INTRODUCTION TO "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"
Granted that time belongs to the truth of Being in a way that is still concealed: then every projective holding open of the truth of Being, as an understanding of Being, must look toward time as the possiblea horizon of an understanding of Being (cf. Being and Time, §§31-34 and 68).
The preface to Being and Time, on the first page of the treatise, ends with these sentences: "The concrete working out of [207 {GA 9 378}] the question concerning the meaning of 'Being' is the intention of the following treatise. The interpretation of time as the possible horizon of every understanding of Being whatsoever is its provisional goal."
All philosophy has fallen into the oblivion of Being that has, at the same time, become and remained the destinal claim upon thinking in Being and Time; and philosophy could hardly have given a clearer demonstration of the power of this oblivion of Being than it has furnished us by the somnambulistic assurance with which it has passed by the proper and singular question of Being and Time. What is at stake here is, therefore, not a series of misunderstandings of a book but our abandonment by Being.
Metaphysics states what beings are as beings. It offers a λόγος (statement) about the ὄν (beings). The later title "ontology" characterizes its essence, provided, of course, that we understand it in accordance with its proper significance and not through its narrow Scholastic meaning. Metaphysics moves in the sphere of the ὂν ᾗ ὄν. Its representing concerns beings as beings. In this manner, metaphysics always represents beings as such in their totality; it represents the beingness of beings (the οὐσία of the ὄν). But metaphysics represents the beingness of beings in a twofold manner: in the first place, the totality of beings as such with an eye to their most universal traits (ὃν καθόλου, κοινόν); but at the same time also the totality of beings as such in the sense of the highest and therefore divine being (ὃν καθόλου, ἀκρότατον, θεῖον). In the metaphysics of Aristotle, the unconcealedness of beings as such has specifically developed in this twofold manner (cf. Metaphysics, Γ. E. K).
Because it represents beings as beings, metaphysics is, in a twofold and yet unitary manner, the truth of beings in their universality and in the highest being. According to its essence, metaphysics is at the same time both ontology in the narrower sense, and theology. This ontotheological essence of philosophy proper (πρώτη ψιλοαοφία) must indeed be grounded [208 {GA 9 379}] in the way in which the ὄν opens up in it, namely, as ὄν. Thus the theological character of ontology is not merely due to the fact that Greek metaphysics was later taken up and transformed by the ecclesiastic
a Fifth edition, 1949: Enabling.
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