itself? Are they not opposites merely in the way we comport ourselves toward Being, in representing and understanding, in using and relying on, in retaining (forgetting) and saying? But even if they were opposites only in our relation to Being, we would still have attained what we were seeking: the determination of our relation to Being (not merely to beings).
That relation is revealed as discordant. The question still remains whether the discordancy of our relation to Being lies in us or in Being itself; the answer to that question may once again decide something important about the essence of the relation.
Still more pressing than the question of whether the opposites identified lie in the essence of Being itself, or whether they merely arise out of our discordant relation to Being, or whether this relation of ours to Being in fact springs from Being itself, since it abides by Being-more pressing than these indubitably decisive questions is the following: Viewed with respect to matters as they stand, is our relation to Being a discordant one? Do we comport ourselves toward Being so discordantly that the discord completely dominates us; that is to say, our comportment toward beings? We must answer in the negative . In our comportment, we merely stand on one side of the opposites: Being is for us the emptiest, most universal, most intelligible, most used, most reliable, most forgotten , most said. We scarcely even heed it, and therefore do not know it as an opposition to something else.
Being remains something neutral for us, and for that reason we scarcely pay attention to the differentiation of Being and beings, although we establish all our comportment toward beings on the basis of it. But it is not only we today who stand outside that still unexperienced discord of the relation to Being. Such "standing outside" and "not knowing" is characteristic of all metaphysics, since for metaphysics Being necessarily remains the most universal , the most intelligible. In the scope of Being metaphysics ponders only the multifaceted and multilayered universals of various realms of beings.
Throughout the whole history of metaphysics, from the time Plato interpreted the beingness of beings as idea up to the time Nietzsche defined Being as value, Being has been self-evidently well preserved as the a priori to which man as a rational creature comports himself.