INTRODUCTION TOMETAPHYSICS 1107
When we mention and correct both of these misinterpretations, we cannot intend
that you should now come at one stroke into a clear relation with philosophy. But you
should become mindful and be on your guard, precisely when the most familiar judg-
ments, and even supposedly genuine experiences, unexpectedly assail you. This often
happens in a way that seems entirely innocuous and is quickly convincing. One believes
that one has had the experience oneself, and readily hears it confirmed: “nothing
comes” of philosophy; “you can’t do anything with it.” These two turns of phrase,
which are especially current among teachers and researchers in the sciences, express
observations that have their indisputable correctness. When one attempts to prove that,
to the contrary, something does after all “come of philosophy, one merely intensifies
and secures the prevailing misinterpretation, which consists in the prejudice that one
can evaluate philosophy according to everyday standards that one would otherwise
employ to judge the utility of bicycles or the effectiveness of mineral baths.”
It is entirely correct and completely in order to say, “You cant do anything with
philosophy.” The only mistake is to believe that with this, the judgment concerning phi-
losophy is at an end. For a little epilogue arises in the form of a counterquestion: even if
we can’t do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us,pro-
vided that we engage ourselves with it? Let that suffice for us as an explication of what
philosophy is not.
At the outset we spoke of a question: “Why are there beings at all instead of
nothing?” We asserted that to ask this question is to philosophize. Whenever we set out
in the direction of this question, thinking and gazing ahead, then right away we forgo
any sojourn in any of the usual regions of beings. We pass over and surpass what
belongs to the order of the day. We ask beyond the usual, beyond the ordinary that is
ordered in the everyday. Nietzsche once said (VIII, 269): “A philosopher: that is a
human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraor-
dinary things....”*
Philosophizing is questioning about the extra-ordinary. Yet as we merely inti-
mated at first, this questioning recoils upon itself, and thus not only what is asked about
is extraordinary, but also the questioning itself. This means that this questioning does
not lie along our way, so that one day we stumble into it blindly or even by mistake. Nor
does it stand in the familiar order of the everyday, so that we could be compelled to it on
the ground of some requirements or even regulations. Nor does this questioning he in
the sphere of urgent concern and the satisfaction of dominant needs. The questioning
itself is out-of-order. It is completely voluntary, fully and especially based on the mys-
terious ground of freedom, on what we have called the leap. The same Nietzsche says:
“Philosophy... means living voluntarily amid ice and mountain ranges” (XV, 2).**
Philosophizing, we can now say, is extra-ordinary questioning about the extra-ordinary.
In the age of the first and definitive unfolding of Western philosophy among the
Greeks, when questioning about beings as such and as a whole received its true incep-
tion, beings were called phusis.This fundamental Greek word for beings is usually
translated as “nature.” We use the Latin translation natura,which really means “to be
born,” “birth.” But with this Latin translation, the originary content of the Greek word
phusisis already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek
word is destroyed. This is true not only of the Latin translation of thisword but of all
other translations of Greek philosophical language into Roman. This translation of
*[Beyond Good and Evil,§292. Heidegger’s references to Nietzsche cite the edition of his works pub-
lished in Leipzig by C. G. Naumann, 1899–1905.]
**§ 3 of the preface to Ecce Homo.