INTRODUCTION TO "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"

and in what free dimension could the intentionality of consciousness move, if in-standing were not the essence of the human being in the first instance? What else could be the meaning — if anybody has ever seriously thought ab out this — of the word sein [being] in the [German] words Bewußtsein ["consciousness"; literally: "being conscious"] and Selbstbewußtsein ("self-consciousness"] if it did not name the existential essence of that which is insofar as it exists? To be a self is admittedly one feature of the essence of that being which exists; but existence does not consist in being a self, nor can it be defined in such terms. Yet because metaphysical thinking understands the human being's selfhood in terms of substance or — and at bottom this amounts to the same — in terms of the subject, the first path that leads from metaphysics to the ecstatic existential essence of the human being must lead through the metaphysical determination of human selfhood (Being and Time, §§63 and 64).

The question concerning existence, however, is always subservient to the singular question of thought. This question, yet [205 {GA 9 375}] to be unfolded, concerns the truth of Being as the concealed ground of all metaphysics. For this reason the treatise that seeks to point the way back into the ground of metaphysics does not bear the title "Existence and Time," nor "Consciousness and Time," but Being and Time. Nor can this title be understood as if it were parallel to the customary juxtapositions of Being and Becoming, Being and Seeming, Being and Thinking, or Being and Ought. For in all these cases Being is conceived as limited, as if Becoming, Seeming, Thinking, and Ought did not belong to Being, although it is obvious that they are not nothing and thus do belong to Being. In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself. But why "time" and "being"?

By recalling the beginnings of that history in which Being unveiled itself in the thinking of the Greeks, it can be shown that the Greeks from early on experienced the Being of beings as the presence of what is present. When we translate εἶναι as "being," our translation is linguistically correct. Yet we merely substitute one set of sounds for another. As soon as we examine ourselves it becomes obvious that we neither think εἶναι in a Greek manner, nor do we think a correspondingly clear and univocal determination when we speak of"being." What, then, are we saying when instead of εἶναι we say "being," and instead of"being," εἶναι and esse? We are saying nothing. The Greek, Latin, and German words all remain equally obtuse. As long as we adhere to customary usage we merely betray ourselves as the pacemakers


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Martin Heidegger (GA 9) Pathmarks