for insight into that which ground as such means, for the way ground as such is intrinsically possible, and that means how it is metaphysically necessary. The inquiry into the essence of grounds can be put into a formula which formulates the problem as: Why do we ask, not just factically but essentially, qua Dasein, about the why? Why is there anything such as a why and a because? Because Dasein exists, i.e., because transcendence temporalizesl To transcend, however, is the ecstatic being-toward-itself in the mode of for-the-sake-of-itself. The for-the-sake-of, as primary character of world, i.e., of transcendence, is the primal phenomenon of ground as such. Because we are in the manner of an existing that transcends, in the manner of being-in-the-world, and the latter is temporalization, we therefore ask about the why.
But this statement is still misleading. It does not mean that, because we are in fact actual, we are also interested in our whence and whither. The question is, moreover: Whence arises this interest at all, metaphysically, the interest that is, in every case, related to all beings and not merely to ourselves? The origin of anything like ground lies in the essence of existence defined as transcendental, i.e., in Dasein's being-carried-away into the for-the-sake-of itself. If for-the-sake-of is, as such, the primal phenomenon of ground, then ground transcends all beings according to all their various modi essentiae and existentiae.
The for-the-sake-of is not something adrift, but it temporalizes itself in freedom. As ecstatic self-projection on its own capacity