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Appendix [199-200]

of being, when posed radically, it appears that all this is visible and can become understood as being, only if a possible totality of beings is already there.

As a result, we need a special problematic which has for its proper theme beings as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen]. This new investigation resides in the essence of ontology itself and is the result of its overturning [Umschlag], its μεταβολή. I designate this set of questions metontology. And here also, in the domain of metontological-existentiell questioning, is the domain of the metaphysics of existence (here the question of an ethics may properly be raised for the first time).

Positive sciences also have beings for their subject matter, but metontology is not a summary ontic in the sense of a general science that empirically assembles the results of the individual sciences into a so-called "world picture," so as to deduce from it a world-view and guide for life. Something of the sort is, in a certain way, current in prescientific Dasein, although the latter has a different structure; th e possibility and structure of the natural world-view is a problem in its own right. The fact that attempts are repeatedly made to summarize ontic information and call it "inductive metaphysics" points to a problem that of necessity arises repeatedly throughout history.

Metontology is possible only on the basis and in the perspective of the radical ontological problematic and is possible conjointly with it. Precisely the radicalization of fundamental ontology brings about the above-mentioned overturning of ontology out of its very self. What we seemingly separate here, by means of "disciplines," and provide with labels is actually one—just as the ontological difference is one, or the, primal phenomenon of human existence! To think being as the being of beings and to conceive the being problem radically and universally means, at the same time, to make beings thematic in their totality in the light of ontology.

It would be superficial and pedantic to believe that once fundamental ontology is founded as a discipline, a further ontology with a new title would be adjoined to it. Fundamental ontology, moreover, is not a fixed discipline which, once the baby is named, should now for good occupy the previously empty place reserved for it in some putative system of philosophy—a discipline which is now to be developed and completed so as to bring philosophy to a happy ending in a few decades (as the layman or positivist imagines). I n fact, that "place" is, in every philosophy, an occupied place, and it is in each case transformed.

The pedantry of a schematic system should not be confused


The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (GA 26) by Martin Heidegger