is their “essence” (i.e., their esse-ness, being-ness, real-ness), in the broad sense of whatever it is that lets them be real? Metaphysics begins with things, then “steps beyond” them to discover their realness in a variety of historically changing forms.99 But finally metaphysics returns to those things with that news. As Aristotle puts it, metaphysics announces “whatever belongs to things in and of themselves” and specifically their “first principles and highest causes.”100 Heidegger indicates that all three of the following questions name ex aequo the concern of Aristotelian metaphysics:
What is “a thing insofar as it is in being”?
What is a thing in its being?
What is the being of a thing?101
Metaphysics is clearly a matter of onto-logy insofar as the operations of questioning and answering (-logy) all bear ultimately on things (onto-).
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Heidegger’s meta-metaphysical inquiry, on the other hand, takes up where metaphysics leaves off. It turns the outcome of the Leitfrage into the material object of the Grundfrage by taking the very realness of things (whatever its historical form: εἶδος, ἐνέργεια, etc.) and puts that under the microscope as the subject matter of a radically new question. What about this realness itself, this οὐσία that things “have”? This is the question not about ὂν ᾗ ὄν but about οὐσία ᾗ οὐσία, Sein als Sein, and specifically the question about what accounts for the fact that there is Sein at all (which things are said to “have.”) Heidegger was concerned with
Sein as Sein, that is, the question about how there can be meaningful presence as such.102 Where and how does the meaningful presence [of a thing] become present?103
99. GA 14: 70.10–12 = 56.18–20: “daß es [= metaphysisches Denken], ausgehend vom Anwesenden, dieses in seiner Anwesenheit vorstellt.”
100. Metaphysics IV 1, 1003a21–22 and 26–27. ἀρχαί, ἀκροτάται αἰτίαι.
101. GA 49: 169.16–18. Also in Schellings Abhandlung, 213.21–23 = 175.37–39.
102. GA 14: 86.24–87.1 = 70.9–10: “Sein als Sein, d.h. die Frage, inwiefern es Anwesenheit als solche geben kann.”
103. GA 15: 405.30 = 96.12: “Wo und wie west anwesen an?”