Excerpt (p 9) from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (a seminar-lecture course from 1929/30) by Martin Heidegger:

Metaphysics is a questioning in which we inquire into beings as a whole, and inquire in such a way that in so doing we ourselves, the questioners, are thereby also included in the question, placed into question.

Accordingly, fundamental concepts are not universals, not some formulae for the universal properties of a field of objects (such as animals or language). Rather they are concepts of a properly peculiar kind. In each case they comprehend the whole within themselves, they are comprehensive concepts [Inbegriffe]. Yet they are also comprehensive in a second sense which is equally essential and which ties in with the first: they also in each case always comprehend within themselves the comprehending human being and his or her Dasein [i.e., there-being]---not as an addition, but in such a way that these concepts are not comprehensive without there being a comprehending in the second sense, and vice-versa. No concept of the whole without the comprehending of philosophizing existence. Metaphysical thinking is comprehensive thinking in this double sense. It deals with the whole and it grips existence through and through.

---

---

---