The discovery of tradition, and the disclosure of what it "transmits" and how it does this, can be undertaken as a task in its own right. Dasein thus assumes the mode of being that involves historical inquiry and research. But the discipline of history—more precisely, the historicality underlying it—is possible only as the kind of being belonging to inquiring Dasein, because Dasein is determined by historicity in the ground of its being. If historicity remains concealed from Dasein, and so long as it does so, the possibility of historical inquiry and discovery of history is denied it. If the discipline of history is lacking, that is no evidence against the historicity of Dasein; rather it is evidence for this constitution of being in a deficient mode. Only because it is "historic" in the first place can an age lack the discipline of history.
On the other hand, if Dasein has seized upon its inherent possibility not only of making its existence transparent, but also of inquiring into the meaning of existentiality itself, that is to say, of provisionally inquiring into the meaning of being in general; and if insight into the essential historicity of Dasein has opened up in such inquiry, then it is inevitable that inquiry into being, which was designated with regard to its ontic-ontological necessity, is itself characterized by historicity. The elaboration of the question of being must therefore receive its directive to inquire into its own history from the most proper ontological [21] sense of the inquiry itself, as a historical one; that means to become historical in a disciplined way in order to come to the positive appropriation of the past, to come into full possession of its most proper possibilities of inquiry. The question of the meaning of being is led to understand itself as historical in accordance with its own way of proceeding, that is, as the provisional explication of Dasein in its temporality and historicity.
The preparatory interpretation of the fundamental structures of Dasein with regard to its usual and average way of being—in which it is also first of all historical—will make the following clear: Dasein not only has the inclination to be entangled in the world in which it is and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light; at the same time Dasein is also entangled in a tradition which it more or less explicitly grasps. This tradition deprives Dasein of its own leadership in questioning and choosing. This is especially true of that understanding (and its possible development) which is rooted :in the most proper being of Dasein—the ontological understanding.
The tradition that hereby gains dominance makes what it "transmits" so little accessible that initially and for the most part it covers it over instead. What has been handed down is handed over to obviousness; it bars access to those original "wellsprings" out of which the traditional categories and concepts were in part genuinely drawn. The