the ground is so worthy of question that it even remains an open question whether the very thing we call differentiation, the settlement between Being and beings, can be experienced in an essentially appropriate way on the basis of such a designation.
Every designation is already a step toward interpretation . Perhaps we have to retrace this step once again. That would mean that the settlement cannot be grasped if we think it formally as "differentiation" and wish to search out an "act" of the differentating "subject" for such differentiation . Once again, however, our designation is perhaps at first the only possible basis for bringing the generalized selfsameness of all metaphysics into view, not as some neutral quality, but as the decisive ground that historically guides and shapes every metaphysical inquiry. The fact that metaphysics generally thinks Being in the same way, although the Being of beings is variously interpreted in the playspace of presencing, must have its ground in the essence of metaphysics.
But does metaphysics think Being in the same way? There are several pieces of testimony that say it does, pieces which at the same time are related to each other and thus display their provenance from what we first identified as the differentiation of Being and beings.
Even the name for Being that was al ready familiar at the beginning of metaphysics, in Plato—namely, ousia—betrays how Being is thought; that is to say, in what way it is differentiated from beings. We need only translate the Greek word in its literal philosophical meaning: ousia means beingness and thus signifies the universal in beings. If we simply assert of a being—for instance, of a house, horse, man , stone, or god-that it is in being, then we have said what is most universal. Beingness, therefore, designates the most universal of universals, the most universal of all, to koinotaton, the highest genus, the "most general." In contrast to what is most universal of all, in contrast to Being, a being is "particular, " " individual , " and "specified" in a certain way. The differentiation of Being from beings appears here to depend on and consist in looking away from ("abstracting") all the particularities of beings, in order to retain the most universal as the "most abstract" (the most removed) . With such differentiation of Being from beings nothing is said about the inner content of the essence of Being. It merely reveals the way in which Being is differentiated from beings,