INTRODUCTION TO "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"
calls itself "fundamental ontology" it blocks and obscures its own path by this very designation. For what the title "fundamental ontology" suggests is that the thinking that attempts to think the truth of Being - and not, like all ontology, the truth of beings - is, as fundamental ontology, still a kind of ontology. In fact, the attempt to recall the truth of Being, as a going back into the ground of metaphysics, has already left the realm of all ontology with its very first step. On the other hand, every philosophy that revolves around an indirect or direct representation of "transcendence" remains of necessity essentially an ontology, whether it achieves a new foundation of ontology or whether it assures us that it repudiates ontology as a conceptual freezing of experience.
If, coming from the old custom of representing beings as such, the very thinking that attempts to think the truth of Being itself becomes entangled in such representation, then it would seem that both for a preliminary orientation and in order to prepare the transition from representational thinking to a thinking that recalls [dar andenkende Denken], nothing becomes more necessary than the question: What is metaphysics?
[210 {GA 9: 381}] The unfolding of this question in the following lecture culminates, for its part, in another question. This is called the grounding question of metaphysics: Why are there beings at all, and not rather Nothing? In the interim, people have talked back and forth a great deal about anxiety and the Nothing, both of which are spoken of in this lecture. But one has never yet deigned to ask oneself why a lecture that attempts to recall the Nothing from out of a thinking of the truth of Being, and from there tries to think into the essence of metaphysics, should claim that this question is the grounding question of metaphysics. How can an attentive reader help feeling on the tip of his tongue an objection that is far more weighty than all protests against anxiety and the Nothing? The final question provokes the objection that a meditation that attempts to recall Being by way of the Nothing returns in the end to a question concerning beings. On top of that, the question even proceeds in the customary manner of metaphysics by beginning with a causal "Why?" To this extent, then, the attempt to recall Being is fully repudiated in favor of a representational knowledge of beings in terms of beings. And to make matters still worse, the final question is obviously the question that the metaphysician Leibniz posed in his Principes de la nature et de la grâce: "Pourquoi il y a plutôt quelque chose que rien?" (Opp. ed. Gerh. tom. VI, 6oz n. 7).
Does the lecture, then, fall short of its intention? After all, this would be quite possible in view of the difficulty of effecting a transition from metaphysics to another kind of thinking. Does the lecture end up by asking with
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