WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?
merciless prohibition require some deeper answer. Bitter privation is more burdensome.
These possibilities of nihilative comportment - forces in which Dasein bears its thrownness without mastering it - are not types of mere negation. That does not prevent them, however, from speaking out in the "no" and in negation. Indeed, here for the first time the barrenness and range of negation betray themselves. The saturation of Dasein by nihilative comportment testifies to the constant though doubtlessly obscured manifestation of the nothing that only anxiety originally unveils. But this implies that the originary anxiety in Dasein is usually repressed. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in what makes us "jittery," imperceptibly in the "Oh, yes" and the "Oh, no" of men of affairs; but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically daring. But those daring ones are sustained by that on which they expend themselves - in order thus to preserve the ultimate grandeur of Dasein.
[15] The anxiety of those who are daring cannot be opposed to joy or even to the comfortable enjoyment of tranquilized bustle. It stands - outside all such opposition - in secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing.
Originary anxiety can awaken in Dasein at any moment. It needs no unusual event to rouse it. Its sway is as thoroughgoing as its possible occasionings are trivial. It is always ready, though it only seldom springs, and we are snatched away and left hanging.
Being held out into the nothing — as Dasein is — on the ground of concealed anxiety makes the human being a lieutenant of the nothing. We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing through our own decision and will. So abyssally does the process of finitude entrench itself in Dasein that our most proper and deepest finitude refuses to yield to our freedom.
Being held out into the nothing — as Dasein is — on the ground of concealed anxiety is its surpassing of beings as a whole. It is transcendence.
Our inquiry concerning the nothing is to bring us face to face with metaphysics itself. The name "metaphysics" derives from the Greek μετὰ τὰ φυσικά. This peculiar tide was later interpreted as characterizing the questioning that extends μετά or trans — "over" — beings as such.
Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings that aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp.
In the question concerning the nothing such an inquiry beyond or over beings, beings as a whole, takes place. It proves thereby to be a
93