In presencing there speaks presence, and in presence there is a moment of time; thus the determination of Being as presencing is related to time.
Now if I attempt to determine presencing in terms of time, and if I look around within the history of thought at what has been said concerning time, then I find, beginning already with Aristotle, that the essence of time is determined on the basis of an already determined Being. Thus the inherited concept of time is unusable. And for this reason, in Being and Time, I attempted to develop a new concept of time and temporality in the sense of ecstatic openness.
The other question is one already posed by Leibniz, later taken up again by Schelling, and which I literally repeat at the close of my lecture already mentioned, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’
But this question has in my thought an entirely different meaning. The ordinary metaphysical representation of what is asked in the question means: Why are there beings at all rather than nothing? That is: where is the cause or ground for the fact that beings are and not rather nothing?
I ask instead: Why are there beings at all and not rather nothing? Why do beings have priority? Why is the nothing not thought as identical with Being? That is to say: why does the forgetfulness of Being prevail, and from where does it come?
It is therefore a wholly different question from the metaphysical question. That is: I ask, ‘What is metaphysics?’ I do not ask a metaphysical question; rather, I ask concerning the essence of metaphysics.
As you can see, these questions are all extraordinarily difficult and fundamentally inaccessible to ordinary understanding. They require prolonged ‘head-breaking,’ a long experience, and a genuine confrontation with the great tradition. One of the great dangers of our thinking today lies precisely in the fact that thinking—that is, thinking in the philosophical sense—no longer has any genuinely originary relation to the tradition.