The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics

The question of being — what it means to be, what being is — was live for the earliest Greek thinkers. The pre-Socratics did not simply ask what things are made of; they asked about physis, the self-arising presence of beings as a whole. But beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and accelerating through the medieval and modern periods, philosophy increasingly took being for granted as the most general and most obvious concept — too abstract to investigate and too universal to need investigation. Heidegger's project is to recover the question beneath the forgetting, to make it live again by showing that everything depends on how it is answered.

The pairing of being with nothing is not a logical curiosity but an existential provocation. In experiences of profound anxiety, boredom, or grief, the world reveals itself as contingent — it need not be, and there is nothing that guarantees its continuance. The nothing that threatens from the margins is not a logical zero but the abyss against which being shows itself as the remarkable, ungrounded fact of presence. To ask "why beings rather than nothing?" is to stand already in this abyss and to demand something rather than nothing explain itself — which it cannot, since every explanation is already an answer from within being.

Philosophy, for Heidegger, is not a body of knowledge or a set of techniques; it is a mode of being — a way of existing in relation to the questions that determine what we are. To genuinely ask the fundamental question is already to have placed oneself in a different relationship to existence, to have loosened the grip of the obvious and the habitual. This is why the question cannot be answered once and filed away: its value lies not in any answer it might receive but in the transformation it produces in the asker. The university and the sciences produce knowledge; philosophy, at its best, produces a different kind of asking.

Introduction to Metaphysics is based on a lecture course delivered at Freiburg in summer 1935. The text begins with an extended analysis of the fundamental question and proceeds through readings of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Sophocles to develop the account of the history of being.