Heidegger presents us with the question 'Why are there beings at all, instead of nothing?'[1]. He goes further, breaking down the question into its elemental linguistic form. He tells us that posing a question of 'nothing' is a heresy of language; that simply by asking about 'nothing', we are making it 'something'. Therefore the most valid question is not 'Why are there beings at all, instead of nothing?', but 'how does it stand with being?', allowing us to confront first and foremost our knowledge and understanding of being, which by its very existence is no longer 'nothing'.
Moreover, the question 'How does it stand with being?' has not been successfully confronted by History or Science, who are more concerned with an 'object of knowledge'. This is a problem also confronted with difficulty by language - the awkward, irregular tenses of the verb 'to be' reflect our inability to first ask the question.
The essay uses language first and foremost to posit the 'correct question'. In a desperate attempt to work out how this could be of any philosophical use, I related it to the famous opening of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to 'life, the universe, and everything' is, disappointingly, '42[2]'. The supercomputer tells his questioners to look for 'the real question' first, before seeking the answer. I thought this was a good way of looking at the questions Heidegger poses - asking us not to question our origination out of nothing, but question the formation of questioning itself.
[1] Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics, London, Yale University Press
[2] Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, London, Macmillan, 1979
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