1122 MARTINHEIDEGGER
From the fundamental question of metaphysics, “Why are there beings at all
instead of nothing?” we have extracted the prior question
stand with Being? The relation between these questions needs to be elucidated, for it is
in a class of its own. Usually, a preliminary question
and outside the main question, although with a view to it. But philosophical questions
are in principle never settled as if some day one could set them aside. Here the prelimi-
nary question does not stand outside the fundamental question at all but is, as it were,
the hearth-fire that glows in the asking of the fundamental question, the hearth at the
heart of all questioning. That is to say: when we first ask the fundamental question,
everything depends on our taking up the decisive fundamental position in asking its
prior question,and winning and securing the bearing that is essential here. This is why
we brought the question about Being into connection with the fate of Europe, where the
fate of the earth is being decided, while for Europe itself our historical Dasein proves to
be the center.
The question ran:
Is Being a mere word and its meaning a vapor, or does what is named with the
word “Being” hold within it the spiritual fate of the West?
To many ears the question may sound forced and exaggerated. For if pressed, one
could indeed imagine that discussing the question of Being might ultimately, at a very
great remove and in a very indirect manner, have some relation to the decisive historical
question of the earth, but by no means in such a way that from out of the history of the
earth’s spirit, the fundamental position and bearing of our questioning could directly be
determined. And yet there is such a connection. Because our aim is to get the asking of
the prior question going, we now must show how, and to what extent, the asking of this
prior question moves directly, and from the ground up, along with the decisive histori-
cal question. To demonstrate this, it is necessary at first to anticipate an essential insight
in the form of an assertion.
We assert that the asking of this prior question, and thereby the asking of the fun-
damental question of metaphysics, is a historical questioning through and through. But
does not metaphysics, and philosophy in general, thereby become a historical science?
After all, historical science investigates the temporal, while philosophy, in contrast,
investigates the supratemporal. Philosophy is historical only insofar as it, like every
work of the spirit, realizes itself in the course of time. But in this sense, the designation
of metaphysical questioning as historical cannot characterize metaphysics but can only
propose something obvious. Thus either the assertion says nothing and is superfluous,
or it is impossible, because it mixes up fundamentally different kinds of science:
philosophy and the science of history.
In reply to this it must be said:
- Metaphysics and philosophy are not science at all, and furthermore, the fact
that their questioning is at bottom historical cannot make them so. - For its part, the science of history does not at all determine, as science, the orig-
inary relation to history; instead, it always already presupposes such a relation. This is
why the science of history can either deform the relation to history—a relation that is
itself always historical—misinterpret it and reduce it to mere antiquarian expertise, or
else prepare essential domains of vision for the already grounded relation to history and
let history be experienced in its bindingness. A historical relation of our historical
Dasein to history can become an object of knowledge and a developed state of knowl-
edge; but it need not. Besides, not all relations to history can be scientifically objectified
and become scientific, and in fact it is precisely the essential relations that cannot. The